Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow

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Sheila gently laid the photo album on her Aunt Mary’s lap. It had been a while since she had visited with the last of her mother’s siblings. Time and distance conspired to keep them apart. But a 100th birthday didn’t happen ever day, so Sheila put everything else aside to be at Riverdale for the celebration.

Frail hands, veins standing out and marked with age spots, caressed one of the photos on the first page of the album.

“That was 1911, the year I was born. That’s my mother.”

Sheila moved closer. Aunt Mary’s hearing wasn’t very good anymore.

“They didn’t smile much for photos, did they?”

Mary harrumphed, as she said, “Mother wasn’t a very happy person at the best of times. Ten children before me and all the farm work too—just about wore her to death.”

She turned the page. The photo of a handsome young lad in a military uniform stared up at them.

“Was that one of your brothers?” Sheila asked, hoping to encourage more memories. “Some of them were in the First World War, weren’t they?

Mary thought for a moment before she answered: “No…at least I don’t think so, though…well, it might have been Charlie…but…oh, I don’t remember…” Her voice trailed off. Mary’s hand stopped over the picture, resting on it as though waiting for an answer to magically flow from the thick cardboard into her mind. Sheila could see the struggle to remember on her aunt’s face.

“It’s okay, Aunt Mary, it’s not important.”

The older woman looked up, meeting Sheila’s gaze and pinioning it with the icy blue of her own. “It IS important,” she retorted, frustration and a touch of anger adding an edge to her usually calm tones. Immediately her eyes went back to the photo.

“It was Charlie, not my brother, but my mother’s younger brother. He went away and never came back,” she said. It was as though that moment of pique had chased the fog away. She turned the page and reached out to stab a more modern photo with a long, boney, arthritic finger.

“That’s Emma, my sister.”

“My mother,” said Sheila.

Mary looked up again as though seeing Sheila for the first time.

“You were away for a long time, weren’t you? Where was it…Africa?”

“Japan, Aunt Mary. I was there for twelve years.”

“Yes, of course,” her aunt replied.

There had been a time when her visits with her aunt had resulted in hours of questions about Sheila’s life and experiences. Mary kept every letter, writing her questions in cramped handwriting in the margins so that she wouldn’t forget what she wanted to ask the next time her niece came. Now the questions wouldn’t come and the answers didn’t matter.

“Have you heard anything from Edith McKay? I haven’t had a letter from her in a long time. Has she called you?”

Sheila smiled to herself. In her latter years Aunt Mary had begun to collapse time in her mind and think of her niece as one of her peer group, another one of the “girls” like Edith, Mary’s best friend from her younger days.

“Edith died several years ago, Aunt Mary,” Sheila said.

The older women looked puzzled for a moment. Then, as her brow cleared, she nodded slowly. “Yes, of course,” she replied.

Sheila decided it might be time to press her aunt a little. What kind of present do you get for a woman about to celebrate 100 years of life?

“What would you like for your birthday, Aunt Mary?”

This time Mary didn’t hesitate. “What I want I think I’m going to have to wait for,” she answered. Sheila knew that her aunt loved to go out for drives through the countryside and, thinking that perhaps the other nieces had some special outing planned, she asked: “And what might that be?”

“I want to go home.”

Her cousins had assured Sheila that their aunt had made the adjustment from her apartment to the seniors’ home with relative ease, so she was surprised that her aunt would be so adamant about leaving Riverdale.

“Don’t you like it here? Don’t they treat you well? It’s almost as good as the apartment and you don’t have to cook, or do your own laundry.”

The older women straightened with an effort. For the first time during the visit, there was a twinkle in her eye, certainty in her voice, and not a wisp of fog to be seen.

“The apartment isn’t the home I was thinking of.”

Forever Beginning

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“Grandpa? Grandpa? You okay?”

Joey peered around the corner of the doorway. The groans that had called him away from his play had also sent a tingle of fear up his young spine. The sun had climbed down from its midday heights and now streamed through the windows that looked west across the garden.

“Grandpa?” Once more came the question, this time as a plea.

The boy used to play in the sunroom where his grandfather now lay, stretched out on the daybed. However, since his last heart attack, the old man now occupied the room. The stairs to the bedrooms on the upper floor just took too much effort.

The boy eased into the room. Finally, love overcame fear, drawing Joey closer to the prone figure. He reached out a tentative hand. His parents had told him that his grandfather might not be with them much longer. The family visits had become more frequent. The adults meant to reassure him with such frank talk, but every grunt and groan now filled him with terror.

At Joey’s touch, the old man seemed to rouse himself. He rolled over, squinting at the bright light forming a halo around his grandson’s figure.

“Joey? That you, laddie?”

“Yah, grandpa. I heard you groan, and I thought, well, I thought, …” The boy’s voice trailed away. How could he mention death to a man he wanted to live forever.

The old man chuckled, pushing himself to a sitting position. He took a moment to catch his breath after the effort, then pulled the boy into the sheltered gap between his knees.

“You thought I was dying when you heard the groaning. No, I was just complaining to the good Lord.”

At the boy’s puzzled look, the old man laughed again. “Guess I’d better explain. You go to Sunday School so you know about creation, don’t you?”

Joey nodded.

“Well, things were good back then at the start. Everything was just the way God wanted it. And then…”

Now into the story, Joey was eager to show what he knew.

“Then Adam and Eve ate the apple.”

His grandfather smiled. “Well, it might not have been an apple, but you got the rest right. When those two sinned, the whole world started to die, and it’s been dying by bits and pieces ever since. But just like me, it’s not going quietly.”

By this time, Joey had climbed up on his grandfather’s knees, and then thought better of it as the old man winced. He began to wiggle his way down.

“No, stay. It’s okay. Remember you were telling me about earthquakes and all them plates rubbing together and causing the ground to shake?”

Grandpa’s ears provided fertile soil for the seeds of learning that Joey was accumulating. He was pleased that his grandfather remembered, and smiled in acknowledgment.

“Well,” continued the old man, “those plates bumping, grinding, and rubbing each other are like my knees—they’re telling anyone who’ll listen that the pieces don’t fit right anymore. And when things don’t work like they’re supposed to, they complain.”

“You sure complain a lot,” observed Joey.

His grandfather looked at him in mock surprise. “Who, me?” He laughed, then said, “What does your mommy do when you complain about being sick?”

“She does stuff to make me feel better,” replied the boy.

“Sure. She lets you stay home from school, gives you medicine, and fills you full of red Jell-O®. Well, God’s doing stuff to make me, and the earth, feel better too.

“But, you’re gonna …” Joey’s voice trailed off again.

“Die? Sure.” He hugged the boy close, feeling his anxiety. “At the start everything was good. Now it’s all coming to an end, dying from sin. To get back to the beginning we have to get past the end. The end is where the beginning starts all over again. Dying is an end God planned so that He could fix things, to give us a new beginning, to make us like we once were.”

“Can’t I come with you?” protested the boy, tears welling up in his eyes.

“Not now But, I’ll tell you what; I do know how you can get ready to come, not just for a visit, but to live a beginning that never ends with me and Jesus. Do you want to know how?”

Joey gravely nodded his head.

As the gathering darkness seeped across the tiles of the sunroom, Grandpa’s forever beginning dawned in a little boy’s heart.

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Two Minutes Before Dawn

Dad

We all knew it was only a matter of time before night fell. The signs were unmistakable.
“His arteries are like lead pipes,” said the doctor. I had never seen the inside of a well-used lead pipe, so I could only imagine.

Everyone slows down with age, but the first time I noticed life was taking an irrevocable twist was when I caught him staring at me as though I were a perfect stranger.

Who are you, and what are you doing in my living room? He didn’t say it, but I could read it in his eyes, distant and puzzled.

In the beginning, the changes were subtle, causing concern but not panic. Later those changes would become more marked, sometimes frightening. Moments of madness when hours twisted. Morning became night. Night turned into afternoon. Anger and aggression kindled in his eyes. Some other person had taken possession of a man once irritatingly mild and meek. He would not have recognized himself, known himself. He would not have liked what he saw. I was glad he didn’t know.

In the early days and later, in those moments when dad returned to visit himself, he appreciated the humour of the situation. One afternoon he came home from his walk with his face all battered and bruised.

“What happened to you?” is a silly question to ask a man who doesn’t remember those seconds when the mind turns off. We asked anyway, to which he replied with the classic: “You should see the other guy!” He didn’t always collapse from those mini-strokes. Usually he’d simply stand there, a blank look on his face as though he were far, far, away. Perhaps he was.

One Sunday, still dressed in his Sunday best, dad left the dinner table to go to the bathroom. He hadn’t been there long when we heard a loud thump and crash. I jumped up and ran. Dad was sitting sideways, rear in the bathtub, head resting against the wall, and feet waving in the air. He was laughing uproariously. He’d missed every sharp and potentially damaging object in our small bathroom—certainly a miracle in anyone’s book.

Public Health sent nurses in regularly to check on seniors still living alone in their own homes. I was visiting on one such occasion when the nurse came in to check blood pressures and to cut dad’s toenails. It was summer. The light was much better in the porch so they went out there. I followed. Something clicked in dad’s mind as the nurse worked on those yellowed, thickened, nails. He turned to me and smiled that impish smile that was a characteristic precursor to some quip.

“I’m tough,” he said proudly.

Yes you are, dad, I thought.

When he was growing up, everyone had to be tough. He’d had to leave school before finishing the eighth grade to help out on the family farm. He’d worked in an asbestos mine, fixed cars, and looked after his now growing family on the meager income of a unlicensed mechanic. There were no extras. We wore hand-me-downs, and didn’t have a car until dad managed to pick a cheap one up at a police auction—one he drove for the next twenty years. He loved us in his own quiet way, provided for us, disciplined us when we needed it, and was a faithful husband. For a man who had worked all his life, retirement was punishment. He soon returned to work, pumping gas in freezing cold weather until he was seventy-five years old.

However, it was back to his roots that dad returned during his last years. When it was no longer possible to look after him at home, he went to live in a nursing home. By then the lights of his mind were very dim, like the kerosene lamps of his childhood.

I found him fingering the hospital bracelet that he carried on his wrist.

“What’s that, Dad?” I asked.

He looked up with that same quirky smile that time never seemed to fade.

“Pa made it for me,” he said, fondness and pride lifting his voice. He was back on the homestead, surrounded by brothers and sister, mom and dad, rather than doctors, nurses, and strangers. He smelled freshly cut hay, not the odor of disinfectant and stale age. His mind was free even though it was confined to another time and another place.

It was twilight, the grayness before the night, and only two moments before eternal dawn.