SIXTEEN
POP
On a sun-drenched day in August, four-year-old Colton hopped into the
passenger seat of my red pickup, and the two of us headed off to
Benkelman. I had to drive out there to bid a job and decided to take Colton
with me. He wasn’t particularly interested in the installation of industrial-
sized garage doors. But he loved riding in my little Chevy diesel because,
unlike the Expedition where he had a limited view from the backseat, his
car seat rode high in the Chevy, and he could see everything.
Benkelman is a small farming town thirty-eight miles due south of
Imperial. Incorporated in 1887, it’s fraying a bit at the edges like a lot of
communities in rural Nebraska, its population declining as technology eats
up agricultural jobs and people move to bigger cities in search of work. I
steered past the familiar fertilizer and potato plants that rise at the east end
of Imperial, then turned south toward Enders Lake. We drove by the cedar-
dotted municipal golf course on our left, and then, as we passed over a
concrete dam, the lake sparkled below on our right. Colton looked down at
a speedboat towing a skier in its foamy wake. We crossed the dam,
dipped down in a valley, and motored up onto the stretch of two-lane
highway that points straight south. Now acres of farmland fanned out
around us, cornstalks six feet high bright green against the sky, and the
asphalt cutting through it like a blade.
Suddenly Colton spoke up. “Dad, you had a grandpa named Pop, didn’t
you?”
“Yep, sure did,” I said.
“Was he your mommy’s daddy or your daddy’s daddy?”
“Pop was my mom’s dad. He passed away when I was not much older
than you.”
Colton smiled. “He’s really nice.”
I almost drove off the road into the corn. It’s a crazy moment when your
son uses the present tense to refer to someone who died a quarter century
before he was even born. But I tried to stay cool. “So you saw Pop?” I said.