Three Keys

Back in the hmmm -- 1970s it must have been, I’m trying to date it by my car at the time, and my career point in life, and the ages of John Carroll and Teresa, who were children, and I reckon it was before Andrea and Susanna -- my parents moved to South Carolina and listed the old place for sale. I’m not sure what if any action they got on it, I do remember mama describing one looker, but there were no offers and obviously no sale. With the aid of a business associate and friend whose name slips me at the moment, my father had a sales territory with a company selling tools, or it may have been connectors. The Carolina adventure didn’t pan out and in due course they moved back home to St. Andrews.

Yesterday that step in life finally worked out for us as we went to closing, signed the papers, and turned over the keys. Key to the three downstairs doors, key to the doors at the top of the outside stairs, and the generator key. At mama’s insistence, we’d had the generator installed after Hurricane Ivan when there were several days of power outage. Natural gas fuel, it has an automobile type engine, one cylinder, which has a sound of its own, and tests itself by firing up automatically once a month and running about five minutes. It powers emergency essentials: kitchen appliances, ignition to the tankless water heater, lights in one or two rooms, and one HVAC system. We never had a hurricane after, not one that cut the electricity anyway. But the generator was handy once or twice when power was out in our part of town for several hours while Gulf Power worked to restore it. It comes on within two seconds of the electricity going off.

Hurricane Ivan took down the enormous hickory tree in the front yard. Linda, Kristen and I were in Atlanta for my prostate cancer treatment of about seven weeks, but mama and Gina stayed in the house through the storm and the next morning the usual vultures from out of town were swarming the area offering to cut trees and repair damage. One of them, a crew of two or three from somewhere, offered to cut up and haul away the fallen hickory tree for $1500 and was given the job -- which was necessary, because it was all the way across the front yard, had knocked in part of the front porch, and the tip was reaching to Mr. Drew’s house next door. I’m guessing that mama or Gina told the vulture that because the electricity was out, they were not going to stay at the house. I spoke to them by phone from Atlanta, had my radiation zap, and we drove home, finding the tree cut up and cleared away. We used candles and stayed in the house that night of an eerily pitch black town. I’ve never seen the neighborhood so dark. Unnerving, almost frightening, as though we were at the end of the world.

About nine or ten o’clock it must have been, I wrote about this at least once before and remembered the exact time better then, a car rolled down Calhoun Avenue, stopped by the side of the house, cut the engine, and someone got out and closed the car door quietly. Hearing someone at a window, I grabbed my brightest flashlight, ran upstairs, and opened my bathroom window. Peering out, I could see absolutely nothing because of the darkness. I turned on my flashlight and shined it on the car, an old Chevrolet Impala, one of those huge ones with the V8 engine. I then flashed the light back and forth along the side of the house, surprising whoever it was at the downstairs window, and causing him to run jump in his car, start the engine, and speed away.

My unpriestly thought as a Southerner, was that he probably would have been even more surprised with a shotgun blast into his face through the two panes of glass of the window he was trying to jimmy open. Don’t tell anyone that Father admits to that thought, much less that I said that. It would have brought only momentary satisfaction to my rage though, because he was outside, and not threatening me, and the law would have been ugly. Flashlight was a better weapon.

In my mind I am positive that the vulture who had cut the hickory tree earlier in the day was back after dark to ransack my house, thinking nobody was home.

Starting for its monthly run, the one cylinder generator always reminded me of the engines in the boats in Yokohama the years we lived there. Flat barge-like fishing boats, they were also the homes of the fisherman and his family. Mornings going out, they would sound noisily without any sort of muffler, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop gliding out the canal into Tokyo Bay. Same bay where in August 1945 the battleship USS MISSOURI lay at anchor as the Japanese delegation came out to sign the document of surrender.

Anyway, last year when we first started thinking about moving, downsizing, we consulted with friends. One of my questions was, “What do you like about condo living?” From a former house owner, one appealing answer was, “When a hurricane comes, I just lock the door and leave.”