I Still Owe Mr. Motheral a Hundred Dollars

Believe me, I understand it is football season. Major League Baseball, as it does every September, separates the pretenders from the contenders. The kids start back to school. And college campuses are filled with wide-eyed 18-year-olds full of wonder, anticipation, and maybe, just a tad of trepidation.

I have centered my life, at one time or another, on all of the above. Listen, I got hit so hard in a football game against Milan in 1964 that it knocked my gall bladder completely through my sacroiliac! What little brain I had did a tap dance on the front of my skull to the tune of Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music, any old way you choose it….”

When I came to, I wasn’t even on the field. I was way down past the end of our bench and Willie Lowe was fanning me with a towel. I finally managed to ask him if he got the license plate number of that Mack truck….

The St. Louis Cardinals, during the “autumn stretch run,” have broken my heart more times than Carter had boxes of “little liver pills.” I remember the excitement of going back to school “wearing off” before we got to lunch on the first day. As one of those wide-eyed 18-year-old college freshmen, I can tell you my trepidation outweighed my wonder and anticipation by a country mile!

The coming of September and fall never disappointed, became routine, or let us down in any way!

And boy howdy, we were sooooo ready for it. I don’t care how Indian the summer was, September brought some relief. We near ’bout smothered during July and August! Air conditioning hadn’t been invented yet. You won’t believe how many nights I spent out on the porch with the dogs, hoping for any kind of breeze that might bring me, Duke, and ole Blaze a breath of coolness.

The air seemed lighter when autumn finally rolled around. The sky was a little higher. I don’t know about humidity, dewpoints, and such. I do know when sweat is rolling down the small of my back…and when it isn’t!

Food tastes better in the fall. The walk to town is not as long. Girls are prettier. You can run faster. Time moves at a more tolerable rate. Your brothers don’t annoy you as much. Of course, the dogs kinda miss you….

The fall I got run over by the Mack truck, a girl from Paris, Tennessee, took to riding the early Saturday morning Greyhound bus the 20 miles over to McKenzie to check on me. She’d walk the couple of miles from the service station that doubled as the bus depot out to our house.

I think she wanted to know if I had lived through the high school football game the night before. It is eight o’clock in the morning for goodness sakes! It hurts to open my eyes. Chuck Berry is still playing in my ears. I’m trying to get my gall bladder back on the proper side of my sacroiliac.

To get away from the prying eyes of my brothers, and the astonished look on Mom’s face at this early morning rendezvous, I take the girl for a walk. The fall breeze bounces lightly through the maple trees and off our faces. The temperature is just right. The soreness in my legs, back, and frontal lobe has mysteriously dissipated into the near-perfect morning. It IS a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

I start humming, “As I was a motivatin’ over the hill, I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville….” I was about down to “nothin’ will outrun my V-8 Ford” when the girl looked me right in the eye and said, “Neither of us has eaten anything today.”

I wasn’t sure she was pretty enough to spend money (that I didn’t have) on. But remember, it is an extraordinary, drop-dead, gorgeous fall morning after an insufferable long, hot summer.

We strolled all the way to town and eased ourselves onto a barstool at John Motheral’s Drugstore. I ordered two chocolate malts with a pained look that alerted Mr. Motheral immediately to the fact that I didn’t have the price for one milkshake, much less two.

We laughed and drank our way into the early afternoon.

As we turned to go, I quickly and quietly laid all the money I had on the sparkling clean Formica top. Mr. Motheral just as quickly and quietly picked up the 36 cents (on an 80-cent bill) and with a smile and a nod said, “Kes, good to see you, you come back anytime.”

We were walking past the American Legion Hall and the ice house, on our way out to the bus station, when the eternal truth of the goodness and beauty of fall days and small hometowns….riveted itself into my heart forever….

Respectfully,
Kes