Sunday, September 9, 2012
Don’t ask me why, but when we were in college we went through a period when we gave people names of animals. We had Spider, Frog, and so forth. For some reason we decided Jerry should be “Ape,” and Jerry more or less accepted the name.
He had a long drive to get home to his parents’ house in Fairfax so some nights Jerry would sleep on the “couch” in the living room. Of course, the couch was just an army cot, one of those things with a steel frame and wire links holding up the mattress. It had a thin mattress pad, with a cover and some pillows. Some mornings we would get up and Jerry would still be there, other mornings he would be gone.
One afternoon I opened a desk drawer and took out a small matchbook. Not a big box of kitchen matches but a small box with the kind of matches you’d use to light a pipe. When I opened it, on top of the matches there was a small, folded piece of paper, about 3/4 of an inch square, that I hadn’t seen before. I unfolded it. Inside it said “Ape slept here.”
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When my children learned that Jerry was gone, they remembered the evening he spent at our house in Alexandria, VA, sometime in 1971 or 2. They were aged 10, 8, 6 and 2 at the time. Their memories were of Jerry relating and talking to them as an equal, which was very unusual to them. They were totally mesmerized that a bearded adult would pay that much attention to them. Jerry read with them from a Dr. Seuss book and then introduced them to "super balls", those highly compressed rubber balls that bounced really high. Jerry showed them how to do tricks with the balls that really made their day.
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