I Want a Do-Over

By William Traband

It was a typical Saturday night in April. Scott had gotten off work at the A&W at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night April 28, 1979. His dad was at work on the midnight shift, and his mom was already in bed. The oldest brother in the family was in his room. He was visiting for a while. Scott had settled in to watch some Three Stooges and unwind after work. It was Saturday night so the choices around midnight were usually the Three Stooges or Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. As he sat on the couch, he did not have a care in the world. He had already given his boss the dates he wanted off in the summer for MRF concerts he chose to attend. He was just about to finish up his junior year and was looking forward to a fun last summer as a high school student. He never thought about the fact that the choices he and his brother were making had consequences.
A knock came at the door. His mind worked through the possible scenarios as anyone’s often does, never considering the unthinkable. “Who would be knocking at the door at this time of night?” Scott thought. “Maybe it is one of my friends?” He reasoned. “It’s probably somebody broken down on the road needing to use the phone.” He concluded. Having someone come to the door in need of phone use did occur occasionally. He opened the door and it was an Edwardsville police officer. Scott said in a quizzical tone, “Can I help you?”
“Sir, I am sorry to inform you that your brother has been in a fatal accident.” At that moment Scott was hoping he did not know what the word “fatal” meant.
His next anxious and unbelieving question to the officer was, “Is there a chance he will be okay?”
With tears beginning to emerge from the officer’s eyes he said, “Son, your brother is dead”. Scott absorbed the words as a boxer might take a blow to the jaw; stunned, but still able to stand to finish the round. At that point, his mom had emerged onto the upper part of the steps. His oldest brother was right behind her.
His mom asked, “Scott...who is it?” Scott’s first order was to his brother to “hold on to Mom!”
“Mom, Nathan is dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Traband
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463436844

William Traband

For the past twenty years I have been a teacher in mostly alternative settings working with "at-risk" students. Prior to teaching, I worked in both the insurance and investment fields. I've worked at AG Edwards (now Wells Fargo) and Shelter insurance. I grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois and attended SIU at Edwardsville after graduating from Edwardsville High School. After high school I did take a one year detour through McKendree College in Lebanon, IL. I am married with one child who is now a teacher in her own right. I did lose my older brother when I was seventeen, and still miss him. He truly was my hero and friend. My books are works of historical fiction to be exact. My books are a collection of the stories based on real events with the names changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Book preview

I Want a Do-Over

Copyright 2020 Brian Traband

Published by Brian Traband at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One I’m Falling for You

Chapter Two Older Brother’s Apprentice

Chapter Three At the Movies

Chapter Four Vacation and Sitting in the Middle

Chapter Five All is Fair in Love, War, and Little League Baseball

Chapter Six Blood, Guts, Bees, Wiffle Ball, and a Few Other Things in Between

Chapter Seven High School Chemistry and Other Topics of Note

Chapter Eight Innocence to Excess

Chapter Nine The Wilderness; and Other Crazy Things of Pseudo-Nature

Chapter Ten Café Society, Where’s the Party?

Chapter Eleven A Paper Hat and Would You Like Fries with That?

Chapter Twelve Cracking Armor

Chapter Thirteen Shattered Reality

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge the family and friends in my life that made this work possible. I especially want to give due respect to my brother Steven H. Traband to whom this book is dedicated. My older brother meant the world to me. I lost him when I was 17 years-of-age. This work has been a bit of a cathartic process for me. I would also like to thank the administrators and staff at Madison High School from 2010-2016 who encouraged me to write. Last, but not least, I want to thank Stephanie Malench for her help in bringing this effort to fruition.

Prologue

I was standing by my window

On a cold and cloudy day

When I saw the hearse come rollin'

For to take my mother away

-Gregg Allman

Will the Circle be Unbroken?

Laid Back (1973)

For the average person on the street, time and life roll past like objects moving by for a passenger in a vehicle. The scenery is there for a moment, and then it is replaced by new visions. Some points are beautiful and breathtaking, other scenes horrific and depressing. It all passes by at the same pace as the vehicle continues forward. Some sections of the trip leave lasting impressions as they startle and/or amuse. One wants to keep watching, but the image is gone because the mode of transport has moved on and the scene is no longer within a range of sight. Some of the landscape is arduous to endure and seems to never end.

A few cannot really appreciate the new scenery because the pictures of the past have preoccupied their minds. There are people we meet and know for a time that ride with us along the way but then they vanish, lost in their own journey as they are transported to another place to resume their life’s ride. Others are with us for the ride and experience similar stimuli, yet we still have our personal interpretations of what it all means.

Scott Henry was a traveler upon this road of life. His journey was one of joy and heartache just like so many fellow passengers. As he got older, he tried to understand it all. He tried to reason out the whys and what fors of his trek. In the end he decided to focus on one central point in his journey and work it all out from there. The inevitable loss of a parent brought back memories of the very avoidable and unexplainable loss of an older brother.

He got in the hearse to head to the cemetery for the final ceremony. He was laying to rest the last loved one with an immediate connection to his older brother, his beloved mother. A lot of feelings and emotions flooded his mind. It was as if his mother’s death had let loose this torrent of memories of his father and his brother. On top of the pain of this grief, glowing embers of past losses were reignited.

Memories can be like a rudder on a ship. They can determine a course and change the direction of a life. Even the smallest memory, if exceedingly happy or painful, can launch one in a direction unexpected under normal circumstances. They can be so enjoyable and filled with love and laughter to the point the tears are based in joy. Then, in a moment’s notice, those tears turn to regret; for the time of the reign of the image’s solace has passed. He had been to this cemetery two depressing times before, and this trip carried the weight of the prior two; along with their separate, but equally heavy, baggage.

As he listened in a disconnected way to Amazing Grace being played on the bag pipes, he thought about his life and accomplishments, or lack thereof. Times like these are times of reflection. Sometimes people reflect by choice, at other moments such as this, reflections are thrust upon the individual to the point that they have no other option but to sort through the files of stored information. Though one may edit information when re-telling stories, the unedited versions present themselves in unabridged formats.

Scott began to go back through it all with highlights and animated versions being brought to life through stories told around the old kitchen table. That table could tell many of the stories from its own witness if it had a voice. If the table had been able to talk, the stories would not have any favorable editing or shading. When telling stories in the first person it is hard to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The average human being tends to avoid self-incrimination, brush aside any humiliating or inconvenient circumstances. The kitchen table would not take a side, it merely reports what it sees and hears, no gloss.

Scott was trying to see life through the table’s viewpoint. He was attempting to see the past for what it was and not what he wanted it to be. He was trying to go back and figure out exactly how he got here. For only in truth can one find the capacity to use the past for change in the future. Lies do not change the future for the better, only truth can accomplish such a feat. As the well-worn biblical passage clearly states, the truth shall make you free.

His mother had been sick for just a short time. In her 86 years, she had been relatively healthy. Then, she was told she had pancreatic cancer and was given three months to live. At 86 she chose to do nothing, and the three months ran its course. She perished in March on St. Patrick’s Day. The irony in that was that she was of Irish ancestry.

His father’s death was more unpredictable. At 65 he had a stroke and was forced to retire from Clark Oil Refinery. During the stroke, he lost his ability to speak. He was told by the doctors that if he went through therapy, he might get his speech back after a year (he never heard the might and counted on the year). This was important to him for a couple of reasons. One reason was that he had been selling real estate for years on the side and had always planned to do it full time once he retired from the plant. Two, he was never one to sit around and watch T.V. Three years later he had a heart attack and died.

That was 22 years ago. Both that trip and this one hurt, as burying any parent hurts. What stung the most were the memories of his lost brother. The trip to the cemetery carried very painful memories of that loss. That maudlin ceremony occurred 31 years before. His brother was 4 years his senior. Scott grew-up worshipping the ground on which his brother walked. His brother, for his part, always had time for his little brother. Nathan Henry taught, mentored, and protected his younger brother. Scott not only lost his older brother when he was 17, he did not have him now when he felt he needed him the most. He was buried on a cold and cloudy day.

It was a double barrel hit. It was a loss that affected him as a teenager and later as an adult with an estate to settle. He had been left executor of an estate with very diverse recipients. His mother felt like he was the one to be most fair to all involved. As his friend Jason used to always say; You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose; but can’t pick your family. For his part, Scott preferred Nathan was still around to handle things. He was the natural peace maker; he was the one who really was the fairest. The problem was that Nathan was not around. The mother, Scott was burying, was being laid to rest next to his father and brother. Scott was alone, very much alone in dealing with all the family issues. Scott had always just removed himself from the family fray and let it work itself out; now he was in the middle of the storm with no escape hatch. In the past, when frustrated, Scott merely cut himself off from people who irritated him. He was now unable to simply separate.

When Scott was younger, he simply assumed the people he loved were always going to be around. He saw the changes life made around him in the larger sense, but somehow felt impervious to its impact on him. He did not see the mosaic that life truly is in its whole. People, places, and faces blend into the recesses of the mind. Life becomes a patchwork of situations and personalities. He missed his older brother’s guiding hand for a variety of new reasons; and he just began remembering.

A cacophony of charismatic characters had illuminated the landscape of Scott Henry’s life. As in any life, emotional tides rolled on and off the shores of his beachhead. Who is he? He could be anyone, any one of the millions of everyday people who muddle through this life on the edge of ecstasy and endangerment. Racing to and fro, looking for that niche of security that was to set him up in his hobbit hole of comfort and ease for the rest of his life.

He was an average middle-class kid. His parents were average middle-class parents for the 1960s and ‘70s. They provided him, and his older brother, with all the tools necessary to succeed in life. His parents worked hard and taught their children to work hard for what they wanted. They were told they could be anything they put their mind to being. They were told success came with effort and determination.

He and his brother ran to uncertain futures, where time moved faster than either expected. When they were young, they viewed time as replaceable. It appeared to them that there was always going to be enough time for all they wanted to get done. The reality was the future came just too fast. As Gregg Allman penned, …time rolls by like hurricanes; Runnin' after the subway train; Don't forget the pourin' rain. They saw the past accumulate and make up their day-to-day lives; they always looked to the future, but it was just a haze of possibilities. It is well known the past cannot be changed; but, one can alter the future by the way the past is viewed. Scott spent a lot of years trying to get a fix on just what happened and why.

Chapter One: I’m Falling for You

Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.

-Johnny Carson

The tree that grew just behind the garage and next to the back porch just across the sidewalk from the house was a big leafed climbing tree; a Catalopa-speciosa. At least that is what Scott recorded it as in his seventh-grade leaf collection. The way the branches grew made it perfect for tree houses; and it housed two of them during his childhood. It sat in the back yard, a theater in which much of his young life was to be performed. The back yard served as baseball diamond (where wiffle ball was played due to the danger of breaking windows), catch with his dad as he tried to perfect his grasp on the strike zone, and a rendezvous for the neighborhood kids as they planned many adventures. The tree witnessed it all; not the least of which was the famous paint job of 1965.

It was cool for a late June morning. Frank was up on the roof sanding and scraping loose paint from the highest sections of the house. It had been a much-debated project. Frank and his wife had gone back and forth about the merits of Frank painting the house himself. Frank’s wife, Edie, wanted Frank to hire someone to do the job; instead of him risking his 45-year-old body in such an adventure. There was also the use of a week of vacation days that Edie thought could be used in a more vacation friendly way.

By 1965, Frank and Edie Henry had married off two daughters and still had four kids at home. An oldest son who was attending college at the University of Illinois, a daughter who was ten, and two young boys just four years apart: ages seven and three. It had been a typical Edwardsville summer. They were not Ozzie and Harriet, but they were not beatniks either. The Henrys were your typical Midwestern family of the post-World War II era.

The area of the house Frank was standing on sat above the roof of the garage. The roof of the garage was an A-Frame type. The kitchen sink was situated below a window that looked out towards the roof of the garage. It had been a typical summer morning. The kids had eaten breakfast and started their summer days. Seven-year-old Nathan had been taken to a friend’s house to play, the ten-year-old daughter was in her room (not cleaning it), and three-year-old Scott was in he and his brother’s room bringing little plastic soldiers to life. Frank’s dutiful wife was in the kitchen planning lunch and dinner while washing up the remaining dishes from breakfast.

All was quiet and serene until Frank caught the side of his foot on a shingle. Then, just for a second, he lost his balance and began to fall towards the garage below. Inexplicably, he began to sort of spin in the air and hit just to the right of the peak of the roof of the garage while rolling. He rolled down the roof of the garage and continued spinning off the roof to the ground. He hit the ground with a thud and passed out for a couple of minutes. When he awoke; he was bruised, sore, a little disoriented, but miraculously unhurt. He crawled from the far side of the garage to the back-porch steps.

He looked in through the screen door to say to his wife, I could have died out here and you would have not cared!

She replied, Oh, was that you? I thought I saw something fly past the window. Without missing a beat while still washing and drying dishes; I told you to hire somebody. Frank painfully got up, dusted himself off, and limped back to the self-inflicted grind.

The following Saturday rolled around, and Frank had just the lifesaving garage left to paint, and it was mostly done. The oldest daughter had come over with her one-year old child. Three-year-old Scotty had indicated that he wanted to help Daddy. His mother eagerly agreed, sending him out to offer his services. Frank, never one to pass up an opportunity to teach one of his prodigies manual labor, gladly gave little Scotty a spot on the garage to paint. Frank assumed Scott was going to simply paint the little spot on the garage door he had given him. Content that this was to keep the little guy occupied he went around finishing up the back of the garage; near the afore-mentioned tree.

Scott was always a rambunctious kid. He was not shy or retiring when at home. No better example of that could been seen then when his second oldest sister brought her fiancée home for a visit. He was from a home of just two children and they never had to lock their bathroom doors. Well, he was using the Henry’s bathroom which was equipped with locks; because in a family of six children one never knows what can happen.

The future newest member of the family had just finished his business when this little boy came running into the bathroom and asked, Do wew wanna pay sink da submawine?

The poor martyr replied in an astonished and confused tone; What?

The little boy said in a matter-of-fact way, Sink da submawine, wike dis; and he began to throw toilet paper into the toilet and pee on the contents. Needless to say, from that point forward he always locked the door of the bathroom when at the Henry’s residence.

Once Nathan had heard a dirty joke, which he did not fully understand, and he told it to his mom. His little brother Scott was right by his side in support. Upon hearing the joke Nathan was sternly rebuked and sent to his room. Scott did not understand why his brother was in trouble. He asked his mom why Nathan could not come out of his room and she kindly said, Your brother told a very bad joke and has to be punished, we don’t tell those kinds of jokes. Scott responded by asking, If yew don’t wike jokes yew wanna hear a song? He then began to sing to her a full chorus of Jingle Bells, or as much as he knew of it. After he was done, he asked, Can Nathan come out ov his woom now? She laughed so hard she cried, and Nathan was granted a reprieve from the governor.

Another example of Scott’s unabashed personality came when his little friend, a girl named Cynthia Fruit, came down from her house to ask if Scotty wanted to play. Upon hearing her talking to his mother Scott came from the bathroom, without pulling up his pants, stood at the top of the stairs for all to see and said, Go way Cindy, I don’t wike yew anymoor! His startled mother immediately said; "Scotty,