Part 4 - Hazels' Life After She Renewed an Old Friendship

It turned out that Mom’s “boyfriend” was Bob Eschelman, a person I‘d known for many years. I’d met him in the sixties when I bartended at the Moose Lodge, and Bob was one of the two full-time bartenders, working there for many years, possibly till his retirement. He and his wife had been at Dad’s funeral. She died a couple years after that.

Bob was a jovial fellow with a mischievous smile perpetually pasted on his face. He liked to drink, was fun loving, and partied till his dying day. I went with him on one occasion when he run his “trap lines”. That is what he called his daily round of visits to a string of local clubs: VFW, American Legion, Eagles and the Moose Lodge. He had a drink at each one, visited with the bartender and fellow patrons, and then went on to the next. Bob never appeared to be drunk, but did manifest a watery-eyed glow through most of each day. He had a spontaneous nature, and didn’t seem to put much thought into contemplating the consequences of his actions, he just did them.

Mom told me that Bob grew up only child of a prominent family in Anderson, Indiana, hinting that he had been a bit spoiled. He was a wiry little guy, a veteran of World War II, and had served in Europe through most of it. I remember something about the “Battle of the Bulge“. He might have been a prisoner-of-war, though I’m not certain of that. I often wondered if the war might have had something to do with his laissez-faire approach to life, and the uncomplaining toughness that I liked about him .

One time in 1989, after one of my visits to, Mom and I had planned to fly to California to visit my brother and his wife, Don and Ellie. Bob volunteered to drive us to the Indianapolis airport. He arrived a bit late to pick us up, but there was still time to comfortably make it. Kokomo is a long narrow town, measuring two miles on its east-west axis and eight miles north-south. Mom’s house sat on the eastern edge. When Bob pulled out of the driveway he turned west toward the center of town instead of east which would have taken us the half-block to the by-pass and quickly around town. He drove to the center, turned south weaving his way through perceived shortcuts, and finally reached the south edge of town and open road.

It was then that Mom realized she had forgotten her airline ticket. We had to go back to the house. Bob could have taken the by-pass back but retraced his way back through town. Mom retrieved her ticket and Bob started back through town, but I intervened. Now we were running late so Bob sped down the road only to be stopped and ticketed. That took another ten minutes. It did not seem probable but we did make the airport on time.
GO TO: Part 5: Hazel and Her Friend, Bob, Visit Alaska

Part 3 - Hazel's Life after Dad Died in 1985

Dad died in 1985. Mom was 71 years old, my age as I write this. She was alone for the first time in her life, and in shock for sometime afterward. Don and Ellie had recently lost their farm in Wisconsin, had moved to New Orleans, and arrived there only a few days before his passing. They dropped everything and headed to Kokomo. I took a day to arrange for a substitute before boarding a plane for home.

Mom lived another fourteen years without Dad. I think several of those years were pretty lonely especially the first and final few. She visited Don and Ellie in New Orleans, and came up to Alaska, but was kind of a lost sole in both places. She had lived in Kokomo since 1937, but life around town seemed alien to her after he passed.

The trouble with living a long life is that you out-live most everyone else. One of her friends sat in the front row at Dad’s funeral. I no longer remember her name, Bernice maybe, but she and Mom had been the best of buddies since the sixties, did a lot of things together. The woman had emphysema, and breathed with difficulty. I heard that she passed a short time later.

Mom was the last of her generation to go. She outlived her three brothers, and Dad’s four siblings - family members of whom I’d known from my beginning.

Three or four years passed. I visited for a week every year of so, cleaned gutters and did needed repairs around the house. We tried the Senior Center for lunch a couple times, but she didn’t seem to know any one there. We went to a Unitarian Church service. She liked it and continued to attend till summer recess, but never went back when they commenced in the fall. She lived in her bedroom with the television on 24/7. On visits I often crept into the room to turn off the blaring TV after she had gone to sleep. The TV was her constant companion in those days. The bedroom and kitchen became all she needed and were the only rooms she went into.

Then things changed for her in the next year. One night she called me, said she had been out with a couple old friends, a rare occasion. The three had a couple of drinks and Mom’s voice possessed a bit of an uncharacteristic slur. We talked on for a while, then the phone line went silent for a short spell, and then Mom blurted out, “What would you think if I got myself a boy friend?” In-a-way she was asking my permission, would it be alright with me? If I had said something like, “You don’t want to do that.”, she would have dropped the subject and I’d have never heard anything more about it. I said, “That sounds like a good idea to me”. I consider that to have been one of the wisest and most thoughtful statements I’ve made in my life.
GO TO: Part 4 - Hazel's Life After She Renewed an Old Friendship