Route 55 with Dad

You couldn’t have called it just another sunny Sunday. It was way beyond that, so bright and intensely hot that the pitch the highway departments used to patch the road was bubbling.

My father, a genuine sun worshiper, had put down the convertible top of
his flashy Ford Thunderbird. Otherwise known as the “T-Bird”, cruising along the interstate with my father and older brother Ron was fabulously fun. Life was … good. We had only moments before driven through Litchfield, Illinois on the way to Chicago. You cannot have made this trip from St. Louis to Chicago without having seen it, driven through it
or around this “slice of Americana” town.

Litchfield is one of those “dots on the map” you’ll miss should you blink or nod off for a second some forty miles northeast of St. Louis on U.S. Route 66,. In the old days before the interstate was rerouted around  the town, “motorists’, as they used to be called, drove through the actual town itself, stopping at every red light “stop” sign and “Dog ‘n Suds”.

My brother Ron and I, as thrilled as we could be to be spending a week with Dad in Chicago, rode in the back seat where any mischief might stand a better chance of going undetected for a while at least, which it did.

“Boys, will you hand me up my cap, please?”
“What Dad? It’s ‘kinda’ windy back here. What did you say?” we shouted deliberately inflating the volume of our voices in the hope that Dad would forget about his request.

My father loves the sunshine, the brighter, the hotter, the better. But, as with everything, there is a limit, and my father reached it that day. He had driven bare-headed from St. Louis and, by the time we reached Litchfield, it had become too hot for him.

Sharing the cap … well, that was out of the question. And so we tussled. “Boys will be boys,” I saw my dad say, smiling contentedly, when both he and I looked into his rear-view mirror at the same moment.

Have you ever noticed how quickly the summer’s weather can change? As we approached Lincoln, Illinois, about forty miles beyond Litchfield, those big, fluffy, puffy gray rainclouds began looming overhead. My dad put up the convertible top. My brother and I had settled down so much so that it caught our father’s attention. “The jig was up!”

“Hey boys, everything all right back there?”

“Oh yea. Sure Dad. Fine, really …” we shot back, our overly agreeable intonation setting off his parental radar that something was amiss.

“Fellas, I asked for my cap fifteen minutes ago.”

At that precise moment, a giant thunderclap boomed overhead followed by buckets and buckets of rain. I could barely make out the highway sign:

“Welcome to Lincoln, Illinois”.

“What are we ‘gonna’ tell Dad?” I asked my older brother, hoping he’d come up with a way out of this.

“I dunno. Why did you reach for it?”

“Me? 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.”

The rain stopped, having moved on as quickly as it had moved in. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees.

Dad put the top down again and seemed happy, you know carefree. Pulling off his shirt at a rest area, he drove the rest of the way into Chicago bare-chested. He loved to sunbathe. I think I mentioned that.

As for the cap, the wind had snatched it from my brother’s hand when I grabbed for it.

Incredibly, my father never mentioned it again. Did he realize what had happened? Probably did, but this week in Chicago would be his time with us and ours with him. 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? And do you know what? Even had it been a
Borsalino, my father was certainly wise enough to know that it’s not the hat but who’s under it that makes a difference.

Revised February 1, 2009