Party Crashers

It's interesting, looking back, how many of our families came from the south. Oh, we came from all over, of course, our families, but it just seemed like I grew up hearing the names of families my parents knew "back home" before they uprooted from Mississippi and Oklahoma to start life over up here in a place called Richland, Washington. The Hammers and the Weezners were families whose names I remember hearing my folks talk about, growing up over on Turner Street. I guess there was a whole cluster of families from that region who came up during that time.

During the late summer of 8th grade, Rick Warford and Chuck Trujillo and I heard about a backyard party somewhere up around Cottonwood, and we decided we would go uninvited. Please understand there wasn't anything especially aggressive about our doing that, just showing up that way, because basic rules of that time were that if you heard of a party going on it was more or less okay to at least stop by and see who was there. We three were Chief Jo boys, and this party was in the backyard of a boy named Tommy Hammer, and he was from Christ The King. So that meant there would be girls there that we didn't know. I knew Tommy vaguely from Pony League baseball, so even though we weren't invited, we wouldnt exactly be unwelcome. Or so we figured, anyway.

But we were wrong. These were polite and well-mattered Christ the King kids, and I realized as I stood there at the edge of the backyard and looked across the lawn at the kids clustered up around the record player on the patio, that I didn't know anybody at all. And Tommy for some reason was nowhere to be seen. And since we hadn't come in through the house like regular guests, but had come up through the yard from the sidewalk and from the side of the house, we really were intruding on a private gathering of people we did not know, polite Christ the King eighth graders who are standing there looking at us like we were from another planet. And actually we were. There was a slight difference between Carmichael and Chief Jo kids back then. And kids from Christ the King we're more different still. It's hard to explain that now, looking back, but that's just the way it was. Within a year we would all be blended together at the high school, and those differences would dissipate quickly. But this was still 8th grade summer, and Rick and Chuck and I were standing in the middle of a backyard where we did not belong.

All three of us turned and made for the edge of the yard in a hurry, more embarrassed than frightened. But ashamed nonetheless.

And then I heard a loud adult female voice call out:

"Terry Davis! You stop right there!"

The three of us froze.

From somewhere up by the patio a woman strode quickly across the lawn and came up to us and put her hand on my shoulder in a friendly manner and said, " You're Terry Davis! I recognize your daddy in you the minute I saw you. I've known your daddy a long time. From back home. And your mother too. I'm Tommy's mom."

And she was.

And by then Tommy had shown up there on the grass beside us too, and after a few moments of friendly greetings by Mrs hammer it was determined that we should stay and have something to eat. And we did.

In The limited space I have here to tell this little story I won't really go into all the different stages of my relationship with Mrs hammer over the years, except to say that we became true friends. It was a little tricky, of course, because when I met her I was 14, and if she knew my father it meant that she also knew about his drinking, and so in addition to the normal uneasiness a secretive kid like myself would have around an adult, there was the matter of her knowing things about my home life that I went to Great pains to prevent anyone from knowing.

That kind of thing.

But she was an angel, Mrs Hammer. An angel.

And she was also a nurse at Kadlac.

Over the years I would run into her there whenever I would end up in the emergency room for one thing or another. But as soon as she was always there.

The night my father died, when I was a junior in high school, I was at boxing practice up at the basement of Christ the King where we worked out in the ring there, and I didn't know. I really shouldn't have even been at practice, as sick as he was there in the hospital. But I figured I would just work out and then jog on down the hill and visit my dad in his bed, even though he was barely conscious. It was a bad time, and I'm not proud of the kind of son I was during the prolonged event of his dying. I would come and sit by his bed and wipe the discharge from his tracheotomy tube for him, even though he didn't know I was there, and he certainly didn't know the squeamish disloyalty of my thoughts as I sat there. It had been several years since my folks had split up. His drinking had been the source of the problem, and his drinking was the reason he was dying now.

But when I came down from the Christ the King gymnasium after boxing practice at night, still carrying my jump rope, I came down the hallway to the doorway of his room and looked in and saw the bed was empty. I stood there in the doorway of the room a little confused. I checked the number on that wall to make sure I was at the right room, but I was.

And then someone had their arm around my waist and was guiding me down the hallway and talking softly to me, so softly I only slowly made sense of the words "your dad...gone... sorry ... Take care of your mother."

It was Mrs Hammer. Of course it was.

She was an angel.

TDK '65'

• Those Black Hoses
  
• Party Crashers
  
• Fighting
  
• Parking
  
• Last Time Around
  
• Charlie Nevins
  
• Young Men And Fire
  
• Austin Healy
  
• Cathy
  
• David River's Birthday
  
• Han's Pavilion
  
• Muscles, Our Neighbor
  
• John Browne, Learning to Dance
  
• Your Brother Mark Browne
  
• Buster
  
• Celluloid Lies
  
• Nuked
  
• Learning to Box
  
• Dog and Goose
  
• Buses and Such
  
• Stealing
  
• Hookybobbing
  
• Stiles Old Upstairs Apartment
  
• Sign Of The Time
  
• Learning to Drive