EAST MONTPELIER – “Mister Lange,” Judge Murphy intoned. “In the State of New York you are allowed to amass eight points in fourteen months on your driver’s license before a review of its status must be held. You have managed to amass fourteen points in eight months. Now, what do you imagine will be the result of this hearing?”
I don’t remember what I murmured in response, but I was mentally noting the touch of humor in the judge’s otherwise sober demeanor as he described my record.
“I notice that your wife is obviously pregnant and I have a letter from your seasonal employer stating that your truck driving job will be restarting next month. But if I don’t take your license for a reasonable amount of time, Albany will take it, and God alone knows when you’ll see it again. So I’m taking it for thirty days.”
This was better news than I’d been expecting. I nodded appreciatively. Then he asked if my wife could drive us home. He knew what I had: a retired race car, a modified Jaguar roadster with four on the floor and far too much power, plus a 25-mile drive through the woods and mountains to our home village. The notion of my wife driving was hair-raising in the extreme. I shook my head.
“Okay, then. You drive it home. I’m pretty sure you won’t get stopped on the way. Am I right?” I nodded enthusiastically. “Then you park it in your driveway and don’t touch it till your license comes in the mail. Good luck to you.”
On the way out of the courthouse, chastened but hopeful, I couldn’t help but think of a line from the old Tin Pan Alley song “A typical Tipperary,” “Irish judges and police, Begorra, the Irish are keepin’ the peace.”
My friends at home assured me that the license was gone and not likely to resurface unless I hired a lawyer. But on the thirtieth day it was in my mailbox. I solemnly salute Judge Murphy whenever I drive through Port Henry, on the far shore of Lake Champlain.
I often reminisce, on these long, dark late fall evenings, about the people, most of them now deceased, who made it possible for me to be sitting here in a quiet office, my dog in a chair just behind me, the aroma of espresso in the room, placidly typing. There were too many to remember all at once. Just over a year after my only meeting with Judge Murphy, and now working for good wages at the state-operated bobsled run in Lake Placid, I looked around at my mates and noticed that they were doing the same work I was, but they were older than I and didn’t appear to be enjoying themselves. Uh-oh, I thought. I now have a family to support, and don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my working life. I’d better go back and finish college.
My collegiate record in Ohio was spotty, to say the least. I kept dropping out willy-nilly to go west with passing mountain-climbing friends. So I approached the dean, one of the kindest men I’ve ever known, and asked about it. I still have his response. He’d pled my case to the Academic Standards Committee and gotten its approval. He wrote that he didn’t need to remind me it was my last admission to the college, and went on to say he was looking for housing for us. He was a true mensch.
We left the Adirondacks in a January storm, now driving a more sensible VW Beetle stuffed with everything we owned and a playpen on the roof.
The local pastor came to see us. Did we have enough money to get to Ohio? Well, yeah, but it was going to be tight. About twenty gallons of gas ought to get us there. She gave us fifteen bucks from her discretionary fund to, as she said, get us out of town. Another saint.
There were many more along the way over the next thirty years or so, even my boss at the bus station where my evening job kept me in college and the family in food. He could do my job, had, in fact, for years, but now he was spending evenings “going over the books” with the woman who ran his bus station lunch counter. His indiscretions were my job security. My discretion was his security.
An elderly Dartmouth professor learned I was building my own house in Etna, N.H., and most days after work changed duds and came to help till dark. A friend from the Adirondacks heard I was going broke at one point and bailed me out by retiring my liens. If there’s ever anything he needs that I’ve got, it’s his. There were bogeymen, too. One did a Donald Trump on me and caused the bankruptcy. But the memories of the last 70 years are studded most of all with true saints.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
