Kevin Teevens

Goodbye

This is a eulogy of sorts. For a fish joint.

I am writing with my thumbs on a smart phone as I sit in my car listening to satellite radio. My belly is full of perch. Tonight was the last all-you-can-eat perch fry at Duffy’s Tavern. My favorite place to sit and contemplate the Detroit River is to be no more. The sun was setting in more ways than one when I walked in. Now, I am staring at the Detroit River flowing past, chunks of ice glinting here and there in the moonlight.

Has it ever taken you a long time to say goodbye to something or someone?

I’ve been saying goodbye to my old cottage in Canada for the last two decades. It’s just up the river a ways from Duffy’s and we sold it in 1993. It was a shack, really, that my Grandmother bought in 1960. The place was built in the early ‘30’s at the mouth of the Detroit River where it meets Lake Erie.

In the 20’s and 30’s a group of doctors from Detroit used to sail their boats to a point just shy of Bar Point, called Amherst Pointe. They’d tie up for the night and camp. Later, they bought a piece of land from the farmer that owned it and began to build cottages. Three tidy streets of them. Our cottage was previously owned by a Dr. Woodbridge, one of the founders of Amherst Pointe and the namesake of the first street there, Woodbridge Drive. When I was six, I used to scale the field stone chimney. An adventure that always ended with a hoarse cry from my Grandmother Adelaide out the kitchen window, get down from there! Kevin! Our cottage was locally famous, in a way, for the bunk beds inside. They were from the Tashmoo, the popular paddle-wheel steamship that sank not far from where I am typing this.

I grew up in many ways, on the Canadian side of the river. Every summer we’d live there for two months, a getaway from our small bungalow on the Northwest side of Detroit. It was here that I became acquainted with a great many things. Fishing. Sailing (and the ill-advised stern-kissing of passing freighters.) Canadian Beer. Love. Not necessarily in that order.

Tonight I find myself saying yet another goodbye to that era.

Duffy’s Tavern. Closing. The docks were always filled with sailboats and cabin cruisers and all manner of craft. They jostled and tugged at their moorings when freighters passed upbound in the Amherstburg channel on the way to Detroit. The channel was so narrow here the passing ore carriers towered over you. People came and went. It was a great vibe. It was a nautical pit stop that served the best lake perch around. Caught that morning and on your plate that evening. I suspect a confluence of “Homeland Security” and the economy and gas prices probably spelled the end of Duffy’s.

So here I am, not really wanting to drive away.

Do we ever really leave the people, places and things that mean something to us? When we say goodbye are they really gone? Do we leave a little bit of ourselves with them and take a little bit of them with us? I’d swear a part of me is still sailing Lake Erie as a 20 year old. I am still swimming out to the 2nd beach raft with a girl. I am still waking up in that top bunk from the Tashmoo, listening to the mournful call of the foghorn on a still morning. Sitting here tonight I can feel it. Do you know Quantum Physics says Tiger Stadium is still there? Oh what the hell, while we’re at it, let’s cue Barbara Streisand singing “The Way We Were.”

Maybe I am just no good at saying goodbye.

The Safe

Today is my birthday.

I am watching my Grandfather being lowered into the cold Wisconsin ground. I realize something as I look down at my black leather dress gloves, given to me by a friend long ago that is no longer in my life. My realization is this. With this birthday, today, I am exactly half my Grandpa’s age.

He was 102.

There seems to be some sort of cosmic geometry going on here. This place and this time and this birthday and this man I am planting in the ground. On the exact day I am exactly half his age.

You have to wonder sometimes how things line up. Why things happen in our lives. Who you meet. Who you love. Who you don’t love. Who you run into with your car. Or bump into in the grocery store. Thousands upon thousands of these happenstances occur everyday in our lives. Some people call it fate. Some call it a meaningless randomness that can be expressed mathematically.

Some call it God.

I like to think of these intersections as synchronicities. So many intersections. This life crossing that life. This thing bumping into that thing that creates a new thing. So many people and events crossing and recrossing our existence. It seems to me the criss-crossing creates this fabric, this blanket of experience we call our lives. Yeah, I know. Deep. Maybe I just need one of my Grandfather’s Bloody Marys made in what he called “dirdy girdee” style. Where he topped it off with pickle juice and beer, and for chrissakes whatever you do don’t stir it! Family has been gathering for a couple days at the old house with the tin roof that was built in 1910. A lot of toasting and reminiscing is going on. When I got here I did what I always do when I first get to Oconto. I go into the basement. I breathe deeply. It always smells the same and like no other place on earth.

All my life I’ve tried to crack my grandfather’s safe.

This started when I was five. I used to lean my head to the cold surface of the ancient safe in the basement of his house and carefully spin the dial back and forth, listening for the tumblers to click into place. I had seen this done on TV shows like The Wild Wild West. So I knew what I was doing. What treasure was inside? My Grandfather was a locally famous guy, avid fisherman and hunter who worked at the Holt Lumber company back when the lumber business gave Oconto its reason for being. He worked his way up to paymaster and accountant. When he retired the first time it was 1972. The second time he retired he was 85. He was good with money and even better with numbers. Yet he never had more than a 5th grade education. A true pick yourself up by your bootstraps self-educated man. It was said he made a lot of money in his wheeling and dealings and tax work. Where could it be? I tried to crack that safe every time I visited for 46 years. This visit was no different.

Except that Grandpa Mercier wasn’t here.

Tony Mercier was the poster child for bad living. Which is why, of course, he lived to 102. He never exercised a day in his life. He drank. He was overweight. He put salt in his beer. He put salt in his coffee. Salted Spanish peanuts were a staple. A giant brown paper bag of them would always slide from under my seat when he was driving me somewhere when I was a kid. He showed me how to fish. He showed me how to trap shoot. He put one of the first beers in my life into my hand. When I was a bit older, he lent me the money to start my ice cream truck business that put me through college. I can still hear him saying to me on the phone with a laugh, “Kevy! You pay that note back within three years. Because if you ain’t making money by then you should hang it up!” He was one of the funniest men I ever met, too. He had a way of putting things that made perfect sense and no sense at all. One of my favorites was when somebody had imbibed too much. "He’s jagged up like a hoot-owl!”

Cosmic geometry.

That Ethel La Fortune would bear an illegitimate son, Anthony, in 1910. That her parents would force her to give her son up to the orphanage. That the orphan’s grandparents would move to a small lumber town in Wisconsin and that they would adopt their grandson, Anthony, and raise him. That they would run their home as a boarding house for lumbermen and that the house would burn in 1942. The very house I am sitting in as I write this and that Anthony would rebuild that house in 1945 and live there until now. Where he raised a family and sometimes Hell. And there his wife would give birth to a woman that would give birth to me.

La Fortune?

I approached the safe. It's in the same place as when I sat next to it two years ago after driving to Oconto for Tony’s 100th birthday bash. It must weigh 800 pounds and has never been moved in all the years I have tried to crack it. I remember that the date on the lock says it was built in 1884. I turn on the light and I can’t believe what I see.

The door to the Mosler Safe Company safe is open.

You always hear people talk about doors closing and opening when jobs or relationships or lives end. There is truth to it. So that I should find after 46 years that the door to the old Mosler was open shouldn’t be a surprise.

Because after all, doors close and doors open. Like hearts. That's just what they do.

The Drive Home

A kid rear-ended me on the freeway tonight.

You know the drill. The freeway you're traveling on is filled with people in a hurry to start their weekend. It moves in fits and starts. It's a cadence we all know. Traffic slows. You slow. Someone behind you doesn't.

Bang.

Not a new story. Nor the first time I've been rear ended in the Motor Capitol of the World. The last time I was driving with my son after picking up bags of you-bag-it-cedar mulch at Angelos in Wixom. It was the best smelling accident I was ever in. A young guy failed to maintain a safe driving distance as traffic slowed. I had just admired the Ford GT on the roof of the Ford Wixom plant with a glance and bang. Mulch flew everywhere. We were all right except for the indignity of picking cedar mulch out of our hair. The kid that hit us got out of the car mumbling he didn't have insurance. I was not in a sensitive mood and didn't comfort him. Nor did I tell him his zipper was open.

Today was different.

I was talking on the phone hands free and traffic was slowing and bang. I am hit from behind at what I would guess to be about 60 mph. I am driven from the lane I am in halfway into the lane to my left. I see debris in my wake and weirdly enough think of NASCAR. Then, what to me is the most interesting thing about all this drama happens. My, the language that issued forth from my mouth.

I used to occasionally drive with my Great Uncle Dan. A really rough character who had a varied professional career including being an ex member of the Devil's Brigade. He also worked as a miner. Uncle Dan used to swear at other drivers constantly as he drove me around in his VW Bug. As I child I had never heard such language. Uncle Dan had an aggression toward other human beings that really surprised me when it came out. He once said to me that there were too many Slopes in his old Sarasota neighborhood and that "they ought to call in Lieutenant Calley!"

Bang.

Now, any of you that know me know I have this sorta Zen thing these days about life. Which is why when I was rear ended tonight after work I found my initial un-zen like reaction very funny. Profanities spewed forth from my gob that would make a Master Drill Sergeant proud. So much so that the person I was on the phone with knew I was ok as I pulled over under the 96 Telegraph overpass. Because if you can swear so eloquently about another's lack of driving ability after they've hit you you have to be ok. Or, you are channeling my Great Uncle Dan.

I always wonder what I am being taught when things in life don't go as I think they should. The personal relationship that ends only to have you realize too late how truly important the person was. The jerk at work that is mean and rude who leaves in his wake destruction and lost jobs and lost opportunity who then gets promoted. A man you spent time talking to at basketball and baseball games that gets beaten to death with a baseball bat by his son.

I pulled over and watched in my rear-view mirror as this young guy got out. His car is toast. Really toast. The front end is so crumpled that his insurance agent will throw in the towel on his beloved late-model wheels. At 50 I know this. At 18 he doesn't. I could get out and yell at him. For a moment I felt like it. But only for a moment. As he walked around the front end of his decimated wheels, anti freeze running out everywhere, I got out. He looked at me, shaking. I asked him if he was ok. He said he was. I asked him how old he was. He said 18 and that he should call his Mom. I said that was a good idea. Afterward, the State Police pulled up. As the officer approached I told the young man not to worry. I told him that I understood he was worried about paying for his car. I told him that someday he would look back on today and realize this wasn't about losing this car.

It was about not losing him.

The Neighbor

The neighbor across the street died this morning.

It turns out she did so while I sat on my porch sipping coffee, reading an old, esoteric text about the meaning of life.

Lynn was a woman who loved her only child and her husband. She once said to me there was just something about a man on a John Deere. That was the brand of tractor her husband drove. My son used to hang out with her son playing video games years ago. On Halloween, after the kids were done coming by, she’d sit on my porch or me on hers and she’d smoke her cigarettes while I puffed a cigar.

The trucks and ambulances came. You could hear them in the distance getting closer. When the paramedics arrived, they hurried. And then, they didn’t. The sun is setting as I truck around on my bike with music in my ears and no helmet on my head. My wife wonders if we should have run over there and tried to help. Should we have done more than watch it unfold. Should I have issued a precordial thump? Breathed life into her until help arrived? Tell Lynn it’s not time to go and get back to where you once belonged?

I don’t know.

Life isn’t TV. Not even close. I can’t shake the feeling some things are meant to be.

Bob and Adele across the street and next door are sitting in lawn chairs on their driveway in the setting sun. Her walker is within reach. He is 85. She is 84. She has Alzheimer’s and has been in an expensive facility that charged Bob 250 a day just to sit with his wife, the woman he has called Babe for the last 64 years of their marriage. To hell with that says Bob. She belongs here, sleeping next to me. They hold hands.

I pass a vacuum cleaner next to the curb. Kids jumping on a trampoline. A little yellow plastic man with a flag declaring, SLOW. A cement bench on a lawn. God Light hitting it all.

God Light. You know what that phrase means. How the light of the Sun going down can be so magnificent it makes everything it touches beautiful. Even the product you’re selling. Except I am not selling anything today. I am pedaling a bike as Dawes sings in my ears… Stories don’t end.

The light hits the house where a neighbor has lost his wife. The light embraces the aging couple sitting in their lawn chairs in the driveway holding hands. Holding on to dear life.

I pedal hard.

A Dad Thing

Recently, my 11 year old expressed a fear to his Mom. He was afraid to grow up and have “big clumsy Dad hands.”

I’m a Dad?

Twenty years or so have passed since I was changing my first-born’s diapers while my spouse worked the night shift. Now, don’t get all warm and fuzzy with that image in your mind. As she will tell you, I was pretty much a slacker in the diaper-changing department and my ratio of diapers changed to diapers avoided is somewhere in the record books.

Seriously, though. I really don’t feel like a Dad.

I guess there are 2,826,576,003 tell tale signs of my being a Dad if I look back over the years. Not to mention the last three digits of that number have names and make things in the fridge disappear. One of the first signs that I was a Father, I suppose, was when I was standing in the delivery room asking if I could have an epidural, too. I guess picking up an apple in the produce section of Kroger and explaining it to a rapt 18 month old probably was a clue, as well. Or striding purposefully out of Hudson’s carrying a two year old who vomited all over us and down my back, (“Daddy, I messed you all up”) was indeed probably another solid indicator. I seem to remember how for years how when I went for a walk or a jog there was always a strap on my wrist attached to a three-wheeled something-or-other with two boys sitting inside saying “Faster, Dad! Go faster!” Since I've always thought Baseball is transcendental, I have to ask myself, how many games does it take to realize who you really are? I've been to hundreds.

I guess I really am a Dad.

We have a tradition in my house. When a boy is sick and on the sofa, he automatically knows what I’ll prescribe. Just like I watched when I was a boy and sick on the sofa. James Garner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough in The Great Escape.

Imagine. A certain old guy in the house says nothing makes you feel better when you’re sick than watching a great old war movie about men digging out of a prison camp.

If that isn’t a Dad thing to say, I don’t know what is.

Lucky

So many people we just pass by in life and never give them a second thought. Do we cross paths with strangers for a brief moment for a reason? Or is it just random?

I was checking out the chip aisle at Meijer an hour ago. A woman shopping that aisle smiles at me. I smile at her. I don't know, it was a chip aisle smile that meant to me, so many choices of something neither of us should be eating.

I tossed some Pringles on top of all the veggies in my cart that I am going to juice and I head for the checkout. It occurs to me as I push my cart away that maybe she held that smile a little too long. Cut to the checkout. I am off-loading all this healthy stuff and the can of Pringles. Same woman gets in line behind me. Smiles at me. I assume because of the incongruity of this truckload of fruits and veggies topped off by a single can of Pringles. Then, she comes closer and says to me, "go home and tell your wife how lucky she is, if you didn't have that ring on, you'd be in big trouble."

Now, I'll be honest here. It's reasonable to say I fairly misjudged that chip aisle smile.

I would like to be able to report that I flashed a toothy smile and tossed off a rejoinder that would make George Clooney proud. But that would be untrue. What really happened was this. She then said to me, "My husband died last year, and sometimes, when I see a bald guy..." her words trailed off.

I then did the only thing I could do. I tipped my freshly shaven head down and told her to go ahead.

And she did. With both hands.