Pondering Bob

 

Bob. What a simple unpretentious name. Bob was a contractor and built a house for his wife and five children. They never went without. Never.  A modest, quiet man of few words, one knew to listen when he spoke: there was either something profoundly, wryly funny or something profoundly insightful about to be said. There wasn’t a math problem you could put in front of Bob that he couldn’t do in his head. Not a book you could mention that he hadn’t read, but to his dying day he was prejudiced.  Women were simply too sentimental in his opinion, to be good authors. No amount of ranting about the philosophies of Ayn Rand or the fact that Sylvia Plath had won a Pulitzer Prize could dissuade him. Born in 1924, long before women burned bras or fought wars his prejudices were cemented in place, a symptom of the age when he grew up and perhaps a symptom of the profound hatred he had for his stepmother.  

 

After a particularly bad time between him and his wife, he built himself a cozy home inside his barn where he kept a small television, a radio, his cigarettes and whiskey. The battered easy chair doubled as a comfortable place to sleep. Many a visit to the barn, I’d find Bob snoring away, the TV on, a heater going near his feet. In his quiet place of refuge, he read and spent time making things of wood. He built each son a fishing boat; his grandchildren were given beautiful midget sized handmade furniture. It was marvelous. My daughter still has a pair of wooden pliers her grandfather made with worn and weathered, loving hands. It seemed girls could be given tools after all.

 

Bob’s war stories were from World War II, when he served in the South Pacific. These stories were lurid and filled with the details that most veterans don’t want to hear themselves, but Bob delighted in telling his stories. I wonder if it was some guilt riding his shoulders that also made him refuse treatment of his heart trouble and emphysema.  He would go to the Veteran’s Hospital half, or more so, dead and return well but determined to continue the smoking, drinking and life in the barn that put him in the hospital in the first place. I asked him why didn’t he straighten out his behavior and health when the doctors told him to. He looked me dead in the eye, unwavering, and asked, “Why?” He was ready to be gone long before he was. Still, the children and I enjoyed our visits with him. Often when we stopped in the yard, the children ran for the barn before heading inside to see anyone else. 

 

One particularly intense memory I have is one time when I hugged him, Bob ducked his head and like a shy child, he half whispered, “You shouldn’t hug me, I’m filthy, I know I smell awful.” I told him I loved him, it didn’t matter what he smelled like. His eyes filled with tears. “No one has ever told me they loved me.” I looked at the house and wondered if it could be the truth. Could a man go through his whole life without hearing those simple words? 

 

I knew both Bob’s parents died when he was quite young and his stepmother sent him to work on the neighbor’s farm rather than send him to school. His life then was spent living in the barn. He could see the sky through the holes in the roof, he told me, and during the Ohio winters the snow drifted onto him and his bed through those same holes. No, I don’t think his stepmother told him she loved him and his siblings had no time for such frivolity when basic survival was at stake.

 

His wife had been engaged to another man; a pilot who happened to share my maiden name, killed during training exercises during WWII. Bob said he and his wife were married while the casket was passing by in the funeral procession. He laughed; a dry and hollow sound after telling me this. I didn’t ask why or how it happened that way, and looking back the questions had begged to be asked. He knew then she didn’t love him. It would be speculation to say what his motives were in marrying her, but it’s not hard to narrow the list to two or three. Did he love her? Without a doubt. Did he hate her? Without a doubt, but most profound was the sense that the weight of her hatred for him hung around his neck and shoulders like a physical weight. He wore her loathing like a cross he deserved that bent him low and made him suffer to the point of exhaustion. He was long past trying to please her by the time I knew them, but he had tried at first. Maybe several of the family attitudes grew out of different strategies he tried along the way. Again, it’s something I don’t doubt at all. 

 

After Bob died, you can be sure that at least my children and I mourned him.   He was cremated and three of his four sons went out in one of Bob’s handmade boats to spread his ashes on the water of a quiet bay where he became a part of the ocean; hopefully at peace and hopefully rid of the guilt that rode him for so long.

 

Reviews

[Fabian G. Franklin]

What an awesome story! I was enthralled from the first line to the last. Just wonderful. Some of my favorite writers were women. The Bronte' sisters, of course, Dikinson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, many, many great women writers. One of my favorite poems is by Lilian Arleen Walbright called The Poet.