1. Let me invite you for a minute into our little house. Walk in the front door. Walk straight ahead and a few feet and turn left. You are now facing a very small hallway. You are also facing what our family has referred to for fifty-six years as the hall closet. Two door open up to three small storage areas in a small cabinet, perfect for towels and sheets and bathroom items. Below it is a series of five drawers. Over the last eight or nine months, we have cleared a lot of Mom's belongings out of the house: we emptied the basement and the upstairs storage closets; we gave furniture away; I organized and disposed of papers and old magazines; we cleaned out the garage. I wrote a lot about this as it happened.
We never, however, cleaned out the hall closet. Until today. It wasn't a big task. All the same, I was relieved to dispose of a lot of odds and ends that we don't need and to have drawer space available for however we decide to use it. The top drawer continues to be a catch all drawer with staplers, staples, writing implements, paper clips, thumb tacks, tape measurers, and other odds and ends and the second drawer is a medical supply drawer and now has sticky things in it like scotch tape or packing tape.
One task remains with the hall closet. I have go through things of ours in the cabinet that I have stuck in there and avoided dealing with and some last things of Mom's.
2. Last fall, as the remodeling project moved along, the Deke, Shawn, and I got into the habit of habit of toasting the end of the work week with a beer or a slug of whiskey (or two). Yes, we spent some time reviewing the work Shawn and the boys had done and talked about what was to come, but mostly we shot the breeze, told stories, and became friends.
We got back into that habit around 3:30 or so this afternoon. Here's partially what today's session was about: around ten or so days ago, the Deke looked out the upstairs window on the east side of the house and saw the carcass of turkey on the garage roof. It had been pretty well picked over by birds and maybe by a rat, but some of its rottedness remained. Shawn secured his reputation as a stand up guy and as a most versatile contractor by volunteering to remove the carcass from the roof and to dispose of it.
Shawn took care of this foul (get it?) task and with a huge grin told the Deke and me, "Okay. Now you owe me a bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon!"
No problem. Today I went to the friendliest liquor store in the world, here in Kellogg, and purchased a fifth of Basil Hayden's Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. It is just our luck that Basil Hayden's Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey's motto, or sales slogan, is, "A whiskey to be shared."
So, on the back deck Shawn, the Deke, and I shared it. Christy joined us. She enjoyed a couple green bottles of Premium Extra Pale Lager, since 1939, Rolling Rock.
We had a great session. Christy had worked hard around her yard and gardens, Shawn was pleased with how our remodel projects are coming along, and we had a lot to talk about thanks to living in the Silver Valley and all the ways different people are connected to each other in a variety of ways: family, marriage, re-marriage, friendship, business, work, club membership, etc.
3. The party didn't end on our deck.
Christy, Everett, the Deke, and I enjoyed a fine meal together at Best Shots and had a great time yakkin' about all kinds of things.
After dinner, the Deke and I hopped in the Sube and blasted our way uptown for the good times we can always count on at the Inland Lounge.
I had a great session shooting the breeze with Mike Grebil and learned, to my great joy, that his brother, Steve, will be coming to Kellogg in July for Mike's daughter's wedding. I have seen Grebe for at least forty-five years, since our days as teammates on the Kellogg-Wallace American Legion baseball team and our days as adversaries when he played basketball for the Wallace Miners.
Later on, the Deke and I sat at a table and before long she joined the table next to us to talk with Martha, Candy, and others and Jim and Harley and I held down the other table and enjoyed a visit from Mike Pierce.
I was in the company of master storytellers and historians now. I don't have many stories to tell, having been away from the Silver Valley for so long, but I loved listening to all that Jim and Harley, and later Mike Pierce, had to say about stuff that happened back in the day and their perspective about how things have changed over the years, not just in the Silver Valley, but in the world at large. I enjoyed our conversations about the high regard we have for our elders, many of them deceased now, and what we learned from them about decency and respect.
I thought about how Jim, Harley, Candy, Mike P, the Deke, Martha, Christy, Byrdman, Ed, Jake, Stu, Mike G, Cas, and the many others I haven't named our age are now becoming the elders around here. I hope one day there will be people younger than us sitting around a table, having grown old, downing a few beers or drinking a little whiskey, and that they will be able to remember us as decent people, people they respect. I know my dad and his friends talked about their Silver Valley elders with respect, even reverence. I know my friends and I talk about our elders this way. I hope this talk among friends continues, long after I'm gone. After all, the nowadays we complain about today will one day look to those younger than us like the good old days when they find themselves being sixty, seventy or more years old, longing for how things used to be back in the 2010s.
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