Stuff My Father Won’t Tell Me, Part 10

(Stuff we didn’t tell our father)

If you have ever driven the interstate between St. Louis and Chicago, you have seen the town of Litchfield, Illinois. If you haven’t noticed it, it’s a town forty miles northeast from St. Louis on U.S. Route  66, one of those “dots on the map” you’ll miss should you blink or nod off for a second.

In the “old days’ before the interstate was rerouted out of the town, “motorists’, as they used to be called, drove through the actual town, stopping at every red light  and “Dog ‘n Suds”.

My dad had a penchant at that time for the flashy Ford Thunderbird, the “T-Bird”, as it was nick-named, with a convertible top. My brother Ron and I rode in the back seat naturally where any mischief might stand a better chance of going undetected-at least for a while. And it did … go undetected … for a while.

You couldn’t just call it a sunny Sunday. It was way beyond that, so bright and intensely hot that the pitch-the black tar used to patch the road-boiled. The top was down. We had just driven through Litchfield on the way to Chicago. We had a least another five to six hours to go depending on the number of times my brother and I asked Dad to stop at one of the rest areas. My father was always one to enjoy the sun, the brighter, the hotter, the better. But, as with everything, there is a limit, and my father reached it that day.It was simply too hot for him. The sunshine was beating down on all of us but, it seemed, on my father’s head especially.

“Boys, will you hand me up my cap there, please?”

“What Dad? It’s kinda windy back here. What did you say?”

“My hat, my cap, you know?”

“His cap?” I looked at my brother and he at me. Now we’ve done it.

What had happened was this …

We had quarreled about who was going to wear Dad’s cap. My dad did not want to wear it after we had left St. Louis, so it came back to us. At that moment, sharing the cap-clearly the reasonable option, failed. When two small boys compete for one cap, it’s either everything or nothing. And so we tussled Ron, my older brother by eighteen months, reveled in the aggravation he caused me by not only wearing the cap but flaunting it as well. My father was focused on the road. I guess so long as one of us did not fall out of the car, he left us to our own devices.

Have you ever noticed how quickly weather can change? As we approached Lincoln, Illinois, those big, fluffy, puffy gray rainclouds loomed overhead. My dad put up the convertible top.My brother and I had settled down, so much so that it caught my dad’s attention.

“Hey boys, everything all right back there?”

“Oh, yea. Sure Dad. Fine, really …” I guess it was our lack of controlled intonation that made him suspicious. Something was going on. “Fellas, I asked for my cap fifteen minutes ago.” At that instant, a giant thunderclap boomed overhead. The rain began coming down in buckets. I could barely make out the highway sign:

Welcome to Lincoln, Illinois.

My dad switched his wipers on to high.

“What are we ‘gonna’ tell Dad?” I asked my older brother, hoping he’d devise  a way out of this. “I dunno. Why did you reach for it?” “Why did you dangle it in front of my face? You think we can go back and find it?” “Are you whacky? That was probably fifty miles back. By now it’s long gone. Probably run over by a big truck.”“You really think so?”

“Yup.”

The rain stopped, having departed as quickly as it had arrived. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees at least. Our father put the top down again and seemed happy, you know care free. The sunshine was not nearly as hot. Dad actually pulled off his shirt and undershirt at a rest area and drove into Chicago bare-chested. He loved to sunbathe. I think I mentioned that.

As for the cap the wind snatched from my brother’s hand while I grabbed for it, well-as incredible as it may sound-my father never mentioned it again. Did he know what had happened? Probably did, but this weekend was his time with us and ours with him, in Chicago no less. So my dad made a choice. After all, the cap … well it wasn’t exactly a Biltmore black Canadian suede fedora, just a cloth cap, no big deal, right?

However, had it been a Biltmore black Canadian suede fedora, he just might have “mentioned” something, ‘ya’ think?