The Farm

“Have you got the money?” I asked Don. We had been staking this place out for weeks. This was no ordinary caper, because we weren’t actually stealing anything. We would be paying for what we were about to take. The plan had been worked out very carefully. I was to go in and discuss with the restaurant owner some details about his restaurant or ask him if he’d been receiving his newspaper on a timely basis.  My goal?  Create a distraction.  During this distraction, Pete would keep a vigilant eye outside the restaurant for any patrons who might come between us and our ultimate goal of securing a box of little cigars.  Don would go into the restaurant’s entryway, quickly deposit 60 cents in the vending machine, grab the cigars, then get out as quickly as possible.

“Of course I have the money.  Now get inside there and talk to the restaurant owner.  We’ll meet in Gabe’s Convenience Store parking lot when this is all over.”

When you are 12 years old and come from very responsible families, you may as well have been purchasing cocaine.  It didn’t matter, because if we were caught, the penalty would probably have been the same.  We were willing to take the risk.  Tomorrow we would embark on a bicycle trip from our homes in Dearborn, Michigan, to my grandfather’s farm in Concord, Michigan.  It would be a long trip, and the gratification of smoking little cigars while riding down a country lane was worth all the risk.

I don’t recall the exact words that I used when I went in to distract the restaurant owner.  My heart was pounding so hard I could not have heard the words anyway.  Pete had the easy job, standing outside the restaurant doing nothing.  Don moved through the door quickly, deposited the 60 cents, gave the knob a pull (which, by the way, made quite a racket), grabbed the cigars, and then took off out the door.  He headed two blocks away to our rendezvous point.  Everything went off without a hitch.  We had agreed ahead of time that Pete would take the cigars home with him, because his parents were the least involved in his life.  It was highly unlikely they would ever find the cigars in his bedroom, because to our knowledge, they had never been in his bedroom.

“That wasn’t so hard.  We probably could have got two packs of cigars,” Pete said.

“Oh, you’re a big one to talk!  You didn’t have to talk to the restaurant owner.  Now listen to me.  I’ve got to get home.  Make certain you have everything packed for the trip and let’s meet at Pete’s house tomorrow morning.  Six o’clock A.M. sharp, okay?”

“See you at my house at six sharp.”

Don had one of those classic “fuzzy looks” on his face.  “That’s pretty early.  Why do we have to leave so early?”

Pete and I weren’t listening to Don.  Starting to pedal towards home, I yelled back to Don and Pete, “See ya at six!”

I was up early.  The fact is, I don’t think I ever went to sleep.  We had never been on a bicycle trip longer than 3 miles one way in our entire lives.  But somehow we got it in our heads to take this trip out to Concord.  I had done my homework and calculated the trip to be about 86 miles, door-to-door.  My dad helped to map out the roads we would take.  The plan was to knock off about 45 miles the first day and the remainder of the trip the second day.  The little town of Grass Lake was our first day destination.  There, we would bed down in some farmer’s pasture or along the road somewhere.  Pete and I had been planning this trip for weeks.  Don and I had just recently become friends, so his addition to the trip came at the last minute.  Pete and I had very carefully packed our bicycles, making certain we had all the necessary provisions to make it through this two-day journey.  The time now was 6:20 and Don was nowhere to be found.

“Well, John, shall we wait or shall we leave?”

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