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A Special Mothers Day Tribute

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Written 38 years ago by Vance Meyer, a friend and admirer of the late Loretta Pettit of Marion, Indiana, and her son, the late Randy Pettit. Winter, 1984 — Loretta Pettit leaves the Nobby Grill promptly at 4 p.m. and drives to her small Northgate Village apartment to change out of her waitress uniform.   Just inside the apartment door, she is greeted by a framed picture of Randy that sits on a stack of imitation-wood shelves.  Randy’s eyes and wavy, black hair shine in the photographer’s light and his cheeks have sun in them.  A loud shirt with its thick, seventies collar make him look more like a TV star than a junior high school student. Loretta, at just over five feet tall (not counting her Bouffant hair), walks into the bedroom and comes out wearing a flannel shirt, rolled-up blue jeans, and thick-soled shoes.  She glances at her watch and starts moving about more quickly.  After slipping on a down coat and grabbing a canvas bag filled with items she had packed the night before, s
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Freedom of Speech? Are You Kidding Me?

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When I began my corporate communication career in the mid-eighties, CEO’s were flocking to video to sell their visions and products.  As novices under studio lights, they moved like Gumby and kept glancing off-camera for someone to rescue them.  (Inevitably, after their spouses and kids told them how awful they looked, they’d take it out on guys like me.)  Today, CEO’s, middle managers – heck, even interns – log into Zoom and handle themselves like Ryan Seacrest. Back in the day (Did I really just say that?), if you wanted to get something off your chest about politics or anything else, your choices were to complain to your local barber or bartender, take it out on the dog, or spend your lunch hour banging out a “letter to the editor” on a Wang computer and hope that it might appear several days later in the local newspaper.   Today, you can sit in your Fruit of the Looms, drink a skunky microbrew, and unload on the President of the United States on social media, with the free world
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Aren’t We Lucky

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By Vance Meyer This what not at all what I was expecting. Had a shorter fellow in mind, maybe.  Soothing voice.  A pouch on his belt filled with dog treats. Certainly not this chisel-face in combat fatigues at our front door. Our Shih-Tzu, Lucky, was eight-months old and beginning to need a little help with social graces, so we asked some friends if they knew a trainer. His name was Butch, and after nine-and-a-half years my fingers are only now recovering from our first (and last) handshake. Without being asked, Butch stepped in and began delivering a take-me-or-leave-me rendition of his training philosophy: Discipline. Boundaries. People run the house, not the dog. (We’re already screwed, I thought.) Butch’s first order of business was an evaluative short walk down our suburban street. Just Butch and Lucky. Quiet time. Building rapport. Dog-whispering, I imagined. He returned from their five-minutes together with his recommendation: Our dog very much needed him and his traini
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Christmas Memories

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Christmas memories are like the giant oak trees I have come to love in my 13 years as a Floridian; they are indescribably beautiful and last forever.   Here, in no particular order, are some memories that are rooted in my heart. My father placing a blinking red lantern in the fork of a tree to alert me to the coming of Santa Claus, and later stomping around on the roof above my bedroom on a snowy night.  One year he fell off the roof into the snow-capped hedges and my older brother, Harold, had to rescue him. Putting the final touches on our tree with silver icicles while mom played carols on her accordion, an instrument that came out of the case only once a year. Cutting down our Christmas tree from a tiny parcel of land on Bond Avenue, owned by a kind old man in a flannel hat, and continuing the tradition on my own as a teenager at Mr. Helt's tree farm outside of town.  I came home every year with a tree sticking way out of the trunk of my yellow Mustang, and my mother
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My Dear Aunt Reba

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by Vance Meyer Aunt Reba and I were the only two riders on the small municipal bus that ran a continuous loop of the northern neighborhoods of Marion, Indiana.  Her house was across the street from ours, and the bus stop was just a block away.   It was our ongoing agreement that I would be the one to reach up and pull the thin cable that rang a bell and alerted the driver to our desire to be let off.  Today's trip would take us downtown to the shops that adorned our town square before the mall swallowed up the shops and before Walmart swallowed up the mall. On this snowy afternoon we would not make our usual stop to see her sister (my mom) at the Grant County Treasurers Office in the old courthouse, where mom worked for 19 years.  This was a covert mission to find my Christmas present for mom.   Knowing my budgetary parameters, Aunt Reba suggested that we head right to SS Kresge's less than a block down Washington Street from the bus stop.  We kicked off our boots on the cr
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My Dear Aunt Reba

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by Vance Meyer Aunt Reba and I were the only two riders on the small municipal bus that ran a continuous loop of the northern neighborhoods of Marion, Indiana.  Her house was across the street from ours, and the bus stop was just a block away.   It was our ongoing agreement that I would be the one to reach up and pull the thin cable that rang a bell and alerted the driver to let us off.  Today's trip would take us downtown to the shops that adorned our town square before the mall swallowed up the shops and before Walmart swallowed up the mall. On this snowy afternoon we would not make our usual stop to see her sister (my mom) at the Grant County Treasurers Office in the old courthouse, where mom worked for 19 years.  This was a covert mission to find my Christmas present for mom.   Knowing my budgetary parameters, Aunt Reba suggested that we head right to SS Kresge's less than a block down Washington Street from the bus stop.  We kicked the snow off our boots on the c
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My First Girlfriend

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by Vance Meyer Knowing that mom had supper on the table was the only good thing about leaving Shirley’s house one humid summer afternoon in 1975.   The two of us had just blown another entire day doing pretty much nothing except swinging too high on the bulky porch swing her dad had built by hand in the back yard. Heading down the long Highland Avenue hill, I was listening to a transistor radio that was Velcroed to the handlebars of my red Schwinn Stingray, while popping wheelies on the uneven cracks in the sidewalk.   Two years later, that same radio would inform me of the death of Elvis Presley.   But today, it was Frankie Valli singing his new hit, “My eyes adored you,” through the low-quality speaker.   I listened to Frankie carry on in song about a girl he knew in the sixth grade and wondered if I might still feel the same way about Shirley when I grew up. Shirley Montgomery was a year behind me at our Marion, Indiana elementary school (She was fifth grade, I was sixt
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