We'd make the six-hour drive to Jefferson, IA, where Dad was born and where my grandfather had two farms -- still in the family. One is 120 acres, which was the birthplace of Dad and his late twin sister Julia, and the other is 240 acres six miles away, where the family (including his younger adopted brother Sam) moved when Dad and Aunt Julia were sixteen.
Craig and I are now the only two sons who live in the area. Tim's been in Oklahoma for years and Kevin – who until recently lived closest to my folks – moved to Washington state with his family in January of this year. When his wife Yvonne, an OBGyn, took a job in Seattle, I knew it would be a particular hardship on my folks. In the last decade or so, Kevin had become their right-hand man and unofficial financial advisor and he was able to visit them frequently.
Mom and Dad, Craig and I all still live in northern IL. The folks are in Huntley; Craig and his wife Katy live in suburban Chicago, a little less than an hour away; and I'm about the same distance from them in Dekalb. If Kevin still lived in Woodstock, about twenty minutes from where Mom and Dad are, he would have been the point man for helping Dad through his illness. I've become very limited in my driving because of eyesight problems associated with the MS with which I was diagnosed about eight years ago, so I can't be that guy. Craig has heroically stepped into the breach, accompanying Dad and Mom during his chemo treatments. As it is, I can only visit them on weekends, and only if the weather is good. Years ago I limited myself to driving only in fair weather, except when it's very local. I have to keep an eagle eye on the forecast to make sure I can drive there and back safely. Dad's chemo treatments are never on the weekends. Thank God for Craig.
Throughout the weekend of our trip, the six of us had lots of laughs reminiscing about the family vacations we used to take when the four us were kids. I'm the youngest and when I was born, my parents had had the four of us in just over four years. Craig and Kevin were born on the same day a year apart (“Catholic twins”.) Tim was born a year and a half later and I came along a year and a half after that.
We lived all over growing up. When I tell people this, I'm fond of recounting that I was born in Arlington Heights, IL and that we moved just about every year after that. And that as a result, we lived in Illinois; Omaha; St. Louis; Orlando; Atlanta; Wilmington, DE; back in Atlanta (across the street and about four houses down,) Cincinnati, and then I was eleven. People understandably ask if I was a military brat. I tell them that, no, I was a sales brat. My dad kept getting promoted and transferred out of state. With the Cincinnati move, Dad told us he'd finally gotten the job he'd long been after (regional sales manager with his company) and that we'd stay in Cincinnati til we all graduated high school. Suddenly, the forever transient Eldridges would put down roots and my brothers and I would make what became many lifelong friends. (But that's a whole 'nother story, at least for my own part.)
People almost invariably say something to the effect of “Man! That must have been hard, moving around like that all the time.” The fact is, it wasn't (for me, anyhow; I think as the youngest it was easiest for me in a lot of ways.) My older brothers perhaps had more of a sense that pulling up roots was difficult. I was born into it and don't even remember Arlington Heights, for instance. I'm reminded of Candice Bergen, the daughter of '30s & '40s ventriloquist radio star Edgar Bergen. She was forever being asked “What was it like being the daughter of someone so famous?” Her answer was, “I don't know; he's the only dad I ever had. It's all I knew growing up.” I think for me, it was the same kind of thing. Constantly moving was simply a fact of life. I've frequently told people that there were three cardinal truths in my life growing up: we went to church on Sunday, ate dinner every night at 6:30, and we moved about once a year. It's just what was. It's all I knew growing up.
Dad had two weeks' vacation every year and most of our vacations involved going to the farm and/or visiting my mom's extended family in Chicago (usually both.) One especially memorable trip was when we lived in Atlanta (the first time.) Dad's company car was a four-door sedan and he outfitted it with a sturdy piece of plywood, cutting it so that he could wedge it behind the headrests of the front seat. We didn't leave til after Dad's workday on Friday. My brothers and I would sleep for most of the twelve-hour drive – Tim and Kevin on the plywood, Craig on the back seat below it and me on the floor, laying over the transmission hump (I was small and limber as an eight-year old. *sigh*) In today's politically correct world, the authorities probably would have jailed my parents on charges of child endangerment. If the car had experienced a head-on collision, there would have gone Kevin and Tim, flying through the front windshield. Ah, those were the days, when seat belts were but a fleeting option for the anally retentive and overly-concerned . . .
It was the 240 that my brothers and I knew best growing up because that's where our grandparents then lived. We loved going to the farm. And every year – for several years – one of us would get to go out there and spend about a month alone with Grandma and Grandpa. We'd spend most of our days horsing around in the farmyard or tooling around the pastures with Gramps on his 1945 Ford tractor -- on the hunt for weeds to spray with 240-D weed killer, (Hah! Spraying 240-D on the 240 – never thought of that til just now.)
We'd help him feed the cattle, repair fences, mow the yard or help out with various odd jobs around the farm. Gramps always had something going on. A farmer is perhaps the world's original one-man gang. He not only raises crops and livestock -- with all that entails -- but he's also his own plumber, mechanic, painter, blacksmith and all-around handy man.
We got paid real money to help shell corn or walk beans. One summer, I got paid minimum wage in cash (then $2.35 an hour – tax-free) and made over a hundred and twenty bucks walking beans in just a couple of weeks. In 1976, that was an absolute fortune for a twelve year-old kid. Doing that job, you'd be part of a crew of maybe a dozen people (neighboring farmers and their kids and grandkids.) Each of us would cover about a half dozen rows of soybeans, walking up and down the field, armed with a hoe, and hacking up any weeds we saw. (My grandpa's fields were among the cleanest in the county, by the way.)
Shelling corn was likewise a group effort. The professionals would come around with the proper heavy equipment and neighboring farmers would take turns helping each other out with the operation. Everyone's seen corn silos as they pass farms on the highway. But have you ever been inside one? (Editor's note: after I wrote this my dad pointed out that corn is stored in a corn crib; that being the case, I don't know what the hell a silo's for. I forgot to ask.) Several of us would stand on top of fifty feet or more of corn still on the ear (the kernels are hard before they're processed, city slicker.) We'd use rakes to push the cobs on to a conveyer belt that fed them into a machine that removed the kernels and sent them spewing into the backs of dump trucks (or something very like them.) After it was filled, one truck would head to the grain elevator (where the surrounding community stores its grain) and return after unloading or be replaced by other trucks til the job was finished.
You'd wear a mask (think people guarding themselves against bird flu or SARS) to protect your lungs from the fine dust that was generated by moving all that corn around. Even then, you'd have to go back outside periodically to cough the shit up or otherwise let it get out of your system. Since we're talking late summer, it was hot as hell outside and hotter still slinging corn inside a silo. You have no idea how cool and refreshing 90 degrees can feel when you get out and hit fresh air after shelling corn for a couple of hours.
One of the great things about these work crews was breaking for the lunch hour. The host farmer's wife would prepare a fantastic spread or we'd climb into the back of a truck and head to one of the diners in town. We kids, at least, ate for free and stuffed our maws with burgers or eggs or fried chicken. “Dinner,” as farmers refer to the noon meal, was the biggest of the day. And we worked up quite the appetite while laboring from shortly after dawn.
In the evening we'd head back to the house where Grandma would serve another great, though usually somewhat lighter, meal. Afterward, we'd eat watermelon on the porch, swatting flies and playing with the wild cats that lived underneath it. Gramps would tie an empty, crushed cigarette pack to the line of his bamboo fishing pole and the kittens would endlessly bat it around, much to our amusement.
Every day after dinner, Gramps would take his afternoon nap upstairs and I'd often sit in his La-Z-Boy recliner next to Grandma and she'd tell me stories, usually about the old days. Sometimes at that hour I'd play in the barnyard, often throwing a rubber ball against the old wooden corn crib. Occasionally I'd throw it high up against the crib and in some places, age had caused the slats to be spaced far enough apart that the ball would get stuck there. One day it got stuck maybe thirty feet up. Naturally – in earnest to retrieve my thirty-nine-cent treasure – I scaled it by putting my fingers and toes between the slats til I could reach it. Sure, I could've been killed, but hey – thirty-nine cents . . .
Anyway, the stories are endless and as boring to you as I suppose the others are. But, having moved almost every year of my childhood, the farm (as well as my mom's roots in Chicago) represented the only real places that ever gave me a sense of permanence; of home. Of course, being a visitor – a fair-weather farmer, as it were – I only experienced the good stuff that the place had to offer, and almost always in the beautiful Iowa summertime. My dad grew up on the farm and learned to work hard there all his life. It certainly couldn't have been for him the amusement park it was for me and my brothers on our vacation getaways. But it is home for him.
Everyone has their roots – somewhere. For my dad, it was the farm country of Iowa. Even on those summer days – a beatific paradise for my brothers and me – it was surely work and more work for him. The winters in Iowa are bleak and cold and windy. But in that place and among its people, Dad learned the admirable ethics of life that he'd try to pass on to his sons. Whatever may be good and decent and allegedly worthy about me comes largely from that.
On Thursday morning, the family arrived to pick me up. As I live just off the I-88 tollway, my place was the last stop before we began the trip in earnest, west on 88. It was a beautiful September day when we headed off for Jefferson. The miles flew by quickly, as they're apt to do when you're in good company. We remembered, but failed to engage in, our old family traveling game of counting the number of VW's on the road. There wouldn't have been much point to it, anyway, come to think of it. When we were kids, there were lots of the old VW Bugs out there. I'm not sure we would have seen even one on this entire trip. Whaddya gonna do, anyway? Count Golf's? Gimme a break. Even the new Bugs, which are pretty cool (and one of which Kevin's wife had for a few years) just aren't the same.
Craig made the point of expressing, in no uncertain terms, that this was to be Dad's weekend. Our agenda would be to see whatever he wanted to. Funny how you don't get any objections when everyone's in absolute agreement. Dad mentioned a few things he wanted to check off the list and they were noted accordingly. We talked about past family trips, including the plywood deathtrap sedan and three different trips to Minnesota where we stayed in cottages on Lake Le Homme Dieu in Alexandria. The name is French for “the man of God” and there's no doubt a beautiful and correct French pronunciation, but we called it “Lake Lahommadoo,” as if it were named after a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character. We were little kids the first time we went there – probably about ages 4 thru 8. On that first trip, we were accompanied by my Aunt Pat & Uncle Joe and their (then) two children, Joey and Brad. The memorable thing about the town for us kids was the giant Viking statue in the middle of the street in downtown Alexandria (such as it was). I've since found out, by means of searching the electric internet (read: just now) that “Big Ole,” as the sculpture was christened, is 28 feet tall. Of course, as a four-year-old, it seemed to me about the height of a dwarf Statue of Liberty. They've since moved it outside of town to a park, which – in my world – was a blow against this country's great mid-century tradition of kitsch roadside culture. But in my mind, it'll always tower above the metropolitan Alexandria skyline.
As the morning wore on and early laughter and reminiscences died down, Craig drove; Dad rested in the front passenger seat; Tim went to sleep; Kevin was listening to something on his headphones; and Mom and I did a crossword. Our first scheduled stop was for coffee at the Flying J truckstop en route to Des Moines. When we got there, I think we all loaded up on Pumpkin Spice Latte. It was kind of like Starbucks, but about a quarter of the price and it didn't suck. There's a town near Des Moines called Eldridge, IA. I guess I haven't had reason to say so, but for the uninitiated, Eldridge is our last name. We'd all seen signs for it on our many trips to the farm, but none of us had actually ever been there. This seemed like the occasion to knock if off our collective bucket list. Turns out it's a nice little town. We took photos of the Eldridge water tower, the Eldridge fire house and the Eldridge Dog Park. I'm still waiting for word from the city fathers that the founder was our long-lost ancestor who'd stated plainly in his last will and testament that he wanted to leave us a big pile of money. No word yet, but I'll get back to you.
We picked up Route 30 shortly after leaving Eldridge. This is the Lincoln Highway, the first cross-country road in the United States. President Eisenhower, then a junior officer in the army, led (or at least participated in) an early navigation of the road with military trucks and equipment. That trip was an inspiration for him to inaugurate the modern interstate highway system that we all take for granted today. So, too, was the Cold War. He felt that we needed it as a means to quickly transport men and materiel across the country in the event of national military necessity. Jefferson is among the hundreds of cities and towns in the U.S. through which the Lincoln Highway runs.
On one stretch of the road, Mom and Dad looked for, without much hope of it still being there, the diner where they used to eat as a young married couple on trips to the farm. They told us about one trip, when my brothers and I were small. We were all sleeping in the car and they parked it in front of a window where they could eat and keep an eye on their slumbering brood.
“You left us all alone in the car?” I asked Mom. “Was that when you two started your career of habitual child neglect?” She looked at me with the sardonic expression of a woman who's listened to fifty-plus years of bullshit coming from her son's mouth. They never did find the place. There was a Mexican restaurant that appeared to occupy the most likely existing candidate building that may have been their diner, but they couldn't be sure. It's just as well; less evidence for child services to have in pressing their ancient cold case.
We stopped for lunch at a different diner, the Mill Creek Cafe in Clarence, IA. They were only open for lunch until two o'clock and at 1:50 we asked if they would let us come in. The lady who ran the place very graciously invited us in and I think all of us enjoyed one of their fabulous pork tenderloin sammiches. Lightly breaded and twice as wide as the bun. Check 'em out if you're ever in the neighborhood. Kevin gave them a glowing recommendation in the restaurant's first-ever Yelp review.
And so we took the Lincoln Highway as the last leg of our trip to Dad's hometown. We stayed at a brand new casino hotel that had just opened up in Jefferson the month before. My, how times have changed. Nice accommodations, though. And for all the rustic charm of the Redwood Motel, the place at which we'd stayed in years past, these were slightly nicer digs. We wandered around the casino for half an hour or so after a nice dinner (the coconut shrimp was outstanding,) and I won fifty bucks playing a slot machine. I split it with Craig, who'd handed me a chip to start off with. Knowing that the casino bosses have it stacked against you if you stay long enough, I quit on the spot and pocketed the dough.
The six of us ended up in one of the rooms, playing cards, sharing some wine and talking about the old days. As it happens, it was Thursday and that was opening night for the NFL. We had the game on mute and the Patriots silently beat the Steelers, though we didn't pay much attention to it. I think for most of us – maybe all of us -- that evening was the highlight of the trip. I wish, though I know it's not the case, that everybody could experience what life felt like that night. It really has everything to do with what it's supposed to be all about.
The next morning, and the business of driving Dad to the places he wanted to see. He expressed an interest in getting a cap to keep his head warm under his hair which was thinning with the chemo treatments. Craig – definitely the idea man of this excursion – said he wanted to pick up a five-gallon bucket and bet that the hardware store would also have caps. He was right. In fact, I think they gave us one. Good hat, too. The cloth kind -- with an adjustable strap to fit any head. Dad still wears it and has every time I've seen him since.
Craig's idea for the bucket was a stroke of genius that Dad fully endorsed. We would fill it with earth from both of the farms. When Dad passes (a good while from now, we hope) each of us and the grandkids will drop a handful of the dirt into his coffin so he can be buried with it. Yeah, Dad liked that idea a lot. Near the hardware store, we stopped the truck for a short while and watched as some corn was being harvested. Dad's always loved farm machinery and seeing it do the work for which it was intended.
One of the memories Dad navigated us through was to a field where his country grade school used to stand. I don't remember how far it was from the 120, where they lived at the time, but I think he and Aunt Julia used to walk to it every day. Maybe they just had to walk to the spot where the bus used to pick them up. If memory serves, buses had been invented by that time.
We went to the cemetary where our grandparents and Aunt Julia, as well as untold other relatives and family friends, were laid to rest. We spent some quiet time in front of their gravesites and Dad kept his counsel as to exactly what his thoughts were as he contemplated his parents and sister. Years ago, he and Mom bought plots there where they, too, were to be buried. But a while back they sold them, as none of us lived in the area and we couldn't have easily visited them when they're gone. They wanted us to be able to do that, as do the four of us. We saw the grave where one local young man, a race car driver, is buried. My brothers and I all remember seeing it when we were kids. It has a carving of a race car on it and I always thought that he'd died in a wreck at the track. But I think Dad told us he was just a racing enthusiast who was so fond of the sport that his parents had the car put on his gravestone. I don't know how he died, but he did die young.
One of the largest monuments in the place is the Mahanay's mauseleom. The Mahanays were one of Jefferson's richest couples and I believe it was Mrs. Mahanay who left in her will enough money to have a large bell tower built in the town square. Grandma said it was often referred to as the “Singing Silo.” On Saturday morning, before we headed back home, we would take a guided tour of the tower and the man who brought us up the elevator to the top told us all about the history of the tower and of the city of Jefferson, which we saw laid out before us. Craig and Kevin once spent some time alone on the farm and our cousin Dave (one of Aunt Julia's two kids, and her only son) was there as well. One day (they were young teenagers – Dave is just slightly older than Craig) Kevin and Dave went to the top of the tower with a shopping bag full of paper airplanes and launched them through an open window. Kevin was pleased that the guide said he “kind of” remembered the event. And I guess someone must have “kind of” spent time picking up the hundred-odd paper airplanes that would presumably have been scattered around the town square.
Kevin and Dave notoriously got themselves into a few forms of trouble on that trip. Once, they were firing stones with “wrist rockets” (sling shots on steroids) at the cattle in the pasture. Evidently, there were bonus points to be earned if you nailed a cow in its udder, and a lovely door prize for hitting the bull's testicles. Seems the bull eventually took offense at this behavior because he suddenly led the whole herd (perhaps as many as a hundred cattle) on a stampede in which they sought to inflict considerable harm on the young perpetrators. Dave and Kevin ran. They hoofed it across the pasture toward the dried out creek bed which had been generously tiled with a floor of manure by the cattle, who tended to gather there at certain times of the day. As they were handicapped by the fact that their pursuers each had twice as many hooves as they did, the cattle rapidly gained on them. In his haste, Kevin lost his footing and slid through about twenty feet of cowshit toward the far bank of the creek. The cousins managed to escape with their lives but Kevin was in need of a shower that served as his baptism in the finer points of human-bovine etiquette.
And then there was their escapade that now lives in the great annals of Eldridge family lore. In the pantry between Grandma's kitchen and the downstairs bathroom, Gramps kept a .22 caliber rifle – always loaded (I know what you're thinking; what could possibly go wrong?) – and hung high up against the wall so that he could quickly shoot some critter or another that might appear in the yard outside.
Gramps was upstairs taking his ritual afternoon nap to which I alluded earlier. Naturally, in their boyish curiosity, Kevin and Dave just had to have a look at the single weapon in Lloyd Eldridge's armory. As they handled and admired Grandpa's firearm, the damn thing suddenly went off, a bullet punching holes in some various canned goods in the pantry. Fortunately, the red liquid that poured forth was V-8 juice and not a fourteen year-old's blood.
Now to fully appreciate the next phase of our story, you have to realize that Grandma was a portly, diabetic, chain-smoking 60-something woman of no great athletic prowess. She was watching TV in her recliner, when suddenly Dave and Kevin heard her LA-Z Boy fly violently down from its recline position in the next room. “LLOYD!!!” came her cry from the living room. And to further appreciate this scene you also have to understand that it was a shrill cry that Grandma let loose -- sort of a cross between a live cat being declawed without aenesthetic and the banshee shriek of a portly, diabetic, chain-smoking and wildly panic-stricken she-wolf being startled awake with a taser.
Meanwhile, Craig was just emerging from the bathroom, probably a mere moment or two away from walking into the path of the bullet. “I was only in the bathroom!” he shouted, as Grandma tore into the kitchen. Kevin, in his tactful effort to soothe Grandma's nerves, said to her, “It could have been worse; a minute ago, I was looking down the barrel . . . “ I'm pretty sure that from that point forward, Gramps left the rifle unloaded when the grandkids were around.
As we meandered our way around Jefferson, Dad agreed when Craig asked if we might stop by the town's firehouse. Craig's a volunteer fireman in his hometown of Glen Ellyn, IL and wanted to see if he could look at their equipment. A fireman on duty was happy to give us an impromptu tour of the facility. He showed us their trucks and one of their ambulances. He and Craig talked shop while the rest of us looked on. Craig's fascinated with fire equipment in kind of the way Dad is with farm equipment. Reminds me of the time, twenty-five or so years ago, when Gramps visited the print shop that Dad, Mom and I then ran. After a minute or so, he understood how the press worked, a couple of rubber vacuum tubes picking up each sheet of paper, allowing it to feed them into the press. In each case, the apple, as they say, doesn't fall far from the tree.
As morning turned to afternoon, we headed off the see the two farms. We approached the 120 by way of “The Seven Hills,” a fabled stretch of road in Jefferson that was legendarily dangerous back in the day. They've made it safer by grading down the hills some, but not so much that they've totally lost their character.
The only building that remains on the 120 is the sturdy, cement smokehouse that Grampa and/or his father built many years ago. Weeds have overgrown the place and it took a couple of my brothers some effort to get the old gate open that now closes the place off. But we were finally able to get the truck through and walked around and looked around, and Tim was able to pick up an old board or two he found lying in the grass. They would have come from one of the buildings that used to stand in the farmyard. I think he's going to use them in some fashion to decorate the bar in the new condo he's having built in Oklahoma City.
We then drove the six miles to the 240 -- another place that doesn't look much like it did when our grandparents were alive. It was gated off now and a few vicious-looking dogs barked fiercely at us from what was now the barnless barnyard. It had the look of a lot that had been converted from the scene of happy childhood memories to a place that, likely as not, now housed a meth lab or a dogfighting operation. We introduced ourselves to the man who lived there, presumably with his wife or girlfriend and their kids, and asked if we might have a look around at our grandpa's old place. We were refused. Again, likely as not, we weren't welcomed in so as not to stumble upon a stand of marijuana plants somewhere on the property.
We walked up the road and took more photos; we took a lot of photos on this trip. The six of us, or Dad, or Mom and Dad, against some tableau of Dad's memory. This time we got a nice snapshot of Mom and Dad on the highway bridge over the creek that we knew so well growing up.
We'd earlier taken a few shovelfuls of dirt from the 120 and put them into the plastic bucket. We did the same now at the 240 and it had thus been filled with its intended cargo. Craig snapped the lid shut and placed it in the back of the truck. We now had ample handsful of dirt for the funeral. It may sound macabre that we were doing this while Dad was still alive – and in his presence, even. There was nothing macabre about it. Just a healthy acknowledgement of everyone's short span of time allotted to walking this earth. The same goes for you, don't you know. If you don't fully realize that, or if you're too young to (don't worry, it'll come to you soon enough) you'd do well to entertain its due reckoning. And if you don't do that, you'll be gone soon anyhow. Best to give it some thought along the way . . . I reckon.
When I was about eighteen, I asked Dad how and why he'd become a mortician, which had been his occupation when he met my mom. As a young man, he'd considered becoming a minister, but when that didn't work out, he said, he felt that being present to people in their time of greatest grief and trial was the next closest thing. People always think of funeral workers as being creepy or weird; it was nothing of the sort with my dad (and I doubt it is for most morticians, by the way). Quite to the contrary, to him it was a great affirmation of life. It's clearly the rare person who's cut out for that kind of work. It's a point of pride for me that my dad is one of those rare people. In my own way, I've always tried to be something like that sort of person, myself, though I can't say I've always made the connection I'm sensing as I put these words together right now. For what it's worth, they're coming to you as they came to me.
I've always admired Dad for having been that young man who thought the way he did; for making that connection which wouldn't be obvious to most of us. Most people probably think of a mortician and a minister as being two very different kinds of people, albeit, people whose lives happen to intersect at the extremities of life. In fact, he taught me that they do very much the same kind of work -- soldier's work, you might say, filling in at different critical spots on the line. Each is heroic in his own way. And my dad sure is a hero to me.
When my brothers approached me with the idea for this trip, it was both inspired and an obvious thing to do at the same time. A bunch of middle-aged men and their aging parents, not regaining, but pointedly recalling together the spark of the young family they'd been. We all know that we can't regain the past and it's a fool's errand to try. We are what we've become as our lives have unfolded. For all the sorrows and mistakes and regrets that each of us unavoidably suffers, my brothers and I – and all of us – can only hope that our own kids will know at least something like the joys that Steve Eldridge and his family have had along the way.
It's been a helluva run.
