Message from the Past
Welded to the outside-center of a twelve-inch
piece of angle iron, the pulley turns
on the peak of the roof. A steel cable stretches
from the trailer hitch on your 1964 Oldsmobile,
across the roof, and out to the end of a forty-foot tower
reaching from the house into the backyard.
You inch forward, and the antenna slowly rises
as the tower pivots on its base. From a handheld
radio, I coax you forward, my voice tinny
on the car’s CB radio. The tower reaches
a perpendicular, and I call out for you to stop
before I lock it into the base with a heavy pin.
You talked on the radio later that night,
your signal skipping from Buffalo
to North Carolina. Radio was your thing,
not mine, but it made me happy to know
I played a part in putting that smile on your face.
Of course, I remember this on Father’s Day.
rivrvlogr 
Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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🙂
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A great remembrance for Father’s Day! Thank you for sharing, and have a beautiful weekend! Michael xx
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😀
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Oh… that ending took me by surprise! Lovely.
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🙂 Thank you, Steve.
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Wonderful detail … just a touch of tension … and then the amazing conclusion. Ken, this is a read-it-again piece – your dad would perhaps want you to read it to him over the radio?
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Thank you, Jazz.
Sadly, he’s been gone since December 1993, when he was 60. Father’s Day falling on the 20th is always a reminder for me that it was Father’s Day, the same date, that I met him on the tarmac at the Buffalo airport as he was wheeled from an air ambulance. Heart surgery (not his first) while on vacation in Las Vegas, hospitalized for a month there, then till December in Bflo.
When I still lived there, Father’s Day was my time to sit by his grave and talk with him about the past year as I trimmed the grass growing over his marker.
He transitioned from CB to ham radio, and I’m sure more than one photo existed of him sitting at the radio, but those are long gone.
One of my earliest poems was written for him, just prior to his return from Vegas.
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Thank you so much for the link to the earlier post – your video/recording brought tears.
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Thank you, Jazz. Watching it this weekend had the same effect on me.
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you capture so well the moments that define lives – his, and yours ~
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Thank you. In hindsight, situations taken for granted often prove to be lessons.
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My brother was consumed by ham radio as a teenager. We had an antenna just like that on our roof. I wonder if he talked to your father? He had many father figure radio friends. (K)
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When my parents belonged to a CB social group in the mid-sixties (my early teens) there was a sub-group formed of children of members. They encouraged me to participate, but I was an introvert (still am, in ways) and was not comfortable chatting, even faceless & over the air, so I resisted.
My wife points out the irony of my online activity, today. From 2006 to 2013 I was creating hundreds of vlogs a year, and now it’s interaction with others through blogs.
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That would have been the right time. My brother graduated from high school in 1967.
I think the internet is a boon for shy people. I have lots of trouble with face to face communication–writing is much easier for me.
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Somehow I managed to turn it around. I traveled around the country meeting vloggers (more than 50), some of the meetups orchestrated by yours truly. A way of forcing myself out of my comfort zone, I guess,
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