Chris is tall and his grey hair, parted on one side, complements his blue eyes as if it were dyed to match. He looks like he could be Ted Kennedy’s son, and when he told me his mother knew Ted, I thought, okay.

“I don’t need much, a couple 1×8’s of quarter-sawn white oak.”

As Chris punched the keypad of his calculator, multiplying board feet by price, I asked, “Do you remember old time radio?” He paused and looked at me quizzically, as if the fifty years had to be traveled in real time.

“The Shadow, Ellery Queen, Dragnet, Sam Spade.Ö. I bought a three CD set from Willow Books, and now I can’t get out of my truck. “

“No, we were TV watchers.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-one; my brother, Mark, is fifty-three.” He and Mark run this business, a hardwood outlet. Suppliers ship rough cut lumber which is then dressed to order in the brothers’ mill.

“That was the beginning of TV. You would have listened to the radio.”

“The only thing I remember was the Dickens tale on WBZ. They played it two years in a row on Christmas Eve. It helped me get through the nightmarish night before Christmas Day.”

“I’ve never heard anyone call it nightmarish. Exciting, over-stimulating.Ö.”

“Maybe I exaggerate, but we could never fall asleep, thinking about presents waiting under the tree. Once my mother gave us sleeping pills.”

“Sleeping pills. I’d be afraid to imagine what they might have been.”

“You know, I don’t even know if they were sleeping pills. Could have been anything.Ö.”

“Placebos.Ö?”

“Like aspirin. That was the only time she gave us something to sleep. I wish I had asked her what they were, but I don’t think she would remember.”

“My mother would. She remembers everything.”

“Not mine. She had late-in-life depression which affected her memory, and she had electroshock therapy.”

“This was before Prozac?”

“No, it’s only seven years ago. There is a small percentage of people those medications don’t work on, and my mother was one. They contain speed, or something like speed, and it made her agitated. Instead of depressed and lethargic, she was depressed and hyper. But don’t think of mad scientist electroshock.Ö.”

“I know. My wife works at McLean.”

“It made my mother feel much better, but the side effect is it erases your memory. Not long term, but your short term memory.”

What is it about me that gets people to reveal this stuff? I don’t know that I’d even tell a friend my mother had electroshock. I could have gone on, but I changed the subject. “Are those your girls?” Portraits of two high-school age girls, both redheads, hung on the wall behind Chris.

“No. They are Mark’s, which means they are my nieces. The one on the left is sixteen and a half, just got her driver’s license.”

“Uh oh.” My father worried when we got our driver’s licenses, and even with safer cars, that worry was passed down.

“And she had a fender bender.”

“As did my son, Matthew, not long after he got his license. It seems to be a rite of passage.”

“She was driving in the snow. She slid right through an intersection.”

“Matthew has done that, too, without running into anything.”

“But she uses the snow as an excuse.”

“Let me guess. She said she was driving soooo slowly.”

“But not slow enough.”

“I know. It’s as though teenagers have established a minimum speed, below which they won’t go, and if they have an accident, it is not their fault. Was she alone?”

“She was, but she doesn’t pay much attention to the law about not driving with other kids for six months.”

“Doesn’t pay attention? Don’t you tell her not to?”

“We compromised. That is one law very few kids obey. I told her if she drives with kids it can’t be at night and she has to be extra careful.”

“That is your compromise? Think about the cops that stop her. They don’t compromise anymore. There is no longer any we’ll-make-sure-they-get-home-safely stuff. It’s all leg irons and handcuffs. I hate the rigid world Matthew inhabits.”

“Don’t get me started on that. We’ve lost control of our police departments.”

“That’s a great way of putting it. It’s all punitive.”

I could see my morning disappearing inside this two-room building.

“We could go on and on, but I’ve got to get back to work.”

***********************

My day’s project was to add connecting side rails to an antique head and footboard. I had the matching lumber, now all I needed was the hardware to connect the pieces. Next stop, my local lumber yard.

“Mr. Miller!”

“Jim.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I need bed rail hardware.’

“We don’t have any.”

Jim is sixty-two, has a lived-in body and acts at work as he might at home. He is so pleasant and so casual, I expect him to pop a slice of pizza in a nearby microwave and offer me half. I’ve known Jim for years and have learned that he is divorced, has two sons, and a daughter and two grandchildren. He claims his job killed his marriage. Or should I say, his jobs. For the last twenty-four years he worked two: one behind a desk, selling building materials, and the other, evenings and nights, patrolling the streets as a town cop.

“Okay, forget the hardware, tell me more about your two jobs. I can’t wrap my brain around the lack of sleep thing, and even worse is the space issue.”

“Like outer space?”

“Inner space. When I get home after work, I kick my dog, my wife and my kid in that order. You don’t go home, you go to another job. What do you kick?”

“Remember, I was doing two entirely different things.” Jim ended the sentence with a lilt, as if the change in tone added emphasis.

“Oh, yeah, that would do it. Go from your day job to your night job, the one where you carry a gun. And this is on how many hours of sleep?”

“Four, but never all at once. And you know, it never bothered me. My doctor couldn’t understand it either, but he said I was so healthy, to keep on doing what I was doing.”

“Here’s a question for the old time cop in you. I was talking to Chris down the street, just before I got here, and we both agreed we’ve lost control of our police departments. Nothing is settled in a friendly fashion. Like the old days. You remember the old days.”

“You mean domestic disputes?”

“No, we were talking about driving…but, yeah. That too.”

“You can’t anymore.”

“Can’t what anymore?”

“Walk away from a fight. It’s the liability. If I walk into a situation, I own it. From the moment I arrive, it’s on my shoulders. If I leave and someone gets killed, I’m in trouble.

“You can’t stop the fight, dust your hands off, and say goodbye?”

“No. If I get a call and it’s a couple, one of them is going in. No matter what, and I have to decide who. I got a call once and it was a woman beating her son. She had pulled the glass and wooden shade off a ceiling fixture, smashed it on the floor and was hitting her kid with the wooden slats. She said she was trying to teach him who was boss. I had to take her in.”

“So you go from child abuse to, ëI don’t have bed rail hardware?’ No stops at Jim Beam’s house, let alone your house?”

“I don’t drink, and that lady hitting her kid is far from the worst. I had a seventeen year old point a gun on me. He kept me at bay for forty minutes.”

“And then what?”

“He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”