Black Eyed Susan, Joseph Devon [the giving tree read aloud .TXT] 📗

Black Eyed Susan

By Joseph Devon

I don't know that I believe in love at first sight, at least not how The Beatles describe it and all. That being said I think I fell in love with your mother the first time I saw her, I just didn't know it. Looking back, that first instant, it's all pretty clear now. Maybe that's what they mean. I'm just saying it's not like I went home that night and couldn't stop thinking about her or anything, she was just another girl. But, looking at it all in reverse, yeah, it was love.

It was summer and we were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and we were at the Jersey Shore. Too young to drive anywhere interesting but too old to have fun hanging out in a house full of parents. If you were lucky you might get a ride to a party somewhere with an older brother of a friend, but that was only rarely and usually you had to pay a price, like by siphoning some gas out of a parent's car or something. And that's a nasty business. You have to get a length of garden hose and everything reeks of gas once you're done.

No, those of us in our early teens were driven into the streets, squeezed out really. Ten blocks of sleepy beach houses and during summer nights the outdoors became the only place we could hang out. Personally I loved the challenge of it.

You couldn't go anywhere that was built for people, the park on the bay for example, because that was city property and had to be maintained, so it was one of the places the police would sweep. For that matter, anywhere with a proper place to sit: a bench on one of the boardwalks or out in front of one of the cafes that were closed for the night, anywhere like that was too out in the open or too double checked by the police. Cul-de-sacs could work, and dead ends, but then you were sitting on the street and inevitably you got loud enough so that some house lights would come on and you'd have to run.

The only real option was to move to the beach. Even if one of the ocean front houses had their deck lights on it was still basically pitch black. Every street had a small wooden walkway running up through the dune grass so you had multiple exit sites. The constant sound of the surf helped hide noise. Also the distance between you and anyone trying to sleep could be maximized out there on the cold sand.

You'd get chased off eventually of course. Once you found a good spot word would spread and enough people would show up and be loud enough that sooner or later you'd see the flash of blue and red light crawling across the outside of one of the nearby houses, or, worse, you'd suddenly find yourself on the receiving end of a very bright flashlight. At that point it was every man for himself.

Finding a place to hang out was only part of the challenge though. The rest of the challenge was getting beer. Not only getting beer, but hiding the beer, then transporting the beer out of your parents' house and onto the beach. You had to have beer. If you didn't find beer it was a sure thing that someone else would, or at least someone would sneak a bottle of something out of their parents' house, and then what did you have? You had chaos because everyone always followed the beer. It didn't matter if you were drinking. If you were one of the night people then, whether you knew it or not, you were going to follow the beer.

One twelve pack buried in the dunes would attract enough people who in turn would attract more people until the entire party would be centered on that twelve pack. Twenty or so kids would eventually cluster. It was like magic.

Although looking back I guess it wasn't magic, it was just that some kids liked biking around town more than they liked sitting on the beach drinking beer, and they'd tell others who would tell others and soon everyone would be up at the beach, sitting against the dune fence. Of course, as soon as this happened you'd start running the risk of seeing the flashing blue and red lights. That's why you had to get beer. Or why I had to get beer. If someone who didn't know what they were doing managed to get beer and picked a bad spot, like the playground by the bay, then you were running real risks of getting caught and not just chased, of getting marched up the driveway of your parents' house at midnight with a policeman behind you. That's why getting beer was so important, because it was too important to be left to amateurs.

Nowadays it seems so normal to walk into a bar, and to procure a booth or a stool or a comfortable spot in a corner, and to order a beer. And then the beer comes, and it's cold and it's fresh and it has a coaster underneath it and you pay for it and everything is perfectly legit. But it doesn't taste as good. When I stop to think about it, nothing will ever taste as good as the first can of beer dug out of the sand. It was usually lukewarm and you had to brush the sand off the rim, and it would gurgle up in foam the second you cracked the top and even when you wiped it off with the sleeve of your sweatshirt all you'd wind up with is a wet sleeve and sand in your beer. But I swear nothing ever tasted so good.

Your father always had a beer in his hand and they were always disgusting skunked frothy cans encrusted in sand...and he clearly thought he was the greatest thing going for being able to produce such stuff. Over time I came to realize that he barely ever finished an entire beer in one night. For him holding a beer had nothing to do with getting drunk. It was a source of power for him, a symbol of accomplishment. If the hiring board at Amalgamated Packaging Inc. had known your father in those days they wouldn't have needed four interviews to decide he was the man they wanted heading their northeast distribution chain. If anyone ever understood how to move a product and the power required to do so and the power gained by it, it was your father, sitting on the beach, offering people a can of warm beer.

I'm being a little harsh. In all fairness it's not like his whole universe centered on beer that had been hidden in a sweltering garage for a month, but that first summer I wasn't quite ready to accept this bizarre world of perfectly normal kids acting like street urchins once the sun went down.

And it's not like they made it easy. They had all known each other, or of each other, for years, all seeing each other summer after summer. I was coming out for the first time that year to live with my cousin. And for some reason everyone got it into their head that I was a "city girl." Just because I didn't have the clothes down right and I wore strap on sandals to the beach my first night there. It was a little judgmental on their part. It's not like I was from the city any more than they were. I'm from the suburbs of southern Michigan. I just had never spent any time at the beach. So it wasn't a very smooth transition. And I suppose I was being overly defensive, I was getting heckled from all angles it seemed like. So when this boy who looked more like a Dickens character than anything else offered me a sand coated beer like he was handing me nectar from the heavens, well I guess I acted a bit like a bitch. I snorted and laughed him off and looked around hoping that my cousin would side with me and we could walk away from him and I could retain some sense of dignity. And that's what happened. My cousin and I weren't that close but she didn't know your father too well so of course she sided with me, but it didn't help any. I was known as a bitch for basically the rest of that summer. Even when I wasn't known as a bitch I was referred to as the bitch by my closer friends. Nicknames stuck back then. I was the bitch and your father was the beer man. And we were both fifteen.

She had all these snippets of information about herself that she insisted on giving us. In fact it was the night she met everyone that I learned her favorite flower was the Black Eyed Susan. It was almost the first thing she said after being introduced to the group and snubbing my beer. We were fifteen, who on earth has a favorite flower at the age of fifteen? Who has a favorite flower at any age? And who decides to give that information out when they first meet a group of people?

She was nervous I guess, trying to establish some sort of identity or something. But there it was. Black Eyed Susans. Over the years I've gathered that a grandmother of hers who she was very close with cited Black Eyed Susans as her favorite flower and they always held a special place in your mother's heart. Turns out that not only had that grandmother passed away earlier that year, but your mother had misunderstood someone next to her as saying something about a favorite flower and that triggered her to insert this information into the conversation and, thus, tell me her favorite flower absolutely out of nowhere.

As I've told you before, there was a great degree of magic involved with your mother and me getting together.

But really, not much happened that first year between the two of us and then summer ended and I was back in school. That was when I received my first shocking glimpse of how small my world really was. I took it for granted that I would see all my school friends when the fall came and when summer rolled around again that I'd see all my beach friends. But this awkward lanky girl was on my mind when the school year started and it suddenly hit me that I might not be seeing her again. Ever. In my life.

Like I said, it wasn't exactly love at first sight. It took some time for her to be accepted by the group and to get over that whole bitch thing, and then I sort of talked to her here and there and I hadn't realized it but she had gotten to me. And suddenly in the middle of a September afternoon everything went all topsy turvy on me. My shoes were too tight and my clothes were all neat and everything was white walls and I was back in this school world and everyone was concerned about tests and books and playing sports and yet only a few weeks earlier I had been the beer man. I had snuck out after curfew and watched the sunrise just