Tag Archives: Memoir

Courage at Twilight: Will You Stand By Me?

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I am the shy quiet guy that lives with his parents, almost 60 years old, who they see pushing Dad’s wheelchair very slowly, so Mom can keep up, down the aisle to the front church pew, where a space is reserved for a wheelchair, where Dad has a better chance of hearing the worship meeting speakers, in the front where our family has sat in church for decades: in the front, where Dad, sitting on the stand those many years, presiding and exhorting and teaching, could keep an eye on his six children, not that we caused any trouble, and where he could be as close as possible to his family while carrying out his lay clergy duties. I am slowly learning their names, making a few acquaintanceships crawling toward friendship.  But today Dad was too weak to attend church meetings, and I had my granddaughter Lila with me, and we walked hand in hand down the aisle where Mom sat alone on the front church pew, and I could feel the eyes on me, friendly and interested and astonished eyes, and could hear their thoughts: Oh, he has a story!  And they wondered what my story could be as they saw my oldest son and his good wife and the little black-haired baby, my newest grandchild, and Lila my three-year-old friend, all sitting together in the front.  I share my desserts with church families now and then, always friendly cheerful encounters after which, as I am walking away, I hear them thinking to themselves: I wonder what his story is?  And they wonder if mine is a strange tragic story, as they munch tentatively, at first, and then with gusto, on my latest baking attempts, tonight’s being an enriched German holiday “Stollen” bread filled with dried fruits and sweet almond paste.  I baked the Stollen after cleaning up our Sunday dinner dishes, when I wanted to get off my aching feet but wanted more to make something pretty and interesting and sweet.  Dad asked if he could have a slice, which of course I gave him, in spite of the spiteful diabetes that is wrecking him, because he will be 87 in two weeks, and it was a thin slice after all, and let him live a little for heaven’s sake, and I said “no” to his importuning for seconds.  And he asked me, “Rog, will you stand by me while I try to stand up?” but I heard, Rog, will you stand by me as I am wasting away, in my pains, as I am dying?  Will you stand by me to the end?  Yes, Dad, I am here, and am not going anywhere.

(Pictured above and below: my first attempt at Stollen, an 18-inch loaf–delicious.)

Courage at Twilight: Diabetic Amyotrophy

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Dad’s eyes followed me as I moved about the kitchen preparing my breakfast. “Let me know what you think of those gluten-free no-sugar keto cereals,” he commented as I rummaged through cereals bought for him that he will not eat.  You could try them yourself.  “Not blackberry jam!” he gibed when I took the bottle out of the refrigerator.  “Are you putting blackberry jam in your peanut butter granola?”  No, Dad, I’m having toast with jam.  “And is that cream cheese?”  Yes, Dad, I like it with toast and jam—reminds me of Portugal.  “You’re putting milk on your cereal, right?”  Oh, my, gosh, Dad—stop commenting on my food!  I can feel his eyes on my every movement, and I want to scream.  But they are benign, innocent, aged eyes.  Why does the inoffensive become so irksome in people we love so much?  After breakfast would come the drive to the hospital for the NCV and EMG tests.  “You brushed the snow from the Suburban, right.”  Of course, Dad.  And I shoveled the driveway.  And the Terry’s driveway—he has been looking feeble lately—and Melissa’s driveway.  I had enjoyed marching the snow blower through four inches of new powder; it sparkled in the sun at it flew.  Clearing our own driveway was anticlimactic, so I moved to the neighbors.  I hoped they would now know it was me—I enjoyed thinking of their surprise and gratitude.  And, being anonymous, I would not have to face my clumsiness at being thanked and smiling and saying you’re welcome and other social engagement awkwardness.  I have noticed my happiness is greatest when contributing to the happiness of others.  There is joy in service.  So why do I spend so much solitary energy unsuccessfully pursuing my own happiness?  There really is something to that business of finding your life by losing it.  At the hospital, the doctor performed two tests.  First, nerve conduction velocity: he hooked up small electrodes above key nerves and administered numerous not-unpainful electric shocks to measure nerve conduction in Dad’s legs and arms.  Second, electromyography: he inserted a needle in key places to “listen to the muscles” as Dad flexed them in various instructed ways.  Dr. Hunter focused on his work as I focused on Dad’s grimacing face and jumping limbs and spots of blood dripping.  The testing shows you have severe neuropathy in both legs; severe nerve damage.  We now, finally, have a diagnosis.  Diabetic amyotrophy: rare condition…severe burning leg pain …weakness and wasting of the muscles.  Experienced by older patients with moderate controlled diabetes.  No cure; no treatment.  The pain may subside, but the weakness will remain: your strength and mobility will not return.  I am sorry.  “Well…that’s life…I’m 87 in two weeks…my body is falling apart…that’s what happens.”  I retrieved the wheelchair from the back of the faithful Suburban, helped Dad slide from the front seat into the chair, pushed him through the melting ice and up the slick salt-covered ramps and through the front door to his recliner, the salt crunching under the wheels against the cold white tile.

(Pictured above; our after-hospital dinner of lemon chicken on a bed of pesto couscous with white bean and corn salsa.)

Courage at Twilight: Bittersweet Good-byes

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“I’m not doing my arm exercises today,” Dad announced with some belligerence. I had heard the CNA coughing and sniffling continuously as she helped him bathe and dress.  How ironic, and alarming, for a health care provider to bring sickness into our home.  Dad was none too pleased, and invited her to leave an hour early.  He asked me for the physical therapy supervisor’s name (we’ll say “PT”) and phone number: “I’m going to call PT and tell him not to come back.”  Dad could not walk, could barely move, the day after PT poked and pushed and stretched him, yet a new depth of debilitation.  He made the call and left a message.  He did not confront either the CNA or PT, instead just removing himself from the threats.  For days now, there has been no question of walking to the bathroom at night: the bedside commode has to do, and it is all he can manage to transfer from the mattress to the commode three fee distant.  Today he could lift neither foot over the four-inch lip of the step-in shower stall.  On a happier note, I installed the old steel banister, removed with the stair lift installation, in the basement stairwell, making trips to the cold storage room and the freezer much easier for Mom: a “piece of cake.”  This morning I brought up frozen chicken breasts to thaw.  Hyrum came over for dinner—his last, for a while, with Mom and Dad—and I transformed the raw bird into tangy Hawaiian chicken on a coconut rice bed.  Hyrum, at age 20, is leaving for Brazil to begin his volunteer missionary service, as I did in Portugal in 1983, and as Dad did in Brazil in 1956, for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Two years he will be gone, and I will miss him.  He is my son and my friend.  Dad told him the old stories about eating avocados the size of grapefruits for lunch and being arrested at the behest of local clergy and inviting hard men to lead their families in kneeling prayer and about feeling the love of God for the people.  Hyrum said his farewells, promising to send Mom and Dad his weekly email updates.  “I may not be alive when you get back, Hyrum,” Dad mused, “but I’ll be happy to read your emails while I’m still alive.”  Hyrum and I were both poignantly aware of the real possibility of Dad’s passing before Hyrum’s homecoming, making sweeter and sadder this good-bye from a grandfather to a grandson.

(Pictured above: Hyrum with Dad and Mom.)

The basement stairs, before and after installing the steel banister, left.

Courage at Twilight: Wheelchair Halloween

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Our ballots came this week, in yellow envelopes.  Mom spread the campaign mailings over the kitchen table.  “Should we do our ballots?” she suggested.  “Do you know anything about this candidate?” Dad asked 14 times.  I certainly knew one incumbent senator and one judge I would not be voting for, and told them why.  “I like this one,” Mom offered as we filled in our circles with blue ink.  “I’ve never voted by committee,” I observed.  It felt unorthodox, but not unnatural.  Why not talk about the candidates and their positions and records and agree amongst ourselves who we think are the better candidates?  Mom took the sealed ballots to Help-U-Mail for delivery—though she likes our mail carrier, she does not trust the mailbox because of how easily mail can be stolen.  The calzone dough is rising, waiting to be rolled and filled and crimped for baking on the very hot pizza stone.    Pepperoni.  Mushrooms.   Sauce.  This year on Halloween, Dad is sitting by the front door in his power wheelchair, a book in his hands, a bowl of candy on the card table—Mom bought four enormous bags of candy bar minis—waiting hopefully for the doorbell to ring.  His first customer was a cheerful young woman with a toddler in one arm and a baby in a car seat in the other.  She smiled and said “thank you” and I thought how quickly tired she is going to be, but more importantly how she was out with her children making a fun memory of the national candy-grab.  Dad is surprisingly nimble and dexterous with his wheelchair—joy stick precision.  Cecelia came this morning, as she does every morning, at 9:30 a.m.  Dad awakes in his hospital bed earlier, but his day starts when Cecelia comes at 9:30, to help him up the stairs lifting a gate belt, to help him shower and shave and dry off and dress, to help him come back down the stairs, pulling back on the gate belt, for his breakfast, and to coach him through his daily therapy with colored elastic bands.  He talks and talks, about the sports section and his childhood and his aches and pains and the subtle changes in how his body feels and about Mexico and her family and his family, and he tells the old stories, and she listens with “mmm-hmmn”s and knowing nods.  Perhaps the best two hours of his day.  “Ding dong!”  “Trick or treat?!”  Dad will have to eat his calzone from his post of vigilance at the front door.

Courage at Twilight: Witch Season

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My relative mood seems tied directly to Dad’s relative strength, and today has been his weakest in the eight days since his homecoming, too reminiscent of pre-hospital days, days of barely standing and of barely walking and of legs quivering. “Up up up!” I commanded, using physical therapy’s compulsory three-times repetition (is that diacope, palilalia, or anaphora?).  Straighten your legs.  Pull your butt in.  Chest out.  Chin up.  All this harassment to make standing and walking as safe and easy as possible.  Leaning over a walker is never safe, for the walker can run away, leaving its master behind on the floor.  My spirits had sunk with his sinking strength.  But Jeanette and I pushed Mom in her wheelchair as Dad motored himself very slowly down the street—until I showed him how to switch from “slow” to “moderate” (there is no “fast” in a power wheelchair), allowing us to walk along at a normal pace.  The Wasatch mountains looked powerfully but benignly down upon us, boasting a vast patched skirt of oranges and reds from the gambel oaks and mountain maples transitioning toward winter.  And Mom and I assembled and painted our witch craft kits—all cute and no scary—I added no warts but mere freckles to her nose—and added them to the decorated front porch, along with a witch’s broom I fortuitously forgot to put away yesterday, and purple mums, and pumpkins newly painted by Jeanette and Amy, next to the wheelchair ramps now stained and sealed as well as sturdy.  And we sat on the back patio in the cool evening air, so pleasant on the skin, discussing already our traditional family Christmas Eve gathering, the shadow of the sinking sun climbing up the mountain’s skirt, the vibrancy of red and orange leaves delighting in matching sunset hues, both fading now to the subdued, the sleepy.

Courage at Twilight: Glad You Survived

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Despite Dad’s continuing profound weakness, I see how much he has improved since his hospital admittance a short thirty days ago, when he was too weak to talk or to eat or to raise a finger or toe, when his light was almost extinguished, when he wept to see his siblings, to whisper “we have never been angry with one another,” to sigh his life’s great spiritual thoughts and convictions perhaps one last time, witnessing of Jesus and the process of atonement He works in our hearts and minds every moment of every day for every human being—to be more kind and humble and teachable, generous and self-sacrificing and good, forgiving and loving and meek—working not only to forgive sin and wipe away tears but to uplift and ennoble and exalt: that is Dad’s Savior. And he told us again about the old dream, when he stood observing a great green grassy field filled with babies who crawled and played and sat looking around as babies do, when a great snake emerged from a hidden hole and coiled itself around a defenseless child and slithered back toward the dark hole.  Whereupon the Dad in the dream ran to attack the serpent, to rescue the child, to beat the snake back into its hole, to feel the relief of avoided tragedy and the joyful energy of victory.  But another snake slithered from another hole and grabbed another baby, and Dad reenacted the rescue.  And another snake and another battle.  And a growing fatigue.  And a growing awareness that the field was infested and the babies so vulnerable.  Then waking into the questions of the meaning of such dreams where the feelings are real and the stakes are real and high, and of whether the field could ever be rid of serpents, and of whether he were strong enough to persevere in battle knowing that to rest is to condemn the defenseless.  Then glimpsing an image of a small oil lamp lighted and placed atop a peach bushel on a hill overlooking a green grassy field.  In the hospital, I watched Dad’s life-light flicker, knowing he has done his work tirelessly and well, that many many serpents have taken his beating, and many many children have been rescued, that the disciple had helped the Master do His Kingdom-work.  So now he fights on, and Victor has repaired the sprinkler pipe for station 7, and Baxter measured and photographed the staircase and took the lift deposit, and PT Virgilio declared the yellow band too flimsy and gave Dad both a blue and a black, and Cecilia helped him up the stairs for a shower, and Harold the wheelchair sits in a corner while the flower-print walker still works, and Dr. Hoffman said limply “glad you survived.”  Dad wondered all afternoon about that word, “survived.”  Yes, he is surviving, not cured, not healed, not strong, but surviving, his lamp still full and aflame, for another great-grandchild, also named Owen, who arrived today from the heavens to crawl and giggle in the grass under Dad’s acute and ready eye.

Pictured above: the view of the mountain from Dad’s and Mom’s kitchen, with the oak and maple turning red.

The broken pipe that caused the big leak.

Courage at Twilight: Haunted by Stairs

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Eleven o’clock at night, and Dad’s reading light burned above his recliner, with Dad comfortably settled in, intently focused on a book. I felt very tired and wanted to be in bed an hour before, what with my 6:00 a.m. wake time routine.  Voiced echoes of “back to normal” and “climb the stairs” raced chaotically in my brain.  Daring to interrupt his reading, I asked carefully if we could have a conversation.  “Of course,” he said pleasantly, plainly happy to be home.  I explained to him how frightened I felt of him attempting to climb the stairs in the middle of the night, and how traumatized I felt from weeks of pre-hospital hauling him up the stairs with a gate belt and easing him down the stairs with the gate belt (he does not remember this), and I asked him, please, for his commitment to not climb the stairs tonight, and suggested now would be an excellent time to go to sleep, when Mom and I were going to sleep, being both so tired, so we did not need to worry about him moving safely around in the night.  He had come home just that day, after all.  “I am going to climb the stairs,” he asserted with confidence, “but I will not do it tonight.  I know my limits, and I am not going to be stupid.”  “Stupid” is a word that simply could never ever describe Dad.  “Super-intelligent,” yes.  “Super-determined,” absolutely.  But I have watched Dad dozens of times push himself beyond his capacity, with the predictable collapses that followed, and wondered if he really did know his limits, or rather knew what his limits used to be, or what he wanted them to be.  Still, physical therapists had been working him hard, and the idea of him being newly cognizant of his current limits was plausible.  With no further argument, Dad shuffled to his downstairs bedroom with a “good-night,” his book and a bag of mixed nuts in hand, while I stepped up the stairs.  The next morning, a Sunday, with the new CNA’s arrival, Dad expressed his understandable desire for a shower, which meant, of course, climbing the stairs.  I sat down with him again and practically yelled at him out of my fear of his falling down the stairs.  He deferred (after the CNA demurred), and accepted a sponge bath instead.  But on Monday, day three at home, after I left for work, the CNA helped him up the stairs to the shower—how wonderful and liberating that shower must have felt—and back down again, without incident, and I was glad I had not been there, and I was glad the CNA had felt sufficiently comfortable helping him, and that the story for that day had a happy ending.  True to his word, he indicated to the caregiver on Tuesday that he felt too weak to attempt the stairs.  And with all this my tension eased somewhat.  But I knew, as I have not known before, that now was the time to install the obscenely-expensive stair lift, and that only with the stair lift could we eliminate the issue of stair climbing and substitute constant dread and risk with comfort and ease and safety and freedom and independence, if not accomplishment.  As I myself plopped down the steps to discuss stair lifts with Mom and Dad, grasping the wood handrail, my hand suddenly slipped where the housecleaner had oiled the wood, and I caught myself without falling, and I pictured Mom grasping the railing and leaning out over the stairs to let her arthritic legs follow after, and I pictured Mom’s hand slipping on the greasy handrail and Mom going down, down, the stairs with nothing to stop her, and I knew the stair lift was her safe solution as well.  Straightaway, I ran for a spray bottle of kitchen degreaser and wiped the handrail squeaky grippy clean.

Courage at Twilight: The Big Leak

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Don’t tell him about the big leak, I exhorted myself.  Victor will fix it on Monday.  But Dad is home, at the end of a month of hospitalization and rehabilitation, and will want to know why Victor is digging up the back yard.  So, I told him, at the end of his first day home, and that Victor and I knew exactly the problem, and it would be fixed on Monday.  Dad is home.  He drove his power wheelchair slowly up the smooth and sturdy ramps on a 5:1 slope, drove his chair through the front door and into the house and directly to his recliner.  “Those ramps are great, Rog.  Smooth and sturdy, and perfect.”  In his institution rooms, after the visitors had left, he stared at the ceiling through the long nights, fighting off loneliness and despondency.  Daily daytime visits from family and former missionaries and church members—and especially from Mom—had injected him with love and with hope, had fortified him against the dark nights.  In his recliner, he gazed slowly around the room, taking in the familiar surroundings, which looked different now, somehow, feeling an immense swelling gratitude for “every window and wall,” for the heavy scrolled wood dining table and hutch that he and Mom had bought in 1975 for $700 from a newly-divorced mother who need cash, now, and for the painting by Greason of a pre-industrial French countryside at dusk, for the many lamps that light his late-night reading, for the windows and chairs, for the front-door which had opened for his return, for Mom’s needlepoint of Noah and his wife and the animals and the ark, and for the kitchen counter laden with fresh fruit, the gratitude of survivors, of soldiers who nearly lost, but somehow managed to not, life’s latest battle, finding everything the same, but different, seeing with the eyes of someone returning home from war.  So, I did not want to tell him how I had begun to suspect a sprinkler problem, when pressures dipped, and when Station 7 was dry, and knew for sure when I stepped in two inches of water in the back yard, and saw the mat of grass rising, floating on the pond growing underneath, and turned the valve to off.  But I chose a good moment, and told him, and he was glad Victor was coming on Monday to fix it.  His hospital bed arrived in time to learn to raise the head and knees, to raise the whole bed, and to make the bed with sheets and blankets, and to add to the décor the laminated magazine page with the painting of Jesus which he had taped to the rehabilitation bed floorboard, which visage, together with the afterglow of the visits, helped him endure intact the interminable nights.  Sarah made him motor down the ramps for a walk in the cool darkness of the autumn evening, and then back up, praising again my solid and sturdy ramps.  He looked at me with a twinkle and vowed, “I’m going to climb the stairs”—and I said we were going to have a conversation about that (in other words, no, you’re not)—“but not today.”

Courage at Twilight: Maracangalha

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They came from Texas to Utah, and wanted to stop by the rehab center and see Dad.  They had met each other in 1972 in São Paulo, Brazil, and had met Dad then, too, when they were 21 and he was 36, the President of the Brazil South Central Mission, their President.  They were serving as volunteer youth missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (misnomered “Mormons”), preaching the Gospel of Jesus and of faith and repentance and baptism and of Christ’s Church restored in 1820 through the prophet Joseph Smith.  They met me, too, in 1972, but I was only eight.  I had met Steve and Dorothy and the others many times at mission reunions in Mom’s and Dad’s basement great room, with their name tags and paunches and gray hair (or no hair), with a taste for mousse de maracujá (passion fruit mousse) and guaraná (Brazilian soft drink) and feijoada (Brazil’s black-bean stew), and with love in their hearts for Mom and Dad and for the people of Brazil, and with still-vivid memories of their formative experiences with a benevolent personal living God.  Dad served a mission to Brazil in the 1950s.  I accepted a mission call to Portugal in 1983.  And my children were sent to Oklahoma and Florida and South Korea and Mozambique and Brazil.  Missionary service is not compulsory in my Church, but every young man and woman is invited to serve.  We dedicated two years of our time, energies, and resources to share our convictions about God’s plan for the eternal happiness of humanity.  Covid-19 ended Mom’s and Dad’s annual reunions, and we felt a new emptiness, one of numerous new voids compelled by the pandemic.  But Larry emailed the group, and a Zoom mission reunion was conceived.  Mom and Dad sat at their kitchen table, looking at my laptop screen, as dozens of thumbnails popped up, of their beloved former missionaries, with whom they had labored, with whom they had been reviled, with whom they had formed strong bonds of caring, who now listened as Dad declared his convictions, evoked their common tender memories, and expressed to them his love (as did Mom).  And at the click of an icon they were gone, and we sat on the sofas, Mom and Dad and me, and reminisced about Brazil, and about how at mission reunions I had led them all in the old Caymmi songs: Maracangalha (1957): a young man so excited to attend a party in the next town; Coqueiro de Itapoã (1959): a youth missing the sand and the waves and the coconut palms and the beautiful morenas of Itapoã.

Courage at Twilight: Something to Hope For

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The pace of progress crawls and stalls, and we wonder at times if there is any hope for his healing or merely the painful prolonged waiting for the inevitable end.  “I don’t know if your dad will ever be able to come home again,” Mom softly wept to me, bravely facing possibilities of future truth.  In the skilled nursing facility, Dad wondered similar thoughts, whether he would ever leave his hospital bed, if his suddenly imprisoned legs would ever find a measure of old freedom.  For non-medicals like me, “auto immune response” is a vague and strange euphemism for individual internal corporal civil war, the body’s immune system besieging and dismantling other vital systems and organs it is meant to protect.  He sits in a reclining bed unable to do anything but to exist, and to think long about life, and to sleep.  He wakes from post-visitor exhaustion and is so relieved to find Jeanette still in his room, at night, and reaches for her reassuring hand to squeeze before she leaves.  “I’m so glad you’re here.  I feel very sad.  I wonder if there is any hope of ever getting better.”  Though aged 87, he does not feel old.  He says he is not ready to go.  “Well, Dad, we must find something to hope for,” I remarked, like knowing that with a power wheelchair he will have full and easy run of the main floor, most importantly of fridge and pantry—that is something to hope for—and knowing that in his power wheelchair he can roam the yard with his hoe and rake and weed-picker and work in the yard as long as he wishes—that is something to hope for—and knowing that he can back his reclining wheelchair into his recliner rocker space, under his white spindle lamp, under his favorite French countryside painting, with his books and mixed nuts and sugar-free chocolate chips and a tall glass of ice water—that is something to hope for—and knowing that if he works as hard as his feeble body can work to regain some little strength, he can leave the hospitals and facilities and centers, he can come home, for however much time is left—that is something to hope for—and knowing that though the world may no longer think it needs his strength and wisdom, he remains very much needed by his sweetheart and his children and his grandchildren and his expanding posterity who all look to him with adoration and tenderness—that is something to hope for, both for you and for me—because I need something to hope for, too.

(Image by Pexels from Pixabay .)

Courage at Twilight: Ridiculous: A Joke

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“It’s a joke!” Dad has said to me many times.  He drops something on the floor and stares at it, unable to bend to pick it up.  “It’s a joke!”  He relies on Mom to pull on his socks and pant legs, to straighten his shirt collar and do up the buttons.  “It’s a joke!”  The push mower pulls him faster than he can follow and he falls, but not, of course, until he has reached the concrete driveway.  “It’s all a big joke!”  I have never thought these jokes particularly funny, but I can certainly recognize the ironies.  And at the hospital he found new things to declare a joke, like when he couldn’t hold his spoon and we fed him his mashed potatoes and meatloaf.  A joke.  And the newest: radiculitis.  Encephalitis, as I understand it, is a swelling of the brain.  Meningitis, they tell me, is a swelling of the membranes protecting the brain and spinal column.  They are dangerous and painful, caused by invading vectors, bacteria or virus.  They can kill you.  But all of Dad’s spinal fluid tests were negative for both.  Had the cause been bacteriological, antibiotics would have been the treatment.  Had the cause been viral, merely time and careful attention.  Now a new theory, the meningitis and encephalitis are not caused from the outside, but from the inside, from some internal mechanism creating the inflammation in the membranes and nerves, radiating out from the central nervous system.  Radiculitis.  “Guess what?” Dad quipped.  “I have ridiculitis!  It all a joke!  Ridiculous!  My central nervous system is trying to kill me!  A big joke!”  And he laughed.  I was glad he could summon the mental and physical wherewithal to laugh.  They injected strong steroids for three days, and he began to move again, and raise his legs and feet, and feed himself, and engage intellectually and coherently with the physicians and therapists.  And to be willful and stubborn again.

(Artist rendering of neural network by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.)

Courage at Twilight: A Box of Peaches

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Three sons and their wives and children and a brother and sisters converged for the holiday weekend on “Grandma and Grandpa’s house” where I live. They slept on sofas and air mattresses and foam pads and emptied the closets of sheets and blankets and towels.  They devoured Dad’s supply of sliced ham and Swiss, which pleased him immensely.  John had called to tell me he and Alleigh were bringing peaches from Pettingill’s Fruit Farm, and how many did I want, a whole box-full or a half.  I opted for the whole box (a half bushel) because one can never have too many fresh ripe peaches in one’s home on a holiday weekend with family.  I would give him the $30 when they arrived, I said.  But they would not let me pay, announcing the peaches as their gift for the weekend.  We enjoyed peaches and cream, peaches and almond milk, peaches on cold cereal, peaches in oatmeal, peaches blended in fruit smoothies, and peaches plain.  Mom and Dad were good sports to have their quietude disrupted with happy energy and noise.  And they joyed to be with three great-grandchildren.  Lila carried around a big sunflower from the vase.  Gabe ran through the sprinkler in 102 degrees F.  And Henry, teething and drooling, always chewing on some toy or other, and babbling and gurgling like babies do, with occasional excited squeals.  And my sons laughing and tossing corn-hole beanbags—how happy I am they are friends.  Living with Mom and Dad, I think of myself as a son, not a grandfather—Dad is “Grandpa,” not me.  But this grandpa worked hard to coax smiles out of the seven-month-old cherub.  Helping Dad down the stairs, keeping a mortal fall at bay with a taught sling around his chest from behind, we heard Henry jabbering from downstairs.  “Is that little Henry?” Dad chuckled.  “It’s just so fun to hear his little voice.”  Here was this old man straining to step down the stairs, and this little boy just beginning to figure out the world, each on the move.  Dad pointed and fell into his recliner, and we brought him Henry, who as if on cue lighted up in a big smile for great-grandpa.  When people are grown up and gone and I think of Labor Day weekend 2022, I will remember Dad’s tenuous stair descent, and the sounds of Henry’s brain growing and mouth teething and grinning and voice babbling and gurgling, and Dad’s rueful chuckle across four generations, and the box-full of gift peaches, juicy and aromatic.

(Pictured above: four generations of Bakers.)

Courage at Twilight: The Best Bad Experience

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The two Brazilian women had invited us to dinner at a Brazilian restaurant where we looked forward to reminiscing on our many tender connections to Brazil.  They run a small housecleaning business and work very hard scrubbing toilets and mopping floors and scouring sinks and vacuuming carpets to make a passable living.  I had planned to pay for the group, but in the order line they whispered happily to me that they were paying for the group.  I felt grateful for their generosity and mortified by their sacrifice.  I mumbled a feeble protest, not wanting to hurt their feelings or draw attention.  “Não pode ser,” I said—This cannot be.  Would my dad be angry? they wondered.  How could I say that Dad and I would both feel embarrassed without embarrassing and hurting them?  Instead of explaining, I offered a compromise: they could pay for themselves and for Mom; I would pay for myself and for Dad.  They accepted without hurt.  But no one expected what followed.  Dad’s steak and onions came out timely and well (medium), then Mom’s seafood stew.  While Dad munched on his steak and Mom hunted for shrimp, we reminisced over avocados the size of cantaloupes, the colors and smells of the traveling street market feiras, neblinha fog rolling in from the Atlantic and over the big city of São Paulo, the fine falling garoando mist-rain for which we do not have an English word, and the cheerful generous people of Brazil.  And Dad cannot simply resist telling about how when I was born the world had only cloth diapers and he had to wash them out by hand and how they strung ropes across the apartment to hang my drying diapers, but in the cold June humidity they would not dry so he pressed them dry with a hot iron, and I was beyond embarrassment and simply dumbly smiled.  We spoke mostly in that most pleasingly musical language of Brazilian Portuguese.  But our food never came: Solange and Ana and I had ordered several favorite Brazilian appetizers for our meal—coxinhas, bolinhos de bacalhau, esfihas, pasteis, kibe—and they never came.  The owners were vacationing in Brazil, half the cooks and servers had called in “sick,” and the remaining two teenagers ran around overwhelmed and frantic.  We checked with them several times on our orders.  Several times they brought us the wrong orders, meant for other frustrated customers.  Solange pilfered some white rice and black bean feijoada from the buffet, but the rice was only half-cooked—al dente would be kind.  At nearly the three-hour mark, the frenzied young manager came to our table, apologized profusely for the problem, refunded some of our money, offered us free brigadeiro cake and vanilla pudim, and begged us to give them another try on another day with another kitchen staff.  We thanked him.  We laughed at our experience.  We could have vented angry frustrations, but we laughed.  We laughed because we had enjoyed such wonderful conversation, memories, impressions, and stories (even if they were about my cloth diapers).  Solange’s and Ana’s meekness and cheer and forgiving positive spirit made anger and frustration impossible.  And they had received no dinner at all!  But the five of us together for three hours relished company and conversation, generosity and kindness, and had the best bad restaurant experience of our lives.  Solange and Mom hugged a rocking dancing hug, smiling and laughing, and Ana jumped in.  Dad received abraços, too, though he is not a hugger.  And I did not complain at being embraced by two pretty ladies from my birth country of Brazil.

Courage at Twilight: Carpets, Canes, and Wheelchairs

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You can imagine cream-colored carpets gathering dirt during regular big-family events where my siblings and their children and their children’s children gather to eat and talk and sing and eat more and tell stories and play games. Certain high-traffic areas are especially prone to pollution: passages between sofas; recliner curtilages; where the little ones play.  Dad has always enjoyed keeping the carpets clean, with his own carpet shampooer that begins with clear water and soap and ends with water dyed black.  He brings the carpets back to clean newness.  When I came home from work on an evening, I found him pushing the machine with one hand, barely balancing with his cane in the other, grimacing and red, and awkwardly bent at knee and hip, seeming ready to sink at any moment.  Seeing a crisis in the making, I stood with my back against the wall, waiting for him to collapse, my body tense and taut and my mind stressed and focused.  I do not take over and I do not chide or boss.  I wait and watch.  But this waiting is far from a passive, peaceful exercise: while the body is poised and still, the energized state of preparedness to pounce in advance of disaster takes a toll.  And at church he leans so heavily on my arm as I tip-toe stoically past the pews, waiting again for the trip and fall, or the spontaneous collapse.  Whether or not he was ready, for me the time for the wheelchair had come, so we had a talk.  I explained that our church mobility method was too stressful for his body, leaving him weak and fatigued for days, and was too stressful for my mind, with his every step an imminent disastrous fall.  I confessed to not being mentally sufficiently strong to stop my life’s orbit to stand with my back against the wall and watch him struggle and anguish over once-easy tasks, to stand tense and taut waiting for him to fall, at which moments I want to scream at my impotence and the agony and futility of his struggle.  I gave the kindest gentlest ultimatum I knew how: “When we go to church tomorrow, I would like you to use your wheelchair.”  It would be much easier for him and for me both, and I would appreciate it.  He looked at me, emotionless, then looked into some unseen distance, without a word, and I knew he was wrestling with overwhelming feelings of uselessness and obsolescence and whether the fight were worth the effort.  Dad has told me a hundred times, “I’m a fighter!” and his fighting spirit has seen him through many an adversity, has kept his family and his own life going in spite of terrible obstacles.  Assaulting Dad’s dignity and dousing the hot ember of his fighting spirit would hasten his demise and would be perhaps my life’s greatest sin.  So, I left my ultimatum-turned-plea floating heavily in the silent room, hoping he could find the mental niche that would allow him to use his wheelchair and to still fight on for life.  The next morning, he greeted me from his bowl of Cheerios and blueberries with a smile and called out, “Rog!  It’s time for church!  Grab that wheelchair and start up the Mighty V8!”  Hallelujah! sighed my spirit.  Glory Hallelujah!

Courage at Twilight: The Gaping Jaws of Hell (or That Damned Window Well): Act 3

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I had served Mom and Dad their plates of chicken strips sauteed with red bell pepper and onion, and their bowls of refried and black beans, cumin-taco seasoned, with cucumber slices and crenshaw cubes on the side, and was preparing my own dinner plate, when Mom shrieked, “Roger!  Terry just fell into the window well!  One moment he was standing there, and the next he was gone!”  Spurred by the memory of Window Well Horrors Act 1 and Act 2, I spurred out the back door in my red socks, wrapped in my baking apron, to where Terry’s head poked up from the window well, blood streaming into his eye and down his face from a head gash.  Hooking an arm under his, I heaved while he stepped up the ladder (thank goodness there was a ladder), his legs trembling, his face ash gray, and sat him in a chair, triaging: How do you feel? (fine) Where do you hurt? (my chest) Are you dizzy? (no) Can you walk? (I think so).  With him stable, I barged into his house to blurt the situation to his wife, grab wet towels, and shove ice cubes into a grocery bag.  First on his head went the wet towel, second the bag of ice.  Then I begged his patience as I wiped blood from his eye, nose, mouth, cheeks, chin, and neck, and removed his blood smeared glasses.  “How are you feeling now?” I asked for the second of a dozen times.  “Stupid!” he spat.  Like with Gabe and Dad, a perfectly placed step on the window well cover had cause Terry’s to flip from its seat and drop him into the deep hole, gashing his scalp as he fell.  And the blood had flowed.  Off Pat rushed him to the hospital, emerging four hours later with stitches and a bandage and Percocet for the pain of his upper body being suddenly spread and stretched by his arms hitting the well on the way down.  But no broken bones or torn muscles or ligaments.  “How are you feeling now?” I asked at midnight.  “Sore,” he signed.  “And stupid!”  A loaf of chocolate chip banana bread the day after, and fresh corn on the cob from Dad the next, and we had become “the best neighbors ever.”  Neighborliness aside, had Mom not glanced out her window at precisely the moment Terry fell into the well, no one would have known, perhaps for a long time, and the list of possible horribles is too long.  But Mom did look out her window at that precise moment, and Mom did see him fall, and Mom did send me bolting with a scream, and I was there when I was needed.  And Terry (82) is alright, asleep, Percocet prone in his recliner.  He is safe.  In one short year, window wells at our two houses have gobbled up three people.  If we were a statistical cohort, the country would be in a serious window well epidemic.  At some point in the late night, I realized I had been privileged to enact the rescue in all three scenes, and with my presence being the common denominator, I hereby decree that, from henceforth, stepping by any person on a window well cover of any type, shape, or material, for any reason, is hereinafter strictly prohibited.

Courage at Twilight: Nature’s Serendipity

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The mountain bike trail proved too challenging for me: too steep and too rocky for too long. I stopped pedaling a dozen times to rest and drink and slow my racing heart.  Walking the steepest stretches, I finally reached the top of the trail, marked by a bridge over the river, set Dad’s red vintage Specialized against a tree, and stepped down the fractured granite to the riverside, where I knelt and cupped icy water onto my feverish head.  How relieving that cold water felt, and I calmed and relaxed.  The river cascaded violently and deafeningly down and past, lurching between thousands of giant rough angular granite boulders.  My peripheral vision detected a short-tailed gray bird land on a mid-river rock downstream, bobbing on her backward knees, lifting her very-short tail with each bow.  She fluttered from boulder to boulder, thrusting her black beak into the current to pick nymphs and rollers off rocks, working her way toward me, at times even immersing and walking along the river bottom to find insect morsels.  I sat perfectly still and she paid me no heed as she came to within six feet, preening her delicate gray plumage before me in a spot of full sun, then hopped back into the shadows to work her way upstream and around a bend fifty feet off.  What an encounter!  Forty years ago, Dad and I left the Sawtooth Mountain trail to follow the stream, and saw a little gray bird with a short tail hopping and bobbing along a log fallen across the stream.  The bird grasped the bark with its long feat and stepped around the circumference of the log from dry air to upside-down and under water, emerging dry and pretty on the other circumference side.  Dad and I were gob smacked.  A Robin-like bird that walks and hunts underwater in a swift mountain stream?  We had never heard of such a bird.  But our field guide introduced us to the American Dipper, and, though a colorless non-descript little bird, she has become one of our favorites.  Memories of our first Dipper and the stream and the forest and the mountains and the moose and trout and bear and beaver and the wild blueberries flooded back to Dad’s perfect recollection as I described my new and fortuitous encounter.  I discovered as a boy that Nature comes to me when I am still.  I do not call her or pursue her.  I study and I watch and I wait, in good places and at right times, and Nature’s path veers toward mine to grace me with intimate unearned wildlife experiences.  My children know this, and we both marvel at Nature’s magical providence.  The butterflies come, and I know their names and their habits, and I talk to them: “Hello Beautiful,” I whisper to the Tiger Swallowtail or the Red-spotted Purple.  “You look lovely and strong today.”  The deer come, and the beaver, the Red Slider turtle and the Belted Kingfisher and Clark’s Grebe and Black-crowned Night Heron.  “Hello pretty Mama,” I once whispered to a Mule Deer doe suckling her spotted fawn, the mother taut with fear, ready to pronk away, and I reassure her, “Don’t worry, little Mama, I will not hurt you or your magical spotted fawn.  You need not fear me.  I will wait right here until you are ready for me to pass.”

(Photo above from eBird.org, used pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Pictured below: photos of Little Cottonwood trail, creek, and canyon.  The trailhead is a ten-minute drive from Mom’s and Dad’s house.

 

Courage at Twilight: Resolute

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“Look!  There are two birds perched in the top of that quaking aspen tree,” Dad enthused.  “Those aren’t birds, Nelson,” Mom corrected.  “They are leaves.”  A month later, while I weeded the flower garden of its “carpet of weeds,” as Dad called it, I saw that the two resolute bird-leaves clung to their spot in the tree.  When Dad discovered I was working outside in the cooler heat of a summer morning, he hurried with all the torpor of a nearly 90-year-old to dress and join me in the yard.  “I want to work outside with Roger,” he told Mom.  Before he came outside, I hoed and raked and piled weeds, and shaved Irish Spring soap on the flowers to deter the urban deer from munching, and I thought about meeting my date the night before, and several other women I met at the singles conference and on the dating app I both like and loathe.  Dad shot me an avuncular grin last week when I informed him I had a date.  I met Shar, with long flowing red hair, at a park where I had unfolded a blue gingham tablecloth and set out the quiche I had managed to bake that day.  She was sweet and kind and affirming despite my awkward boyish 58-year-old attempts at romance.  “You did all this for me?” she asked with some emotion.  Yes, I did, because I wanted to make our meeting nice for her, and for me.  I did not want ham sandwiches or fried chicken; I wanted to make and bring a special homemade meal.  In recent weeks, I have met Rie, persisting through bar exam preparations despite a traumatic brain injury, and Chris, who thought the restaurant’s azeite olive oil of low quality, and Sol, who sallies forth to text once in a while then withdraws, and Deb, who has grown distant, and Lynn, who teaches Bronte and came down with Covid and cancelled, and Tawny, with seven children, and I have seven children, and oh my gosh! can I imagine having fourteen children with all their spouses and children? no I cannot.  All wonderful, kind, pleasant women whom I have enjoyed meeting and whom I respect.  I am learning (again) that dating requires meeting new people, and meeting new people requires courage and effort, and finding courage requires me to believe in myself in spite of rejection and risk.  Shar and I dipped strawberries in sour cream and rolled them in brown sugar and munched the pleasurable sweet-tart-sour combination.  And we painted canvas boards and glued on buttons and paper dragonflies, and I felt so grateful she thought the evening was fun and so grateful she did not mind my timid nerdiness.  “Rog!” Dad called out when I walked through the door.  “Tell us all about your date!”  And I happily did.

Courage at Twilight: That Pervasive Little Squeal

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The front door nob when turned emits a pervasive little squeal upon the first turn, never the second or third, such that our comings and goings are never a secret.  The squeak begs for lubrication, and goes without—once the door shuts, I forget, for the squeal comes with the opening not the shutting of the door.  Out that door we piled, into the suburban, loaded with coolers and cabanas and chairs, on our excursion “to the Uintas” the old east-west range in the younger north-south Rockies.  We set the “easy-up” cabana over the picnic table at the edge of Moose Horn Lake, and we eased Mom and Dad down the shallow trail to their camp chairs under the cabana from where they gazed out over the lake where the zebra trout were rising for gnats, at the towhee flitting low in the dwarf spruces, at the robin dangling a worm lakeside, at the paintbrush and wild strawberry and blue columbine blossoms, at the layered formations on the back side of Bald Mountain, some lying flat and dark, others standing crumbled and rusty, evidence of tectonic cataclysm.  These views formed Dad’s definition and experience of wonder.  “I used to come here when I was young,” Dad began, recounting how he bought an old jalopy and cut off the roof to make the car a convertible and draped a blanket over the occupants with holes cut out for their heads, how he put a “bumble bee” on his fly line and lowered it from his perch on a house-sized boulder and how when the bee hung six inches above the water an enormous trout leapt to devour the bee and how the beautiful sleek strong creature hung wriggling for a moment then flipped itself free and flew back to the water.  Dad told us how he came often to the lakes of the high Unitas to fish, and how his best fishing day was when the rain drizzled down and he floated his fly and the fishes struck and struck and he caught and caught.  Purple-black clouds began to gather, as they can do several times a day in these high mountains, and knowingly we packed up and shoved off, grateful to be in a warm suburban with a roof to protect us from the sudden deafening blinding hailstorm that carpeted the forest with billions of white balls of ice.  Might this be Dad’s last trip to the Uintas, where he can relive in context the happy youthful memories of driving the jalopy and dangling the bee and looking up into the rain?  Reaching home, 98 degrees Fahrenheit to the Uinta’s 46, I turned the door knob and did not hear the iconic squeal, for I had oiled it as we left.

Pictured above: Glacier Lilies

Courage at Twilight: So Many Singles

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Most of Barber’s Adagio for Strings is intensely hushed and weeping, so Mom turns up the volume, but then The School for Scandal blares its horns and winds and Mom mercifully lowers the volume down to middling. Yesterday’s emotional volume flood-gushed and cymbal-crashed and left me feeling worn and ready to withdraw for an extended sabbatical to my cool dark cave.  More than five-hundred singles had gathered at their annual conference, people just like me: 41+ years old, friends and members of my Church, divorced, widowed, or never married.  I had plumbed my vulnerability reserves and found just enough courage to attend my first-ever event for older singles.  I stood in a corner and scanned the crowd, not as a predator, but as a fascinated intimidated spectator who feared being thrust into the arena.  People of all sizes, styles, and shapes, elegant to homely, hubris to humility.  Women glanced at me curiously (thirstily?), and men haughtily, and moved on.  I recognized that here was a room filled with pain and struggle, filled with dark disappointments, filled with raw effort and growth and triumph—these have all been mine, too, so I guessed I fit fairly in.  I met many over ice-breakers and Polish sausages: Jessica, who has lost 70 pounds, no longer eats sugar, and does not work, being supported by her children; and Keith, who lost his wife to cancer, waited six months, and now is on the hunt; and Deborah, a graphics artist and child advocate who lost a son to muscular dystrophy and loves nature and hiking and was delightful to talk to; and Eric who recently moved from the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico and who “just” runs a local warehouse; and Eileen, who jumped in to help set up round tables and unfold steel chairs and toss tablecloths because she was there and was needed; and many others during a black-out bingo mixer in which I would not participate because one had to make animal impressions (I finally yielded one dead-pan “ruff ruff”) and show off dance moves (having lost them decades ago, if I ever had them), gaze into someone’s eyes unspeaking for sixty seconds (oh God, never again!), and play rounds of Rock Paper Scissors to help ladies get their “bingo!” (kind of fun, actually).  Keith decided he was my pal, and stuck to me while I mingled and politely conversed with the ladies.  A room full of pain, I thought, and triumph.  And I decided I admired every single person present (well, they were all single) for their willingness to be vulnerable, their courage to show up and be seen, their determination to hold intact their sense of value, their resolve to grow through suffering.  Dancing came later, but I felt too terrified to attend, and Mom and Dad had a neighborhood party to go to, and I was their driver.  I would like to see Deborah again.

(Pictured above: a small number of our group who hiked to the lower falls of Battlecreek Canyon, my favorite part of the singles conference activities.)

Courage at Twilight: Getting It Right

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Yesterday: I was not angling for a pat on the head, but neither did I expect a rap on the knuckles.  I had listened to everything Dad said he would do to get ready for the wedding: string trim the grass along the sidewalks and the rock wall and around the landscape beds; hoe and pull all the weeds and tall grass and wild morning glory vines from the shrubs and beds.  He could do none of it, and I suspected the man he had hired would not show up (he didn’t), so I set to work hoeing, snipping, trimming, raking, bagging, sweating, near collapse from illness and fatigue.  Six neighborhood men converged for a successful second attempt to winch the impossibly heavy brick mailbox pedestal into its hole.  They repaired the broken sprinkler pipe, stacked the sod, and will come back in a couple of days to see how the pedestal has settled, pour fresh cement, and restore the soil and grass.  Dad sat and watched and worried and advised, straight from his bed, without taking his medicine, without drinking, without eating—straight to the job for the long-haul, sitting in the driveway in the hot sun, sweating out his strength, begging on the misery of seizures and exhaustion.  Four friendly Columbians assembled the wedding tent and I stumbled to be friendly in Spanish, treating them to cold Brazilian Guaraná soda (“No es cerveza?”  “No, no tiene alcohol.”)  I finished my work after six hours, and putting the tools away, Dad told me I had done the string trimming wrong.  No “thank you.”  No “looks great.”  No “you did a lot today.”  Like I said, I did the work because it needed doing, and I was proud of the beautiful manicured result—I was not pandering for praise.  But if you expect a job done a certain way, tell me at the beginning of the job; do not wait until the job is done and then criticize the result.  I felt suddenly furious, and announced I was done because I had worked beyond my limits, which I had, and my arms and hands were shaking and my breathing tight and short and all I wanted was to lie down in a cool dark room.  But I found little Gabe (almost four already!) and asked him the question he always hopes to hear: Do you want to bake some cupcakes, little friend?  He measured and poured and stirred and tasted at every step, from bitter cocoa-powder paste to rich batter to sweet butter-cream icing to small spoonsful of sprinkles, the various chocolaty substances fingerpainted on his face.  But Gabe’s all-time favorite game is Hide-and-Seek.  “Nobody wants to play Hide-and-Seek with me,” he bemoaned as everyone worked, and I thought maybe I could find a little hiding and seeking energy for my little friend.  When he counts, he counts fast, and ten “seconds” was barely enough time to bound off and stumble behind a bush, where he found me when I poked up for a peak and he squealed and I laughed and his mama watched us from the kitchen window, giggling.  Gabe took most of the cupcakes home, thankfully.  Later I laid in bed wondering at my still-smoldering anger and how outsized it was to the offense and wondering where it came from and pondering my six-decade relationship with the great man I call “Dad” and learning long ago not to expect praise but to get the job done right and wondering what my three daughters and my four sons think of their “Papa” and whether my expectations were reasonable, and reasonably expressed.

Last Night: And at 1:00 a.m. my sleeping ears began to hear Dad’s far-off call “Rog!” and at the second “Rog!” I jumped from my bed, threw off the loathed CPAP cup, grabbed my 45-year-old homemade brown terrycloth bathrobe and ran to the stairs to confront the whole spectrum of trouble.  But there sat Dad in his recliner, reading, munching, happy, perfectly fine and safe, waving, smiling curiously at me looking distressed in my underwear at the top of the stairs.  I hung my bathrobe on its hook and resumed staring at the dark ceiling, ready to let go of unintended offense, ready for sleep, ready for the last Mary Berry cupcake the next day, a Sunday, a day of rest.

Today: Dad, sitting with me at a round table under the wedding tent: “Rogie, did you do all this work in the yard?  There’s not a single weed in the shrub beds, and they are all raked out so nice and neat.  And the string-trimmed edges of the lawn are perfect.  It’s all perfect.  You have made the hard look so nice for the wedding.  Thank you.”

Courage at Twilight: Broken

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The dishwasher door springs both broke and the heavy door slammed down if not snapped securely shut, and with the anchor broken off the washer tipped forward and the dish-laden trays rolled out with a jarring clang. Brian helped me pull the machine out and install the new springs and pulley cords.  Tracy helped fashion homemade counter-anchors from common elbow brackets—and they worked!  On advice from the Bosch store, I had bought an expensive new dishwasher base, but was relieved to find the old base had a built-in slot for the new springs, and I was spared the chore of disassembling the washer and the exasperation of not being able to see in my mind how to reassemble the parts back into the whole (an annoying life-long intellectual weakness).  As it was, You Tube was indispensable, even to replace the springs.  I felt thrilled and relieved we had succeeded in fixing the dishwasher, and thanked my Lord the repair was simpler than anticipated.  I had not realized the stress and pressure I was putting on myself to get the machine fixed.  But then Brian found a pool of water under the kitchen sink, dripping from a filter cartridge seal, dripping down a hole into the cavity above the finished basement, and we could not find the filter wrench.  The bowl I placed under the filter filled overnight and spilled again into the dark void in the floor.  Following with my eyes the various colored hoses (blue, yellow, red, black, and white), I discerned how to turn off the water to the filter and close the bladder tank valve—and the drip stopped, just in time to leave for church.  Staggering with his cane, Dad wondered if today would be his last day walking to our habitual pew near the front.  “My legs just won’t work.  I’m getting worse.”  Post-polio sets in like a heavy dense discouraging fog that never blows or burns off but grows only heavier and denser and more oppressive, and one’s feet become increasingly thick and leaden and mired in an energy-sapping sink.  He made it to and from church, today, with help under each arm.  Terry asked me how Dad was doing, not needing my response to see the truth, and knowing my unspoken thoughts as he offered, “I have a good wheelchair.  I’ll dust it off and bring it over.”  I thanked him, and suggested I would come get it so I could sneak it into the house unseen.  Dad thinks he likely will skip the walker and go straight from the cane to the wheelchair.  After church and rice casserole and a nap, Mom showed me how the DVD player would not respond to the remote or to direct button pushing—it had swallowed the DVD and refused to give it back.  She pried the tray open with a serrated Cutco knife, and the tray stuck stubbornly out, appearing much like a dead animal with its tongue lolling.  Remembering the no-longer-used basement entertainment equipment, I brought up the old combination VCR/DVD player, made before HDMI technology, and plugged the red, white, and yellow audio/video cords into the TV.  With new batteries in the remote, the old machine came to life, functioning correctly and obeying Mom’s commanding button bushes.  She was so pleased she decided the moment was right for an episode of NCIS, which she learned was also a favorite of Gabe’s other great-grandparents, the Scotts.  The word “surprised” describes my reaction to having fixed three broken appliance problems in two days—generally I am not very handy.  I only wish I could fix the only real problem of these four: Dad’s crumbling legs and feet and disintegrating mobility.  The best I may be able to do is to push his chair down the aisle at church to sit near our customary pew, on the front row, where space was left for a wheelchair.

Courage at Twilight: Cleaning the Church on Saturday

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The church responsibility I would like least of all—and every member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a church responsibility—is being in charge of recruiting families to clean the church every Saturday morning at 8:00.  But Jim does not seem to mind, and called to remind me that my turn would be this Saturday.  The six families had last names beginning with the As and Bs, plus a holdover Y.  Jim set me to work vacuuming the cultural hall (a carpeted basketball court and social hall).  Until my first decade in life, if Church members wanted a church meetinghouse building, they funded the building, built the building, operated the building, and maintained the building with their own labor and funds.  In 1971-1972 Dad worked nearly every night on our nascent New Jersey church building, digging footing trenches, laying brick, mountain baseboards, painting cinderblock walls, stretching carpet.  Dad had been put in charge of the enormous volunteer project, in addition to his job as an international corporate lawyer, his job as a lay minister, and his jobs as husband and father.  My siblings and I have marveled at how he did it all, and did it all ably and well.  Everyone that helped with the construction project received a small plaque made from scrap wood trim showing the number of hours worked: Dad’s plaque announced his 312 volunteer hours.  Half a century later, the Church now builds and operates its meetinghouses with Church funds, collected from the tithing of members worldwide.  But Church members clean the buildings that they attend.  My willingness and cheerfulness about rising early on Saturday to scrub toilets and vacuum floors in my Utah church building is one of several built-in barometers by which I can measure my mental health.  (The frequency and virulence of under-my-breath profanity is another faithful manifestation of stormy emotional weather.)  My cheerfulness this Saturday to rise early and clean the church was a good sign, in contrast to past years where despair and tension and exhaustion kept me in bed.  And I only swore a few times when tripping on the vacuum cleaner cord—no one knew but me.  Other church members on our A-B (and Y) team were a commercial litigation lawyer, a pediatric anesthesiologist, a happy shy Downs syndrome man, a retired long-haul truck driver, and assorted children.  Wielding our rubber gloves and spray bottles, status and position meant nothing—we all put our shoulders to the wheel, counted our blessing of service, and counted our blessing of being together in the community of our Church.  And on the other side of the country, my younger brother was scrubbing toilets and vacuuming carpets in his North Carolina church building, his barometer reading gentle spring weather with wisps of clouds in a blue sky.

Courage at Twilight: Mother

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Brother Liu rang the door chime and asked me to deliver the Mother’s Day sermon in church in two weeks.  Feeling honored, but also intimidated and overwhelmed, I set to researching my Church’s teachings about motherhood, and searching my memory for vivid images of meaningful times spent with my mother.  A good place to begin was this simple statement of Church doctrine: “Just as we have a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven.”  A prominent Church member and businesswoman, Sister Dew, explains that  Eve mothered all of mankind when she made the most courageous decision any woman has ever made, to leave the Garden of Eden and to begin the mortality both of Earth and of humanity.  Eve modeled “the characteristics with which women have been endowed: heroic faith, a keen sensitivity to the Spirit, an abhorrence of evil, and complete selflessness.”  Never married, and without children of her own, she asserts what I welcome as divine truth: as daughters of our Heavenly Father, and as daughters of Eve, all women are mothers.  Every time a woman builds the faith or reinforces the nobility of a young woman or man, every time a woman loves or leads anyone even one small step along the path, that woman is true to her endowment and calling and inherent nature as a mother, declaring, Are we not all mothers?  I can easily use the word “endowment” to refer to my own mother’s presence in my life.  In our weekly family gatherings, Mom taught us children new Church primary songs by writing words and symbols on posterboard.  Every morning before school I found a bowl of steaming whole wheat cereal, made from wheat she ground, and creamed with powdered milk she mixed in the blender.  On Sunday afternoons, Mom read us wonderful books—like The Secret Garden—while we munched on small quantities of M&Ms.  She took us to free concerts and musicals in the park.  She was my church choir director for nine of my years in New Jersey.  Mom took me to pick wild asparagus, and taught me to make blackberry jam, sealing the jars with hot paraffin wax poured on top.  She gave me swimming lessons and supported me in Scouting.  She nursed me through endless ear infections, cheered for me when I succeeded, believed in me when I failed, and buttressed me when I mourned.  And she drove me all over the Garden State to give me enriching musical, educational, cultural, and nature opportunities.  Coming from a rural Utah town, Mom took on the world when she and Dad moved to New York City, living in Greenwich Village, and then to São Paulo, Brazil, for post-graduate school and work, soon settling in New Jersey for a 35-year career.  And she relished it all.  I have heard endearing stories about children who burst through the door after school, calling, “Mom—I’m home!”  At almost 60 years old, I again get to experience the privilege of walking through the front door each day after work and calling out, “Hi Mom.  I’m home.”  I think the word “mother” is synonymous with “home.”  My 20-minute sermon ended with the blessing of living Apostle Holland upon all mothers, “Be peaceful.  Believe in God and in yourself.  You are doing better than you think you are.  Thank you. Thank you for giving birth, for shaping souls, for forming character, and for demonstrating the pure love of Christ.”  How relieved yet invigorated I felt after finishing the talk!  And Mom seemed happy with my tribute to her on Mother’s Day.

(Pictured above: Mom’s Mother’s Day bouquet.)

Mom with Mother’s Day fluffy pillow present.

Courage at Twilight: Sundry

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Ely discovered water pooled on the laundry room floor and reported the flood to Mom. Together they mopped up the water with rags.  Appliance said he could have a new pump shipped from Washing in a few days.  I had procrastinated, and needed to wash my clothes that very day.  I focused on yard work, putting off my evening trip to the laundromat.  But when Terry and Pat, the nice neighbors, stopped by to visit, Mom told them about the washer and the laundromat and they insisted I come to their house to use their washer.  “Do you want me to do it for you?” Pat asked kindly, but I do not allow anyone handle my dirty laundry, and told her I would enjoy doing it, thank you.  Ely is a housecleaner.  Dad has vacuumed the carpets and swept and mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms and scrubbed the shower walls his whole married life, but has run out of strength, mobility, and steam.  Ely, a delightful, humble, thorough dual citizen, now takes care of what Mom and Dad can no longer take care of.  They do not call her the cleaning lady; they call her Ely, their friend and indispensable helper.  The house tidied, Brian and Avery arrived with two-year-old Lila to celebrate his 32nd birthday, and I was touched he wanted to celebrate with us.  We set up cornhole and ring toss and a PVC scaffold onto which one tosses golf balls joined by short ropes.  Lila objected to how my rope-tied-spheres hung from the rungs—“No! Gwampa Waja!” she insisted.  She repositioned each hanging rope according to her adorable imagination, delightedly proclaiming the decorated structure her Christmas tree.  At dinner, I decided ground sirloin is much tastier than hamburger, well worth the extra one dollar per pound.  I had prepared a birthday dessert from my French cookbook—Brian chose chocolate mousse, which I have mastered after many trials.  Into the dessert cups we jammed and lighted three candles.  Lila made sure her daddy blew them out correctly.  An unconventional birthday “cake,” still the result was superb (thank you Julia), with strong Pero substituting for strong coffee.  The sun dipped low behind the house, and the air quickly chilled.  Dad and I sat on patio chairs listening to the red House Finch sing with happy gusto, perched on a spiny blue spruce nearby.  “Listen to that little guy sing!” Dad hooted.  We commented on what a happy thing it is—a happy miraculous thing—that nature sings.

Courage at Twilight: Class of ’58

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“I’ll go with you!” I enthused when Mom showed me her invitation to her 64th high school reunion, for the Class of ’58. I have never once attended my high school, college, or law school reunions, but felt excited about going to Mom’s.  But the morning of, she confessed to being very nervous and perhaps not wanting to go.  I suggested we just go for an afternoon drive and perhaps stop in at the reunion to see what it was like.  We drove through the old dilapidated Magna neighborhood, Mom pointing out “Uncle John’s” house here and “Uncle Jim’s” house there.  With Mom hanging on my arm, we entered the high school cafeteria and saw milling around a milieu of gray smiling heads and gnarled mottled hands with an assortment of canes and walkers.  Faces mostly were unrecognizable to Mom after 64 years, but looking at each other’s nametags through the bottoms of their trifolds, recognition dawned and faces lit up.  “Lucille!” one woman cried.  “Valorna!” Mom called back.  They were young girls again.  Louie Notarianni wandered over with a pleasant hello.  “He was so cool then,” Mom whispered to me.  “Now look at him!”  I guess carrying the cool is harder at 85.  “Neil wasn’t very nice,” she remembered, but noted how pleasant he was to everyone now.  And her second cousin Gay (with the same maiden name, Bawden) ambled over with a smile and a hug.  “When I called in and found out you were coming,” Gay rattled to Mom, “I decided the long drive from Portland would be worth it.”  Still sweet friends.  Don Lund welcomed the crowd and explained how Doreen Harmon had catered the lunch from Harmon’s grocery store as a gift to her class.  Don held up like a waving flag a typed list of 147 Gone But Not Forgotten classmates, 147 out of a class of 200.  The list sobered me, knowing Mom was one of a dwindling minority of surviving members of the Class of ’58.  Which one of these good cheerful persons will be next to join this list? I wondered.  I hoped it would not be Mom, turning 83 this year.  The scull & crossbones on the reunion announcement added a macabre touch to the event, even knowing the Pirate was the mascot of Cyprus High.  Mom decided she had had enough of a good thing, and that we could “go home now.”  I hurried over to cousin Gay, a spritely youthful woman, embraced her (for the last time in this life), and crowed, “The Bawdens are great!” twinkling to her husband that the Iversons were okay, too.

Class of 1958 Cyprus HS Centennial banner, reused from 4 years prior.

 

Class of ’58 reunion announcement.

Courage at Twilight: Not Feeling Well

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“I’m not feeling well this morning,” Dad muttered, and Mom cried out, “Oh, Nelson! Again? What are we going to do?” She tossed her needlepoint in sudden tears and shuffled to the kitchen, making herself busy with her morning herbal tea and granola breakfast, leaving Dad on his bedroom couch to contemplate the ever more difficult daily ordeal of shoving off to the shower and dressing.  I hoped he would feel better after swallowing his medicine with a glass of water.  And I hoped Mom could let go of her terrible fear for his welfare.  His noon breakfast over, we left in the Mighty V8 for the grocery store.  Grill fixings were in order with my son Brian visiting for his 32nd  After finishing with produce and meat, I told Dad I would get the dill pickle hamburger chips, and rushed off down the aisle.  I put the pickle jar in my cart, and he asked me as he rolled up if I had seen anything else we needed or that looked good to me as I had walked down that aisle.  I looked at him, then down the aisle, unsure of what it contained.  Focused on the pickle job, I had not seen anything else on the aisle, and reported as much.  “I saw everything,” he asserted. “And I wanted everything I saw.”  His unbounded enthusiasm became evident as we reached Luana’s check-out counter with three full shopping carts in tow.  Home by 3:30 p.m., Dad announced lunch time, and set to work building his onion sandwich.  Knowing the strain of walking and bending to retrieve the makings from the fridge, I tossed on the counter baggies with leftover onion and tomato, the mustard and mayonnaise, the sliced ham and cheese, and the multi-grain bread, then ascended stairs to my home office to finish remotely the afternoon’s work.  Descending later for a cold water bottle (refilled now at least 400 times), I looked upon the familiar after-lunch scene: a half onion generously deodorizing the house, spiked with the protruding fork Dad used to hold the onion in place while he safely sliced it; the rubber scraper slathered with warm mayonnaise soiling the counter; slices of Swiss cheese exposed and drying in the package because he had scissored off the zipper his fumbling fingers no longer pulled.  I have allowed this scene to annoy me a hundred times, and I am tired of being annoyed, and am choosing instead to incorporate into my afternoon routine the washing of a knife and a rubber scraper and the restocking of ham, cheese, mayo, mustard, potato chips, and the wiping down of the countertop with Lysol bleach.  One day I will look at the empty, sterile countertop and miss the mess, all those things that will mean he was here with us then.  Who else in this world will prepare every day an onion sandwich for lunch at 5:00 pm?  There is no one, I am sure.  From my desk, pondering the empty countertop, sudden quick shadows passed over the front lawn, shadows of Canada geese flying over the house with their honks and blares and gray feathers.

(Pictured above, two of Mom’s exquisite needlepoints.)

Courage at Twilight: An Inconvenient Husband

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I was looking forward to my visit with Harvey, my old mountain man friend and friend to the west desert’s Native Americans.  The night before I left, he called to let me know two things, first that he was looking forward to my visit, very much, and second that he and Mary were separating, selling the property, and moving from Enterprise, he to the obscure Arizona town of Eager, and her to the obscure Nevada town of Panaca.  When the equity was split, he would receive about $30,000.  He paid $40,000 for the house and property almost a decade earlier, before the housing boom, paying in cash, and owning the property outright, without debt.  But she decided she needed money, mortgaged the house once then twice, couldn’t make the $120,000 loan payments—she could not say where the money had gone—and filed for bankruptcy, dragging Harvey along.  He bought the property free and clear for 40K and sold it for $200,000, what would have and should have been a windfall but was instead a pittance of a retirement estate.  Bankrupt.  Only a small social security income—a fixed income, as they say.  Not nearly enough to pay her debts.  Enough to feed him a bird’s portion and to feed his birds, his roller pigeons and his Araucana hens.  The birds is what the row was about, ostensibly.  He loved his birds.  He doted on and clucked to and spoke and sang and whistled to his birds.  Enamored early in their first marriage, she now was tired of the birds at the end of their second marriage—his fifth marriage—because she wanted to travel and he, at 85, did not want to travel he could not travel because he needed to take care of his birds—this 85-year-old man that weighs 98 pounds and stoops to four feet tall and that loves his birds and feeds them and clucks knowingly to them.  Harvey had become an inconvenient husband.  And she had demanded, It’s me or the pigeons, Harv!  Well, he guessed he’d keep the pigeons—they were less trouble and loved him more. So now he will lose both his wife and his pigeons, because he is moving far away to live with his daughter, who will treat him kindly and patiently in sync with his tenderness and devotion and love.  I shouted at Harvey for the two days of my visit—my final visit to Enterprise and perhaps to Harvey—because when he could not make the payments, the company turned his hearing aids off, and he was deaf, and I had to shout to be heard, hollering after several uttered Hmmn?s and a final nod of comprehension—hunchbacks? NO LUNCH BOX! (the antique I gave him for his 80th birthday)—and if I had stayed another day I would have become hoarse and would have grown too sad.  An inconvenient husband, Harvey, friend to Native Americans and knower of their ways and medicines and religion and rituals and pure hearts, Harvey the mountain man, Harvey my believing accepting humble grateful friend.  Mom and Dad were kind enough to listen to my grieving when I returned home feeling the doom of human pride and selfishness.  Harvey had wondered to me where he had gone wrong in his life—he had done everything he knew to do right—to lose three wives to divorce (two of them twice) and to lose all his earthly means and his tools and clever rustic scrap-wood outbuildings and to be alone at last at 85 without the love he has always craved.  Lying in my bed staring at the ceiling fan in the early warmth of spring and remembering back three decades, I saw his beard’s two-foot-long white ringlets, his pet skunk Petunia hiding shyly in his quilted plaid jacket, his hearty chuckle and a good joke, and the glow of the hot rocks he placed in the center of the turtle lodge where the Sun Chiefs sang and blew the pipe smoke and whispered aho!

(Pictured above: Harvey with the tractor of his youth.)

 

Harvey with his pigeons.

 

The diminutive Harvey with my giant son Caleb.

 

Harvey with Yours Truly.

Courage at Twilight: How Was Your Day?

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“Tell me about your day,” I ventured as I drove Dad to Smith’s in the Faithful Suburban (also known as the “Mighty V8”). “Oh,” he began, “I had a good day, even though I didn’t accomplish one blessed thing.”  I said I supposed one’s perspective of what a good day is might change at different times in one’s life.  “Indeed,” he confirmed.  “For me, a good day is to survive.”  That’s all: to survive.  Gone are the days of ebullient striving and thriving.  The point comes where mere living is sufficient—as opposed to dying, from viral meningitis or a car wreck or heart disease or aspirating on one’s food or falling down the stairs or eating too much sugar or an abundance of other morose possibilities.  Changing the subject, I mentioned I had stopped at the Bosch store to buy a part to fix the dishwasher door, which one day had lost all tension in the springs and fell open with a bang.  The belligerent door had already hammered at Mom’s leg, leaving a big long angry purple bruise on her leg.  Dad and I had driven to Smith’s with a particular mission in mind: a rotisserie chicken for dinner.  And after dinner I slid the dishwasher out and found the suspected chords broken and detached from the springs.  Then I discovered that the 1/16 of-an-inch-wide plastic anchors holding the stiff springs in place within the dishwasher frame had deteriorated from their old weld, and the springs floated anchorless in their plastic sockets.  The new chords would do me no good with nothing to anchor the springs.  Discouraged, I discerned that the door could not be fixed: the integrated plastic anchors had simply disintegrated, on both sides of the door.  Things seem to be crumbling all around me, I thought, as the clip that held the dishwasher in place buckled and broke and the machine lurched forward and the loaded dish trays rolled out clanking.  Already the first week of May, with already several 80-degree-F days behind us, heavy snow blew at a slant outside the kitchen window from low black clouds.  I had arrived home late from work, and did not have time or energy to cook, hence the rotisserie run to Smith’s in the Mighty V8, where Dad motored off in the motorized shopping cart and another older patron quipped, “Drive safe.”

Courage at Twilight: Flower Garden

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Field grass had grown up through the thick ice plant groundcover in the front flower bed. Dad had sprayed with a product that avowed “kills grass, not flowers,” which did not kill the grass and did kill the flowers, just not the plants.  He had spent hours poking at the grass with a long weeding tool, from a seated position.  But he finally gave up.  “Rog, I have made a decision.  I want to dig all the ice plants out.”  I began to dig in the dense matt.  “Make sure to shake out the soil,” Dad instructed.  I did so (and would have done so), tossing the dirtless plant clumps in his direction.  I did not look as I tossed them, and was confident I was not hitting him with the clumps, but did toss them in the vicinity of his feet, where the remnant soil filled his shoes.  “Roger’s revenge,” I quipped playfully.  “Did you know you dig with your left foot?” Mom asked randomly.  No, I did not know.  I am fairly confident my long life of garden digging has been ambidextrous (or as the local newspaper recently headlined, “amphibious”), but for some reason my left boot liked this job.  Dad had stumbled out with all his hand tools, but sat in his chair talking to me as I strained at the earthy tangles.  Several times he enthused, “I’m enjoying just visiting and watching you work.”  As long as he is happy, I am happy.  Using a leaf rake, he pulled the clumps together and lifted them into the garbage can, which I had positioned near his chair.  The filled bags were very heavy, and the wheeled can, with four filled ice-plant bags, felt full of rocks.  After two hours, we had an 8×9 open space, penned in by old bushes, with soft sandy soil, an empty pretty, space.  “I like it just like that,” Mom insisted.  “I don’t want any more bushes that you have to take care of.”  But Dad and I really wanted to decorate the space with new flowering plants.  We took ten-year-old Amy to the nursery, and carefully selected the plants based on tolerance of full sun and low water, plant height, and especially color and beauty of flower.  The empty space is now decorated with beautiful flowering plants, seen by every car that passes—a thousand a day, easily—and every person that walks by.  They all know: That’s Nelson’s yard; look how nice he has made it.  “You did a big job today, Rogie.  I didn’t think we would even start this job, let alone finish.”  Truth be told, neither did I.  Both my back and my attitude held out.  We finished at dusk, and I felt too tired to cook, so out came the leftover whole-wheat lasagna Sarah sent over days before, with canned corn and peas, warmed in the microwave.  Remembering the ravenous mule deer roving the neighborhood, I ventured into the dark and chill to grate Irish Spring bar soap on and around the plants.  Though we like seeing the deer, having our plants eaten overnight would have made us very sad.  But the next morning, the plants were intact and happily boasting their blossoms.

(Pictured above: Dad’s ice plants, before the non-killing spray killed them.)

(Pictured below: our new flower garden, before and after.)

(The string is not to keep out the deer, which would easily step over it, but rather the neighborhood children congregating at the corner bus stop who always traipse through.)

Courage at Twilight: The Very Walls of My House

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We had planned the celebration for months, and on the day of, I awoke too sick to attend.  My sisters handled all the preparation and hosting.  At the top of stair case, I listened to bursts of laughter amid the general soft murmuring of many friendly voices in catching up and conversation, like the gentle babbling of a booklet tripping down a mossy cascade, and in that gentleness I detected elements of acceptance and respect and affection, and of a love that could turn fierce in mutual defense.  I enjoyed my chicken salad croissant and chips, watching through the railing as Dad, 86, launched into his stories, with occasional intervening from Mom.  They had met at a church dance, at the end of which he asked for her phone number (“and she gave it to me!”).  He called her the next day, and drove her to the university and dated for the next three years, and they married—60 years ago.  “I know her much better now than I did then!”  Law school over, they moved to New York City, living in Greenwich Village.  While Dad was at school, Mom rode the subways just to see where they went.  She played violin in a Washington Square orchestra, and during one concert the conductor’s baton hit the music stand and flew out of his hand into the audience.  After three days of descending to the street at 5:00 a.m. to move the car the opposite side of the street, Dad sold the car to the bellboy for $50.   Then off to São Paulo, Brazil, where I was born, to live in a tiny studio.  Mom passed the time by walking me to the embassy library and taking me on every bus route (in the city of then 16 million people) to the “fim da linha”—the end of the line.  “I can’t do this,” was not part of Mom’s vocabulary, Jeanette enthused.  Dad befriended the city comptroller at school, and invited him to their studio, where they sat at a card table on folding chairs, their only furniture, for homemade pizza, which the millionaire graciously enjoyed.  “I loved your mother when we got married,” Dad said, “but I love her more, and differently, today.  I never look at her without thinking, ‘I love her.’”  (“Even when I’m bossy!” Mom chimed in.)  David told how Mom and Dad sacrificed several days to help clean and paint his house, and how their love is literally worked into the very walls of the house.  “I want to tell you something,” Dad began, warming up to his life’s witness.  “This is important to me.”  And he quoted Jesus: “’Be faithful, and I will protect you from every fiery dart of the adversary.  I will encircle you in the arms of my love.’  That is how our Savior feels about us.”  When I was an infant in Brazil, Dad was assigned to visit ten families who no longer attended church.  He had no car or phone, just bus schedules and maps.  But he found them, and visited them every month of that school year.  Walking home from his final bus ride in Brazil, Dad contemplated his ministering effort.  That is when a voice in his mind affirmed, “I accept your offering,” and he felt an overwhelming loving presence embrace him.  As I listened and watched through the bars of my separating sickness, I contemplated how close Dad is to walking home from his life’s final bus ride, and of my certainly that he will again hear the words, “I accept your life’s offering,” and will again enjoy that sublime embrace.

Courage at Twilight: When You Walk Through the Door

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My son John and his wife Alleigh invited me to join them on a trip to visit their aunt Jeanette—my sister—in the Arizona desert.  Of course, my two-month-old grandson Henry would be coming, and he would not just be with us but would be the center of everyone’s excited attention.  In the last eight months, I have not left Mom and Dad for more than one night, and on this trip I would be gone seven.  Before leaving, I emptied the upstairs freezer then restocked it with food they could cook while I was away.  I even drew a rough diagram showing them which foods were on which parts of each freezer shelf.  For example, the bottom shelf had (from left to right) beer-battered cod, lima beans, mixed vegetables, four chicken breasts in bags of two each, and Impossible-brand plant-based “chicken” nuggets.  Excited for their beans and franks, they left the hot dogs in the refrigerator.  “Don’t worry.  We’ll be fine,” Mom reminded me.  I called her mid-week to report our outing to the Superstition Mountains where we saw a large yellow-diamond rattlesnake with five rattle segments, and a gray-blue Peregrine Falcon skimming red outcroppings on the cliff walls, and the Boyce Thompson Arboretum with acres of cacti, succulents, yuccas, and trees from the world’s deserts, and how much I loved the tall strange Boojum tree and the huge unlikely endangered Saguaro and the skeletal Cholla and Ocotillo, and how John and I saw a vivid orange-and-black Hooded Oriole and fantastically-scarlet Cardinal.  “I miss you,” Mom brooded.  “I love it when I hear the door nob turn, and the door open, and your footsteps down the hall, and I love to see you walk into the room with your briefcase and your lunch bag.  I just love having you here.”  Such affection so freely offered, and me stammering an awkward, “Thanks, Mom,” not adept at receiving or expressing such depths, but still marveling at the love and acceptance and absence of judgement at my weaknesses and joy my mother pours out onto this 57-year-old son of hers, and no less upon my five younger siblings.  How lucky am I—are we.  And when I asked what they had cooked for their dinners, she described the chopped frankfurters mixed with cans of pork-and-beans and stewed tomatoes—the epitome of hardy simplicity.  Returning home after my week abroad, I found the food in the freezer largely as I had left it, the easier now for me to cook.  Sarah had brought milk and eggs and Easter treats both savory and sweet.  And Mom had been right: I need not have worried.  “Welcome home.”

(Pictured above: Sis, Yours Truly, and Mr. Boojum)

(Pictured below: Cactus gardens at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum and in the Superstition Mountains outside Phoeniz, AZ.)

 

Courage at Twilight: Guinness and Treacle Bread

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After watching me mix and knead breads and bakes for eight months, Mom and Dad informed me we were purchasing a bread mixer. NutriMill makes a Bosch lookalike for half the price, and we brought one home, along with a “baker’s pack” because I am a baker and a Baker.  On my first attempt, I dumped in all the ingredients and watched the dough not mix and the dough hook grab the poorly combined mass and whirl it around uselessly.  Hannah (and the owner’s manual) instructed me on pouring in the liquid ingredients first, turning the mixer on low, and adding the dry ingredients slowly.  The technique worked.  Our first success was Paul Hollywood’s Guinness and Treacle bread.  Into the bowl I poured a bottle of warm dark-and-stout beer, tablespoons of molasses, water, and yeast, and turned the mixer to level 1, while Hannah slowly tossed in the dry ingredients: whole wheat flour and strong white flour.  The dough hook mixed the trickling flour into the yeasty treacle-beer until we had a sticky dough that the dough hooks pummeled and whipped enthusiastically.  While the dough rested and rose, I sat at Mom’s laptop to help her with a Word document: she had made revisions accidentally using the Review tool and felt exasperated by the unwelcome blue insertions and red strikeout deletions.  “I promise you, Mom: one button-click and your document will be fixed.”  She was incredulous at the simple “Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking” function.  That task accomplished, I lifted and hauled off Mom’s cracked and broken chair mat, and laid the new mat in place—the chair casters would no more anchor the chair immovably in the hole.  Dad, in the meantime, had noticed how dusty the living room sofas had become, and was struggling with his carpet cleaner to shampoo the floral sofas.  “Look how nice they look!” he crowed: the sofas did look bright and brand new.  Just as the oven pre-heat bell sounded, I finished hanging the thistle seed sock feeders for the goldfinches, pine siskins, and house finches, which will land grasping the socks and pull and crack the tiny musky seeds one by one.  Mournfully, we had discarded the other feeders because falling masses of disfavored seeds attracted a family of rats, and we could not have rats, and so also could not have bird feeders, much to Dad’s sadness.  But rats will not be interested in empty Niger husks.  The socks happily hung, I peeled the risen Guinness dough onto the 400-degree stone, and the house filled with a most delicious aroma.

Courage at Twilight: Popcorn Popping on the Pear Tree

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I grew up singing “Primary” songs in the Church’s Sunday classes for children.  A perennial favorite still is a springtime song celebrating blossoming fruit trees: “Popcorn Popping.”  The song has nothing to do with Jesus or the Church, but helps keep the children entertained and orderly: the lyrics and catchy tune never fail to rouse children’s enthusiasm to sing.

I looked out the window, and what did I see?

Popcorn popping on the apricot tree!

Spring has brought me such a nice surprise:

Popcorn popping right before my eyes.

Eye can take an armful and make a treat:

A popcorn ball that will smell so sweet.

It wasn’t really so, but it seemed to be:

Popcorn popping on the apricot tree.

The popcorn is popping on Dad’s ornamental pear trees, in full white-blossom bloom.  Strangely, though, as pretty a sight as they provide, the blooms smell more like putrescence than popcorn or perfume.  So, I admire the flowers from a distance.  Large limbs have occasionally broken away from the trunks, unable to support their own weight, leaving great gaping scars which we painted over to help heal.  Dad has trimmed and shaped the trees to better bear their bulk and to provide a more pleasing garden architecture.  In a short week, the delicate popcorn blossoms will fall and float away, and the glossy green leaves will take the summer show.  In the fall, the leaves will turn a million hues of rusty purple red, perfect for pressing.  But tonight, a late wet snow is falling.

Pictured: Mom’s and Dad’s ornamental pear trees in bloom.

Courage at Twilight: April 5, 1962

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“Hi baby!” Mom answered my phone call.  I had called in honor of their special day, to make sure they were happy, to praise and cheer them, Mom and Dad.  They had driven the faithful Suburban to Burt Brothers for a safety inspection and minor repairs.  They had walked next door to Dairy Queen for burgers with bacon and for fries and for a chocolate Blizzard—“They were so good!  But the walk about killed your dad,” Mom reported.  “And the walk back about killed him again!”  But it was a “lovely day,” a “perfect day,” she said, and she was very happy, I could tell.  Approaching home near 10 p.m., I turned into Smith’s grocery store and selected a small bouquet of flowers of vibrant colors.  Steven had sent a thoughtful happy card.  Barbara had brought a lavender orchid.  Others had called and texted and Facetimed.  Entering the house with my inexpensive bouquet, I cheered, “Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!”  Happy 60th Wedding Anniversary.  Sixty years of marriage.  As I snipped off several inches of stems and slid the flowers into a clear glass vase, I heard Dad say from his recliner to Mom in her recliner, “I love you, Lucille.  You are so wonderful.”

Pictured above: my real life Mom and Dad.  Happy 60th!

Courage at Twilight: Hard Pressed

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Hannah spent the morning with Mom and Dad and me, playing the piano, baking Guinness treacle bread, playing Carcassonne, and warming leftovers for lunch, topped off with last night’s Tarte Tatin (French up-side-down caramel apple pie). She played pretty hymn arrangements and the perennial sublimity of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune­—Moonlight.  Mom sat listening on the sofa with her eyes closed.  Dad reached the bottom stair just as Hannah finished playing.  “That was beautiful,” he complimented her.  “I think you played that exactly the way Beethoven would have liked.”  Hannah and I glanced at each other and smiled.  No one laughed, of course, because the music was so moving and his loving accolade so sincere.  The week Dad retired, more than 20 years ago, the law office joined him for a final jog through Johnson Park.  One heavy-breathing attorney, O’Shaunessy, panted amiably to Dad as they ran, “You know, Nelson, I appreciate that you are religious.  Before you came here, I had never heard the story of Moses and the Ark.”  A third attorney asked if O’Shaunessy meant Noah instead of Moses, and a friendly argument ensued, with Dad caught in the middle, not weighing in.  Maybe O’Shaunessy was not too far off, though, since Pharoah’s daughter had found the baby Moses floating in a tiny reed ark.  And Beethoven did compose the famous Moonlight Sonata.  As Hannah left for home, Dad called to her, “I love you,” and commented to me about what a delightful young woman she is.  He sat at his computer to type her a note.  I had judged him for pressing the mouse button so forcefully and deliberately, like an old person who had grown up flipping toggles and pressing mechanical switches.  But sitting later at Dad’s computer to retrieve a “lost” document, I realized his chorded mouse was not functioning properly, and that if I did not lean forcefully into the mouse, it did not respond.  I had judged incorrectly, as I often do, placing pride and arrogance before compassion and respect.  “Dad,” I called, “I’m sorry your mouse doesn’t work correctly,” and he thanked me for noticing, and I drove to the store and purchased a new mouse with a smooth wheel and a soft clicking touch.

Courage at Twilight: Between Two Temples

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Taylorsville Utah Temple

Church President Russell Nelson announced the construction of 17 new temples, from Montana to Texas, the Congo to Spain, New Zealand to Peru, bringing the total number of temples to 282 worldwide. I drive past two temples under construction every morning and afternoon, one near my home—the Taylorsville Temple—and one near my work an hour away—the Deseret Peak Temple.  While I could drive an alternate way, I feel drawn to the temple route, where twice a day I get to see the construction progress.  Through the winter, the crews completed the steel framing of the Taylorsville temple, and dressed the ribbed walls with foam-panel insulation.  Behind scaffolding, marble and granite slabs began to clad the ground floor, and just today enormous cranes lowered the steel-gray steeple.  In Tooele, the Deseret Peak temple shows only the steel-beam super-structure forming the ground floor, mid-section, and tower, the walls yet to be built.  These temples are sacred edifices to the Latter-day Saints, Houses of God.  There Church members learn about the purpose of life on earth and the possibility of eternal life with an omni-beneficent Father.  There we make covenants to be determined disciples of Jesus: chaste, sacrificing, kind, generous, and honest disciples.  And there we are “sealed” or joined to our families in eternal unbreakable familial links and bonds.  I look forward to seeing what the crews accomplish each day, and I rejoice in the progress toward the ultimate stunning exalting beauty of the final buildings.  I wondered aloud to my siblings about this fascination of mine, and realized that the slow incremental transition from the foundation cornerstone to the steeple capstone gives me hope, hope in the life process of slow and careful creation toward a perfect end.  Like the temples, I hope my character is being similarly dressed and shaped and polished.  I know this: as I age, every act of meanness and gossip and pride and stinginess brings me pain, and every instance of kindness and compassion and generosity and forgiveness brings me pleasure.  So it is that I joy in driving by these two temples, twice a day, knowing they will be finished and perfect, in time, and hoping the same for me.

   

Deseret Peak Temple in Tooele, Utah

 

(Photos from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

 

Courage at Twilight: Smoke Alarms

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Chatting with Mom and Dad one evening, we were all startled by a loud triple chirp typical of a smoke alarm whose battery is expiring. (In my last house, the alarm actually spoke to me, a creepy whispered warning in the middle of the dark and dreary winter night—never in the light of day.)  I knew where the 9v batteries were, and retrieved two, just in case.  What I could not discern was from which alarm the chirping emanated.  I wandered the house, standing under each alarm, growing increasingly agitated at the incessant three-minute chirp cycle.  But the irritating chirp always came from somewhere else.  Chagrined and swearing now, after checking each alarm on three stories—twice—I stood on a chair inches away from the alarm where the damned ventriloquistic chirp was loudest.  I replaced its battery, twice, with no effect.  With my head near the ceiling, I abruptly realized the chirruping sprang from below.  And there it was, behind Mom’s cedar chest, a real homemade aromatic brass-castered cedar hope chest, built by her grandpa James.  A carbon monoxide alarm.  As I glared at the thing from up close, it dared to chirp a triple-chirp, in my face.  I yanked it roughly out of the wall and changed out the battery—but it continued a defiant chirp.  Now I began to worry I might die of carbon monoxide poisoning, and fled to retrieve a different unit, with a red readout screen.  I showed a “0” and I allowed a deep breath.  Marching down the stairs, I found Mom and Dad and complained about the stupid monitor, at the same time wondering why I was disproportionately distressed.  And then I remembered: my new house in Erda in 1998, with three floors of smoke alarms, all connected electrically, so that when one alarm began its screaming, they all bansheed, deafeningly, terrifyingly, and of course, in the middle of the dark and dreary winter night, the children crying in their beds and me frantically yanking out batteries and yanking off alarms and flipping breakers while the crying children stood shivering and crying on the front lawn while the demons screamed on.  Oh, I thought, so that’s why I’m upset: that stupid little triple-chirp triggered the trauma of faulty smoke alarms setting off, of course, in the middle of the cold night.  Disgusted with the monitor, I banished it to the back porch, where it kept on chirping, until I realized I could simply end the drama by taking out the battery and tossing the cursed object, now powerless, into the trash.  Which I promptly did.

Courage at Twilight: Penicillin

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The year was 1945, the last year of the great and terrible War, and Dorothy languished from pneumonia.  The family thought she would die.  Mom was the oldest child, but still a little child.  At his last house call, the country doctor said he could do no more for Mom’s mom.  But when he came to the house another night, he offered a glimmer of hope: he had a new medicine to try.  “I don’t how much to give you,” he hedged as he filled a syringe full with yellow fluid, “so I’m going to give you a big dose.”  Six years old, Mom watched the physician inject the fluid into her wasted mother.  “We’re just learning how to use it.”  Called Penicillin, it showed promise, he said.  Professor Alexander Fleming discovered in 1929 that the Penicillium bacterium produced a “juice” deadly to rival bacteria.  In the early 1940s, Penicillin had transitioned from a laboratory curiosity to a serious infection-fighting medicine, of special value to wounded and diseased soldiers.  Penicillin became widely available to the public in the spring of 1945, just in time for my grandmother Dorothy.  Very quickly after the injection, she turned a corner and began her journey back to the land of the living.  These 77 years later, Mom asked rhetorically as she reminisced on her childhood, “Can you even imagine the world before antibiotics?  People got sick and just died!”  How grateful I have been, as I have carried and rocked sick babies in the middle of the night, for the miracle of antibiotics.  Without antibiotics, I myself would have died a dozen times over.

(Photo from Scientific American, used pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Champions

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Mom and Dad and I had just paid our respective income taxes, and the need to be frugal was on our minds and in our conversation.  “You know what?  That reminds me….”  And Dad began his story.  It was 1947, and the world heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, defended his title against contender Jersey Joe Walcott.  Sonny (Dad, age 11) pedaled the bicycle, with little brother Wiggy (Bill) on board, some 40-odd city blocks, in the cold December air, to their grandpa William T Greene’s little shack: no plumbing, no running water, no furnace, no bathroom, no stove or oven.  The place boasted only a hand pump and an outhouse and a wood stove, which served both as heater and cook stove.  And he had a vacuum tube radio on which the threesome listened to the 1947 world heavyweight championship boxing match.  Sonny and Wiggy tallied the score as the announcers called out the blows.  Mom broke into the story here: she (age 8) and her family had gathered around their diminutive black-and-white television, watching the same fight.  Sonny counted the blows.  Mom’s family kept score, too.  Jersey Joe knocked Louis down twice, and had more points, according to Sonny, listening to the radio, and according to grandpa Wally, watching the television, and they felt confident Jersey Joe Walcott would be the new world champion.  But in the end the judges called the fight for the incumbent Joe Louis, and the commentators rationalized that only a decisive win could unseat a world champion like Joe Louis.  The morning after the fight, Sonny snagged an enormous brook trout from Mill Creek.  “Now that’s more like it,” Grandpa Greene cheered.  “Let’s cook him up for breakfast.  Get some sticks and let’s light the fire.”  Grandpa William T Greene, at 80, liked his grandsons, and was happy for their company—and the boys loved him.  He told Sonny once that he was afraid of dying.  He would not know where to go, or what to do.  He would not belong.  But later he explained to the boys that the spirit of his long-dead sister had appeared to him, standing at the foot of his bed.  “You don’t need to worry, William,” she reassured.  “When you die, I will be there waiting for you.  I know where you need to go, and I will take you there.”  He would join her in 1956 after 89 years on this earth.  And Sonny would miss his champion grandpa.

(Pictured above and below: William T Greene.)

Courage at Twilight: The Lord Is My Shepherd

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When I hear the 23rd Psalm and envision myself walking beside still waters and lying down in green pastures, I do not think of triple-forte fff. But exultation is the spirit of Gordon Young’s arrangement of The Lord Is My Shepherd.  Mom had been working her way through her filing cabinet stuffed with choir music—hundreds of pieces—keeping her favorites and tossing the rest.  As she began plunking the allegro maestoso introduction on the piano, the music and the memories drew me irresistibly down the stairs and across 45 years to the church choir where I learned to sing under Mom’s enthusiastic and competent direction.  I stood behind her now, put aside my usual inhibitions, and belted out “God is my Shepherd. I shall not want.” from memory.  Mom pounded out the triplet eighth-note chords, and this 57-year-old returned to 12 and sang the melody.  Abruptly and appropriately subdued to meno mosso, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, very temporarily, for I need fear no evil with my Shepherd with me, providing comfort, preparing my table, and anointing my head with aromatic oil.  I confess that my cup ran over as the music washed over me and the song neared the fortississimo fff promise of dwelling forever with the Lord.  Suddenly very happy, I thanked Mom for the break from my work, climbed the stairs to my home office, absorbed in emotional echoes of musical memory, and sat at my old desk to write, grateful to my Shepherd.

Courage at Twilight: Shots in Her Knees

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Mom’s gait has grown increasingly halting and unsteady, and she digs into the floor with each step to assure herself of not falling. At choir practice, she leans hard on my arm to ascend the single step into the host’s house.  When I asked her if it were becoming harder to walk, she confessed that “my knees hurt.”  Three years ago, she had cortisone shots in her knees, which reduced arthritic swelling and pain.  But now the pain was back, especially when enduring the stairs in her house.  One day she declared, “I’m not going to the gym anymore, and I’m done riding the bike at home, too—my knees hurt too much.”  She asked if I would get the mail for her, and I said “nope” full of cheek, explaining gently (I did not want to seem rude and hurt her feelings) that if she could not go to the gym or ride her stationary bike, she would have to walk to the mailbox, and invited her to keep on going to the street corner.  So she walked to the mailbox.  Tough Mom.  Movement was important for her heart and her general strength.  Mom often tells me, “I’m so happy every day when you walk through the door from work.”  Sweet Mom.  I was not so sure she would still feel that way after I made her walk to the mailbox on her old knees.  But she loves me still.  I “broke” my knee in high school, bending it sideways in a basketball game and severing the anterior cruciate ligament, the infamous ACL.  The non-invasive MRI machine was not widely available in 1982, and to diagnose my injury the doctor shoved a 10-penny needle into my knee, injected contrast, and manipulated the wounded joint under live x-ray trying to discern soft tissue tears—what agony.  So, when Mom made an appointment to get shots in her knees, I cringed.  She reported later that the doctor numbed her skin with spray, inserted the needles under her knee caps, and injected a syringe-full of liquid—but she felt no pain.  Brave Mom.  “Come back in six months, not three years,” the doctor instructed.  Mom is already walking better, and we will see about the stationary bicycle.  That night Mom and I delivered the results of my latest baking adventures—pains au chocolate (chocolate croissant rolls) and bacon fougasses (flat bread shaped like a leaf)—to several neighbors.  She was happy to be my delivery buddy and to get out of the house for even the humblest of adventures.  Fun Mom.  Back home in her recliner, it was time for her favorite daily ritual: a bowl of Farr chocolate ice cream, which, of course, I cannot resist either, though I add milk for a thick chocolate shake.

(Pictured above: leaf-shaped Fougasses–the French answer to Italian Focaccia–with bacon and onions.)

Courage at Twilight: “I Hate the Church”

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For over a century, my Church has preached a ministering program called “home teaching,” where Church members, two by two, visit with assigned families to make sure their temporal and spiritual needs were being addressed. At the awkward age of 14, I was Dad’s home teaching companion, and he was the “bishop” or unpaid lay minister of our large congregation—he knew all the Church members and their many problems and hardships.  He saw on the records the name of a young woman he did not know, Continue reading →

Courage at Twilight: I Don’t Matter Anymore

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The men of my Church historically were divided into two groups or quorums, one for the older men and men with leadership responsibilities (called “high priests”), and one for the younger, less-experienced men (“elders”), where each could relate best to his peers.  Dad has been a high priest from his mid-20s, having been assigned to lead larger and larger congregations.  The Church recently merged the two quorums into one, for the purposes of (1) eliminating an age hierarchy within a single priesthood, (2) giving the younger men the benefit of the older men’s wisdom and experience, and (3) becoming a more cohesive group of “priesthood brethren” focused on church instruction and service.  For Dad, at 86, the combining of quorums has been counterproductive, and he feels anonymous and isolated and invisible, due to age and condition.  His legs do not work, so he staggers and uses a cane, and rising from his chair takes all his strength.  He raises his voice a bit because his ears do not work, and he uses hearing aids.  But in the minds of some, the cane and the voice and the hearing aids and the trembling effort indicate both physical and mental decrepitude.  In quorum last week, Dad raised his hand to comment, the lesson topic being faith in Christ.  The young instructor did not acknowledge him, calling on others with raised hands.  He raised his hand several more times, but was ignored.  The elderly gentleman sitting next to Dad got the instructor’s attention and demanded, “Nelson has something to say.”  But the instructor said the class time was up and he had not been able to call on everyone for comment.  “I used to be relevant,” Dad lamented to me when I returned from my weekend trip, “but I don’t matter anymore.  The teacher thinks I don’t know anything, that I’m an old useless fuddy-dud.”  In my 30-year career of professional acquaintances, Dad remains the most intelligent, learned, and discerning man I have ever known.  He graduated top of his class from the University of Utah law school, received a master of laws (LLM) in international corporate law from New York University, and worked a 33-year career as legal counsel for a major international corporation.  He presided as lay minister over congregations from 200 to 2,000 souls for 35 years.  He reads a book a week during his late-night solitude.  He holds his own discussing the world’s great philosophies, histories, religions, and personalities.  But at age 86, with his stumble and his cane, his voice and his hearing aids, he feels invisible to his younger peers.  Actually, “invisible” is the wrong word, for they are aware of him.  But they misjudge, seeing him as irrelevant and obsolete.  He thinks he does not matter anymore.  And it makes me furious.

(Pictured above: Dad circa 1972.)

Courage at Twilight: Falling on Friday

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It is a Friday night, and I am home alone in my upstairs office, reading, and writing, and I am not out with friends and I am not being entertained by superheroes. Every hour upon the half, I roll out and fold over a butter and bread-dough laminate—24 layers—for tomorrow’s chocolate croissants, and between rolling I am reading the Selected Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln.  I bought a copy for myself after reading another Lincoln biography, but Dad was so excited to dive into the book, and cannot read without a yellow highlighter (like I cannot read without a yellow highlighter) that I gave him my copy and bought a second for myself.  Already I have learned the words “vulpine” and “hagiography” and learned that Mr. Lincoln was not merely the stoic statue of still photographs, but faceted and furious and considerate and cutting and desperately sad and brutally patient, and witty, and he loved to tell stories, for stories will tell the truth faster and longer-lasting than the truth itself.  Dad told Lincoln stories at the dinner table, but he looked very tired; he had seemed tired all day.  When I first saw him this morning, and asked him “How are you today, Dad?” he responded with his characteristic “Marvelously well, thank you!”  But later he confessed to feeling “very poorly” and tired and weak.  When I finished my work day, he said he would go outside to blow the rock wall clean of pine needles and leaves and dirt.  And I began mixing my dough.  I kneaded and listened, tense, and soon heard a desperate bellowing from the back yard and rushed out the door to see Dad, on his hands and knees, sinking to splay on the concrete, shaking with vain exertions to move.  I managed to lift him back up onto his knees, and in a huge joint effort he inched up the arms of a patio chair high enough for me to kick another chair behind him, where he sat, trembling and pale.  “I fell,” he observed flatly.  Despite his state, he insisted on mounting the mower and cleaning up the grass.  Between bites of chicken and broccoli, he told us, “I think my legs just collapsed.”  Feeling traumatized, I blurted, “We need to have a conversation.  You cannot work in the yard if you are feeling weak and I’m not here.  If you fall when I’m not here, you’re not getting back up, and it will be an ambulance and a hospital and who knows what!”  Inside my head, I screamed, You’re not allowed to be stubborn!  To be stubborn is to die!  I had felt terror at finding him helpless on the patio concrete, at my not being strong enough to muscle his bulk off the ground, of his visible deterioration week to week, of knowing this is a one-way track with a finish line I don’t want to cross.  Seeing that my fury came from my fear, I could forgive myself and forgive him and calm myself into a nice family dinner.  It is a Friday night, and Dad is watching the Jazz game from his recliner, and I am reading and writing and rolling out my croissant dough, and after the rolls bake tomorrow, Dad and I will go outside together with rakes and shovels to do a little yardwork before dinner.

(Dad’s labors in the yard beneath his beloved mountains.)

Courage at Twilight: Fractured Days

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My son John explained to me that he allows himself only five minutes of social media time each day.  He is accountable to his wife Alleigh.  I felt proud of him for recognizing how social media distracted him from weightier life matters, consumed hours of time better committed to real learning and real recreation and real entertainment and real human interaction.  After watching the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix (I wrote to my children about it), I resolved to reform my social media and game-app habits.  I uninstalled Solitaire—I was on level something hundred, after thousands of games.  Quitting Solitaire was hard, like quitting caffeinated soda or chocolate.  I stopped checking 37 times a day (is that all? you ask) for Facebook likes and WordPress visits and Instagram hearts, opting instead to check once or twice a day for family photos and life updates, and to make and respond to personal comments.  I no longer scroll.  Those visits and likes and love emojis have such a power and pull toward measuring life and success by their numbers: lots of visits = high value; just a few likes or hearts = low worth.  Very quickly I could decide I am not liked, I am not worth much, I am unattractive, or out of shape, or obtuse.  Such falsehoods and lies.  Besides all this, I had lost my power of concentration and focus, interrupted unceasingly by smartphone lights and sirens, in the guise of blinks and dew drops—my days were fractured—so I turned off light and sound notifications except from the most important and least disruptive apps.  And, I do not want some algorithm deciding for me what political and social views I should have and which products and services I should want to buy.  I have intelligent, respected friends who decline to use Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram, and they are no worse off for it, and perhaps better off for having lifted their eyes up from their phone screens, to experience the world.  So, instead of browsing videos and reels tonight, I am going to watch The Great British Baking Show and choose a decadent dessert recipe for tomorrow, I think chocolate croissants—from scratch.

(Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay.)

Courage at Twilight: First Week of Spring

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With heavy snows and sub-freezing temperatures just three days ago, today reached 65 degrees, made warmer by the bright sun and blue sky. I found Dad settled heavily in his recliner, looking exhausted, which he was.  He explained that he had worked “all day” in the yard, raking out thick mats of pine needles and milkweed stalks from the landscaped beds.  He had reached above the rock wall and stretched the rake as far as he could—he can no longer climb to the terrace.  “Can you help me?” he wondered, asking me to pick up the piles and compact them in the big garbage can.  I used the technique my son Brian taught me, scooping a snow shovel underneath the pile and pinching from the top with a rake, then picking up the pile and dumping it in the can.  Before long, the piles were gone, and the can was compacted and full.  I jumped up onto the terrace and quickly raked the area Dad could not reach, filling the can beyond the brim.   “Doesn’t that look nice and tidy?” he asked, pleased.  He was thrilled to have worked in the yard after the long winter, though he characteristically worked too hard and too long and barely made it staggering back to the house, to settle heavily in his recliner, too tired even to eat.  But Dad came outside and sat in a chair to watch me finish the work he once did, to crow over the tidy beds, and to sigh at his beautiful snow-capped mountain view.  “Isn’t the mountain just beautiful?  Lone Peak is now a designated wilderness area.  There are no maintained trails.”  He had climbed to Lone Peak 20 years earlier, exulting on the 11,253-foot peak, neglecting to take enough food or water, and making it back thanks to nice young hikers who noticed and shared.  “Did you hear they just found a wolverine in those mountains?  A wolverine!  Here!”  We had seen the story on the news, of game wardens in a helicopter filming a black wolverine racing through the snow in that wilderness.  They trapped it without injury, anesthetized it, measured and weighed it, radio tagged it, then released it, excited to track its forest wanderings.  Relatively little is known about wolverines, but the solitary aggressive carnivores often roam 15 miles a day in the most rugged mountain wilderness.  “I just love sitting here looking at the mountain,” Dad said as I went in the house to cook dinner.  He had me leave his tools outside, ready for tomorrow’s spring yard work.

(Pictured above, a view of Lone Peak, from YouTube, used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

 

Dad and great-granddaughter Lila by the landscaped terrace and rock wall.

Courage at Twilight: Visit to the Ophthalmologist

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The ophthalmology technician was pleasant, respectful, and competent as she walked with Dad toward the examination room, chatting along the way.  Mom commented to her how cute her name was: Lexi.  Lexi laughed and explained freely that before she was born, her infant brother Alex had passed away.  When she was born, her still-heartbroken parents named her Lexi, in memory of Alex.  I wondered silently if it were a good thing for a girl to be named after her deceased brother.  But she felt honored by her name and proud of how she came by it.  Lexi invited Dad to sit in a chair and put his chin on the machine.  “I hate that machine,” Dad protested, but Lexi reassured him, “We’ll get through it together.”  She administered numbing and dilating drops, and instructed him on the procedure.  “Blink…Hold open…Good.  Blink…Hold…Good.”  She held a gentle hand on the back of his head to support the position his arthritic neck resisted.  With the pressure test and glaucoma examination over, Lexi congratulated him: “See?  You got this!”  “That wasn’t bad at all,” he agreed.  “It’s the other machine I hate.”  Lexi promised Dad he would not have to do the peripheral field-of-vision test with all the blinking lights and needing to push the button with every light and not being sure if that was a light and whether he should press the button because he wasn’t sure and not being able to move fast enough and feeling anxious and frustrated.  “We won’t make you do that one again for a while.  Your eyes look great.  No damage from diabetes.  Keep up the good work.  And your new lenses have grafted nicely.  You’re seeing 20/20!”

(Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay.)

Courage at Twilight: Three on the Tree

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Scott came to the house to help Mom and Dad prepare their tax returns. Dad had all their documents ready.  Fifty years ago, Scott served as a young missionary in São Paulo, Brazil, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Dad and Mom presided over the mission for three years, becoming much beloved by the 200 missionaries.  And here was Scott, five decades later, their bonds of affection intact.  From my upstairs office, I could hear the tender tone of their conversation, their occasional laughter, and place names in that most beautiful language of Brazilian Portuguese: Piracicaba, Juiz de Fora, Itapoã, Rio Grande do Sul, Curitiba (some of their fields of labor).  They remembered fondly old friends like Helvécio and Saul Messias and Camargo.  After an hour, Scott drove away in his black BMW sedan.  “That big BMW was part of Scott’s required profile at Price Waterhouse Coopers,” Dad explained.  “Now he teaches at the University.  It was very nice of him to come see us.”  Dad has spoken to me many times about his own “profile” as both an international corporate attorney for Johnson & Johnson, wearing the compulsory navy-blue pinstripe suit, one identical suit for each day of the week, while also being a lay minister for the Church in New Jersey.  As part of his ministry, he visited many people in poverty, and he decided his car should be as humble as theirs.  He drove to work and to church and on family vacations in a 1970 Dodge Dart, in which I learned to drive, with “three on the tree,” meaning a three-gear manual transmission with the shifting lever on the steering column.  That clutch was touchy and stiff, you can take my word for it.  But I mastered that clutch, and did not roll back on the hill into the shiny new black Trans Am with red racing flames.  Later in his career, Dad upgraded to an Oldsmobile 98 (hardly a luxury Lincoln or Cadillac), which he drove one evening to the projects in New Brunswick to visit a fraught Church member.  Upon leaving the squalid high rise, he found a gang surrounding his Olds, the gang leader sitting on the hood.  “Hello,” Dad said pleasantly.  “Can I help you?”  The gang leader sauntered over, opened Dad’s suit, and removed his wallet from the lapel pocket.  “Thank you very much,” he sneered and swaggered away.  Dad spoke up: “I am a minister.  I have just been visiting Sister Morales, who is a member of my Church and my flock.  She needs help, and I was seeing what I could do for her and her children.”  The gang leader turned, handed back the wallet, and said to Dad, “Have a nice day, Minister.  Thanks for coming.”

(Very nice photo of very  nice 1970 Dodge Dart courtesy of Hemmings, used pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Red Underwear

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Dad’s running days are over, as are his cycling days. In fact, even his walking days are over.  His walker days, however, have arrived, though he still refuses to use the big blue walker.  During his jogging career, Dad ran 13 marathons.  His training regimen included running seven miles a day during his lunch break, and 20 miles on Saturdays.  He and other Johnson & Johnson attorneys and executives enjoying running together in Johnson Park along the Raritan River.  After changing into his running shorts one day, he bolted from the locker room to join the jogging group.  One attorney in the group, a woman, commented to him, “Nice shorts, Nelson.”  He looked down to find himself wearing only his tight red underwear.  In his hurry, he had neglected to slip on his running shorts.  Darting back to the locker room, he soon returned more appropriately dressed.  The group set off, and no one said another word about it.  To Dad’s credit, he did not mind telling us children the story, many years later, including both horror and the humor of the episode.

Courage at Twilight: Be Still, My Soul

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From my seat in the choir loft, I looked out upon a sea of 500 faces.  Panning slowly, I looked at the details of each face, especially the eyes.  And I could tell that all these people sitting in church on a Sunday morning were good people, wanting to do their duty to each other and to God and the Church.  Many couples sat beside each other, their children by their side, or alone where their children had grown.  A number of adults sat without partners.  Like mine, each face held a story of heartache and loss and grief, and joy.  I pondered how their stories are not part of mine, and how my story is not part of theirs.  We may cross paths from time to time, but we do not walk the same specific path together.  I experienced again the sensation that I would walk the remainder of my path alone.  The possibility remains that I might meet a compatible companion, who I now cannot imagine—it might happen.  But to flourish in this present moment I have to let go of that ephemeral possibility.  Several times I have worked hard to make a relationship happen, but these fabrications have always failed, painfully.  In this and other oceans of faces, good faces, I have found no face or soul to belong to.  And that is just as well.  I have written elsewhere about my setting out to find wildlife in nature, how the harder I search, the less I find.  I have learned that when I relax, and breathe, and labor faithfully without expectation, when I prepare myself and allow nature to arrive on her own terms, she and her creatures arrive, beavers and bullfrogs, muskrats and turtles, herons and kingfishers, wild iris and rose.  As with nature, so with natural relationships: I must relax, and breathe, and labor faithfully without expectation—I have to be prepared for the universe to arrive with her abundant blessings.  For the present, my job is to get used to being alone, to sacrifice and to love alone, to contribute alone, to maintain spiritual standards and practices alone, to be healthy and fit alone, to cook and eat gourmet meals alone, and to forego the pleasures and pains and joys of intimate companionship.  My opportunity is to learn the lessons of living from my particular life.  Your opportunity right now is to sing with the choir, I thought, emerging from my reverie.  To end the long church conference, the choir director led Mom and me and the choir in singing Be Still, My Soul, arranged by Mack Wilberg.  The women sang with one clear voice, to which the men added another, moving together into a pleasant perfect eight-part harmony.  A spirit of beauty washed over the ocean of faces.  After the benediction, Dad walked slowly beside me toward the exit, his arm heavily upon mine.  Stepping through the door, we saw that the snow had begun to fall, and remarked upon how beautiful it was, and how cold upon our bald heads.

(Pictured above, Utah’s Jordan River from my kayak.)