OLD CAL
His name was really “Calvin. Everybody in town called him “Cal” or “Old Cal”, if you were younger than he. He was a thin dark man and a bit on the tall side it seemed to me when was small kid. His father named him after John Calvin, whom be believed started the Presbyterian church pretty much single-handedly.
As a kid I always remember old Cal's eyes. He seemed to be about ready to start crying most of the time. His eyes looked funny, sorta watery, uncertain look. Adults never told youngsters that we had “drug addicts” among us. They used a stronger term. There were “drug fiends”out there - never mere faddists. We young-younguns never thought of Cal as being .well, certainly not a-“fiend”or monster of some kind. He was always nice to us and our parents had him to do odd jobs for them around the place often.
Cal earned his living as a janitor. In the winter he fired furnaces.. He fired the furance in the apartment house in which we lived as well as our neighbors. Cal, himself, lived in a room or two in the unfinished basement of the apartment building. This drug thing was an oddity. We expected that he used “dope” like the Chinese people did in the opium dens and all that sort off thing, or maybe just whiskey. It came as something of a surprise, as well as a disappointment, when we found Cal drank a medication we had all used when we had a bad toothache and that sort of painful trouble. Paregoric. We were left to wonder about such a thing. He sipped paregoric solutions.. He was said to have acquired doctor's superscriptions which allowed him to buy the stuff. He could go from drug counter to drug counter to get a small bottle at each. He left home early every other morning and we didn't see him again until he came home that evening happier than when he left. It was a set o routine every other day with only occasional changes.
We came to think of Cal as being the village drunk, I suppose, though he never caused any trouble was never mean or disruptive. . We found, him to be well known where there was a drugstore.
I remember one Sunday morning/The choir was singing: “Shall We Gather At The River?” When we stopped, everyone was surprised to hear Cal adding a fifth verse. One of the church deacons jumped up and ran downstairs were he found Cal seated on some bags of ashes, a-singing his heart out. The singing stopped and the pastor got on with his the sermon.
Cal did a lot of “walkin' "' out” at night. We were always concerned about that acquired habit. Sooner or later he would get hit by a passing truck or car. It happened “sooner” rather than “later”./ A heavy, expensive car skidded on the wet highway and half overturned on him in the grass. Cal was well off the state's right of way.
Now, when people we talk about God working his miracles n mysterious ways, we know we certainly saw it happen with Old Cal. The man who was driving the car which hit Cal saw it that way, too. We heard he set up an insurance annuity of some sort which provided Cal with an income for the rest of his life.
How is that for a strange piece of luck? Of all the people who might have hit old Cal on that rainy roadside, he was struck by a rich, compassionate man. I remember thinking at the time, that maybe an old girl friend of Cal's might turn up to comfort him in his old age/”for as long as they both might live” It didn't work out like that, of course. That would have been asking too much. One miracle was enough.
A.L.M.. February 10, 2004 [c664
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