Time and people come and go so quickly through our lives. Recollection is so often such a blur of faces and memories. Perhaps it was like this for us before our birth and may be so after our death. So much to remember and to learn and so little time, it seems. Mr. Edison was correct, of course...time is certainly the most valuable thing in existence. May you stay aware of what to save for that blur. May you say the good words to those you love while you and they are still here, together.

Goodbye Frank

Frank Tensington puffed on his pipe. Great circles of smoke collected lazily around his head, then darted quickly to the ceiling in swirling circles, driven by the hot air from the furnace.

Behind thick, black-rimmed glasses, Frank squinted his eyes as the smoke thickened, then opened them as it dispersed. Pensively he gazed toward the large office window, one of two full-wall panes of glass that helped keep the room safe from the sub-zero, white winter winds that rose and fell outside, at one moment driving hissing particles of snow in a headlong assult on the glass, then transforming to a low howl, as they slipped around the corner of the building and into endless night blackness.

"Well," he started slowly, then stopped. I could tell he was thinking. When Frank started a sentence with "well," then stopped, it was always because he was thinking. Usually, this would have been an annoyance, but with Frank, it did not matter to me. Unlike many of those from whom this habit would have been irritating, when Frank did it, I waited patiently. Frank had important things to say. Looking back, I cannot remember one time when Frank said something that was not important to me. I was just seventeen then, so this was very substantial.

The insides of the windows were beginning to turn fuzzy white with ice. Behind the five foot tall Christmas tree, a pyramid-shaped area of glass remained unfrozen from the heat of the tree's red, blue, orange, and yellow lights. Water droplets dribbled slowly down the surface of the pyramid, carrying with them a kaliedoscope of light.

To the left of the tree was the office desk, littered with piles of repair invoices, gasoline company record-keeping books, a half full cup of coffee left over from the morning, and the cat. Frank's cat, asleep, curled with its nose to its tail. The wall to the left of this was waist-high wood, separated by the doorway into the repair bays. On each side of the doorway, from the waist-high wood to the ceiling, was a single window.

Phantom-like, the repair bays rested in total darkness. From them, the mixed smells of anti-freeze, gasoline, oil, brake fluid, engine exhaust, rubber, and grease drifted into the office on an invisible cloud of humidity, as water used to wash the floor condensed on a layer of cold outside air blowing in under the overhead bay doors, and then evaporated in the warmth from the furnace.

Outside, in the darkness beyond the gas pumps, a single car whispered slowly by on the snow covered road.

The dimly lighted clock on the back wall of the office hummed softly. Ten after nine. Below the clock, on a counter, the cash register rested, its cash drawer opened like a large, protruding, compartmented black tongue. On each side of the cash register, two shelves ran to the far walls. On these shelves were the waxes, polishes, rubbing compounds, fuel additives, rust dissolvers, and various lubricants----all intended to compliment repair sales, but, on this night, all acting with singular purpose as multi-shaped reflectors of Christmas tree lights.

Once in a special while, it was like this. Frank would kiss his wife Suzanne----his "sweet wife of fifty-five years," as he called her----goodbye, walk the eight house distance from his home to this country gas station, sit down, and we would talk. The seventeen year old kid working to support his first thirty-five dollar car and the seventy-four year old man who had lived through much and who had much to share. Once in a special while.

On this night, I had asked Frank how he had been able to navigate his seventy-four years without going insane from all the nonsense that went on in the world. What was it, I wanted to know, he had done to make it all this way and still remain so calm?

"Well," he started slowly, then stopped.

"Well, it was like this. I was born in eighteen eighty-nine. The world then was different, of course, but more than you would suspect, it was similar to the way things are now. There was corruption, love, hate, war, understanding and lack of it. Sound familiar?"

I told him it did.

"In those respects, eighteen eighty-nine wasn't much different than now. It just took a lot longer to spread the word about any one thing back then than it does today."

A gust of wind shook the office windows.

"By the time I was fifteen, I was caught up in all the crazy feelings you could imagine. I wanted to do everything at once, be everything at once, and change everything at once. All at the same time. I imagine you've had some of those feelings."

"Still have them," I answered.

"All right, then you know what I mean. I felt like I was going to burst from anger one minute and from happiness the next. Much later in my life, I figured out that the one seemed to always balance out the other, in the long run, I mean.

"The only problem all this left was that I felt like I was running in several directions at once, then slamming on the brakes, then running again, and so on and on and on. Almost got whiplash," he said and laughed out loud.

I laughed with him. He was easy to laugh with.

"So, what did you do?" I pressed him.

"Me? Well, nothing, exactly. In my case, you see, it's more like what was done to me."

"What do you mean?" I quizzed.

"I mean that right about then is when I met Suzanne. I fell in love with her so fast and so bad that I thought I was going to throw up."

"Throw up? Why throw up?"

"I don't know how else to describe the feeling. Up until that time, I was jerking back and forth between running and stopping, happiness and anger, and then I met Suzanne, and I felt I had to be with her all the time to be sane, and when I wasn't with her, I felt like I was going to throw up."

"Doesn't sound like much of an improvement over your first situation," I told Frank. "What did you do?"

"Well," he started, and broke into laughter, then started again; "well, believe it or not, and this is the truth, believe it or not, I threw up."

"Get outta here!"

"No, really, after about two months of this, I went out behind my house, and I threw up! There I was, standing with my head pointed at the ground, and the ground seemed to be spinning, or maybe it was my head; anyway, it was as if at that moment all the bursts of anger and happiness and starting and stopping rushed together----all those feelings I had been dealing with for about two years----and they just exploded and disappeared. It's hard to find any better words for it than that. Kaflooey. Gone."

I thought for a moment that he would have been about seventeen when this happened----my age.

"How could they have gone?" I asked, incredulous, knowing that I still suffered from each and every one of them.

"Don't know. I just don't know, but they were gone. I was staring at the ground, and they were gone. Maybe it was because I felt that I was in love. Maybe that gave me a larger thing to hold on to than all the other confusion. Those things do happen. Sometimes one thing is important enough to you that it gives your life a focus, and other things that used to seem big and important seem smaller and less important."

I realized that I had not yet had such an experience in my life, and I wondered if I ever would.

"Well, what did you do then?" I asked Frank. I really needed to know.

"Just then I needed to sit down, so I did, on the steps of the back porch of my parent's house. There was a big oak tree in their back yard, and I sat there looking at it, and I thought about what I was going to do next. I thought about that for a very long time. It was a hard thing to think about.

"I knew I didn't ever want to go back to the confusion I had for two years, but I didn't know what I was going to be able to go ahead to. No one decision happened, like some people will tell you that they thought about something, and they decided on one certain thing right then and there. It wasn't like that. Through the years I found out that not many important decisions in life happen in that definite a way----that you actually sort of ease into a decision through time as you experience more and more."

This was a tough one for me to grasp. I was still at a point where I needed to make a decision----any decision, and then do something right away.

"As it turned out, I didn't actually make a whole decision that day. Not actually. It was more of a discovery that I needed to marry Suzanne eventually. No revelations came on how I could do that, or how I could support her.

"Anyway, in those years a lot of boys my age didn't stay in school much past sixteen. I was already seventeen and still in school, mostly because my parents thought I should be. As it turned out, I actually stayed in school until I was eighteen, and I received a diploma.

"I remember one of my high school teachers----an English teacher by the name of Mrs. Wilson. She was one of those teachers that, no matter how much of a goofball you were, or if most folks thought you had little promise, still saw any good there was in you and always tried to help you do something with that good. I didn't know it then, but Mrs. Wilson was a born teacher. Someone who was put here to teach and to help young people find out that they were not stupid or dumb, but, rather, that they could find a place in life and they could be self-supporting and happy. I realize how many hours she invested in that task----both hours at school and at home. She was certainly a born teacher, and we needed more of them then, and we still need more of them.

"Anyway, for some reason I could not understand, Mrs. Wilson thought I would make a fine teacher. When she first suggested it, I thought she was crazy, I really did. As time went on I would think of it once in awhile, but still had trouble imagining myself as a teacher. I wasn't like Mrs. Wilson. I wasn't.

"One day while I was out walking with Suzanne, I told her what Mrs. Wilson suggested and how I felt."

"Of course you're not like Mrs. Wilson," she told me. "You aren't Mrs. Wilson. You're Frank, and as Frank, you'd make a very good teacher."

"Seems I was being ganged up on. I still didn't get it, I guess. After all, I was a boy, and I was seventeen!"

Frank laughed, and so did I.

"Well," he started slowly, then stopped.

I waited.

"Well, I was thinking about this one day about a month after my walk with Suzanne. It seemed that my becoming a teacher could solve two of my problems. It would give me a way to marry and support Suzanne, and it would give me something to do with my life. It gave me a way to see my life moving ahead, I guess, and it took me many years to realize how important that is to a person.

"So, I became a teacher, and two years later I married Suzanne, and I was very happy."

It seemed logical to me. It made sense. Find something to do with your life, marry someone you love, and be happy. No problem.

"But, there were problems," Frank said.

"Problems?" I almost shrieked, disbelieving. Here I thought he'd solved it all for me, and now he was telling me that there were more problems. "What kind of problems?" I pleaded.

"It was like the old confusion was raising its head again. I found myself thinking that so many of the things that the school board made us teachers do were were stupid. I found myself thinking that so many things that various countries and governments around the world were doing, including ours, were stupid. I found myself thinking that so many things in general all around me were stupid, and I wanted to change them. Then I realized I couldn't change them all, so I decided I wanted to get away from them."

"Boy, Frank," I said, "this is a mess. Did you think about throwing up again?"

Frank smiled. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I did," he said. "But that was no good either. It seemed to me as if all the rules had changed. Too many things needed fixing, and I coundn't fix them all, and I couldn't find a way to get away from them. Truthfully, I became an angry man. Carried the anger around with me for a long while. Don't know why Suzanne didn't throw me out. She should have, probably.

"One night after dinner Suzanne and I were talking. Or I should say she was talking, and I was grumping. Talk, grump, talk, grump, and then she said something that really got me thinking. She said:"You're a good teacher, Frank. That's something you can do"

"I knew she was right. I knew it as soon as she said the words. For a minute I felt the same way I had when I was seventeen and in the back yard throwing up. And I made a discovery, just as I had back then: that teaching, mixed in with all the things I couldn't change or do anything about, was something that I could do. One step at a time. One student at a time. One little victory at a time. One plus one plus one until, perhaps, by the end of my career, it would add up to something bigger than the sum.

"And I realized something else I could do: love Suzanne."

"But Frank, you must have already loved her," I pleaded. After all the years and after all those feelings you've told me about, you must have already loved her."

"Oh, it's not that I didn't love her. I loved her, all right. But at that moment, I realized that I didn't love her completely."

"I don't understand," I told Frank. "I don't get it."

Frank looked at me for a moment and smiled. "Of course you don't," he said. "You can't, not yet anyway, but you will some day. What you need to know about it now is that complete love has more to it than it seems from your side of the fence. It's a lot more than fun and physical and emotional attraction. Oh, it's all those things, and should be, but it's more, too. It's also things like making each other happy and feeling supported, and caring about what is important to the other person in a two-way-street kind of way. It's quite a bit, actually, and if it's gone about the right way, it keeps becoming more."

We were both very silent for a long time. I could hear the humming of the clock on the rear wall. I glanced up: ten o'clock.

"Well," Frank started, "if I don't get myself home pretty quick, Suzanne will throw me out for sure!"

I looked at him and smiled. "Thanks Frank," I told him.

"Sure thing. I enjoyed it."

"Me too."

That night, I gave Frank a ride home.

"Thanks again," I told him, as he opened the car door.

"Sure thing, sure thing," and the car door closed, and he walked up the walk and opened his front door and went inside to see his sweet wife of fifty-five years.

Time does get confusing, and things do happen fast. New jobs, new places, new problems. Frank knew that, and I found it out in time.

One thing I am sorry about is that, because of the confusion time created in my life, I never did get to see or talk to Frank again. I never got to say "goodbye" to him in a way that would have meant "I'll see you later," either here on this earth, or somewhere after this earth."

So very many years have passed since Frank and I had our last talk. I miss him very much, of course, but I'm convinced that I will see him again, wherever he and Suzanne, his sweet wife of fifty-five years have gone on to. I'm also sure that the two of them are still very much in love.

With this certainty, and with an everlasting gratitude for the truth and honesty and insight he shared with me, I can now say: "goodbye, Frank."

Your comments or questions are welcome at houghton@classicpreservation.com.

© H. Houghton

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