The Girl Who Stole a Piece of the Sun

I think I was eight or nine years of age when my Grandma went down the road. At least that’s what my Granddad called it.

“Your Grandma has gone down the road, and I’m afraid she won’t be back,” he said with sad eyes.

“What never?”

“Listen, sweet-pea, one day I’ll take that walk and later, so will you. We’ll all meet up at the little shack further

down the road, just over the first hill. You remember that I’ll see you there.”

My name is Sara, by the way, and I always remembered that story from my Granddad. On that day, the day that my Grandma took the walk, my Granddad took me into the city to show me how to be happy in times when the world goes a little dark.

“Anytime you want to talk to your Grandma, just say ‘hey Grandma’ and then tell her how you feel.”

“She’ll hear me?”

“Of course she will, saying ‘hey Grandma’ is like pushing buttons on your telephone,” said Granddad with a big huge grin.

“And I’ll show you another thing to show she’s listening.”

And my Granddad led me into a railway station, nearby.

“Whenever you feel lonely,” he said. “Or sad, just stand on this spot and say to your Grandma ‘please make people look at me, Grandma’”.

And do you know what? People were staring at us, and I said ‘thank you, Grandma’ to myself.

It was only years later I realised we were standing in front of the railway departures board, but still, it worked, and I couldn’t help smiling.

Then my Granddad took me to the park, and to the little pond where they sailed model boats.

It was just then that the sun came out and from his little bag, my Granddad took out an old glass jar, one with a lid.

“Look sweet-pea,” and my Granddad pointed to the sun’s reflection in the water. “See the sun?”

"I do, Granddad, I do.”

And then he put the glass jar in the pond and filled it with water. And just then the sun disappeared, and my Granddad told me he had caught a piece of the sun in a jar. Then he put the lid on it.

“I want you to put this jar under your bed, sweet-pea and when you feel dark, or you miss your Grandma, just open the jar and let some of the sun fill your room.”

My Granddad took his walk a few years ago, but you know what? I’ve still got that jar with me, the one where we captured a little piece of the sun. And on dark days, I always open the lid.

bobby stevenson 2020

photo from http://www.findmeagift.co.uk/sun-jar.html

HOPE STREET

Only two kindsa folks in this life, boy. Thems with a conscience, and thems who ain’t got one.”

Then my grandpa would suck on his pipe, chuckle a little, and finally rock back on his chair.

After another couple of minutes, he reaches over to me and ruffles my hair. I’m sitting on the steps of his wonderful home, just getting ready for the night, getting for the rest of my life, getting ready for a way to my dreams.

“I know you got a conscience, boy. Just like me. The only downside is that you have to pay for it all your life. Those lucky folks who don’t think they need a conscience, well in a strange way the world belongs to them. They just go about their little lives hurting and hurting without a second thought as to what they are doing. Us, on the other hand…”

And this is where he points the end of his pipe at his chest and over to me.

“Us, well we gotta pay every day for caring. Every day forever. All on account that we were born with a conscience.”

He cleared his throat, then swallowed some.
“You need a few more bucks, kid?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to look at him, as I knew it might start the tears – for us both.  He’d brought my brother and me up when my folks perished in a bus crash just outside Atlanta. My brother had since moved up to Massachusetts, where he’d started a little business. I was going to follow him up there. My brother had only been back a couple of times since he’d left and I guess that was what was going through my grandpa’s head as I sat there looking at the sky.

“I want you to know; you’ll always have a home here, boy. Always. And if you don’t make it back anytime soon, well, I’ll know you and me are thinking about each other. I loves ya, boy. You know that — more than life itself. I know losing my daughter in that bus crash felt like the end, but bringing the two of you up, well – that was like the start of something new. You gave me hope boy. You and your kind-hearted brother. I wish the two of you well, and perhaps sometime I might just take a little trip up there and see how you are doing.”

“Sure grandpa. You’ll always be welcome.”

I still couldn’t look at him, and I could hear an emptiness in his throat.

“I want you to stand up, boy, when you’re ready and walk up that street and just keep on walking.”
“What’s out there, grandpa?”

“Whatever you want it to be. But that street, well that’s your first step boy. That’s hope street.”

I stood and waved without looking around.
I never did see him again.

bobby stevenson 2020
photo: Larry Morgan Photography.

The House

I hear tell that the house is still there, still standing like. Leastways I heard that was the truth of it a few years ago from a sickly ginger-headed woman who had been passing the little cove. Said it was “the sweetest little shack she ever did see, and she didn’t mind who knew it”.

I still miss the place, the way I miss cigarettes. I forget for a time and then wish I was right back there, feeling good, feeling human again the way I used to feel.

The days when you are a teenager and the hormones are fighting and kicking their way around your body and for the first time (and perhaps the only time) you feel alive – I mean really alive. Music blows your brains out, the thought of nakedness makes your tongue run drier than a desert, and you stutter and fret over the smallest of things. Then some days you feel as if you are standing taller than a mountain, I kid you not and you think you could take on the world. Then someone sounds a whistle, and your hormones go touring around your bloodstream again, and you are lost, good and simple. Tempers and anger and you don’t have the slightest clue why - just that it’s good to shout at someone, anyone. 

Those were the years when I knew that house. The lost years, the days of wine and roses when Ma painted flowers and Pa would go missing for weeks at a time.

Crazed Boy was one of my friends, heck who am I kidding? He was my only friend, still is – in that I carry the stone he gave me just before he went to ‘Nam and never came back. He turned me on to dirty music, ‘black music’ my Gran called it, but we never listened to the elders – we just rocked and rolled until the sun came down and even then we’d light a fire on the beach and keep sometimes going until the morning.

When I think of that house, when I think of those years, I can still smell the ozone that drifted in off the sea, and that somehow kept me company. Everything smelled of the sea and you only really noticed that fact when you drifted into town, and things started to smell of smoke.

Those were the electric years, the times when I felt that I had a million volts wired to my spine, and I tell you what - I would give anything to feel that way again.

No one lived in the place for years afterwards. Some say it was haunted, but I remember I drifted down that way one November, a couple of years later – it was easy to break in – and I saw that some of the Pastor’s blood sparkled on the walls. Even after all that time.

Boy who would have thought that one head full of blood would have made such a mess? He put the gun under his chin and told my Ma and me that he believed God had given up on him and then he splattered his head right across the gramophone and our only two books: one of them ironically being the Bible.

Apparently, he was now in a better place, when I asked was that Detroit, my Ma slapped me so hard that my head bounced off the wall and I wasn’t sure if the blood was mine or the Pastor’s. She apologized later but said I had a way of talkin’ that got folks crazy like. I wondered if maybe I had made the Pastor shoot himself in the head.

It wasn’t long after that things started to go wrong with the family. Like we had been cursed by the shooting. My Ma died of a weak heart – so the Doctor said. My father was jailed for robbing a drug store in Woko County. My brother and I were taken into care, and then we were split up. I never did see my brother again. I have been told that he made it good in the oil down in Texas. I hope that’s true; I really do. So if you happen to walk down by the cove some empty sunny day, and you see the house, just keeping on walking. It ain’t healthy to stick around.

bobby stevenson 2020

Skiing In Central Park

I don’t think there was a precise time when you could say that they actually met; instead it would be more accurate to say that they rubbed against each others' lives from the moment they were born.

Kitty and Jethro were born in the same week to families who lived next door to each other. They grew up together, sat in the same school rooms, and had the same good and bad teachers.

When one of them missed school due to ill health, the other couldn’t rest until they were back together.

It was inevitable that one day they would start to see each other in a differing light. One evening Jethro looked at Kitty and saw, not a little friend who needed to be rescued, but a beautiful young girl who needed to be held. And one summer’s day, instead of a little boy who always needed his nose wiped or his tears dried, Kitty saw a strong upstanding boy who she could think of perhaps marrying, one day.

Jethro spent a long time away in the army when the government felt that he was needed, and in those times apart (it seems strange to anyone who has not experienced it) she fell more in love with him than she could put into words.

Their wedding was in the little chapel just north of the town’s river and everyone turned up – it was said that the sheriff allowed his prisoners to also attend and even ‘though the sheriff got real drunk that night, the prisoners locked themselves up, afterwards.

The two love birds settled down to a life in the little town that was by-passed by all the main roads, and there they got on with the business of living.

When no kids turned up, Kitty went to the doctor and found that she and Jethro just weren’t compatible – had it been with someone else both might have had children, but not in this combination. Kitty knew things could have been done to help them but they both decided that if that was the way things were, then they just get on with it.

Not having younger ones to worry about, meant they got to see a lot of the country. They drove north, south, east, and west and loved every single minute of every single day in each others' company.

There was one crazy dream that they both shared (Kitty thinks she first read about it in a book) and it was their wish to go skiing in Central Park in New York City. Neither of them had ever been in another country but this seemed the perfect reason to go. They knew there were only the smallest of hills in the park but that didn’t put either of them off – not one bit.

Every winter they would talk about going to New York, and then before they knew it, another year had passed. They were in their sixties when Jethro started to get ill, and it meant that Kitty spent more and more time looking after him. It wasn’t a chore, she just worried about her little boy who had once lived next door to her.

One winter, just before the start of December, Jethro shut his eyes for the last time. When Kitty found herself brave enough, she started to sort out Jethro’s things. In an old jacket she found details about a savings account in the little bank at the top of street.

When she went into the bank, the young man behind the counter said:

“So you’re going skiing in New York, then?”

Kitty asked him what he meant and he told her that every week, Jethro had put a little money into the skiing account and that one day, he told him, Jethro and his wife were going to go skiing in Central Park.

Kitty counted the money and there was enough to get her to fly to New York and a little over to help a young family who lived next door.

When she got to New York it was September, in fact the hottest month since records began – so skiing was out the question. That night she sat in her hotel room and talked to Jethro as she always did, and after telling him she hoped he was well where ever he was, she mentioned the lack of snow. It was just then that a TV show came on about the Guggenheim Museum in New York and it gave her an idea.

The next day she took a cab to the museum where the security man at the door looked in her bag - she told him ‘they were for her grand-kids’, so he wished her a nice visit and Kitty went on her way.

When she looked up it was just as she had hoped – the inside of the Guggenheim was a path which descended from the top of the building to the bottom, in circles.

She got on an elevator to the top floor, took out her new roller-skates and before anyone could stop her, she shot down the Guggenheim path at several miles per hour.

“Can you see me, Jethro?” Kitty shouted, “can you see what I’m doing?”

And then she laughed and giggled and screamed all the way to the bottom of the path.

bobby stevenson 2020