Grandma Henke

I was driving over to visit Mother one bright, sunny afternoon in the spring when the strangest de javu occurred … I almost expected to see Dad sitting in my passenger seat with a huge grin on his face.

I had just turned the corner from Sunset by the big McDonald’s and there were some cars parked off to the right, and a motorcycle.  A man in a helmet was standing by the side of the street so I edged over to the left to pass by and didn’t think anything of it. Soon I could hear a beeping and looked in my rear view mirror and this man on a motorcycle was pulling up to the side of my car waving for me to unroll my window.

“You owe me $200.   You just ran over my sunglasses” he yelled at me as soon as my window was down.

“What?” I yelled back, unsure I had heard him right.   I mean what kind of a person would run you down like this if you ran over their sunglasses in the middle of the road?

“You owe me $200 bucks! You just ran over my sunglasses you stupid #$%@#.  Pull over!”  he raged. 

“I didn’t see your sunglasses.   I’m sorry if I ran over them,”   I yelled back, suddenly remembering Dad’s animated similar story of how he got his black eye and almost lost his glasses.

“Pull over right now!” he hollered, motioning at the same time with his middle finger.  

Holy crazy man!    Here he was, back to haunt me!    “I’m sorry about your sunglasses,” I yelled back,  “but I’m not pulling over!”    Unconsciously I removed my own sunglasses and tucked them safely in my purse.

“No way am I’m pulling over,” I thought holding my cellular phone between us as a threat while I simultaneously stepped on the accelerator and rolled up my car window.   I’d heard this story before and knew the ending …

One hot summer day many years before, when Dad was a supervisor for the Utah State Road Department, he was driving along one of the less frequented roads in Salt Lake County looking for road damage when he came up on a motorcycle off to the right of the road with a man standing next to it. He started to pull over to see if the man needed help when the guy appeared to flag him past so Dad pulled to the left a little and passed him up. Shortly afterwards the man on his motorcycle was at Dad’s window angrily honking and yelling at him to pull over.

Dad pulled over, thinking the man needed some help,  and quick as a flash this dude was off his motorcycle, standing with his head through Dad’s window yelling at him … eyeball to eyeball.

“You did that on purpose,” he yelled, his rage apparent from his red face and the protruding veins on his neck.

“What are you talking about,” Dad tried to ask him.     “Calm down and tell me what you need.”

“Calm Down!   I’ll tell you what I need.   I need new glasses! My old ones were in the road and you ran over them with your truck you #@$%@#$!  You did it on purpose!”

He tried to tell the man he was sorry about his glasses and that he hadn’t seen them in the road but his words were falling on deaf ears and finally Dad’s temper started to flare. This leathered up, bearded motorcyclist was a lot bigger than Dad, but Dad was in his big yellow State Road truck and wasn’t about to be bullied.   So the two of them shouted in each other’s faces … with neither of them hearing a word the other one spoke.  (which is a good thing since Dad had proceeded to tell this man where he might want to put his broken glasses).

“You’re the SOB who left his glasses sitting in the road anyway, not me!” he finished up as he prepared to roll up his window and drive away.

Before he knew what happened the Hell’s Angels wannabe reached in, popped him in the face, grabbed the glasses off his nose, and quickly reared back with his right arm and threw them as far out  into the deserted fields as he could before jumping on his motorcycle and roaring down the road with a wave of his middle finger.

Dad needed his glasses and couldn’t afford a new pair so he’d been looking for them for a couple of hours or more before he spotted them dangling from one of the bare top branches of the only tree in the field.    Of course, by then he’d gone over this incident many times in his head trying to change the outcome.    About then one of the men who worked for him pulled up in another big yellow State truck and walked across the field to where Dad stood looking up at his glasses glinting in the sunlight.

“What are you looking at, Lewy,” he asked congenially as he craned his neck to look up into limbs of the tree.

Dad wiped his forehead and face with his red bandana handkerchief and said, “Well, I need you to help me get them glasses a mine out of that tree.”

“What are your specs doing up in that tree?” he asked as the two of them worked together to get them down.     There’s nothing that calmed Dad down quicker or brought out his humor than getting to retell a story like that.    I wish I could tell it like he did.      Who would have thought that thirty years later something so similar would happen to me?