There came a time in the long and occasionally bewildering history of the Ward family when my eldest son, his wife, and their three young’uns needed a place to live.
We Had a Place
Now, dear hearts, Celeste and I had a place.
We didn’t have a theoretical place. We didn’t have one of those offers where somebody says, “Well, you know you’re always welcome here,” while his wife is standing behind him making motions across her throat. We had an apartment-sized place right there at our house in the North Georgia woods, sufficient for a family of five to sleep, eat, fuss, make up, raise children, contemplate their future and generally conduct the ordinary domestic affairs of mankind.
And the rent was a figure that has been particularly attractive to struggling young families ever since money was invented.
Nothing.
Not reduced rent. Not first month free. Not a family discount with an application fee, damage deposit, cleaning charge and fourteen dollars a month because somebody once saw a squirrel near the garbage can.
Free.
I figured Celeste’s offer was a pretty good proposition. There was, however, a defect in the property that we had not considered. We didn’t have sidewalks.
The Trouble Was, We Didn’t Have Sidewalks
Now I want you to understand where we lived, because some of y’all who grew up in civilized communities may have an entirely different notion of what a child requires in order to ride a bicycle.
We were back in the North Georgia mountains, and we had trees.
Lords a’mercy, lot’s of trees.
We had trees big enough for a boy to climb until his mama couldn’t reach him, woods deep enough to establish a fort, a camp, a hideaway, a secret society and possibly an independent government before anybody called you for supper. There were squirrels conducting high-speed commerce through the upper branches, little animals scratching around under leaves attending to whatever little animals attend to, vines and rocks and hollows and creeks and places where a young’un could disappear at nine o’clock in the morning and come home at five carrying three sticks, a dead bug, one wet shoe and information he considered too sensitive to reveal to the United States government.
That’s what we had.
A boy could build himself a hideout behind a fallen tree, declare war on the boy living half a mile down the road, make peace with him by lunchtime, and the two of them could spend the afternoon climbing trees after squirrels neither one of them had the slightest possibility of catching.
You could ride a bicycle down a driveway, up a road, around a bend, through gravel, across dirt and, depending upon your ambition and your mother’s tolerance for blood, over things that no bicycle manufacturer ever intended a bicycle to encounter.
What we did not have was sidewalks, and to my daughter-in-law, apparently this was important.
My daughter-in-law did not consider our place suitable for the children because there were no sidewalks for them to ride their bicycles on.
Well, dang me.
I had lived a fairly eventful life by then. I had been in the Army defending our nation from the dreaded Red Menace, wandered off to California seeking my fortune beneath the gilded lights of Hollywood, been in radio, restaurants, accounting, auditing and enough other occupations to qualify as a man who either possessed unusual versatility or couldn’t hold a job.
But I had never before encountered the proposition that several acres of North Georgia woods represented a shortage of places for a child to play.
I studied on that.
You see, where I came from, if you gave a boy a bicycle and several miles of woods, you didn’t have a recreational deficiency.
You might lose a kid for awhilst. But, eventually they’d always come back.
Well, usually.
But the absence of sidewalks was apparently an insurmountable impediment to habitation, so they went to her folks because her folks had a basement. And charged rent. Full rent.
Zero Needs Free
Now somewhere in this great republic there is undoubtedly an economist capable of explaining how a free apartment provided to an unemployed couple with three children, surrounded by woods becomes inferior to rented rooms in somebody’s basement once sidewalks are entered into the calculation. I am not that economist.
I studied accounting at Baylor University because, at one point in my illustrious business career, I was making more money than I knew what to do with and had no idea what all those numbers on my financial statements meant. So I freely admit there may be advanced branches of economics that have escaped me.
But I know zero income. And I know free rent.
And ordinarily zero needs free.
For years, that was the funny part of the story.
Sidewalks.
You could say that one word and I could see the whole thing again: all those trees and hills and roads and little trails disappearing into the woods, squirrels leaping overhead like they had been hired by the Chamber of Commerce, acres of God’s own playground lying there free of charge—and somewhere, apparently, a bicycle sitting forlornly against the house because nobody had poured it twelve hundred feet of concrete.
Lord a’mercy.
Then the Story Changed
But stories have a way of changing on you while you’re not watching.
Those three children were my eldest son’s children, which makes them my grandchildren according to genealogy, biology and every courthouse in the country.
I have trouble calling them that.
Not because of anything they did. They were children. Children go where the grown people take them, believe what they’re told until they get old enough to question it, and grow up inside whatever world the rest of us build around them.
I have two other grandchildren in Georgia. I call them my grandchildren without thinking about it. They call. They talk to us. They visit on holidays and when they can. They let us know, in all those ordinary little ways that matter more than people realize, that we’re part of their lives.
Their mother has been my stepdaughter for forty-one years, and I’m in the process of adopting her now.
That’s right. At eighty-four years old, when sensible men are trying to get their names off legal documents, I am putting mine on another one. I reckon forty-one years was long enough to decide whether I was going to keep her.
The other three children went another direction.
Their mother brought them to see us once when the first two were little. I remember them as being somewhere around five and eight, maybe, but I’m not going to swear to the ages. Time has been rummaging around in that particular drawer for a long while.
After that, they simply faded out of our lives.
Today I don’t know what they do, where they live, or what kind of people they became.
Hell, I don’t even know whether they’re alive, and their father isn’t here to tell me.
My eldest son suffered from depression. Their marriage ended, and later he died from what I understand was an accidental overdose of prescription medicine, combined with alcohol. I’ve wondered whether the divorce was part of the depression, whether the depression was already carrying him somewhere none of us quite understood, whether this caused that or that caused something else.
A father can worry at those questions a long time.
You can turn them over like rocks in the woods, looking underneath each one for the little critter that explains everything. But, mostly you find dirt, so I don’t know. Ain’t no reason to make up an answer merely because an answer would make the story neater.
What I know is that once upon a time my son and his family needed a place, and we had one. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t suburbia. It wasn’t one of those neighborhoods where every third house has the same mailbox and the homeowners’ association sends you a registered letter because your azaleas have become insolent.
It was a place in the North Georgia woods.
There were trees to climb, squirrels to chase, places to hide, roads to wander, camps waiting to be invented and enough room for children to build whole worlds that disappeared every evening when somebody’s mama hollered that supper was getting cold.
And even though it was free, it just didn’t have sidewalks.
The Sidewalks Were Only the Funny Part
For years I thought that was the story.
Turns out, the sidewalks were only the funny part.
The story is the people who went away.
And every once in a while, all these years later, I wonder where those three children are and what sort of roads life carried them down.
I hope they’re well.
I hope they’re happy.
And wherever they ended up, dear hearts, I surely hope somebody finally got those young’uns a sidewalk, even if it is in the middle of the Arizona desert.