"Friends"

       I don't have many friends. Maybe two or three. Dave Hladik, née Mannford, is one of them. I think.

       Dave and I met at the first ever Tulsa Ducks Unlimited banquet in, I think, about 1967. It was held at the Tulsa Sportsmen Club out at their location in Catoosa and was hosted by the late Bob Parkhurst.

        It cost five dollars to get in, which included some kind of a barbecue dinner and a one-year membership in the organization, if you can imagine all of that for five bucks. By the time I got there that evening there were only two seats left, and at almost the same time Dave sat down in one and I sat down in the other. Fate rides a strange horse, and sometimes no horse at all.

       We had things in common. Dave, that year a move-in from his native Wichita, Kansas was an elementary P.E. teacher in North Tulsa, and I taught high school English in Sand Springs. He had a wife named Linda, and I had a wife named Pam, both of whom had married below their station in life. Both of those girls would follow us anywhere, for no apparent reason, and did, sometimes as far north as the Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, as far south as Texas, and all over Oklahoma including one adventure to the tick infested woods of wild Adair County over by Stilwell where the girls stripped down and washed ticks off their bodies in a loblolly while we turned our backs.

       If you cup your hands to your ears down yonder in those pine wooded hollows, you might still hear the laughter and giggles, or was it just the wind? 

       Dave and I have always been able to make one another laugh; sometimes, maybe, to keep from crying. The bumper sticker says, "Shit Happens", right?

       Both of those girls wanted families of their own and eventually got them, grandkids and all, Dave fleeing his teaching job, a job he loved, to work as a pipeliner for Conoco so he could feed his kids and put them through college with no loans. All that done, retirement looming close, Linda crossed that last mysterious river leaving the rest of us to figure it all out, all the eddies, rapids, tumbling falls and such. Farther along we'll know all about it, the Broadman Hymnal says.

        Mark Twain said life is a river. Hank Williams said it was a lost highway.

       Now, at my advanced age (ninety-three, I think), I've lost most of what used to be referred to by the erudite as my "physical faculties". I can't hear; I can't run; I wobble when I walk, and the last time I jumped higher than a foot off the ground was last fall when I almost stepped on a copperhead out here in the driveway. The "underlying conditions" the corona experts keep warning us about ... well, near as I can tell I've got about thirty-three of them.

       We've always had a garden out here on the Branch. Pam wanted one this year. Strapping yourself to a roto-tiller of any size is a man's job, the only exception to that last maybe being that manly woman handling that airstrip at the North Pole by herself on Life Below Zero. She could do it, maybe, but not me. Not anymore.

       Dave showed up the other morning in my driveway with his roto-tiller, for no apparent reason. Well, he had warned me. Not being able to say, "No" has gotten me into trouble all my life. Here at the end of my life, I'm praying God appreciates consistency, and won't consider mine to be the "hobgoblin of a little mind." I sat down on the front porch, checked to make sure the little orange light on my Inogen was working, checked its hose for kinks, and watched a Polack go to work.

       Dave gets offended when I mention his ancestry. I do it all the time.

       "I'm not Polish," he'll say, "I'm Bohemian".

       "No you're not, you're a Polack," I'll say back. "Why do you think I never ask you to screw in a light bulb?"

       Dave's roto-tiller is a Troy-Bilt, maybe one of the best brands ever made, and can in one hour do the work my grandparents took all day doing down yonder in “Little Dixie” with a horse-drawn single-bottom plow. So much for the good old days and gee and haw.

       Dave fired that dusty-red beast up, put it in gear, and let it start walking its way up hill to the garden spot behind the house. He was back in a half an hour, letting the machine walk its way across my concrete drive pad up the tilt-trailer ramp behind his pickup before shutting down the motor. 

       Typical Hladik: Always taking care of his equipment. He let the machine's motor idle while he hooked up ratchet straps to hold it in place for the ride home. Had his Troy-Bilt been a horse instead of a machine, he'd of slow-walked it around the barnyard five minutes, and then used an old burlap bag to rub it down before leading it into the barn and giving it a bucket of oats. Honest. He's that kind of guy. They run to a type, and they're about all gone.

       "Did you have to make all that damned noise with that smoke-belcher?" I said. "Hell, you ran all the birds outa' the yard, and I can't breathe."

       He didn't say a word, but I could see him grinning as he leaned back and pulled hard on a ratchet strap.

       "And why the hell did you scratch my concrete all up? You coulda' turned that damned thing off and shoved it up onto the trailer and prevented all the damage."

       "What", he said, "and not marred your mosaic?"

       "By golly, you old Polack, you fooled me. Maybe you can screw in a light bulb. It took me forty years of driving on and off that pad, juuust so, until I got it into ten perfect pieces. You're the only one that has recognized it as such, but now, knowing that, you went ahead and damaged it anyway. It can't be replaced."

       "It needs to be," he said. "Anything else I can do for you, Dipshit?"

       "Yeah. Get outta' my yard. Don't tear anything else up goin' up the driveway."

       "Hey, Bud," he said, walking around the back of his trailer headed for the truck cab, tapping the tail light lenses checking for cracks, "my garden's still making lettuce. Would you and Pam like some?"

       "Well, maybe. I gotta' come down there and get it?"

       "Hell yes, you old fart. I'm tired of messin' with ya' ".

       I gave him a one finger salute. He saluted me back.

       Like I said, I don't have many friends, but I think Dave is one of them. The lettuce deal sealed it, don't you think?

© 2020 Conrad M. Vollertsen