I threw a suitcase of things together, jumped into my truck and took off. My wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor and novelist, reminded me that she was fully capable of watching the house and the cats while I was gone. How long could it be? A week, maybe? How long had it been since I’d seen my family. A year, maybe?

After driving non-stop 1,200 miles through pouring rains across the High Plains of America, Iowa and Wisconsin and then north into the woods of the U.P., I was back in my old “Home Town,” Iron Mountain, Michigan, which doesn’t exist anymore. It used to be the center of the universe, but now it’s just a story in my mind waiting to be told…

Father worked in a factory.

Mother was always home.

When we kids were a little older, they both went back to school to further their education. Dad became the town’s third grade teacher, mom a VA nurse. They’re in assisted living now. Still together. Married 79 years. Dad’s 98. Mom’s not far behind.

They were nestled into one another on the couch when I walked into their room, unannounced. Dad started to cry. Mom tried to remember my name.

The walls of their room were an album of family photos. I noticed one of me in my high school football uniform before I got kicked off the team after I got arrested for minor in possession.

I helped dad over to his favorite chair, like a cushioned throne where he loved to sit and tell stories to the kids and grandchildren. The Gauthiers are famous in the area as drinkers and storytellers.

Dad said he wanted to get a “recording device” that he could talk his stories into. He said it was getting harder for him to write his stories down in cursive on paper. “I sit here at night and so many stories come to me that it’s almost scary,” he said. “It’s so frustrating. My hands just can’t put the words down on paper anymore. I used to have beautiful handwriting. Good penmanship was emphasized in school and at home.”

Dad always wrote, but never called himself a writer. Some of my earliest memories are of him at the kitchen table at night writing in his notebooks with a bowl Shredded Wheat off to the side. He wrote stories about the war and coming back from it and meeting one of the Swedish girls from the other side of town where the Lutherans lived. Starting a family. Union activity at the factory. Hunting and fishing. Coaching the Little League team. Becoming a third grade teacher.

My sister has a couple boxes of his “writings” stored away at her place. Dad says he wants me to “have them,” “someday.”

The night nurse came in and it was time for me to leave. I noticed one of his notebooks lying on a dining tray. I opened it and noticed that the handwriting could hardly be called “cursive.” It looked painstaking, but was legible. It was about growing up during the depths of the Depression-years of the 30s when nobody had too much.

I read:

“Pick-up games of football. No one had a football, but we would make one out of rags or empty cans of canned milk… ski jumping, picking berries, swimming, spending time at my grandparents… outdoor games with kids in the neighborhood — tag, kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, etc. … making camps in the woods across the street, playing marbles, catching bees in a jar, going to a pond and catching frogs and turtles, splitting and piling wood for the house… sledding at night on a street hill by the house — boys and girls. On Valentine’s Day we exchanged cards at school. It was so traumatic for the ones who didn’t receive the same number of cards as some of the others. As a teacher in later years my kids gave to all or none.”

The sun was going down as I left the assisted living facility. My youngest brother had a room fixed up for me at his place in town. On my way there I drove through my old neighborhood, the center of the universe when I was a child. It didn’t exist anymore except as stories in my mind waiting to be told.

It was gone.

Or was it?

While slowly driving past the house where Annie had lived, where we played Kick-the-Can before going to Confession, my heart skipped a beat to let me know it was real.

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