Everyone calls me Thumb.
My given name is Thomas, which makes my nickname ever more obvious. Though my features don’t suggest it, I do look like a thumb if I am being blunt. Always have. My head is oblong. I am bald. I have a receding chin. My eyes and nose are swallowed by smooth, rounded cheeks. Back when I was a kid, I was fat, tubby, blubbery, chunky, even husky, though that posited a level of toughness I did not have. I was soft and doughy, a doughnut, my mouth always open, an eager vessel for brownies, cookies, cake, pie, and such. My Mom was a wizard in the kitchen.
But I have also traveled the stars. I have been an honest-to-goodness rocket ship. How many people can say that?
It’s Saturday, 9 a.m. years earlier, and winter is knocking on the frosted windows of our living room. I am pasted to the TV. It’s a black and white Philco, but I live in full color for these 30 minutes every week. I am a peacock capable of flight. The announcer booms through the flickering pulsing static: Strap yourselves in, all you junior guardians of the galaxy, and get ready to blast off to the far reaches of the universe with Commander Quentin Cosgrove and his Galaxy Patrol! Countdown to today’s episode, To Jupiter and Beyond, begins now. But first this brief message from our sponsor, Good and Plenty Candy.
Once upon a time there was an engineer.
Choo Choo Charlie was his name we hear.
He had an engine and he sure had fun.
He used Good and Plenty to make his train run.
Charlie says, “love my Good and Plenty!”
Charlie says, “really rings my bell.”
Charlie says, love my Good and Plenty!”
Don’t know any other candy that I love so well!
Why doesn’t that kid go outside and get some fresh air? It’s a question commonly asked by my Dad, who grew up hanging from trees, hunting frogs, and loading his slingshot with anything round, hard, and aerodynamic. All the kids in the neighborhood had welts from May through September. Then it was pick-up games of tackle football in the empty lot next to the Eastern Feed and Supply store—all the kids wanted to be Bronco Nagurski or Red Grange. They wore leather helmets, no padding, and limped, laughed, and bled all the way home.
He’d regale us often, my Mom and I, while demolishing a porterhouse as big as a brick, dripping red down his chiseled chin, a starched white napkin, catching hell, tucked in his collar. He would look past me as he did, no doubt thinking of his childhood when there was no steak, no napkin—only lots of thin corn soup and seven mouths to feed, and he was the eldest child. He quit school in tenth grade to work in Miller’s scrapyard. He wound up owning the place. Never changed the name. What works, works, he always said in that practical Dutch way. His nickname was Dutch. Again, obvious, and sensible.
He's not you, Dutch, Ok? Let him be. My Mom—everyone called her Bet—short for Betty, short for Elizabeth, was always obscured in a swirling cyclone of flour, dust rising from the kitchen counter. Her rolling pin, a conductor’s baton. The weather was turning, and the radio called for snow. This was going to be the last rhubarb apple pie of the year.
Commander Quentin Cosgrove was played by Jack Henley—square-jawed, teeth for days, dark eyes, deep baritone voice. Always barking orders, just like my Dad. Except my dad wasn’t saving the universe each week. He sold scrap metal. His rocket ship was a rattling pick-up truck, scarred and scraped—the odometer stuck at 142,309 miles. Where did that take him, I wondered, as I bounced around on the hard bench seat, the ashtray piled high with spent fire, the world rushing at me through the spiderwebbed windshield, cracked and pitted. If I closed my eyes slightly, the fractures receded, and the stars emerged. I hated cloudy days.
Stop squinting, Your face’ll get stuck like that. He never took his gaze off the road. How did he know? Occasionally he’d tap the horn and trade waves and stop for a word or two, my Dad hanging out the driver’s side window.
Hey Dutch.
Hey Norm.
How’s the family?
Good.
You?
Good.
Hey, Thumb.
Hey, Mr. Williams.
See ya, Norm.
Not before I see you, Dutch.
My Dad would gently slap outside of his door, always twice, with his good hand, nod, release the clutch, and we were off.
Good man, that Norm—he did his part, his words echoing in the cab, his command center. He’d say the same of Smitty, Blue Boy, Griff, Hank, Easy Pete, Herm, and a host of others that he honked and waved at. My Uncle Mike said my Dad did his part, too.
If you weren’t on my Dad’s good side, and it was a hard place to plant a flag, he’d simply mumble under his breath. No honk, nary a wave. When he got home, he always updated my Mom, a local weatherman assessing character and grit. Occasionally, he’d predict an impending storm.
I saw Henderson’s brother on the street. He still owes me money. Bastard. I’ll drop by his place later.
No one owed my Dad money long for services rendered.
Galaxy Patrol ran for four seasons and eighty episodes, plus a pilot with another actor playing Commander Cosgrove, and then it exploded, a giant dwarf star that had reached critical mass. And low ratings. I’d see Jack Henley from time to time in commercials after that and then he vanished, his persona ripped to bits and blasted into history at the speed of light. He’d resurface one final time—he was doing dinner theater in Reno and was found dead in his motel room, a drug deal gone bad. He was beaten to death with a pipe wrench just about the time we were collectively staggering out of Vietnam.
We had been to the moon and back, and we now had been lost in the jungle and it consumed many heroes, and there he laid, Commander Quentin Cosgrove, bludgeoned to a pulp. A bit of my wanderlust died with him, but we were all mourning, the list of reasons too long and personal to document. A national processional stretched from ocean to ocean, a snaking candlelight vigil visible from space.
Farewell to old and dear friends, each a spark, and they were gone.
###
The light from the kitchen window cut a sharp path across our gravel driveway. If I stood straight, looking up, and caught the angle just right during a gentle snowfall, magic manifested, and I could fly. Out of that monumental blackness thousands upon thousands of snowflakes, each illuminated by the far-reaching light, would streak toward me, and I toward them. Liftoff. I was with the stars now, my breath easy escaping steam from a gravity-busting locomotive, my feet miles above the solitary, cold, and hard reality of my patch of grass. Fat kids can fly, and I was lost in space. Dreamily.
What’s he doing out there? Is he wearing a cape? My Mom understood and explained it to him. She made me that cape. It was magnificent. Bright red, gold border, secured by an old shoelace around my neck. She sewed sixteen silver stars on it. I carried the universe on my back when I wore it. The cape hung in the back of my closet, well hidden until I was summoned to help save the world each Saturday morning. Or when it snowed.
My Mom was an explorer in her own right, her apron her hero’s cape. She’d start her company years later, about the time I started college. She sold her pies to local restaurants and later a major grocery chain. She named her company The Galactic Pie Company. I came up with the tagline: The best pie from here to Jupiter.
Today I am CEO, and that tagline endures, as does the memory of my Mom in every pie we bake.
Rhubarb apple is our top seller.
Hey, kiddo, here you go. You can’t explore the stars without a helmet. It's dangerous out there with all those meteors and asteroids hurtling by. My Dad had carefully placed his weathered leather football helmet on my head. He then gave it a gentle tap. Twice.
Don’t be too long. Mom’s making pie. I can’t eat it all by myself.
That leather helmet sits prominently on the bookshelf behind my desk at work. It’s next to my Dad’s Purple Heart, a medal of bravery and sacrifice adorned with three stars each, front and back.
I still wear the helmet on occasion.