TWO SPECIAL DAYS WITH JACK T. RODDEY

“The stuff of life tis bittersweet, like burnt sugar, long on the days of toil and short on the eves of rest, but tis all we haveth twixt breathing and naught.” Shakespeare.
That’s Billy Bob Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s loser brother, who wrote the flop play “Hamlet and Juliet”.
We all tend to count down the days till a vacation, short changing the day drift in between. I have a friend who’s always charting maps to his next vacation destination, living for the sudden spray of surf, the splurge of sunshine and the ringing rain of slot machine coins in all-you-can-eat buffet casinos.
Many of us look through the photo albums of our last family reunion, while waiting anxiously for the next one. We take tons of photos to capture the Kodak or digital moment that marks the highlights of our lives.
Some of us fill our days with dreams of moving to a better neighborhood, where life’s rewards increase with the taxes, or out of town to the bucolic countryside of squirrels, skunks and bears attracted by birdseed.
We sometimes proudly show pictures and home movies of our vacations where we lived a week or two as the residents of a paradise picked from brochures or from the Internet.
Some of us find a sense of reality in the reality TV of others who scheme for a better life, backstabbing and betraying for a bigger piece of the pie. There but for the grace of a producer god, go I. What we have is never enough, or so claim the commercials.
Many of us merge with the movies showing worlds of wonder and magic like “Harry Potter”, “The Lord of the Rings” and “Spider-Man” fighting crime and dead end jobs.
We follow our favorite professional sports’ teams whose stars follow the money, playing for and against teams they just went to or left. Their loyalty is to the biggest paycheck, while we fans root for our favorite uniforms, full of former enemies and gypsy heroes.
As parents we often try to stay in the lives of our children, who both need us to baby sit grandchildren and want their independence from us. We probably spend too much time worrying about what will happen when they don’t follow our advice. There’s nothing like the mistakes of your own experiences to move you to a different path, because what do your parents know? They’ve only lived forever.
There’s so much to worry about and wait for that I try to treasure the moment of the here and now, before it’s there and gone, and let it linger a little in my mind. Take last Tuesday, for example.
If it’s Tuesday, it’s Jack, my grandson visiting us. Jack and I hit a bucket or two of balls at a local driving range and then we all walked down the road to see a new bridge.
At the end of the evening, Jack and I sat on the back porch under a whirling fan; the ZZZT ZZZT song of the bugs looking for love in the breeze through the leaves of the trees was loud and constant as a buzz saw.
Our cat, sprawled like a fluffy dust mop on my lap, purred as I petted him under the chin. Home grown tomatoes lay ripening on a table, while bunnies bounced about the yard in the dark. A single table lamp lit up a portion of the porch as Jack read a story from his new “Nickelodeon” magazine in a strong and steady voice.
I rocked slowly beside him listening and drifting in and out of the dark with half closed eyes. The fragrances of our backyard flower bed wafted to and fro on the wind. My barefooted wife puttered around in the kitchen listening to Jack’s story telling too. Our dog kept rolling a tennis ball to my feet hoping for a toss and a chance to retrieve.
Everything bad that could happen to us was put off to another day, all deadly diseases and awful accidents in abeyance, as I spent a few precious moments with my beloved grandson, my loving wife and loveable pets. It was a special night like any other. It just doesn’t get any better than this.


IN SEARCH OF A CLEAN MAILBOX
It was a warm sunny autumn day in my home town and my grandson, Jack Thomas, and I had a letter to mail and we had all afternoon to do it before dinner. It was obviously time for an adventure.
Jack held the letter tightly in his little hand. Several blocks away we saw a mailbox. A ten-minute three-block walk wasn’t much of an adventure, so as we approached the blue squat tub and I declared that it wasn’t clean enough. I explained that if a letter were mailed in an unclean mailbox, it would arrive as a dirty letter and no one wants to get a dirty letter. In Jack’s six short years he has learned to humor me. So we had to find a clean mailbox. This was way before
anthrax airmail attacks, where dirty mail now has a deadly meaning.
Our long hot search had started. I saw several receptacles that I thought might be mailboxes like a birdhouse for airmail and a crate in a yard. Jack patiently explained “Granddad, that isn’t a mailbox.” I trusted his judgment there, but when he pointed out that a person’s porch mailbox could be our mailbox because you put mail in and the mailman picks it up, I had to stop the silliness a tad. Not wanting to be caught messing with someone’s personal mailbox, we had to pass up many promising porches in our pursuit of a clean mailbox, hygienic though they may be.
Heading toward Juniata College I stopped a student to ask him where there was a clean mailbox. He didn’t seem to truly grasp the sanitary concept, but pointed to a mailbox on the corner that ended up being too dirty.
We decided to take a break on a bench outside the college campus. Jack wanted to sit alone on his bench, but I wanted his company, so I sat right beside him. Whereas, he jumped up to sit on the other bench, where I immediately joined him. This game of musical benches continued for a while, till I said we were going on campus.
Jack didn’t want to do this as it was a school and his experience, as a first grader, was that strangers just didn’t walk into a school. I assured him that my father had paid them several thousand dollars in the 60s to send me there, so they all knew me. In fact, they still write me a lot, asking for even more money.
Finally, he went on campus with me. We felt we needed sticks for our hike, so we picked two sturdy tree branches for our gnarled walking sticks. On campus, Jack was very reluctant to climb the steep stairs to Founders Hall to continue our clean mailbox search, but he followed me, rather than be left behind at the bottom. On the porch we had a nice rock and talk in the rocking chairs, before setting down our sticks and going inside.
I asked a lady hurrying down the hall where we could find a clean mailbox, because we didn’t want to send a dirty letter. She seemed puzzled, almost took our letter to mail, but thought better of it and said there was one close off campus.
We left and walked across campus to the gym, which Jack loved. We went down to the basketball court where I told him I had played intramural b-ball with our team the Sneaker Squeakers. We were at the bottom of D league, the lowest league, and I was the co-captain because we needed two captains to share the blame. We only won one game when the other team failed to show. We celebrated for days.
While there I asked a young lady where we could find a clean mailbox on our adventure. She smiled knowingly and said she thought there was one in Ellis Hall. So off we went with our sticks. On the way I showed Jack how I could fly on my stick. While watching me he stated that I was only standing on my tippy toes. I assured him that I was indeed off the ground, only flying very very low. First graders can be so skeptical at times.
We didn’t find a clean mailbox at Ellis Hall, but did find a snack bar where I bought Jack a candy bar and a bottle of pop. We then continued our search off campus, where I showed my grandson the scientific principle of fizz. I held out his pop and let it drop to bounce off the sidewalk. I picked it up frothing at the cap, twisted the cap off and a Mountain of Dew erupted. He had seen this phenomenon before, but only by accident, never on purpose. He wouldn’t let me hold his pop from then on.
We meandered down Moore Street, trying to fly on our magic sticks, but getting no airlift due to gravity. I explained that Moore St. was so named because it had more street than any other. It could go all the way to Lewistown, some 35 miles away. But Jack had seen no such street on his ride here, so he doubted me. Hey, if you can’t trust your grandfather to tease you, then who can you trust?
Finally we found a clean mailbox, amazingly only two blocks from where we had started. I held it open and Jack slipped the letter in, where it would arrive sparkling clean at its destination- the garbage company. Then I tried to grab Jack’s pop bottle and drop it to see it fizz again.

FOREVER FOURTEEN
My grandson Jack was the future I'd never see, now he's the past I see over and over and over again in my mind. That past started horrifically on 1/16/09 about 1:15 pm with a split second shot that took away his life and everything he'd ever be. Jack made our world so much brighter with his presence, but so much bleaker with his passing.
His school friends say Rest in Peace, Jack T. Roddey. Rest in peace should never have to be said to a 14-year-old boy. Ever! Jack, you should be running and jumping, laughing and playing , flirting and hugging, joking and helping people long after I'm gone. Instead, you're still and silent in your dark dark grave.
Oh Jack, my heart is shattered and scattered to the ends of the earth and I see you everywhere; wherever there's video games, Dr. Pepper, popcorn chicken, a playground, sour candy, birthday cards, a backyard trampoline, kids and a boy's mischievous grin. Fun followed you around like a circus. Now the circus has left town, leaving behind misery and bittersweet memories.
Jack, I see you behind me stuck at that terrible January day waving and shouting at me, "Granddad stop! Wait Granddad! Don't leave me here! Please, Granddad! Please!" But I can't stop. I try to turn around. I try to go back and get you, but the present's too powerful and it pushes me forward, hurtling me thru life weeping without you, as you recede and get smaller in the distance.
Goodbye my sweet sweet grandson, I cherish every moment we had together. It went by in the wink of an eye and I'll never really see you again. Even if I could search the seas and wander the world endlessly and fly from planet to planet in every galaxy in the entire universe, I'd never find you and see your beautiful smile and your precious face again. Or hear you laugh, tease you or ruffle your hair ever again. You are gone forever and the enormity and weight of that crushes me.
I love you and miss you so so much, my sweet sweet goofy barefoot boy.
Granddad and Nancy