This is the South, where men talk about football, cars and weather and women talk about food and about family and to our great shame we all argue about politics. I know, it’s a stereotype and only sometimes true but for the sake of the narrative, let’s assume it’s so.
At my age, misfortune manages to hit us with a good many of the arrows it slings our way. Aging should be left to the young. When it stops being fun counting birthdays, say at 35, we should be able to coast along healthy for about fifty more years and suddenly keel over. If you go before I do, speak to someone up there about that. I believe aging was just an oversite and whoever rules the universe and all that is therein would be glad to have it pointed out to him/her/them. Divine rulers always take criticism well, just ask the Greeks.
I took a friend to a doctor’s appointment yesterday. After he was called back, I got up to open the door for a lady who was struggling to walk even with a cane. On the sidewalk just outside the door, a woman with a walker was shouting at her husband about where he parked and he was just nodding his head, something I believe he was very practiced at. When he opened the door for her to come in she was not quite ready to enter and yelled, “Well, shut the damn door!” He chose to wait outside after finally getting her inside.
The lady on the walker sat for a minute before another woman, let’s call her Evelyn, came in. The two knew each other and started talking about ailments but soon got around to family stories. I didn’t eavesdrop, not that I wouldn’t, mind you. That’s where some of my best material comes from. It was a small waiting room but I could have heard these two from the far end of a cruise ship.
I’m sort of quiet in as much as an oversized semi-deaf old guy can be quiet and I was relieved when one of them went in to see the doctor. I was reading a Facebook article about a hole near the North Pole where aliens live in an underground world. I read through about two paragraphs when Evelyn started in on me. She bridged the gap by saying I looked familiar and what was my name. I’m pretty sure I didn’t look familiar but she used the question as an entrance point.
She talked at me for the next twenty-five minutes and I said a total of six words not counting “ums”. I learned that her grandaddy “killed hisself under that big tree in front of the old house” and that her Mama had to raise her and her three sisters because her daddy “wasn’t no good”. She told me about how two of her sisters were dead, one was 83 and the other was 91 when they went. I learned that she had another sister who was still alive but she lived up in Lexington, North Carolina and they didn’t talk to one another.
Evidently Lorene, her estranged sister, had run off with somebody else’s husband when she was just turned seventeen. Well, no good could come of that kind of thing because that sister had a daughter with a ten-year-old son who was always in trouble. Evelyn said it was no wonder the boy was bad. His mama spanked him with a wooden spoon and she had ever since he was little. I was tempted to ask if she knew the brand of the spoon because it must be a good one to hold up over years of backside tanning.
She said, to contrast her parenting style with Lorene, her daughter had three girls and they were all straight “A” students. The sixteen-year-old did have a problem, she said, because she liked to stay out all night and wouldn’t listen to anybody.
The daughter asked Evelyn to have a talk with the girl. “I just told her,” Evelyn said, “that that seventeen-year-old boy wasn’t no count and he would just get her pregnant and run off with somebody else. Then she’d end up just like Lorene. That girl said she didn’t even know Lorene and flounced off out the door.” I am not convinced that Evelyn sorted things out as well as she thought.
We were at a pulmonary specialist and Evelyn said she had taken a fall the week before and couldn’t tell if she hurt her hip, her back or her chest. She told me the doctor told her that she should quit smoking but, she said, “I told him to forget that. I been smoking since I was sixteen and I’m 72 and I’m not about to stop now. He’d just have to work around it.”
She had talked so much that my brain was melting like the Wicked Witch of the West and I was so desperate for her to stop I almost asked to bum one of her cigarettes so I would have an excuse to stand outside with the nodding husband. I think we would have made a good team.
The receptionist in this office was behind a sliding glass window and when I looked up I could see the pity in her eyes, not for the lady or even the poor little spoon-spanked ten-year-old. She felt sorry for me.
When the door opened and Evelyn left the waiting room, the receptionist gave me a thumbs up. I was never so glad to see a door close and just like the saying goes, another one opened and my friend, John came out. John is kind of quiet too so it was a relief even though we had to walk back to the car in the pouring rain and even though we stopped at the chicken salad specialty place and they were out of…you guessed it…chicken salad. We had to wait for them to make up a fresh batch.
There was also the incident of the bulldog in the rain. It started pouring again when we reached John’s house and I had to round up Slim, the aging oversized English Bulldog and corral him up the steps and into the house. Slim was soaking wet so at least he was motivated to move toward the door.
I got home shortly after my exhausted wife who had spent an afternoon taking her mother to see an aging aunt in a nursing facility. Time spent at such a place always robs us of a bit of hopefulness.
So this is what it comes down to.
Life has always been a tragedy wrapped in comedy and we try to look past the hard parts. So often things are terribly sad and sometimes we are haunted by loneliness.
But here’s the thing. I believe we store up memories of our bumbling humanity, of our human faults, of our most ridiculous moments and bring them out to laugh at ourselves and remember how good life has been.
On the way home, I told John the waiting room stories and we laughed about those and the chicken salad-less chicken salad place and about the rain that poured until the moment we got into the car. We laughed like we did when we were young and foolish and for a few moments, the worries and the fears and the sadness were banished.
I think we all live for those moments. They come when we least expect them and I am ever thankful for those folks, friends or strangers, who lift us above the troubles of today and give us strength to face tomorrow.
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