This, too, was written late last week.  Mama is in present tense here as well.  Here’s “The Old Grad.”

THE OLD GRAD

Irresponsible Dave strikes again.  It was a silly purchase, but one much more necessary than the one I had set out to make.

In the early Fall of 1979, I quit a pretty good television job in Chattanooga.  I was doing very well and advancing rapidly.  But for months, major responsibilities were added while promised insignificant pay raises were denied.  The station janitor was making a better wages than I.  Much better.  Look, I may be irresponsible, silly and talented, but I have principals as well.  I gave those guys fair warning, and they never came through.  So I quit and left for home and a house-painting gig at my parents’ house.

My parents were the best employers I have ever had.  I would arrive at work around noon each day.  The commute was hell.  Sometimes the stairs from my place to my work place in the living room and den were just too much to bear.  But I did it.  I always made it downstairs.  And my folks were so understanding.  They never complained of my tardiness nor did they ever threaten to fire me.  They were the best.  No medical.  No dental.  No 401K.  Still, they were the best.

And my employers trusted me.  If I needed supplies, all I had to do was tell one of them, and they would hand over the cash.  No questions asked.  Well mostly anyway.  One late October Friday night close to Halloween, I ran out of paint.  I asked my mom for money to go buy some more.  All she had was something like $10.  But that was enough money to buy enough paint to get me through the night’s work tasks.

Unfortunately for Mama, it was also just enough to buy a rubbery mask of a rubbery old man’s face with a big and round and slightly pink nose.  He also wore a tiny cap colored Carolina Blue, the school color of the University Of North Carolina.  And a mustache.  He looked like Mario, a kid’s video game character. Something told me to forgo the paint and to opt for the mask.  Our family kind of needed a lift that night.  So, the mask it was.

The laughs at the house when I returned without paint but with the Mario mask were subdued to say the least.  I was portrayed by the early comments that night as the irresponsible kid again.  But there were a few chuckles.  And we really did need them that night.  Still, I would rate my actions that night as a failure.

But during the next several years, my dad kind of took to that mask.  My dad was large and round, and, without a mask, seemed to look like and appear to be Jackie Gleason.  And he knew it.  And he fed off the reactions he would create when he would move his arms and hands off to one side, kick his left leg and say, “And awaaaaay we go!”  The mask added a new dimension to my dad’s party persona.  At every Carolina football reunion game that he would attend for the next several years with his brother and friends from his Graham, North Carolina birthplace, he would wear that mask.  And at each of those functions, he would be loudly laughed at and called, “The Old Grad.”
So – irresponsible or wise?  If my former employers were alive or able to understand and speak, I kind of think they would say it was a very wise purchase.  Frankly, I think it was one of the best investments in life and humor and love that I have ever made.  The den walls suffered for a while.  But the years of laughter were more than enough to overcome my silly decision that Fall night.

APRIL 10, 2011:  Thanks for the ten-spot, Mama.  Give my love to the Old Grad, okay?