This boy, 1967.
This boy, this man, was in France and Germany doing everything he could to stay alive serving his country and very luckily, did not get sent to Nam. He asked; he received. Is that why I finally married him? All he had to do was ask, really, which took him a while. When he finally did, it was on the phone from Hawaii to Alamogordo. But his separated-from-him wife didn’t file for divorce until the day he showed up at my door in New Mexico. However, the story I want to tell right now is about high school.
We went to the same high school for one year. I saw him on the last day of school and my friend brought him to an off-to-college end of summer goodbye party. For us, it was a hot hello. He was a dreamboat incarnate and an oddball to boot. But while he had two years of high school left, I was off to college 100 miles away, close enough to stay in touch, a hot touch. But that’s not the story either. The story is jumping off the MacKenzie River Bridge, just north of Eugene, Oregon, where the park is now gentrified into an RV money maker for the county.
That summer of 1963, I went to the river with some of my graduating class friends who convinced me that everyone loved to jump from the train trestle bridge into the probably twenty feet of water, fast and green, rushing along. Climbing out would be easy as a little gravelly beach ambled from the grass in just the right place for easy exit . I didn’t want to. Almost everything everyone liked was Anathema to me–a personal truism that pursues me relentlessly. But I was trying to be normal and to please my peers. Maybe it was almost drowning so many times in the waves by the Santa Monica Pier where our mother sent us to play with one big inner tube between us, me and Gretchen. Maybe it was boys holding me under in swimming pools or having to swim 20 full laps at summer camp faking it and gagging down river water as I glugged along, but after I hit the MacKenzie River and went down down down to the bottom, I was fairly certain my push back up wasn’t going to be enough. Terror set in as I’d lost all my air on impact with the sand. Above me the sun made a glowing spot I tried to shoot for, giving as much push as I could and wiggling up and up until at last my head burst out and I gasped for breath. It wasn’t fun or funny and whomever I was with that day didn’t get another chance with me. I hate that kind of thing.
Years later, like 50 years later, when Randy and I parked our trailer at the same campground for a week of hanging out with relatives and old friends in Eugene, I asked him if he’d ever jumped off the bridge. “Of course,” he said, and a slight smile passed over his eyes and mouth, “but the funny thing was that I had borrowed my father’s car and before I jumped I put the car key in the pocket of my cut-offs.”
“Just a single key?” I asked, knowing the entire Moffitt family pretty well by now.
“Yeah,” he said. “And when I got out I pulled my pockets out but the key was gone. The funny thing is that in the grassy area, a big Roma family was sitting around the table and in camp chairs, and there was a big old guy there. I asked a women first, “Does anyone here just happen to have a car key for a 1960 Chevy Bel Air,” and everyone just looked at me.”
“Let me guess; they were Gypsies (a word we used in the 60s), so you thought there was the possibility that they stole cars, or opened them when needed?”
“Yeah, I just figured maybe, and the woman walked over to the big guy and he looked at me a little then pulled out a huge key ring and flipped through it, took one off, and said,”See if this works.”
And of course it did. That’s a Randy story. We’ve learned if you want to hear something from Randy you have to ask the right question. “And what about your dad, ” I asked. “Did he notice that it wasn’t actually the same key?”
“He just looked at the key, turned it over, looked at me, and put it in his pocket.”
“And not a word was said, right?”
“Right, ” Randy smiled. “Just put it in his pocket.”