He leapt high in the air (much higher than humanly possible) and over the cliff. It was a joyous leap. He laughed that hearty HA HA I got you kinda laugh. He was so happy and free, as he glided toward the ocean.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Dream about Tom
I was loading my car, and I noticed someone sitting in the drivers seat. All I could see was the posture and a big thick long beard. I knew it was Tom right away. I guess it was the way he was sprawled low in the seat with his left leg outside the car. As I leaned in to look I saw he was playing music on a saw. It sounded just as you would expect from Tom. He had that kinda ha ha smile on his face. Then he popped out of the car, which was now parked along a cliff at the ocean.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
More from Bob Barrie
It's two weeks since I last wrote something, but Tom's been on my mind almost every day. Hanging out with him was a large chunk of my childhood. It doesn't help that I am doing parent day care at least two or three days a week, dealing with both beloved parents at once, both are obstinate and often lucid by turns and then loving, then difficult. Mom really is into sweets these days, hates Meals on Wheels that Dad enjoys, she eats the cookies and cake, Dad eats the sandwiches and veggies. My girlfriend, an Ann Arbor native, Wendy (Scheu) Beth, recently heard all of this...
I go by your old house on Cambridge frequently. Somehow keep peering up into the windows to see if there's a familiar face, but it's been how many years since your father left AA for San Francisco and his family?
Tom and I invented a risky but thrilling game as little kids. You may have been there. We were in Burns Park and were climbing trees. The fir trees were fine with many limbs and you could climb up high very quickly, but the sap from the bark was sticky and rubbed into your hands easily. There were elms and maples too. There is still the maple that Tom and I climbed and found that if you went out on a sturdy branch, hand over hand, hanging from it, the branch would flex and bend and one branch in particular would gently let you down almost to the ground. The "Mommy" branch, it came to be known, and it was the "Mommy tree." I've told my nephews and nieces and girlfriends about it for decades. There we were, high overhead, me and Tom Wehrer, hanging on that silly branch, but screaming for "MOMMY!" Passers by in the age range of reasonable adults would come running, expecting the kid on the branch to be in great peril; and we'd drop to the ground and laugh. The adult, chagrined at being fooled by the hanging kid, would stalk away. At the time, we thought it was pretty darn funny.
And so the game went, until one day, the branch broke, and Tom, of course, was the one who fell. And he cut his chin, needing stitches. And your Mom was the Mommy who wasn't at all happy with the game, and me in particular, as I was a year older (and wiser?).
Your Mom took Tom to the doctor and instructed me to watch the kids: Paula, Lisa, Steve. I called my Mom for help. She said: "Read to the kids until Mrs Wehrer returns." So I did. I'd forgotten this, but Mom told me her half of the story about a month ago. She said she walked down to your house and found me on a bed with you three and I was reading Dr Seuss, and she figured you were safe, and walked back up Lincoln. I have no recollection of me reading to you all. Some time later, the broken branch was cut from the tree, and the stub is still there on the same tree, you can see it just off Wells Street at Martin Place.
I think Tom had a scar on his chin for some time. A reminder of a risky game. We repeated something similar in your yard jumping off a swingset, and again, Tom got hurt, and your Mom reminded me to be kinder with her son. We also got four of us in the fishnet hammock on the porch and swung it so wildly that we all crashed into the window and broke it, though I'm not sure if any of us got hurt. Risk taking was in my blood, as I've survived skiing in Colorado avalanche back country, rock climbing, and lately, riding motorcycles.
By the way, I still owe Martha an apology for another imbecilic incident that evidently I was responsible for: dumping water into the mailbox. Your father came out and scolded Martha, and asked where she got the idea. She promptly responded that "Bob Barrie told me to!" My brother John replayed that story to me when we were recounting Wehrer stories some time ago... So, hey, Martha: my sincerest apology for getting you in trouble!
Feel free to edit and post, if you wish. And all my best to you and your family...
Love,
Bob
I go by your old house on Cambridge frequently. Somehow keep peering up into the windows to see if there's a familiar face, but it's been how many years since your father left AA for San Francisco and his family?
Tom and I invented a risky but thrilling game as little kids. You may have been there. We were in Burns Park and were climbing trees. The fir trees were fine with many limbs and you could climb up high very quickly, but the sap from the bark was sticky and rubbed into your hands easily. There were elms and maples too. There is still the maple that Tom and I climbed and found that if you went out on a sturdy branch, hand over hand, hanging from it, the branch would flex and bend and one branch in particular would gently let you down almost to the ground. The "Mommy" branch, it came to be known, and it was the "Mommy tree." I've told my nephews and nieces and girlfriends about it for decades. There we were, high overhead, me and Tom Wehrer, hanging on that silly branch, but screaming for "MOMMY!" Passers by in the age range of reasonable adults would come running, expecting the kid on the branch to be in great peril; and we'd drop to the ground and laugh. The adult, chagrined at being fooled by the hanging kid, would stalk away. At the time, we thought it was pretty darn funny.
And so the game went, until one day, the branch broke, and Tom, of course, was the one who fell. And he cut his chin, needing stitches. And your Mom was the Mommy who wasn't at all happy with the game, and me in particular, as I was a year older (and wiser?).
Your Mom took Tom to the doctor and instructed me to watch the kids: Paula, Lisa, Steve. I called my Mom for help. She said: "Read to the kids until Mrs Wehrer returns." So I did. I'd forgotten this, but Mom told me her half of the story about a month ago. She said she walked down to your house and found me on a bed with you three and I was reading Dr Seuss, and she figured you were safe, and walked back up Lincoln. I have no recollection of me reading to you all. Some time later, the broken branch was cut from the tree, and the stub is still there on the same tree, you can see it just off Wells Street at Martin Place.
I think Tom had a scar on his chin for some time. A reminder of a risky game. We repeated something similar in your yard jumping off a swingset, and again, Tom got hurt, and your Mom reminded me to be kinder with her son. We also got four of us in the fishnet hammock on the porch and swung it so wildly that we all crashed into the window and broke it, though I'm not sure if any of us got hurt. Risk taking was in my blood, as I've survived skiing in Colorado avalanche back country, rock climbing, and lately, riding motorcycles.
By the way, I still owe Martha an apology for another imbecilic incident that evidently I was responsible for: dumping water into the mailbox. Your father came out and scolded Martha, and asked where she got the idea. She promptly responded that "Bob Barrie told me to!" My brother John replayed that story to me when we were recounting Wehrer stories some time ago... So, hey, Martha: my sincerest apology for getting you in trouble!
Feel free to edit and post, if you wish. And all my best to you and your family...
Love,
Bob
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
So many memories of Tom Wehrer & family...
I'm really sorry I missed Tom's memorial service, as he was so large in life he could have walked from the pages of Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey, but he was truly one better, an original original. So, my memories are mostly from 1957 or so through the mid-1970's.
Tom was one of the only kids I knew in elementary school where what we did for part of a summer was read autobiographies of famous Americans: Teddy Roosevelt, Eli Whitney, Clara Barton, and George Washington Carver. He was an intellectual so early on, we talked about whether there was a god and who Jesus was and wasn't, and why there was an antique barber's chair in the basement ("you spin in it and you can see the Universe," he said. "What's the Universe?" I asked. I'm still not so sure that simple dizziness produces cosmic consciousness.) When we were still at Burns Park, he gave me a bio of Ted Williams, because Tom was nuts about baseball and we went to Tiger Stadium and saw Rocky Calavito; Tom was ecstatic and laughed five miles when his toddler little brother, Stevie, could say "Rocky Calavito" in one breath. We took Steve in a wicker basket spoked wheel pram from their house at 1502 Cambridge and Paula, my brother John, and I and Tom climbed up on the Big Rock at Hill and Washtenaw to watch "cool cars" go by. There was no paint on the rock then.
In another summer in the earliest part of the 1960's, Tom and I with some of Tom's pals strolled down to the Blue Front in Ann Arbor and bought cigars for our fathers, we said, and went to the Arboretum and sat on a huge log over a ravine and smoked and saluted Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for providing us with "inspiration." Halloween saw Tom's mom, Ann, carefully pasting black beards onto the faces of my brother John, and Tom, Paula and me, and we went out trick or treating, all of us under the age of ten, and we were certain adults saw us as the true beatniks we'd become later on in life...Tom already had bongo drums. It was glorious, imaginative, and you could always count on Tommy Wehrer (and his family) for an adventure.
My family had four kids, his had five, and we belonged to the same swim club so we sometimes crammed into one car to enjoy the summer in the pool out towards Ypsilanti; there were long stretches of countryside to appreciate on the way out, all gone now. I'd never had cowtongue for dinner until Mrs Wehrer asked me to stay one night and join the family, but I don't recall that I could stomach tongue. One of the things that will always stand out was how many people came and went at 1502. Tom had many friends, as did his siblings and parents, and there was always a party there, it seemed, especially as the years went by.
In the early 70's, I ran into Tom out front of his house, and we sat on railroad ties and he told me how soap works, and how soap was different from laundry detergent, and how the chemicals worked to break up dirt and grease. Ordinarily, I would have paid no attention, but Tom made it fascinating. Knowing him, he might have made up the whole thing, but I doubt it. His mind went in many directions and he knew some trivia and data about lots of things. I recall talking briefly with Joe that day, or sometime then, and chatting up my activities in college with protesting the Vietnam War, but the Wehrers were already there. Leaders of progressive thinking and action, after a fashion.
Years went by and then one day, as I was finishing grad school at the University of Michigan, there was another party at the Wehrer house, and Joe told me they all were moving to the Bay Area, to California. Soon the house was empty of the family, and someone else moved in. The neighborhood was never the same. My parents are now 85 and 89, and Dad has the nasty disease that saps the mind of clarity and lucid expression, and they are among the very last on Lincoln Street to be there...we moved in about 1957 to Lincoln Street, and Joe and Ann Wehrer moved in with Martha, Tom, Paula, Lisa and Steve, I think, about the same time. I sincerely miss them all, and I will always miss Tom. He was truly one of my best friends as a kid, and I hope one day to see him again... and we can finish our discussion about soap... Love to all of you in the family, and Wehrer friends, and those brilliant creative cinematographic and musical minds you'd find at 1502 Cambridge...
Tom was one of the only kids I knew in elementary school where what we did for part of a summer was read autobiographies of famous Americans: Teddy Roosevelt, Eli Whitney, Clara Barton, and George Washington Carver. He was an intellectual so early on, we talked about whether there was a god and who Jesus was and wasn't, and why there was an antique barber's chair in the basement ("you spin in it and you can see the Universe," he said. "What's the Universe?" I asked. I'm still not so sure that simple dizziness produces cosmic consciousness.) When we were still at Burns Park, he gave me a bio of Ted Williams, because Tom was nuts about baseball and we went to Tiger Stadium and saw Rocky Calavito; Tom was ecstatic and laughed five miles when his toddler little brother, Stevie, could say "Rocky Calavito" in one breath. We took Steve in a wicker basket spoked wheel pram from their house at 1502 Cambridge and Paula, my brother John, and I and Tom climbed up on the Big Rock at Hill and Washtenaw to watch "cool cars" go by. There was no paint on the rock then.
In another summer in the earliest part of the 1960's, Tom and I with some of Tom's pals strolled down to the Blue Front in Ann Arbor and bought cigars for our fathers, we said, and went to the Arboretum and sat on a huge log over a ravine and smoked and saluted Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for providing us with "inspiration." Halloween saw Tom's mom, Ann, carefully pasting black beards onto the faces of my brother John, and Tom, Paula and me, and we went out trick or treating, all of us under the age of ten, and we were certain adults saw us as the true beatniks we'd become later on in life...Tom already had bongo drums. It was glorious, imaginative, and you could always count on Tommy Wehrer (and his family) for an adventure.
My family had four kids, his had five, and we belonged to the same swim club so we sometimes crammed into one car to enjoy the summer in the pool out towards Ypsilanti; there were long stretches of countryside to appreciate on the way out, all gone now. I'd never had cowtongue for dinner until Mrs Wehrer asked me to stay one night and join the family, but I don't recall that I could stomach tongue. One of the things that will always stand out was how many people came and went at 1502. Tom had many friends, as did his siblings and parents, and there was always a party there, it seemed, especially as the years went by.
In the early 70's, I ran into Tom out front of his house, and we sat on railroad ties and he told me how soap works, and how soap was different from laundry detergent, and how the chemicals worked to break up dirt and grease. Ordinarily, I would have paid no attention, but Tom made it fascinating. Knowing him, he might have made up the whole thing, but I doubt it. His mind went in many directions and he knew some trivia and data about lots of things. I recall talking briefly with Joe that day, or sometime then, and chatting up my activities in college with protesting the Vietnam War, but the Wehrers were already there. Leaders of progressive thinking and action, after a fashion.
Years went by and then one day, as I was finishing grad school at the University of Michigan, there was another party at the Wehrer house, and Joe told me they all were moving to the Bay Area, to California. Soon the house was empty of the family, and someone else moved in. The neighborhood was never the same. My parents are now 85 and 89, and Dad has the nasty disease that saps the mind of clarity and lucid expression, and they are among the very last on Lincoln Street to be there...we moved in about 1957 to Lincoln Street, and Joe and Ann Wehrer moved in with Martha, Tom, Paula, Lisa and Steve, I think, about the same time. I sincerely miss them all, and I will always miss Tom. He was truly one of my best friends as a kid, and I hope one day to see him again... and we can finish our discussion about soap... Love to all of you in the family, and Wehrer friends, and those brilliant creative cinematographic and musical minds you'd find at 1502 Cambridge...
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