A Life Story by GrayDog

It was the summer of 1974. I was in the final year of my enlistment in the Air Force when they decided to move me from Fort Meade MD to Beale Air Force Base in California. I hitched a new motorcycle trailer to the back of my less than one year old Trans Am, loaded my two motorcycles and a couple boxes of my stuff onto it. Said goodbye to the girlfriend I probably should have married (but how can one ever really know how a different reality might have played out), and headed west. It took me two and a half days to get to Washington.  I was rousted by a very unfriendly cop outside of Chicago when I pulled off the side of the road to take a nap, and got a $5 ticket for “wasting a natural resource” in Montana when I went past a trooper at 95 mph at about 3:00 AM.  Spent a couple weeks at my folks house visiting and playing with my dogs and horses.  Then I loaded up my Honda 750 and headed south.  It’s about a 14 hour drive from there to Beale Air Force Base – I know ’cause I made the roundtrip many weekends over the next 9 months. I arrived the day before my reporting date and my billet wasn’t ready so they put me up in the transient enlisted quarters, kind of like an on base motel.  I noticed the parking lot was virtually empty and the building was quiet as a mouse. 

I signed in and carried my bag to my assigned room.  It had two twin beds arranged in the customary fashion with a dresser between them, and one of them had a travel bag and a garment bag on it.  There was no other sign that the room was occupied, but I had clearly been paired with another tenant.  That was irritating – several dozen empty rooms but I still had to share. After settling in I went to find the NCO club to quench my thirst and hunger.  It was early evening.  When I returned to my room a short time later it was exactly as I had left it. I settled onto the top of my bunk and began reading the various materials that always occasion such rented rooms. After a short time I heard a key in the lock, the door opened and in walked a tall handsome blue-eyed tanned young man, mid 20s perhaps. Thick blonde hair as long as regulation would allow and not a molecule longer, neatly trimmed. He could have walked off of a California surfer movie set. We exchanged pleasantries and while I didn’t know him from Adam, and I’m generally very reserved, He managed to carry the conversation as though we had been acquaintances for a long time.

He had entered the room carrying a guitar case, which he leaned against the locker that was at the end of his bed.  It wasn’t just any guitar case, but one that enclosed an Ovation guitar – they were quite distinctive back then.  I had started playing guitar a couple years earlier and while I could strum a tune and finger pick a little, I wasn’t anything close to proficient.  But I already knew what my dream guitar was: a 12 string Ovation, just like the one Glen Campbell played.  Guess what was in the case when the conversation turned to it? He took the guitar out of the case with the ease of someone who knows he is skilled and will not embarrass himself, and asked if I would like to hear him play. Damn straight I wanted to hear him play it!  He began strumming and finger picking an intro and there was no doubt about his skill. Then he began singing the melody and his voice was the kind that you could listen to all day long: smooth and pure and accurate. Except (sound of phonograph needle scratching across the record: scrrrip) It was a gospel tune!  (Please dear Lord don’t send me a roommate who is a Jesus freak, even if it’s only for one night, for God’s sakes!) He ignored my obvious discomfort and continued to play, interspersing conversation with gospel tunes.  He was stationed in Japan, he said, and had come back to the States on a military hop to visit his family and now was headed back: Tomorrow was the last day of his leave.  He had signed up for a hop on a tanker going to Japan out of Travis the next morning.  “Aren’t you cutting it close, hops are a hope and a prayer at best, what if you don’t make the cut and the tanker leaves without you, what are you going to do then? You won’t have enough time to even take a commercial flight.” He replied with a gentle smile on his face that he had faith that the Lord would provide. The conversation went on late into the night but I don’t remember much else of it. I woke up the next morning on top of my bed fully clothed and he was gone: he was so gone that there was no sign that he had ever even been there. The bathroom was spotless and his bed looked like it had been made by a Marine drill instructor.  I tidied up and then went to breakfast, went to my new duty unit to officially sign in, and then returned to the temporary quarters to collect my things and sign out. I fully expected to see the striking young man back there because I really thought the idea of catching a hop on a tanker headed across the Pacific was a tenuous hope at best.  But he had not returned.  EXCEPT.  When I returned to my room to gather my things, the Gideons Bible was sitting plainly in the middle of the bed with a note on top of it.

The note contained some brief pleasantries and then got to the point. The Bible had several pages tabbed and the note referenced passages that I was urged to read, John 3:16 was first on the list.  The note implored me to take the Bible with me (“That’s why the Gideons put them in these rooms: They would want you to take it.”)  I didn’t take the Bible, but I did take the note which unfortunately, like most such artifacts of one’s life, has been lost to the whirlwind of time. While I was signing out I casually mentioned the encounter to the clerk on the other side of the desk and asked if the young man had returned and was now assigned to a different room.  The clerk looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.  I could have, but I wasn’t.  He told me no person matching such a description had checked in to the temporary quarters in the previous couple of days.  I laughed and said well of course he had and turned the book around to see if I could discover his name. There was no name signed in during the 24 hours before mine and mine was the last on the book. The note had suggested that I find a copy of CS Lewis’s “Mere Christianity.” Which I did within a few days and have never been without at least one copy since then.  I always keep at least one copy on hand, ready to give away.

So that’s my story.  It happened just the way I just told it.