Almost Mother

      Earl and Stella nearly became my parents. There was no fence between our houses and back yards, where Sam lived. Sam, a black Cocker Spaniel who never tired of chasing sticks and balls and having his belly rubbed. My first dog. I was six or seven, I think, when those three moved in.

      This young couple and their dog filled a great emptiness in my life. I had been adopted as a baby by a great aunt and uncle, Nanny and Daddy Bill, when they were in their early fifties. I got love and care, but now just a few feet away were a couple of warm and lively people who brought an entirely new dimension. They were generous and lively and loud. Earl rarely produced a sentence devoid of at least one cuss word. He and Stella smoked heavily and drank beer when they wanted, none of either in my house.

      Earl worked at the State Highway Department building just half a mile out Campbell Street. One winter day after a major snowfall he talked Nanny, ever protective, of letting me ride along that night as he drove out plowing country roads. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Blair, I’ll take the best care of him.” It was a ride that I’ve never forgotten, down country roads unrecognizable by me, light snow falling, heavy snow piled up along the roads, on and on. I recall asking Earl if we were getting close to Detroit. In fact, we were never more than 15 miles from Alpena, but I’d never been to Detroit or to anywhere else further than a dozen miles away, so as we drove on and on it the dark my imagination ran wild. Earl laughed.

      They had a late model Plymouth generally parked in their attached garage, and Earl seemed often to be underneath it changing the oil or doing other mysterious things. I’d stand beside the car and from time to time Earl would ask me to hand him this or that “goddamn” tool. Stella occasionally would step out from the kitchen onto the back porch and offer me a soft drink and bring one or a beer out for Earl. Then they’d have lunch there in the kitchen, me likely joining them.

      One day when I was perhaps nine or ten Earl said that he and his brother Hank were going rabbit hunting. You can come along if Mrs. Blair (Nanny) agrees. By then Nanny felt great trust and affection for Earl and she did agree, and we got ourselves and our gear into their car and off we went. Of course, Sammy came too. From the first time that I was introduced to Sam, Earl repeatedly would say:

“He’s a huntin dog, Sam, aren’t you Sammy? You’re a hunter,” rolling Sam onto his back and rubbing his tummy. Sammy didn’t seem like a hunting dog to me but when we went after those rabbits he came along and really was a “huntin dog.”

      We drove a few miles out of town, parked, and the four of us began walking through a field with trees and boulders here and there, Sammy out front, we humans a few yards apart as we walked. Earl had loaned me a little 22 and I’d practiced a bit so I was ready to be a hunter. Sam scared up several rabbits that day and I managed to bag one of them. All told we had about half a dozen. We put them in a bag and drove home and Earl and Hank butchered and cleaned the rabbits. I recall that the butchering was a stinky as well as a bloody task, not to my liking. But the eating later was fine.

      Riding and hunting with Earl, eating in the kitchen with Stella and Earl, was what their son would have been doing. They couldn’t have children of their own and it did not occur to me then that they might be thinking the same thoughts.

      When I was 12 Nanny died quite suddenly. Soon Daddy Bill was discovered to have tuberculosis and was taken to a sanitorium downstate. There was the house, later sold for about $4500 and a few thousand savings. It was at that point, I learned later, that Earl and Stella suggested to my “aunt-in-charge” that they adopt me. For reasons that I have never discovered, she declined the offer, never letting me in on the decision.

      Years passed, tough motherless and fatherless years. I learned of Earl’s sudden death. Heart failure just as he was reaching 50. Stella lived on alone on Campbell

Street. We were out of touch but she was never far out my mind. A decade after Earl’s death, I invited Stella to fly to visit my wife and newborn child in L.A. She did. I have the picture of her holding baby Julie, looking like a proud grandma as we waited for a boat to take us to Catalina Island. I was living in Chicago when I learned that Stella was a cancer patient in Alpena’s General Hospital. I drove to Alpena and there she was, frail, dying, still calling me James, the only person who had ever used that moniker for me. Almost my mother.