The Power of Testimony

THE TIME MOM MET HITLER . . .
he saw one, so he brought my grandfather aboard as a director
and made him head of sales, and in 1901, they incorporated.
Two years later, A.L. and his wife, Lena, celebrated the birth
of their first son, Dryden. Then, in 1904, their second son, my
father, was born; their daughter, Elizabeth, came a few years
later. Everything was falling into place for A.L. and Lena. By
the time my father was born, A.L. was on his way to becoming
a wealthy man.
A.L. could help people decide. Every business needs people to
decide. A yes helps the business and the customer directly. A no
may help the competitor, which in the end helps the business by
forcing it to improve. But a maybe is death. A.L. was a no-​maybes
guy. And as it turned out, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Uncle Dry also became a salesman (stocks and bonds), as did
his son, Bill (cosmetics). For a brief period in his forties, even
Dad spent time as a salesman (floor wax). Unlike the others,
though, Dad held on to his sales job only until something better
came along. Unlike his father, Dad was not a no- maybes guy.
Dad was a poet. Poets love maybes. A poet’s maybe is the linguistic
and aesthetic well from which creative juices flow. If you
want to find the home of a poet’s muse, figure out the location
of that poet’s maybe.
* * *
Soon after my father was born, the Eberhart family moved into
Burr Oaks, an eighteen-​ room home (complete with a basement
bowling alley, basketball court, and dance hall) that A.L. built
for his growing brood and that dominated forty acres of fields,
woods, and scrub between itself and the Cedar River. Many are
the youthful adventure stories that Dad set there.
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