Ten p.m. The hated hour.  The impossible hour.  The hour of transfer from recliner to walker seat.  The hour of rolling dragging backward to the bedroom.  The hour of transfer to the edge of the bed, to enough of the edge to stay on and scoot farther in, and hopefully enough not to slide off and fall to the floor.  The impossible hated hour.  He doesn’t want me here, Dad doesn’t.  He knows he’s poised on a precipice: “I don’t know if I can do it.”  He knows some unseen stress is getting to me, that I am on edge and irritable, and has no idea it has to do with him.  “Where’s Lucille?” he demanded, looking to her to lift his butt, though she can’t, pretending he doesn’t need me, though he does.  “I won’t do it without Lucille.”  On this night, gripping the armrests to make the impossible effort, he looked up at me in his nakedness and remarked how sixty years ago he was a student in Brazil, and I was a baby, and I dutifully observed in return what a long time ago that was.  But he persisted and began rehearsing to me one of his many mystical stories, this one about being assigned to visit ten families who no longer came to church, ten families who had no phones or cars (neither did he), ten families who lived far from the church building and from each other and from him, families whom he visited every month for the school year he was there, riding buses in the vast internecines of São Paulo, urging them to Christ, inviting them to church, making the last visit as my first birthday neared, and hearing the voice of his Savior assuring him that his offering of service to the ten families had been seen and accepted.  But as he began the old story, looking into my face with the earnestness of someone having something of utter importance to say that had never been said or heard in the long history of the world, I walked away, having absolutely desiccated internal emotional reserves, muttering that I had something in the oven that needed tending, and indeed I did have something in the oven, for the second time, because I had baked the miniature mincemeat pies for the first time on the wrong temperature and now I hoped to salvage them for an office party the next day.  “Never mind,” he said, and he looked up at Mom imploringly: “This is important.  And nobody cares.”  Back from the oven, my own heat rising, I rebutted with how unfair that was to me, and how of course I cared, and how I have heard the story a dozen times and did not need to hear it again, and how I had something in the oven that needed tending, and how I had a lot going on in that moment, and how I was tired and wanted to go to bed.  Another painful barefoot moment on the razor’s edge of being needed but not wanted passed, and I hung back in offering a steadying arm under his armpit until the moment just preceding a would-be fall.  Somehow he made it to the edge of the bed.  “Good-night, Mom and Dad.”  From where I sat in the living room, piecing together the faces of angels and shepherds and sheep, I listening to his gravelly petition to his Heavenly Father, praying for me, praying that I will not be angry, that I will be blessed in my hardships, that He will be with me, totally unaware of the cause of my feelings.  Placing the Jesus piece in the Nativity puzzle, I breathed, “Blessed Jesus, let me not do this to my children.”  Let me leave this planet before this, knowing they will weep for a day and then get on with their joyful challenging bitter hopeful grinding lives, with me a happy memory instead of an angry silence or an endlessly repeating story of a glorious romantic mystical reinvented past.

(Pictured: my own brickwork in an antique-themed writing studio within my old chicken coop.)