A recent journaling prompt has sent me down a rabbit hole. The prompt asked who you would like to sit on a park bench and chat with. In this exercise, it could be any person living or dead.
There are so many people that I would like to talk with, especially people I never met. The one I chose is someone I did meet but didn’t get to know.
My maternal grandfather died at the hands of a drunk driver when I was a month shy of my seventh birthday. A car load of young adult men from Wellston, Ohio were drinking and high when they chose to get in a car and set out on a path of destruction. Turns out, one of them also died and they killed a good man in the process.
I remember him only vaguely and some of my memories are likely hand-me-downs from others who did get to know him well. My own memories are snippets and are often atmospheric like the feel of the backseat of his station wagon on a cold winter night. I think we were going to hear him preach somewhere.
He was a minister but I don’t remember his voice. I do remember how he held his Bible and have vague memories of him at the supper table grinning at something funny.
He and my grandmother raised ten children and had more grandchildren than I can count. Once the kids were grown and gone and they had a little extra money, they enjoyed traveling. I’m told that he could sit for hours with his maps, studying roads and planning trips that he might never even take.
Even if he had survived that accident, he would be gone by now but I suspect he would have made the best of those years he had left.
Being a minister, he was an orator who studied and thought through what he would say before writing his sermons. It sounds like he was a smart man, a thinking man.
Being a country boy and product of the Depression, he was a Jack-of-all trades and was capable with all sorts of skills like laying block, cutting glass and mechanical work. He also liked fast cars – another thing we would have in common.
I suspect we would have a lot to talk about on that bench.
He died forty years ago today and left an irreparable hole in the fabric of his family. Unfortunately, when he died he took a piece of my grandmother with him. She outlived him by many years but was never the same after his death. It’s foolish to question what might have been so I won’t do that but I sure would like to have that conversation.
Tell me – who you would like to share that park bench with?
When I was a kid my grandpa owned an International Harvester Scout much like the one pictured above. His was green and a little older, I think. Nonetheless, childhood memories come rushing back each time I cross paths with an old Scout.
It always surprises me how quickly memories flood in at the sight of an old car or even just by catching a whiff of perfume. We’re lucky, I suppose, to have the ability to summon a good memory with something so simple as an old car in a diner parking lot.