The Long and Winding Road

Someone once asked me why I named this blog Highway 41. I explained that, after some contemplation, I found a title that encompassed so many of my life’s experiences, a common thread I could draw upon for inspiration. (I didn’t tell them my default title was Spork, something that could be whatever I wanted it to be at any particular time.)

I suppose, like Kerouac, I realized that there are valuable lessons to be gleaned from the road. I also realized that if you drew a line northward on US 41 from Punta Gorda, Fla., to Nashville, Tenn., you could place most of my life story within spitting distance of it. It’s as though, by some divine providence, I’ve followed the road … or maybe it’s following me. Even after I relocated to Georgia, both my home and workplace are within a couple miles of US 41. Strange.

In late December, I embarked on the Tour of the South, visiting friends I haven’t seen in a while and retracing my past to give me perspective for the New Year. My fascination with road trips is grounded in the fact that God always speaks to me during them. Maybe it’s because I’m always looking for Him to show up, and He likes that. [Jer. 29:13]

The next few posts are my memoirs from the trip, and impressions from the voice of One who speaks from our past into our present — or future — without differentiation.

Marking Time
Every time I drive past it, I have to go in and look.

It’s a monument to my heritage, and the closest thing to a family geneology that I have. But each year it fades a bit more, as it somehow stands against the encroaching surroundings that threaten its destruction.

In the waning years of my grandfather's career in retail, he managed a Bealls department store off US 41 in Venice, Florida. Living relatively close by, we got to visit him at work often, which gave him no greater thrill. I'd run into the store, past the knowing smiles of the sales staff, straining to see over the racks of clothes to find the slim, tall figure of the austere man with the slicked-back hair. When he'd spot me, his demeanor would transform from the self-contained "boss man" to someone joyfully and obliviously undignified, which my mom loved to see.

Having only had daughters (my mother is one of four), "Pa" took full advantage of the moments with his grandsons (I was one of six) to pass down those life lessons that can only go from man to man. Whatever we did together, there was always a subtext of wisdom he had yearned for years to impart to the sons he never had. I was the closest thing to that for him, since he was the only father figure I knew for the first three years of my life. From all unbiased and independent accounts, this made me his favorite, which I somehow always knew.
On George Washington's birthday, he took me to the bake shop two doors down from the store and bought my first slice of cherry cheesecake (the reason I celebrate my own birthday each year with the same thing). As I ate it, he told me a parable about a certain former president of the United States and a certain tree and the rewards of honesty in the life of a young man. I was only six, but cynical enough even then to wonder if my mother had recruited the old man to sweeten a message I apparently wasn't swallowing at home. But it was all legit; that's just the way he was.

From the time I was in kindergarten until I was 13, I was part of a tradition Pa started when he realized his grandkids were growing up quickly, particularly as they moved farther away and less frequent visits revealed greater changes.

He'd take us back to the stock room, where his seamstress would press us against a wall, lift our chins and trace the tops of our heads with a pencil, marking our names next to the date. As we grew, it became a competition — especially among us male cousins — to be the highest mark on that wall.

My cousin, Danny, and I lived nearby, so our marks were the most numerable. On the rare occasion when we'd visit Pa at the same time, the seamstress would have to officiate as we both tried to stand tiptoe or stretch our necks to win bragging rights. It was seriously a big deal. During the sixth grade I had a growth spurt that put me at least three inches ahead of my nemesis. He was strangely subdued that summer ...

Years passed before I returned to the wall my freshman year of college, along with my girlfriend at the time. For whatever reason, I made it a habit when in the vicinity to take my girlfriends to see it, thinking it would somehow show them a piece of myself that only that wall could express. Truth is, it was about as meaningful to them as staring at the world's largest ball of twine. But for me it has always been like viewing the rings inside a full-grown tree, each hash mark and date a reference point for a thousand memories.

This time I had just minutes to make my pilgrimage as the store was closing. Still feeling the entitlement of my legacy, I walked right into the back room like I had always done, but was greeted this time with a nasty chime that rang when the door swang open. No one seemed to notice, so I hurried on, so relieved to see that it was still there! With a few changes.

Since nothing is sacred anymore, there were a few proclamations of hormonal, adolescent love and colorful metaphors interspersed among the seamstress' marks. And what began as one family's scribbles 37 years before was now home to similar markings for other people's children, presumably those of subsequent Bealls employees.

Sadly, the wall isn't kind to photography, being stark white with small, faint writing in 30-plus-year-old pencil. I found myself wanting to preserve it like the Shroud of Turin, mapping each inch with close-up photos and piecing it together for posterity. To my relief, someone had posted a note pleading to be contacted should anything threaten to alter or destroy the wall. What Pa had started for us became a special part of others' lives as well.

I stood there for a few minutes thinking about that, and about the greater meaning behind everything on that wall. When one of the sales staff came through the door, she approached me like she was interrupting someone in prayer. She knew why I was there.

"Did you know any of these people?"
"I am one of these people," I said. "My grandfather started this whole thing." She smiled. "This wall has become so special here, we don't dare paint it or tear it down," she said. I smiled, needing to hear those exact words. I proposed that "maybe we can get it listed on the National Registry of Historic Places."

From Venice, Florida, straight up US 41 about 120 miles there's a cemetery bearing Pa's remains in a small metal box which I laid inside a crypt more than two years ago. He was the first man in our family to hold me. I was the last man in our family to hold him.

I didn't get to visit his grave this trip, but I know that the time I spent in a stock room in Bealls department store was so much more meaningful. Like all my moments with Pa, the treasure of it was in the application it had in my life. The final measure of a man isn't something written on a wall or on a crypt; it's the mark that man makes on the lives of those around him that reaches into future generations ... those he cherished and those he never even knew.