Scene 4: The Second Half of the Mobius Strip Highway
Grandpa slowly wakes up
Leah: Good morning, Sunshine.
Grandpa: (Slowly licks his lips) Hello there yourself, Sunshine. Looks like we’re getting near coal country.
Leah: Yep. Did you have a good nap?
Grandpa: I’ve never had a bad one, not one in, let’s see, uh, 78 years of nap research.
Leah: Grandpa, you’ve been saying that line all my life.
Grandpa: And it’s still true, right?
Leah: I guess so. I listened to more John Prine while you slept.
Grandpa: Yeah? Still taste like sardines and honey?
Leah: What?
Grandpa: Bitter and sweet.
Leah: Yeah, and funny. Just real and really funny.
Grandpa: Good. If you find someone who likes John Prine, you’re gonna get along for life, or until you kill each other, whichever comes first.
Leah: He reminds me of you.
Grandpa: My oh my, Missy. That is the highest compliment you have ever paid me.
Leah: Well, he’s also nutty as squirrel poop.
Grandpa: Uh huh. You had to say it, didn’t you?
Leah: In my ‘fart voice’ though.
Chuckles. Looking out the windows at depressed towns and landscapes.
Grandpa: You remember my buddy Clark, don’t you?
Leah: Sure, Clark and Pat. Such sweethearts.
Grandpa: He came from up this way, over by Altoona. A little town called, get this, Hon, Gratitude.
Leah: Pretty bleak area, I guess.
Grandpa: Yesssiree kiddo. That’s the power of labeling, though. Greenland was covered in ice, but Iceland was green and fertile. That was a big Scandinavian Switcheroo. But Clark was exactly as advertised. Did he ever tell the best stories about growing up there in the 50’s and 60’s.
Leah: I know you miss him.
Grandpa: I do. He’d call me up and put a smile on my face and a laugh in my throat, yeah… Grandma always knew who was calling because I’d start laughing on the phone. But I’m so glad I have his stories. They take me back for a little while, just like Grandma’s picture books do for you. They are windows on the past.
Leah: Uh huh, I bet.
Grandpa: Did I ever tell you the story of the boney piles?
Leah: The boney whats?
Grandpa: That’s what I said the first time I heard the phrase. Clark had to explain it to me. Back in the coal mines near Gratitude, the outer layer of a coal seam would be part coal and part rock. In those days the mine company engineers couldn’t separate the two, so the miners just piled up these boney pieces of coal outside the shafts, into huge mounds. See, the rock was white and looked like a pile of bones scattered across the charcoal powder burial mound, so I guess the townspeople connected it to a funeral pyre, which they were sort of.
Leah: Charming
Grandpa: Well, over time these piles would somehow start to combust deep inside, and once they started to burn, there was no way to put them out.
Leah: Okay
Grandpa: The crazy part is that Clark and his feral friends would play on these piles. Can you imagine Max and Cambo scrambling around on such a monstrous furnace?
Leah: No, but I’m sure they would have tried if they could. Where were their parents? And OSHA?
Grandpa: Yeah, that’s just it, Honey. Clark and his pals were cast offs just like the boney pile chunks. They were half good and half bad, so they figured, and nobody would miss them if they did get killed there.
Leah: That’s awful. As much as my brothers irritate me, I’d never let them climb on a mountain of burning slag.
Grandpa: Good to know, Honey. So, Clark told me they would get long pieces of pipe and punch them into the boney pile where the ends would melt!! And then other times they’d pour gallons of water down the vent holes to make their own geysers. Lots of sublimated anger there.
Leah: That’s insane!! How could adults allow that sort of thing to go on?
Grandpa: Honey, unlike today, kids were expendable then. Families were large and nobody was special. If anyone said anything to them, it might have been to state the obvious. “You kids are gonna get killed up there.” That’s as far as the community went in caring for their fringe elements. They didn’t see the value in Clark and his buddies. Funny thing is that one junior pirate went on to become a doctor, as I recall. The other one was a minor war hero in Vietnam. Bones and Buggy. Everyone had a nickname back then. Of course, you know Clark became an artist.
Leah: What was your nickname, Grandpa?
Grandpa: Promise not to tell anyone ever?
Leah: Sure, I swear on your life as a sacred promise keeper.
Grandpa: I hear you, P.B. , but I’ll still proceed. ‘Satch’, I was called Satch in my group of friends back in the Hills.
Leah: Like Satchmo, Louis Armstrong. Wasn’t that his nickname?
Grandpa: Yeah, how did you know that piece of trivia?
Leah: I am a music major, Grandpa, I mean Satch.
Grandpa: I see how you wanna play. I was tagged Satch for Satch Sanders, though. He was a bench player for the Boston Celtics back in the day. He was famous for his lack of basketball talent as I was also.
Leah: Just like you. I can’t imagine you playing basketball. Wow! But why did you tell me about the boney piles?
Grandpa: It just is linked with bittersweet, good and bad, disposable collateral waste, and such things in my brain. But the ironic twist is this: sometime later on, Clark told me that the coal mines figured out how to crush the boney chunks and extract the attached coal in the 90’s or maybe in the early 2000’s. So, the value of the boney piles was finally recognized and extracted. Those boney piles only exist in memories now.
Leah: That’s cool, Grandpa. I love that story. It’s so meaningful on many levels. I mean, there’s the waste, the pollution, then the revaluation and redemption, and the Huck Finn feel to it all.
Grandpa: Yeah, good stories aren’t just a retelling of the facts, Honey. Like John Prine’s songs, they sweep across your heart and mind and soul, etching lessons there on your dream muscles.
Leah: Grandpa, you should write this stuff down.
Grandpa: I did once, a long time ago. I have a manuscript somewhere I’ll have to share with you.
Leah: I’d love that, Grandpa. Does it have more stories like this one?
Grandpa: Dozens and dozens, Honey. Wild and woolly tales of the Boney Pile Gang.
Leah: Why didn’t you finish it?
Grandpa: Well, we don’t always finish projects in life, Honey. Especially when you can tell the difference between a friend and a project.
Leah: Can you tell me another Clarkism?
Grandpa: Okay, but you can’t tell your mom or brothers.
Leah: Okay, I really promise this time, no fart voice.
Grandpa: One of my favorite Clarkisms went something like this, “You might as well bark up a dead mule’s ass.”
Leah: What did that mean?
Grandpa: I have no idea, but the tone was hopeless and rude, I’ll tell you that.
Leah: Do you wish you’d had more time with him?
Grandpa: Sure I do. The funny thing is that with true John Prine type friends, time stops mattering.
Leah: What do you mean?
Grandpa: Uh, well, when Grandma and I would rock you and Max and Cambo when you were helpless little glow worms, time and gravity stopped working. We just floated on every baby breath you took.
Leah: That’s sweet, Grandpa.
Grandpa: Yes it is, Sweetie. It’s honey in the desert.
burritospecial 