Keeping a Close Watch

I just have to watch closely to learn stuff. Or that’s my observation. I used to look around me and think how great it would be if I could just sit and soak it up. As in without the demand to move along. I am retired now. This is about as close as I’ll get to that.

That means that I have time to remember I had such thoughts. Though I actually spend more time now wanting to know things and researching between naps.

There was an old guy who lived next to me along the Mississippi river. I liked him a lot, so I considered him a friend. It’s true that anyone who isn’t too critical and still hangs around me qualifies. You could even be critical as long as I didn’t know it. It turns out that I can’t afford to be that selective. But with the old guy, Clarence, I spent a lot of time just listening. He would tell me about what things were like as he grew up.

He gave me a few books. I don’t think he espoused their content. He just had them. Then I did. He sneaked out to smoke cigarettes. He also didn’t hear that well. I talked a lot about whatever I was reading at the time. He may have succeeded in smoking without listening. I wouldn’t have noticed or minded either, really.

One of the books that he gave me was the Book of Mormon. He wasn’t a Mormon, he was Catholic, but I read it. I’m not a Mormon either. Now that I consider it, I think Clarence was more interesting than the Mormons anyway. So, I made the right choice. I wasn’t a catholic either, but I was his neighbor for a long time.

I have absorbed a lot of stories from him. And I retell them as he had related them to me. He had a daughter that was born prematurely sometime in the early 1940’s. At that time, they didn’t have the kind of support capability that is available today. His daughter was born in his house, I don’t know if it was there on the river or an earlier house. A doctor came, but because she weighed only slightly more than one pound, he said she would not survive and left. She was alive, though tiny. Clarence said he put her in a shoe box with a cotton bed. He rested the box on the stove door for warmth and fed her with an eyedropper. She did survive and grow up. I met her in later years. Outside of his story, she looked mostly normal.

Most of my memories of Clarence are good, and I learned a lot of history also. A good example would be regarding the river next to our houses. We lived on what was a reclaimed section of land. A few hundred yards beyond the shore was a section of the Mississippi that became rapids when the river was low. This was in a time before the Lock and Dam system, which was built in the 1930’s.

Clarence told me of a man who ran a grocery store in Bettendorf for years. Prior to his life as a grocer, he worked for logging companies moving log floats downstream to sawmills. His name was Shorty. I don’t know if that became his name after the incident or he earned it for another reason, but it’s all I remember about him. Clarence said that Shorty was riding a log raft through the rapids and fell down between several logs. His leg was damaged beyond repair and had to be amputated. He may not have been the only incident in the rapids, but he was the last. It was clearly too late for Shorty, but the result of the logging accident was the dredging of a channel on the Iowa side of the river to bypass the rapids. The resulting waterway still exists. The dredgings were pumped and shoveled behind a barrier of rip rap and filled in what was previously a swamp. This is the land our house was on. At some point, it was or became the site of a sawmill also. Though, only an old hand pump for water, that doesn’t function, remains of those earlier days.

There are no rapids on the river now. The Lock and Dam system raised the river levels to a guaranteed depth for navigation and we became part of the pool of Lock and Dam 15, downstream in Davenport. If you go slightly upstream on the Illinois side of the river, you come to Rapid City. From the story, I know why it had that name.

None of the history was needed, but I liked hearing it and knowing about where I lived. As I got to know him, I came to see that Clarence was pretty straight forward and if the stories weren’t accurate, that was something that had happened to them before they got to him. I have thought I could fix that, but they don’t really need any help. So, I won’t.