dropping to a knee...a look back

We both had to work Sunday lunch shifts at Red Lobster. It was a long day of endless shrimp, when we got out we were too tired to cook at home; let alone go hiking like we I had planned originally, instead we went to Harvey’s for dinner.

Rheila had a chicken sandwich and I had a salmon BLT. While we were there we talked about how we were  at the exact place where we had first met. It’s something we bring up every time we go there, but we still smile when we say it. The exchange always goes like this.

“You know I like these seats better,” she says.

“But,” I start to say.

“I liked it better when they would have live music upstairs.” She’ll finish.

I’m pretty sure the first time we met was a Monday, I had texted her friend who I had a crush on and she said told me to come down. I drove down and found out her friend was seeing someone, but would I like to be introduced to her fried? Later on that night we went back to a friend of hers house and drank till 5 in the morning. I don’t think Rheila liked me much when we first met. She most likely thought I was crazy.

After dinner Tony, Dave and I were watched football before Tony and I did laundry. Rheila watched the game with us for a bit before hitting the hay. I told her goodnight and after she went to bed I told the guys I planned on proposing the next day.

Rheila had to wake up early for class so got the coffee put together for her in the the night before all she would have to do was hit the button. After I ground the beans, I drew a picture of her, the dog, the cat and me in a sailboat for her with little fishes underneath it with my horrible artistic ability. Underneath I said in big letters, “I Love you.”

She said she smiled when she saw it.

I woke up nervous and after she left and walked the dog. Tony and Dave were pretty quiet and I just  wanted  for her to get out of class around 3 p.m. so I could get it over with. She had a test that day so I wrote her texts saying how much I loved her and that I would pick her up from class so we could go straight to the Kalamazoo Nature Center.

Just as I started to get really nervous, Dave and Tony left, so I was home alone. I wanted to get a haircut and also eat, but my stomach felt kind of queasy, so I packed up the ring and collected some money went out.

The barber college where I had got my gone before my interview in Bad Axe was closed so I went to Meijer to put money in the bank. The younger guys at Meijer were really nice and asked me how I was doing. I couldn’t keep it to myself.

“Well I’m going to pop the question today,” I told them. “I’m really excited yet nervous.”

The guy behind the counter told me not to worry; I couldn’t mess up worse than he did.

“I did it up north with wife on vacation. I took the ring out of my pocket three times and it put back in again before I worked up the nerve,” he said. “She was wondering what the problem was with me that day.”

After made the deposits I found myself wandering around the store aimlessly. I had some plan to get dog food, and also for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to get Rheila a new hoody as well, but I couldn’t find anything. Somehow I got the dog some food and a plush toy a chipmunk before I checked out.

The car took me to Red Lobster more than I decided to go there, I assumed I would get something to eat there and see some familiar faces. I sat in the car for 10 minutes outside and copied some Shakespeare I had found online into my notebook, in addition to that I jotted some things down that I wanted to make sure to say to her.

When I walked in they asked me if I wanted to work, because a host had quit that was supposed to work that day and a server had called in. They were really short staffed but I didn’t have my work clothes with me and was in no shape to work. I showed the ring to Rhelia’s friend Ali who teared up and a few of my co-workers. My manager Mike voice got soft when I showed him the ring.

“OH…that nice,” he said. “Are you nervous?”

“No. Terrified,’ I said.

Afterward I finally went to the barber school and saw the guy who was outside, Juan, who had cut my hair before. He was on the phone and said he could cut my hair after he got off break. I waited until he came back in and he called me to his chair while I had my head down.

“You cut my hair last time when I had a job interview,” I said. “It went well and I got the job. I asking my girl to marry me today so I figured I’d stop here again.”

He laughed and someone else in the shop asked me how I was planning on doing it. It seemed everyone crowded around me and the old man who ran the place put his hand out for me to shake. I did and told everyone about how I was planning on doing it at the Nature Center.

“Shit,” someone said you Juan. “You got him the job, now you need to get him the girl too!”

Juan took extra time to make sure everything was even and then shaved my face for no additional charge. 

After it was done I tipped him $10 even though the haircut itself had only cost $5.

When I got home I paced around the house and attempted to play video games for a while. I called my mom and nearly cried, I was so happy and nervous at the same time. She recommended I take a walk around the block so I did. I passed the Oak Street market and looked at the graphite on the walls outside. We had taken pictures there a few days before.

Finally 3 p.m. rolled around and I went to pick up Rhelia at KVCC. My eyes were red from being emotional.

I wore sunglasses when I pulled up and she greeted me with a big smile on her face. “I think I did well on the test,” she said.

She smiled and told her I loved her, and I asked if she was ready to get moving to the Nature Center. “I want to show you library here on campus, is that ok?” she said with a smile. “I think you’d really like it.”

We went with her through the school and really did think the library was cool. It looked like a rainforest was right behind the 20-foot-tall windows. We got some free books that were being given away and I was in a hurry to get to the Nature Center.

“I need to go home and change my shoes,” she said. “These are too nice to wear hiking.”

We went home and she said hi to the dog and changed shoes, luckily she decided she didn’t need to change her cloths.

We drove through the North side of Kalamazoo on the way out of town. As we passed several stops I thought about articles I wrote at those locations for school and for MLive when I heard a clanging sound coming from the front left tire.

“Please god just let us get there,” I said in my head.

The lady at the gate got my money and then asked if I wanted a map of the trails. Later Rheila said she thought it was somewhat strange that I said that we were ok so quickly. The car was still making a clanking sound.

Luckily when we got there I found out there was only a stick in the wheel well. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I didn’t bring my cell phone out to the trails, even though I thought I might want to take a picture, because I wanted to enjoy the moment in time and be completely “there.”

“Let’s go see your turtle pals,” Rheila said as we got out of car. More delay I thought as we went in the Nature Center building.

Still things were better because I finally was feeling calm because I was pretty sure that she didn’t know what was going on. It gave me some satisfaction to think how happy she would be and what a surprised I’d make her. We went and looked at the turtles and a couple of owls that have to stay inside because they have suffered brain damage. They’re pretty cute.   

Rheila walked in front of me towards the pond in the center of the nature center wearing a pink sweatshirt that wasn’t really needed because of the weather. It had turned out to be a beautiful day and we were able to see a few turtles swimming in the pond.

I came up behind her and wrapped my arms around her as she leaned against a railing looking at the pond and kissed her check.

“Where do you want to go next?” I asked her. I still hadn’t decided on the exact location where I was going to ask her. I was torn between a secret waterfall that we both loved and a bench that overlooked a valley on the side of the hill.

“Let’s go to that bench.”

We had to walk away through the trail as I tried my best not check every step that the ring was still in my pocket. She slowed down for a moment and held hands with me before we got to the trail that went up the hill.

“You’re walking faster than me,” I said as I felt my heart beating at a crazy pace.

“I always have,” she said. “When we first started dating it drove me crazy how slow you walked.”

She paused to wait up for me. “Are you feeling ok?” she asked.

“Yeah, I just haven’t been taking care of myself lately.”

She got to the bench first and I followed her. “Let’s sit down for a moment” I said.

We looked out across the valley. On the other side the trees were still green but just starting to show that they would explode into the fall colors soon. Before us was a steam surrounded by more green and I remembered how when we had first started coming here the ground had been black and charred. The Nature Center needed to rebuild the forest from the ground up.

“This is the spot where I first realized I really loved you,” she said.

“We came here after my grandmother died,” I said.

“That’s right, well you brought me to the funeral and I realized how much I cared for you.”

I knew it was now or never, and I felt my back left pocket to make sure that the notes I had prepared where still there.

“I’m really glad she got to meet you before she passed,” I said. “She was always concerned that I wouldn’t find somebody and hopefully she knew we were working out pretty well.”

“You know I kept the earrings she gave me,” she said. “Well I kept one, but I lost the other, I know they weren’t anything expensive but I still have that one earring in a jewelry box.”

We sat in silence for a moment after that before I started again, reaching for my notes.

“You know we’ve been together for a long time, you were there when that happened, when my dad got out of…” I looked down at my notes. “That first Thanksgiving turkey that you cooked for him was really great. 

"With the move coming up I just wanted to tell you some things,” I said.

I took out Shakespeare’s 116 Love Sonnet (I had printed it out at home because I didn’t trust my handwriting) and read it to her. Afterwards I looked down at my notes and said a few more things about how I think people make their own luck, but I considered myself pretty lucky to have found her.

Her eyes looked crazy calm during the whole experience, and I kept looking in them as I talked. I got up by myself and walked to the edge of the hill and turned, taking the ring out of my pocket as I looked at a trout stream. She got up and I told her it would most likely be best if she stayed sitting down.

When I had practiced dropping to a key in the house during the week before, it had hurt and felt clunky. However this time when my knee hit the ground it was as easy and natural as the first time I ever did during middle school football. I felt young and healthy again

“Rheila will you marry me,” I said.

Her hands flew up to her mouth as she gasped a massive smile breaking over her face. “For real?” she asked.

“Umm yes,” I tried to say still on my knee.

I held the ring out and started to put it on her finger but it didn’t seem to go on fast enough for her so she put it on herself. Then she started kissing me and sort of picked me up. After we kissed for about 30 seconds I pulled away.

“So that’s a yes right?”

It was. We held each other close and I realized I wanted to remember this moment for the rest of my life, so I wrote this somewhat clunky story down. 

Death of a friend: There is a time to laugh and a time to weep

“On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.” 
― Henry David Thoreau

Today one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, David Gumbleton died.

You hear that a lot after a person dies, “so and so was a good guy,” sometimes it becomes cliche. But if you would have me last week who was one of the nicest, kindest, most happy person I’d met, Gumby would have been on the short list, if not at the top. I knew him for five years only, but I’m grateful for the time I spent with him as a co-worker, roommate and friend.

I wasn’t as close to him as some of his friends, but he never made me feel that way. In the last few years it was too bad that I didn't have the chance to see him as often, but since I had been busy at newspapers and he had spent time in China it wasn't on purpose. He just loved adventures, including the one of that took him out west to national park this past summer.

Still when it was his birthday last year, he took time to message me individually to party he was having, not send out a mass text or invite, but let me know I was invited personally. Call me old fashioned but that's something people can overlook to do sometimes. 

When I got the party at his house he handed everyone who walked in a cup for the keg of good beer he had in the living room and when I tried to pay said something along the lines, “Your money is no good here.”

He just wanted everyone to have as much fun as he was having. If there was one thing in his life David knew how to do, it was to have fun.  

It’s strange right now in a one room motel, that I’m alone, 150 miles away from where I met Gumby. Strange because I have no one to talk to in person about this, and I’m just left with my thoughts. When I got Rheila on the phone earlier I cried, and she said it would be good idea to write down my memories of Gumby. She said he wouldn’t want me to be sad, but to do what I enjoy doing. To live my life as he would. 

So that’s what I’m going to try to do. Even though I’m supposed to be a “writer” and I love to write, I feel like my words so far are awkward and haven’t done justice to David. So I’m just going to let the memories flow.

I met Gumby at Bilbo’s Pizza, where we both worked as cooks. He was a couple of years younger than me, but he didn’t seem to be. In fact, I was shocked when I found out he was younger because part of him always seemed like some old wise hippie, or someone who had been to the top of a mountain. He seemed to have figured out how to be happy in life.  

When work was slow, we would take dough and play “Bozo Buckets” with old pizza dough, throwing it across the kitchen into the large, medium and small pizza trays. Of course this tended to get one of two of us in trouble once in a while with the managers, but that didn’t stop him from later teaching me how to juggle. Which I practiced at work. With balls made out of pizza dough.

Needless to say I got fired.

I still saw him off and on again for a couple of years while I was working at a different bar. He lived with several others of our friends and I would stop by from time to time and happen to see him. It wasn’t until I moved away from Kalamazoo and then decided to come back again that I really got a chance to spend time with Gumby a lot again.

I had just decided to reapply myself and go back to school after taking a year off working at a dead end job in St. Joseph. Luckily there was a job in Kzoo and I got the chance to move back there. Because of more luck, there was an open room in the house that he was living in on Austin Street with a another friend, Andrew.

Living there was my last real college experience, and Gumby was a great roommate in a not always so clean living situation.  When I moved in the kitchen was such a mess that no one would really want to go in there, even to mircowave pizza rolls. Bilbo's boxes were stacked up to the ceiling and I don't think we owned a vacuum. One good thing was that I'm really glad to live in a state where you get 10 cents for bottle returns.  

Andrew and I were really the reason the house was a mess. Still Gumby never got upset, and once in a while he would do all the dishes, even though we made the mess and the kitchen would be clean…for a couple of days.

Gumby loved animals and he joked that we had a pet raccoon that lived in a tree in front of the house. He used to leave out left over pizza for the animal so it would have something to eat during the winter. That changed when one day he parked under the tree and the animal must have eaten too many pizza crusts; it made the biggest mess on Gumby’s car windshield I have ever seen. It could have put 100 seagulls to shame. 

But through both of those situations, he never let it get to him. He would just smile and laugh and say something like "that's how it goes."

Another funny story is how we didn’t have garbage service at the house, just a trash bin that no one ever paid for. One night after the bar I walked home buzzed and came into the house annoyed because there was trash everywhere.

“That’s it,” I said. “We’re taking it to the dumpster.” He just laughed but he jumped off the couch to help me. 

As I ran up the hill to the WMU trash bin carrying a full rolling garbage can of trash Gumby ran right next me, keeping “lookout” for police. He had been playing a recorder he found (that little flute like thing kids play in second grade) and brought it with him, playing the one song he knew as I pulled the heavy can. After we illegally dumped it in a WMU dumpster we ran back down the hill, the clang of the empty garbage bin thudding in time with the flute as he played it. For years afterwards we talked about that night, never getting tired of how funny it was.

I was amazed at the energy he had. He would play soccer, rock climb and ride his bike even when he had to work doubles at work. He was generous too, I remember how he would let me borrow his bike when I felt that I needed a little exercise or when I wanted to go to the lake by our house and not drive. 

He was happy to bring me along when I asked if I could go rock climbing with him. I went twice with him and both were great days. I had trouble climbing like he did, because I was 260 pounds trying to pull myself up the tiny grips wasn't as easy as for me as someone as athlectic as he was. Still, he was patent as he showed me what paths to take and what grips to hold onto the beginners wall. 

At the end of that day I still hadn't been able to complete a whole "course" up a wall, but he assured me I would be able to get to the top if I worked hard at it and made calm, fluid moves. He stood at the bottom of the wall and shouted encouragement, I can still remember the song that way playing through the speakers at Climb Kalamazoo at that moment , by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

He cheered for me to get to the top that day at Climb Kalamazoo, but  also in my enrolling in classes again WMU. He was postitive for me when I started to work at MLive and when he heard the everyday struggles that everyone sometime goes through in life. Sometimes you start to notice things when you live with someone, like how they react when you tell them my grandma just died or a fight I had with with girlfriend.

So really, isn’t that what being a good friend should mean, always being there to cheer you on to get to the top?

Now that he’s gone I’m in shock, but when I think about him, When I think about every time he smiled or laughed or said something funny, I smile. Part of me feels guilty for grinning or laughing out loud in this little motel when I’m so sad for for his family and friends who will miss him so much.

I’m sad that he's gone way too damn soon. But I’m also really happy he’s a person who loved life and enjoyed it to the fullest. I'm lucky I got to meet and spend time with him even for a little while. Knowing Gumby makes me want to be go forward living my life more like he did.

Leaving Kalamazoo for a new job in Bad Axe: Staying at a charming motel

I’m in Port Austin staying at a motel a block from the beach after my first day at the Huron Daily Tribune. I think I’m still in a slight state of shock from all the changes during the last week, so I’m hoping writing this down will help clairfy things a little bit for me. After I write bout the move, I will finish telling the story of how I proposed last week.

Yesterday we went out to eat at Uncle Ernie’s in Kalamazoo for breakfast. We had a nice meal of country fried steak and drank coffee, trying not to talk about how much on how we would miss each other during the week. We went back home after stopping by the bookstore to pick up somee things for me to read while I’m up here.

Rheila slept as I watched the Detroit Lions beat the Chicago Bears. It was very nice to have her in the same room as me resting peacefully. We walked the dog when she woke up and than ran to the store to grab some last supplies for my trip before dinner. The plan was to grab some pizza and cuddle while watching a movie, but the Hot & Ready  pizza place was all out of cheese to make pizza. So we decided to go to Red Lobster for the last dinner we would have together for a the week, even though we both work there.

It was also my manager Mike’s last night at Red Lobster before he gets transferred to another location and it was nice seeing him; after all he was the one who hired me almost three years ago. I ate too much and this time at a meal Rhelia and I were able to talk about how things were going to be great at the new job,  although we would miss each other. She agreees it will be a great opertunity for me to start writing again.

When we got home we talked to Tony about the Lion Bears game. He’s a Bears fan and said that the Detroit faithful were not kind to him although they thought his number 55 jersey was pretty cool. He also told a nice story about how he tailgated with a homeless person in a parking lot outside Ford Field.

Afterwards Rheila and I went to bed and watch the new Muppett Movie and cuddled with the dog and cat in bed. We held hands and tried to savor the night sleeping next to each other.

I went to bed at 1 a.m. and woke up at 4 a.m. ready to hit the road. It wasn’t until I was about to get in the shower that I realized that the alarm hadn’t gone off  yet and I got back into bed to get another hour of sleep. I don’t think I did though, instead I just laid there restless, and when the alarm did go off I jumped right up and got ready.

I was putting the suitcase into the trunk when Rheila woke up to say goodbye. We ran to the bank so I could get some cash and walked the dog around the block before we hugged each other for a long time. The sun was just starting to come up when I turned out of the parking lot.

The highway was busy on the way up to Bad Axe and traffic slowed to 50 mph on I-69 because of  heavy fog. I had a strong caffine buzz from a few Starbucks double energy drinks and listened to mostly classic rock radio, I was singing along way to loudly to “Let it Be” by The Beatles and was glad I was on the highway.

There was a note saying welcome at my desk at the Huron Daily News when I first got to my “office” area. Dave is the Editor of the neewspaper and a really great guy. I talked for a while about the area as I filled out tax forms and such. When it was time to try to get to work,  I called for an interview in order to write an article on United Way but couldn’t get an interview the first day.

There was situation with the computers so that needs to be changed, but other than that it seems that it will be a very exciting  and cool place to work. I was feeling very sick because of the drive and too much caffine and left a little early because I didn’t have much else work to do.

I stopped and got grocerys at a small supermarket calle Mcdonald’s in town. There is a lot of fruit stands around Bad Axe as well, and that makes me really happy because I was afraid that  Walmart would be the only place to shop.

Port Austin seems somewhat deserted right now because the summer season is over. A few deer were grazing on the side of the road when I pulled up and they looked at me calmly when I pulled up as if to say “What are you doing here, this is were we live.”

The Port Austin Motel is run by a gentleman name Michael, who has a very heavy accent I can’t place. He and his wife seem nice and they have a dog that barked when I came into the office. I’m staying in room 11 and it’s a cheerful if maybe a little bit dated room. There is seagull art everywhere and it reminds me of my grandfathers house from when I was a child.

Lake Huron is less than a block away and I have a great view from the motel, I could walk right up to the beach if I wanted. I wish Rheila was here because it’s so beautiful up here. When I unloaded I took a much needed nap. When I woke up I read for a while and watched baseball game on mute, looking up while I read a short story about a detective out of my Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. I think that this is a very good place to geet used to being a reporter again