What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [66]
“I have succeed in proving to seniors and to the children that there is something to look forward to other than resigning themselves to just being doddering, good-natured grandfathers,” Thomas said. “The things I do might look silly. I don’t care. I know who I am now. And I give that to the audience. I don’t falsify anything. I’m satisfied with that, too. I was a messenger.”
LORETTA THAYER
A Pie Maker’s Place
“I could make a difference. . . . I could
turn the diner into a place where people
could stop, like they used to years ago
for good food and good fellowship.”
When a tall, blue-eyed dairyman’s widow named Loretta Thayer rose from bed that September eleventh, it was still too dark to know how blue the sky would be. She put on her robe and went to the kitchen of her modest farmhouse on Route 11 in the village of DeKalb Junction, New York. Cars with their headlights on were already passing. Men and women were making their long commutes to somewhere else. The number of travelers that came through on the road had grown steadily over the years. But there just was not much to cause them to slow down anymore on this straightaway that cuts through dairy pastures upstate, close to the U.S.-Canada border.
Looking at the slender blue line of Route 11 on a map of the United States is a pleasant reminder of how this place is connected to a slew of small American towns and cities, strung north to south, for 1,646 miles, all the way from Rouses Point, on Lake Champlain, one hundred miles east of DeKalb Junction, down through such places as Shickshinny, Pennsylvania; Hagerstown, Maryland; Sweetwater, Tennessee; and Purvis, Mississippi before it ends at Bayou Sauvage in New Orleans. But here, at its northern end, Loretta looked across the two-lane blacktop toward the empty parking lot of the defunct diner, dark and still. The vacant truck stop next to it, the same.
Loretta was already sixty-nine then, and after the death of her husband two years earlier, her life had taken on a quiet rhythm. She had retired from a career of sporadic restaurant work with a well-deserved reputation for farm-style cooking and melt-in-your-mouth pies. Her main goal on this day was nothing more than to call her grandson Jason and wish him a happy twenty-ninth birthday. The two had always shared a close bond. It was one nurtured out of loss. Twenty-six years earlier, her son, Jason’s father, was killed in an early morning motorcycle accident, not far from the house, on Route 11. He was twenty, and the boy only a toddler.
Loretta walked into the kitchen and put up her morning coffee. She did not notice what a visitor from elsewhere would: that hers was an iconic American kitchen. It was decorated with souvenirs of family history rather than granite countertops, zinc faucets, and other fashion accessories. When Loretta reached into the cupboard for a mug, she brushed against cabinets her father had built. A half-dozen porcelain teapots, including one given to Loretta as a wedding present sixty years earlier and another that had been her parents’, sat on a shelf. Photographs of eleven grandchildren populated the refrigerator door. In the living room, separated from the kitchen by a wood-burning stove, were other tokens of her family: the colorful wool afghan a granddaughter had crocheted draped over an overstuffed sofa, the empty recliner where her husband used to sit and watch television.
Loretta kept a neat house but not a fussy one. During all the years she raised her five children and worked at area restaurants, she liked most helping Paul in the barn or working in the field. She particularly enjoyed driving the truck during haying. But she was in no rush to do chores or push through the papers piling up on the long kitchen table. She went into the dining room with its wall of windows looking out the back of the house onto a peaceful North Country pasture and sat down to read her devotional. She was lost in her prayers and thoughts when the phone rang. It was Jason. He was shaken. At first, she did not understand why.