Cameel

      

      I have recently started wondering what Life would have been, if Dolores had not walked into my store that Oct. in 2001. I certainly wouldn’t be going through all this pain right now and I wouldn’t feel that my universe had stopped and changed forever. On the other hand I would never have known what love could be, how food could taste so much better, colors more vivid, music more meaningful, and touch, oh yes touch… 

      Thinking these things brought to mind an old gentleman that lived in my boyhood hometown of Rimer, Ohio.  He lived in an old caboose the railroad had given him when he retired after 30 plus years of service.  His name was Cameel   “ca’-meal” and he was an immigrant from somewhere in the Netherlands.  He spoke broken English but my friends and I managed to understand him, I guess it is easier for kids at the tender age of 8 to 11 to understand other languages.  He was old then; by anyone’s standards in his late 80’s or earlier 90’s in 1963. A slight and gentle man, always smiling and waving at passersby. 

     He owned an old model A ford that still ran and would drive it the 8 or 9 miles to the Catholic Church in Ft. Jennings on Sundays.  We had at that time a small Grocery just across the way where he got all his food and necessities.  So there he was;  an old man living out the last days of his life in a very small town, and when I say small, I mean Rimer had all of two streets one RR track, 10–15 houses, a Marathon gas station/fuel oil dealer, a stone and gravel company, a trucking company, and a grain elevator.  All of this is surrounded by small family farms.        

     Any day you could find him sitting at the picnic table beside his Model A dipping tobacco and spitting into his little cup with a napkin in the bottom. Watching the trucks come and go and waiting to see if anyone would stop and visit today.  We were fascinated with his car and his caboose and his stories about life on the RR.  I remember asking him one day when I was older about 16 if he had ever married.  He got a faraway look in his eyes hung his head and said,” Nope, come close once”. And then he changed the conversation to something else. 

     I found out years later after talking to Mr. Oren Beamond; a lifetime resident of Rimer, the whole story.  You see Cameel had as a young man with a promising future on the RR, courted and won the heart of a young lady whose name is lost to history, then a few months before the big wedding she contracted Influenza and suddenly died. This changed his life forever. He never loved anyone again. And died what would seem a lonely and unfulfilled life. Yet you always saw a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. 

     As I watch my Dear Dolores lie dying just inches from me as I write these words, I know why he never married. I only hope one day I can find the smile on his face and the twinkle in his eye.

From somewhere on the back roads,

The Demonmaster

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