Scooter Breeze


I spent Independence Day weekend at Mom and Dad’s house. Mom was out of state visiting my brother’s family, so it was just me and Dad. We arose early on the morning of the Fourth and rode our scooters into town to get some breakfast at a convenience store. We took our food to the city park to eat. It was a nice, mild morning. We could hardly have asked for a better start to the day.

By 7:30 we were back and home and had gotten to work. Dad was building a new porch onto the house. He had had an awful time erecting the framework for the porch roof by himself. While doing so he had injured a muscle and had to knock off work on the project for weeks. He had waited until I was available to help him with the heavy sheets of plywood before working on the roof’s decking.

Dad had carefully calculated beforehand that we would need eleven sheets of plywood. We got twelve for good measure. The roof’s dimensions and the placement of the rafters made it impossible simply to put down the plywood in whole sheets. Instead we would have to cut the plywood into eighteen pieces of varying sizes. Dad had worked out all their approximate dimensions the day before. We began the day’s work by pulling a line on one side of the pitched roof to serve as a guide. From here we would measure each piece and cut it precisely to fit.

Since I was younger I took on as much of the running up and down ladders as possible. It had been many years since I spent my summers working on scaffolds helping Dad lay bricks. Fortunately I’ve still got a good sense of balance and good knees. The biggest problem was heaving the big sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood up onto the roof and positioning them. Some pieces were small enough to slide up a ladder. With others I had to work them up onto a scaffold and then lift them high enough for Dad to grab on.

We nailed the plywood down with a pneumatic nail gun. I had never used one before. A nail gun is big, awkward, and heavy to wield with one hand. The umbilical line that connects it to an air compressor does not help. Still, once you get the hang of it you can put nails down much faster than you can the old-fashioned way.

It took over two hours to get the first side of the roof decked. We took a break at that point. Dad suggested a novel way of cooling off—by getting on our scooters and riding up the road a way. So we rolled out the bikes and mounted and roared off, past the electronic relay tower on the big hill, past the city water supply tank, past the nice-looking house that somebody built earlier this year and the one with all the goats in the yard and the others. The best-looking house lay at the end of a short driveway flanked by two huge oaks. To one side the family had a garden plot. Beyond this stood another oak, and then the grassy yard dropped steeply into a tiny hollow with a little stock pond at the bottom of it. I’ve always loved riding past that place with its little green amphitheater.

About two miles down the road we rounded a bend and crossed a bridge over a small creek. On the hill just above the creek sat a brick church house. We turned around in the parking lot and ran back home. The ride in the slipstream did indeed cool us off. It had an invigorating effect as well.

Unfortunately we had pretty typical Fourth of July temperatures and humidity. As the late morning wore on we got hotter and sweatier, covered from head to foot in a mixture of sweat and sawdust. We had to take more frequent breaks. Dad would send me in now and then to get him a glass of cold water. I would make sure to get a good drink myself.

At about half-past noon we finally finished the decking. We celebrated by taking another breezy scooter ride, this time into down. Near the Sonic, in an old service station parking lot, we found Crawley’s Barbecue wagon open for business and bought sandwiches for lunch. We carried them back home to eat. After this we spent the hottest part of the afternoon relaxing inside. I dozed off for about two hours.

In the late afternoon we got back to work. Now we had to put a final rafter on the outer edge of the newly decked roof. This involved standing on ladders to take measurements and nail the rafter sections into place. As we worked on one section I felt the ladder shift beneath my feet. Suddenly I found myself hanging from a beam, with my feet about five feet above the ground. Fortunately there was a scaffold-jack within reach of my feet, and I was able to climb down that. The fall would hardly have been fatal, but it could have resulted in my breaking something. I took the utmost care in positioning the ladder after that.

After finishing with that job we took one more scooter ride toward the church to cool off once again. Then Dad got a shower and I washed some dishes and took a very welcome bath. Once we had gotten cleaned up we drove into town to eat supper at the truck stop. Supper refreshed us enough to go back home and drag out Dad’s convertible, which had not run in a while.

By now it was getting near dark. We drove to the high school parking lot, where people were assembling to watch the annual fireworks show. The night had turned clear and mild—a perfect Fourth of July evening. As we waited for the show to begin Dad reminisced about what drive-in movie theaters had been like, and the time his and Mom’s dog had become excited by a cartoon dog on the screen.

Dad’s cousin Roy and his wife pulled up beside us in their handsome classic 1950s convertible. They drove it so seldom that I had never even known they had it. We visited for a while. Dad naturally had to tell Roy the story of how he had gotten his own convertible—a very non-classic Geo Metro—for only three hundred dollars and a bit of repair work. The family has certainly gotten his money’s worth from that investment over the years.

A few minutes after nine the show began. They fired off quite a variety of rockets. Some made huge spheres of multiples colors. Others had bursts within bursts. Some made lazy fountains of sparks that left tendriled clouds behind. Subsequent bursts illuminated these drifting, jellyfish clouds like ghosts. At one point we heard a child call out “Happy birthday, America!” Dad said later that this had been his favorite part of the whole show.

After about fifteen minutes the show ended with a grand finale of multicolored bursts. We sat and visited with Roy a little longer while waiting for the worst of the traffic to clear out. Then Dad pulled the convertible out onto a back way into town. We soon had the road almost entirely to ourselves.

We drove under a wide-open moonlit sky, with a cooling breeze from the slipstream that felt as good as the scooter breezes had earlier in the day. We passed along the railroad tracks (I got to see a passenger train roll by in the dark) to a little community several miles southeast of town and made a circuit through the countryside back to town. As we passed by a roadside deer hunting camp we saw some of the trailers there illuminated. Figures ran among the trailers waving sparklers. I thought about what lucky kids those were to camp out there on an evening like this.

Back home we parked the car and put up the top. Mom and Dad’s dog, Tiny, came over and whined at us to let us know that his evening bowl of milk was late. We got Tiny his milk and let the cat come in long enough to have milk as well. Then we said good night and went upstairs to bed. It had been a good day.

Very nice, "kid."