The Sheer Weight of Memory
06/05/2006
We are only days away from Father’s Day. As I sit here at Dulles Airport waiting to board an airplane to Columbus, Ohio, and oh so frustrated that this damn contraption tells me there is a wireless network available and I cannot access it, I decided to concoct a new post for the http://www.Hell-of-a-Guy.com website. What to write about was giving me some difficulty until I got to thinking about Father’s Day. Of course, that led me to think of my dad.
I have mentioned a couple of times here about the relationship I had with him, especially after I reached my forties and he his eighties. Dad was just a couple of weeks shy of his fortieth birthday when this bouncing baby boy made his grand entrance…at 10lbs, 8ozs. I was forty-two when I told him how much I loved him and how wonderful a man I thought him to be. From that point on our relationship blossomed and grew. I miss him everyday. He died Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1997.
My dad once told me a story that I will to pass along to you. The story relates to values and, if you will please pardon this heathen for daring to use the term, Christian ethics and how sometimes we do seemingly stupid stuff that causes us grief just with the sheer weight of the memory of it.
Dad valued his word, lived the Golden Rule and would never do anything intentionally to harm friend or foe. He was just that kind of a guy. Russell Anstine White was born in 1904 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in a little village called Dame’s Quarter. Dad’s family was far from rich. His father kept the family going by earning money as a “waterman” and a boat builder, but nonetheless the family lived a meager existence. There was not much work or money to be had. His mother and youngest brother died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and shortly after that tragedy he and the rest of what was left of his family – his dad, two brothers and a sister – moved to Baltimore and later to Washington, DC. My dad moved back to Baltimore at some point, I believe he may have lived with his grandparents, and in 1928 married my mother. About the same time, dad began to work for the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company in its payroll department. He worked there until his retirement in 1967. It is in this payroll department where this story begins, and to the best of my recollection, this is how it goes.
Dad told me that years ago his company had many “laborers” that worked on various projects spread out around the environs of Baltimore. As a clerk in the payroll office, it was his department’s job to “pay off” the crews that worked outside in the field. In those days BG&E paid the laborers’ in cash, payroll checks did not come into fashion there until about 1964. Dad and some other men were responsible for filling the pay envelopes with the correct amount of cash as each man’s pay. With the envelopes correctly filled, he and the others would travel out to the job sites in a Brink’s trucks, and distribute the envelopes to the men.
Each employee has a four-digit payroll number. I remember dad seeing former and present employees of BG&E many years after he retired and could rattle off their payroll numbers. He had a fantastic memory for numbers and it really spooked people out. He did this almost up to the day he died even though he had been retired for thirty years.
He said “back in those days,” I assume it was in the 50s, the company paid off the labor crews in two dollar bills. Once the total of a week’s payroll was determined, the amount was requisitioned from the bank. Dad and his co-workers would then fill the envelopes with the appropriate amount, and if all went as it was supposed to, there was no money left over as the last worker’s pay envelope was filled with the correct amount of cash. This is the way it was supposed to work.
One particular Thursday evening, as the money for the last envelope was being counted out, they came up two dollars short. This meant that all the employees in the department would have to stay and check each envelope again; making sure each had the correct amount of cash. It also meant the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company would be paying overtime wages to each member of the payroll department. This did not make Bill Graham, dad’s colorful, albeit sometimes grumpy, boss very happy. Everyone knew when the culprit was identified he would be summarily vilified in front of the whole department by Mr. Graham in a very humiliating fashion. No one looked forward to it.
One by one the envelopes were opened and checked. About halfway through the process my dad opened an envelope he had filled, and inside was an extra two-dollar bill. He panicked. Two weeks before, it seems, another error had happened and it, too, was an envelope dad had filled. He did not wish or want to face Mr. Graham’s wrath again. He put the two dollar bill in his pocket and took it home with him.
The two dollar bills came from the bank in packs of fifty bills, $100 worth, with a paper band around them. When all the envelopes were checked, and it appeared that no one in the department had made an error, it was noted on one of the bands used to wrap the bills that it was one bill short. Dad took the bill home with him.
You would really have to have known my dad to know how much out of character this was for him. He fretted over taking that bill for at least forty years. He worried that his self-serving action had caused someone at the bank to be fired. He had told a lie and the weight of it took a heavy toll. Dad told me the story in 1995. He put that bill in the collection plate at church the Sunday after he took it. As he told me the story it was very evident that he was still quite affected by and ashamed of what he had done. As he finished the story, his eyes glassed over and he said to me, “Son, do you think that will keep me out of Heaven?”
Each time I tell this story I get choked up. One time telling it to some friends, I completely broke down and sobbed. This man, who with my mother had raised five children and endowed his children, by his example, with a code of ethics to live by, thought that by some peculiar stretch of the imagination, this one indiscretion could possibly have doomed him to spend eternity in hell. Well, I can most assuredly and unequivocally tell you that if there is any form of life beyond this one, Heaven or whatever, my dad is there at this very moment lying beside the pool indulging in a cool drink with his beloved Alma by his side. Go, Dad, go!!!
If your dad is still living, please, give him a hug for me this Father’s Day.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you and I miss you. And that is all I have to say about that.