Memories - My Travels with Art | Eastern North Carolina Now

    An old man indulges himself in memories of a lost relative whose birthday rolls around again.

    With the exception of 1968, I cannot remember a Christmas when I was not able to be with my family. In 1968, I was still stationed in Viet Nam and was unable to return home for the holidays. Christmas was a time when my cousin Art would be coming to Atlanta to visit for Christmas. I would always ride my bike to the end of Sterling Street and wait for his arrival several days before Christmas. The trip from Nashville was about 5-6 hours by car and I would begin my vigil about 11:00am in the morning. As I remember, they would not arrive until early afternoon. I would sit at the corner of McClendon and Sterling for hours waiting for their appearance.

    We did not miss a Christmas together until I was in my early twenties. Art and I would beg to open presents days before Christmas and mom and dad allowed to open a present a day for the several days before the big day. I do not remember what many of the presents were, but I remember that we always very happy with all the gifts.

    Our delight was no different from many kids at that time of year but it taught me about the value of family which would remain with me during the following years. Art and I always maintained a collection of Army patches and insignias from Uncle Aldo and Uncle Jimmie's World War II service. We would always beg to visit the Army / Navy store in downtown Atlanta so we could add to our collection of patches and metals. Each year we would swap the suitcase, which held the collection.

    One year Art would keep it in Nashville and the next year I would keep it in Atlanta until the next visit. During the year, each of us would add to the collection by trading or buying new items. Our knowledge of the meaning of the metals was either factual based on Aldo's stories or fictional based on our own imagination. World War II and the Korean War were just a few year before.

    There was never a time that we were at a loss of things to do. This was in spite of the fact that we had no television. Art and I would often play in dad's shop in the basement of Sterling Street. We would imagine that we were sailors on a ship. We would use the floor standing drill press as the bridge wheel of the ship. Sometimes the ship would be a submarine and sometimes an old time sailing ship. We could play for hours in this made up world.

    We also rode wooden horses in the side yard on the saddle racks that the old man built.

    When not playing sailors we would spend hours playing with the tools in the shop. We would nail, cut, hammer, twist, and break almost anything that we could get our hands on. In order to protect his workbench, daddy made a workbench on the other side of the basement shop for Art and I to use for our projects. One year we decided to hammer nails into the workbench. We drove ever nail that dad had into that workbench.

    Another year we were so anxious to guess the contents of the presents that we climbed on top of the xylophone to shake and inspect the presents there. Of course the xylophone was not built to handle the weight of two boys and be bent the legs. Uncharacteristically, my dad did not lose his temper but just gave us that "you stepped in it now look"

    We dug holes in the yard and buried time capsules for future generations. Somewhere on the side of the Sterling Street house about 6 feet from the house and at the bottom of the steps to the side middle lot is a jar buried about 1954. To the best of my recollection, the contents of the jar contained a new quarter, a rattlesnake rattler, several stamps, a crudely written note to posterity, several patches, and other items lost to memory. I have often wanted to sneak back to the house and dig up the jar over half a century after planting. I am not sure if the contents would do justice to the memory, so I will leave the capsule as is for now.

    Many years dad would have to work on Christmas day. We would often visit the firehouse on Christmas and spend some time with him. Art and I would play on the fire trucks and imagine that we were firefighters.

    The Cyclorama is located in Grant Park and has a 360-degree mural and mockup of the battle of Atlanta. It also had a coin operated picture machine that would dispense your picture encsed in metal.

    As we grew older, our interest changed. My brother was a horse nut and Dad had bought him a horse. I was never much interested in horses until one of my friends said that daddy liked Jimmy better because he gave him a horse. I immediately asked for a horse and we ended up getting a Shetland pony, which I named Peanut.

    Dad got a pony saddle with a sliver saddle horn. He also had special saddlebags and gun holster made with my name on them. I still have the saddlebags and holster. If Art had ever expressed any interest in horses, I am sure we would have had two horses in Atlanta, one for Art and one for me.

    As we grew older, Art and I became more interested in short wave radio. We would spend hours huddled in the basement with earphones on listening to "Ham" radio operators and distant stations broadcast in a foreign language. (

    He also made one for Art the next year. Later on, he made us both a go-cart. This was long before go-carts were popular. We spent many hours and days scrounging junkyards looking for parts to make the carts. The wheels and tires came from the three wheel Ice Cream carts that were popular during that day. The carts each had a body. I still have the body of one of the carts in the garage. Dad would take us to the early shopping centers on Sunday to ride the carts. Shopping Centers in bible belt were closed during the fifties. When we carried Art's go-cart to Nashville one Christmas we had to put it in the trunk and tie the trunk lid shut to keep it in. After giving it to Art, Dad caught us doing four-wheel drifts in to Art's driveway on Harpeth Hills. He grounded us for the rest of the day.

    When Art's father died in July 1961, Art and I were 16 and 17 years old. Art was a going to be a senior in high school. Dad bought some land in Clarkston, Georgia and began to build the house that he lives in today. After Art's graduation from High School, he came to Atlanta to help build the house on Rays Court. Eventually Art and his mom moved to Atlanta to live with us.

    Art and I lived in the basement of the Rays Road house until his mom bought a small house across the street from us. By this, time both Art and I were driving and we began to hang out at the local drugstore and met Reggie and Jerry. They both remain my best friends today. One of the boys in their neighborhood had a pool in his back yard. We spent many summer days there.

    Art and I continued to share our Christmas time together. Art joined the Air Force and I Army draft got me in September 1967. I left for Vietnam in February 1968.

    After my return from Vietnam, I went through a traumatic break up of my short marriage. I was in denial of the true circumstances of my marital problems. It fell to Art to confront me and prove what everyone else knew. It was during this time that my relationships with Art and my family grew strained almost to the breaking point. This experience left me bitter and rudderless for many years afterward. I had lost my moral compass.

    Shortly after my return in February 1969, Art left for Libya. By that time he was married and had his first child on the way. I was on the tail end of my military service. I had been assigned to be an Infantry Instructor at Fort Mccellan in Anniston, Alabama.

    After Art's return from overseas, we continued to share our friends and enjoy the holiday season until Art's mother died in 1978. In 1982 we held a celebration of my parents 50th anniversary.

    As the years, passed Art and I drifted apart for no real reason except that our lives had taken a different path. When he had his Kidney operation in 1997, I skipped a sales meeting in Chicago so I could await the outcome of the operation. They found and removed a football sized cancerous tumor and one of his kidneys. The long and slow decline in his health lasted for a few years.

    During the last months of his life when he was dying of cancer, we were able to rekindle the relationship we held during most of our formative years. Shortly before his death in February of 2000, we were able to review and completely heal the wounds and misunderstanding that had developed between us. We made our peace. He was only fifty six year old.

    During my time in Vietnam, I had come to hate the reality of a premature death. Death in combat is a foregone conclusion and accepted as a matter of course for the combat soldier. Your training teaches you not to deal with it but to put it aside and carry on. The expression "It don't mean nothin" was a common comment to deal with the unimaginable. I never thought I would feel it again as traumatically as I did when Art died.

    One of my many regrets now is that we were unable to share the lost years as we had our early youth. He was my only true friend and soul mate. During the last of 1999 and early 2000 the two people I really loved have died, My Mother and My cousin. I have had moments of crystal clarity and moments of deep depression as I tried to reconcile these deaths. My mother's death (in October 1999 at 87) was after a long and full life. Art's death (February 2000) was premature as were the many friends I lost during the war. While there is no explanation for the course that life and death follow, there is an overwhelming finality, which sometime leaves me in a morbid state of confusion.

    I wrote the above article in December 2000 with some minor editing in 2015. It was the first Christmas without my cousin and the second Christmas without my mother.



    August 2015 update:

    My Cousin Art's birthday is coming up. It would have been August 12. The past fifteen years have been good to my family and me. My reason for posting this is twofold.

    •One is to document pleasant memories of a life blessed with love yet tempered with pettiness.

    •Two is to remind others and myself that you will not always have family and friends around. If you are estranged from anyone, make an effort to reconcile before you or they are gone.

Click here for a slide show of Art and Bobby Tony