Mr. Tilken

When I was in my late 20s, I owned a small driveway resealing company on Long Island, New York. If you’re not sure what driveway resealing is, I promise you, it’s not terribly interesting. But the job itself was pretty cool. It allowed me to be outdoors all summer. It was incredible exercise as the cans of tar weighed fifty pounds, and I’d shake and carry twenty or thirty of them a day. It was seasonal so I was basically off all winter (it started in April and ended in November). And it required me to hustle like crazy as, on the hottest days (basically June through August), the sun would dry the tar in minutes after I spread it on a driveway. If I didn’t want my footprints to be embedded in a person’s driveway forever, I had to move quickly. Sometimes, I’d finish an entire driveway in ten minutes or less.

Of all my hundreds of customers, the most annoying had to be a man named Mr. Tilken. He’d call every June to make an appointment and after it was made, he’d call three times to confirm. Then, on the day of the job, he’d call first thing in the morning to confirm the time. And, if I gave him a window of 10-12 for the job, he’d start calling at 10:01, wondering where I was. When I did arrive, he’d stand over me, asking me the same questions every year.

“How long does it take to dry?”

“When can I drive on it?”

“Is this good quality sealer?”

And so on.

One year, after I had surgery to replace my C6-C7 disk in my neck, I was forced to hire someone to mix the cans for me. The doctors had me on a pretty strict regimen and throwing around fifty pound cans of tar wasn’t a part of their plan.

The kid was nineteen and a big football fan. So we drove around all day talking about our favorite teams until we got bored and then blasted music when we did.

On the day we were scheduled to see Mr. Tilken, I told the kid the entire ride out to his house how annoying the guy was. As if he knew I was talking about him, Mr. Tilken called on our ride out to ask where I was.

When we arrived, it was the same drill. He stood over us, asking the same annoying, pointless, Mr. Tilken-type questions in his Mr. Tilken-type way: slowly, crankily, and with a nasally voice that I loathed.

On this day, though, Mr. Tilken asked a different question.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Twenty-eight,” I replied, while trying to focus on the work I was doing, trying to beat the sun.

“Twenty-eight,” he said. “I have you by over fifty years.”

I finished the driveway, making one final swipe with my brush, and looked up at him.

“If you think I’m young,” I said, pointing at the kid. “He’s only nineteen.”

Mr. Tilken laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before. I didn’t know he was capable of it.

“Do you want to know what I was doing when I was nineteen?”

The kid and I were on the opposite side of the driveway, forty feet from Mr. Tilken.

“When I was nineteen,” he said. “I was marching through Belgium on my way to The Battle of the Bulge.”

Mr. Tilken was a soldier. But not just any soldier. He was a soldier who fought in the bloodiest battle of World War II. The battle that put the Nazis on their heels. The battle that swung the war in our favor.

He did that when he was a child. Way younger than I was then. The same age as the kid I’d hire to mix tar cans.

All those years, I thought of Mr. Tilken as a crotchety, old man. Someone so bored that he had to call me constantly. Someone with so little to do that he stood over me asking me the same annoying questions every summer. I never thought of him as someone who helped saved the world. But that’s who he was.

I sold the business two summers later and went back to school. But each of the next two summers, I looked forward to seeing Mr. Tilken. His many calls no longer bothered me. His questions no longer grated on me. After the job was done, I hung out and talked with him for a while.

I looked him up recently. He died in 2015 on the same day my son, Teddy, was born. Not sure if that means anything. It probably doesn’t. But learning about Mr. Tilken, learning about his history, listening to his stories, and remembering to never judge a book by its cover, meant everything.