Author: Diana Blair Revell

With both parents gone, we left the Compound and moved to a smaller setting that we refer to as The Cottage on the Ravine (I swear, there is a gully creek bed.) There was a sadness, but now we love our new digs. I used to be a healthcare executive. I don’t miss it. Before that, I worked in radio and cable TV. I miss radio most of all. Radio has to be the most hilarious and fun place to work. Now I do some writing and give my attention to Dave and Dixie, our seven-year-old Shih-poo. My parents were with us for thirteen years. Dad passed away November 19, 2018, and Mom died June 24, 2022. We still miss them. I garden, cook (a lot), clean, play anything with a keyboard, and believe in the power of Love.

2012–Living Into It

I watched 2012 dawn on the water in Florida. I always sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” when I see that big red ball of fire near the horizon. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sunrise or sunset, the song seems to fit and it makes me smile. I was up alone in the Destin condo while Dave and our friends snoozed for a couple of hours. I wasn’t lonely. I love that time of day, no matter where it happens to be.

The night before, we cooked a festive dinner of filet of beef and shrimp scampi and toasted with the balcony doors wide open to the rolling evening waves, a sincere toast to a “good” year. I should have stayed up to see something drop somewhere at midnight–a peach in Atlanta, a music note in Nashville, or the ball in New York City, but I just couldn’t keep these eyes open past 10 P.M. I didn’t want to.

I remember thinking, just before pulling the covers over my head, “There ought to be resolutions, oughtn’t there?” And then, “Something to think about when we get home.”

I started to think about 2012 in late September, I guess because fall is the time I start to think of what to write in the Christmas letter. Don’t congratulate me for in-depth planning. I don’t produce that holiday mailing until the week before Christmas. I just give myself plenty of time to root around in my failing memory and a chance to interview Dave regarding his take on the year’s most meaningful moments.

What do I want for 2012? By early October, I knew the overall theme I would adopt for the new year. I wanted to get my priorities straight–and I knew I didn’t want to wait until January 1.

By the second half of 2011, Mom and Dad required more attention. Dad is still a workhorse in the gardens and on the banks of the ravine, and he still team-teaches a Seniors Sunday school class; but he tires more easily and he seems to have more frequent “bad” days. His most consistent nutrition is taken in the form of ice cream, about a gallon a week, and his breakfast is a cookie with his coffee. Sometimes I can tempt him with New England clam chowder, enchiladas, or shepherd’s pie, but he never misses the ice cream or the cookie.

Mom’s arthritis seemed to progress more rapidly and then she had a bout with stomach distress that culminated in the removal of her gallbladder. Even after her surgery, she missed days of her water aerobics for arthritis when she woke up with stomach upset. We’re still trying to figure out what’s causing this recurring gastritis.

Sometime in the last half of the year, the four of us began to eat a common meal at the middle of the day, an old Southern custom. Most of the time, I cook. It’s my way of knowing the two oldsters eat a balanced meal each day; or, perhaps it’s knowing they are offered a balanced meal each day since my menu choices are not always hits out of the ballpark. I’m happier with the cleanup, too, when I cook.

When our resident old folks made a trip to Nevada to visit my brother and his family, my daughter-in-law and I launched a cleaning invasion in the apartment, scrubbing every dish, glass, and pan, replacing bath rugs and towels, re-engineering storage, and detailing bathrooms. Dave and I hired bi-weekly cleaning help without consulting the parents–and then thought about how to spin such a move when they returned.

We shouldn’t have fussed over their feelings. Mom loves the Monday all-clean house and Dad loves Mom loving it. Mom says she didn’t know how hard it was on her to change the sheets until someone else starting doing it. She says she didn’t realize how much she was letting go because it was too difficult for her to do. And she says she guesses she deserves to have her house cleaned now that she’s eighty.

The October short list of priorities went like this: more care and attention for Mom and Dad, write more/write more often, get that garage monstrosity cleaned up. There are still a few boxes that we’ve never unpacked–no, really, there are– and I regularly make something of a mess rooting around in what has been unpacked and reorganized. Who am I kidding? That garage is downright offensive.

I acted on the first two items on the list before Christmas, resigning from several time-eating activities, committees, and responsibilities. Actually, I answered the call on that second item earlier in the year by joining the best writing group I’ve ever had. I am not writing as much as I want to, but I am writing consistently and my novel-in-progress now gets weekly attention. I piddled and dilly-dallied with that thing about cleaning up the garage…

Now that almost half a month of the new year has passed, I think I’ll give myself a progress report. I didn’t rush but I packed away the twenty-odd bins of Christmas stuff. That corner of the garage looks good. Dave pounded some nails in the rafters so that I could hang baskets and wreaths. We hauled an old bookcase into my office to hold the overflow from the current wall of books. I figure if I do one little thing–just one weeeeeee thing–each day, I’ll have the entire downstairs organized and cleaned up by, oh, let’s say Easter.

Unless I get interrupted.

I finished Chapter 15 of the novel the first week in January. “It is a pivotal chapter,” I told myself, “and that’s the reason Chapter 16 runs from me.” But a funny thing happened in the garage yesterday. I found Chapter 16 just about the same time I found how I can make myself write more. It all has to do with that promise to clean up the garage. Three times as I was lifting, wagging, and settling boxes, I stopped to run to my desk in The Cellar to record a new scene, one that absolutely would not wait a minute longer.

I was certain this fight between organizing and creating a story would stand as evidence for the left brain vs. right brain theory (which I never really understood) and that Right was battling Left. But when I skittered around on various websites regarding creative writing or language or stacking boxes, I found educated opinion that such behaviors might all require bi-lateral brain activity. Well–who cares? I’ll just plan to push, pull, sweep, hang, stack, dig, and flop–and the chapters will interrupt the cleaning and demand to be heard! Or read. No, written.

More care and attention for Mom and Dad is a given. It just…happens. Dad has two doctor appointments next week. I’m working on an appointment for Mom. I cook almost every day. I also clean in the kitchen every time I go to the apartment. I wash all the kitchen linens which Mom changes every other day. I’m going to the apartment more often. I try to pop in for coffee or breakfast every other day. Dave and I still attend the 5:00 P.M. “cocktail hour.” We don’t leave Dad alone. If Mom and I go to the hobby store, Dave visits with Dad. I find a calm comfort in caring for them.

A funny thing happened in late 2011 after I embraced priority. I became able to “let it be.” Remember that John Lennon song? I don’t know who spoke those “words of wisdom.” My new feeling came as a gift, one that I received without knowing exactly how or when it arrived. As I attended that sunrise show in Destin, I was surprised to realize that I had found my joy. It was my epiphany. A couple of pastor friends call this kind of peace with the circumstances “living into it.”

This new year, the third year of living in the compound with Mom and Dad, is off to its own start. It will be as different from 2011 as 2011 was from 2010, and as 2010 was from 2009. This time will be its own time. I’ll carry on with the 2012 three-point plan and I’ll do one wee little thing every day about caring for my parents, about writing, about organizing, but to make this year’s moments really count, I think Dave and I–and Dave and I and Mom and Dad–can help each other by just living into them. All of them.

 

Christmas Eve 2011

Morning always comes early on Christmas Eve. I don’t plan it, I just wake up. This quiet, this peace, this day…I don’t want to miss it. The lighted trees, three of them, are on timers set to go dark at 11 P.M. so I scurry around to flip the timer switches to “Manual.” The little cashmere tree lights the den and the white tree on the table in the living room shines through the picture window for all the passers-by. But, ahhhh…only I can see the tree on the porch, through the double glass doors. It’s the happy-accident tree, on the porch because I could not bring myself to move furniture to put it up in the den. I am looking at a Christmas card, one of those with only a touch of gold glitter, maybe sitting in a snowy meadow with bunnies and squirrels and deer, angels hovering, the kind of view that sort of warms you inside.

The porch tree has no animals and no snow. We won’t have a white Nashville Christmas and the foxes, squirrels, and raccoons are still nestled snug in their beds—the Shih-Tzu, too. I’m sure the angels are there but I don’t see or hear them. The similarity to the Christmas card scene is only in my imagination but I’m happy to be up early to have this calm to my selfish self, to watch the twinkle of the lights against the dark.

I was late with the Advent wreaths this year. I have tall tapers for the metal twig candelabra in the piano room but I couldn’t remember where I put them. There was no sign of the pink and purple votives for my wineglass wreath, either. I missed the glow of those lights against the dark outside my window for the first sixteen days of Advent.

I surprised myself by not running out to find new ones so that I could “start Advent on time.” I knew I’d find them, probably next Easter, in the “safe place” where I put them last Christmas. I found all the candles on the morning of the seventeenth day of Advent. I was in the pantry area of The Cellar looking for chili beans and I felt their presence. You’re getting warm…Yes, they’re very close. Yes, here they are, neatly packed and labeled and on a shelf with the labels facing outward. Nothing was in front of them. I just didn’t see them the twenty other times I gazed at the same shelves.

Advent is a season of waiting—waiting and watching. In the Christian Church, Advent is a time to practice patience in waiting for something that happened two thousand years ago, the advent of our God to walk among us as a child. Advent is also four weeks of making preparations for the resurrected Christ to return to earth, a future event. But while we time travel simultaneously backward and forward with Advent, and make peace with this paradox of stillness and busy-ness, we must also meet somewhere in the middle of the ages for patience in the present.

It seems easy to wait for Christmas. Who has doubt that it will arrive on December 25? The store clerks used to ask, “Are you ready for Christmas?” as they checked us out. And if we answered that we were not ready, we might get the answer “Well, it’ll come whether you’re ready or not.”

Waiting for Christ’s return—someday—only requires an imagination, a hope that there is more something waiting after the last breath, and a willingness to suspend disbelief: I know, some call that “faith.”

But now, the patience in the present, the waiting in the here and now—that’s more difficult for me. I’ve come to think it means living into all those conflicting feelings that fill our moments and our days, mine and yours. Faith and disbelief, struggle and acceptance, sadness and laughter, grief and joy, anxiety and contentment, burden and relief, clarity and puzzlement, “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays”, they come upon us in syndromes, never one at a time, and very often all romping—or lazing—around in a mind-party.

I struggle to find the Advent candles—and accept that I can do the waiting and watching without them. A son leaves for college—and another comes home from battle. A woman is left alone—and finds herself. A good friend dies—and a baby is born. This is no exchange, one for the other, but a mix, and a mix of continuums. Struggles in one piece of the brain might overpower the acceptance in the heart. The abundance of your joy might possibly overcome the tinge of despair in my soul.

This quiet morning, in love with the glow of the lights, I grieve those we’ve lost, but feel such hope and joy for infants born and for the faces of the little ones so delighted by Christmas. I give thanks that the soldiers have returned from Iraq, while knowing that there are still thousands still there to “finish up,” thousands more in Afghanistan and other far places, many thousands of families grieving those who will never come home, other thousands wounded. I am anxious over the children with not enough to eat, and delighted that my jobless friends are going to work in January. The list goes on…good and bad, at the same time.

I am burdened by the condition of our country, but the load is made lighter when I see the goodness showered during this season. The real humanness, that of doing for each other, loving some that we may never know, checking our abundance in favor of sharing–it’s there, like those Advent candles. I forget it and lose it under the weight of worry and blame. I find it in a moment of just “being.”

Maybe there are angels watching over us. Their music reminds us that we are all continuing on, in the paradox, all waiting…together.

December                                                                                                                                                           By Gary Johnson, from The Writer’s Almanac

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Dear Friends.

***

Why They Came

First the black bear walked in. He left the door open behind him. I squatted behind the tan leather sofa while he rummaged through the kitchen cabinets to find some shortbread cookies. Then a white-tail deer trotted in. She stood just a few inches away from my hiding place and watched the bear. I glanced at the dark, shiny wood floors and feared that dear Mrs. Deer would leave hoof marks. The grey squirrel came in talking, tail twitching. “Cashews. Give me cashews. Or popcorn.”

Sometime after that, the dream ended and I opened my eyes and laughed out loud. Dave and I were in our favorite cabin hideaway in Asheville, North Carolina. We’d come to see the roses in bloom at The Biltmore. The night before, while Dave lifted the cooler onto the front porch, I read the laminated sign posted beside the door. “Do not leave your front door open. Bears have been sighted on the grounds.”

Inside, another sign referenced a grey squirrel that might appear on the deck seeking an anticipated snack from new residents. We didn’t see any bears, but the squirrel story was a bit understated. The squirrel stood on his hind legs and knocked on the sliding glass door. We were forced to encourage him by giving him popcorn and peanuts, which we had to partially shell before he would dig in. He was a relentless pest for the three days we were in Dad’s Digs—came inside the living room once and we lured him out with crackers. “Pest,” that’s what they really meant to write on the warning sign, not “pet.”

We did see some deer, but none so brave as to walk into the living room while a bear searched for cookies and a squirrel made demands. Of course, we were careful to keep the doors closed.

So far, no raccoon, fox, nor groundhog has wandered into the house here on the ravine. If any one of them were to visit, he’d probably come into The Cellar, the place where I keep an office and a second kitchen. One reason to appreciate this small efficiency apartment in our walk-out basement is that the dirt comes in here instead of the regular living quarters upstairs. The first landing for hedge trimmers, grimy work gloves, and buckets of whatever vegetable is currently prolific in the garden—today that would be turnip greens—is a counter height table that my dad made for me out of old lumber and four-by-fours. He painted the top turnip-green green.

The garden tools and produce—and dirt—are things that we bring in. And then there are the things that just come in, on their own. Leaves, for instance. Oh, sure, we bring in a few leaves on our shoes, but nothing compared to the brown, orange, and yellow piles that rush with the October wind every time a breeze blows through the opened door.

Some of the smaller critters have already headed indoors, and the entry point of least resistance is The Cellar. We’ve had some cold spells so I guess they’re trying to keep warm. It doesn’t hurt that there are so many good hiding places down here in The Cellar, either.

I don’t mind the occasional box elder bug but the mouse that scurried across the floor in front of the bookcases unnerved me. Dave came downstairs. (I suppose I might have screamed a little, too.) My good husband headed for the hardware store to buy mousetraps. He was gone for maybe ten minutes when I saw something moving from the back door and across the kitchen floor. I squinted my eyes. It was too slow to be a mouse but it was about that size. I eased up from my desk chair and tip-toed around the file cabinets to have a closer peek. A spider. A really big spider. Black, with hairy, meaty legs. On another day, I would find a way to move him outside; I don’t really hate spiders and I rarely kill one. However, my normal self had fled with the mouse so I threw a paper towel over him and stomped. Later I wished I had saved him in one of the fruit jars on the table so that I could show him off.

Dave baited three traps with peanut butter and placed them in various mouse-traffic patterns but for three days, no tell-tale “pop.” I was beginning to think the uninvited guest wanted cashews when Dave informed me on the fourth morning that he had “removed the little friend” and that the exterminator was coming.

Halloween seems to signal “fall-for-sure,” just as Thanksgiving says, “Winter is here.” People, critters, and things come inside. The grandkids and their friends from next door won’t be racing past the window by my desk much longer. Their scooters and bicycles will be tucked into garages and they will draw and paint, read, and watch videos-on-demand. We’ve already brought in the ferns and cactus, and we’ve moved the porch furniture closer to the house. Next frost, I’ll move the potted roses to the storage garage.

Halloween is also the date of my parents’ anniversary. This year, it was their 65th. Sixty. Five. Years. They were young when they took a taxi from the Smith County hills to just over the Georgia state line, just seventeen and fifteen. They looked young at their anniversary gala on Sunday afternoon, an event held in an old mansion that serves as the fellowship hall for Southeast United Methodist Church. Mom dolled up in an ivory embroidered suit with copper and silver accessories. Dad strutted around in his best black suit, an ivory rose tucked into his lapel, and leaned on his cane when he stopped to visit. Mom received most of the guests at a reserved table, but she eased around the room with Dad two or three times, once to pose with the stacked cake and once to receive the short blessing offered by Pastor Ann Cover.

The guests were plentiful and so were the reasons they came. Some came because they’re family; Mom and Dad lived away from Tennessee for most of their married life and every family gathering is a treat. On the memory-video, Aunt Bessie said, “See, now, if you’d stayed in California, I would have missed this.” Some were friends from church; one said, “We are so happy to have you here teaching our Sunday school class.” Some were members of the church Dad retired from; they said they’d never forget Mom and Dad. Heatherly said, “We just love your mama and daddy.” Some were members of a church that Dad pastored when they were teenagers; Jackie Edwards said, “Brother Blair, you’ve been my favorite for over fifty years.” Some worked with Mom when she was a credit manager for a boot company; Bill Black said, “We’ve made the 50th and the 60th and now the 65th and we’ll be here for the 70th—You are going to have another party, aren’t you?”

After the party, Dave and I had to make two trips in the van to bring home the decorations, dishes, and leftover cake. It was a really, really big tiered—no, “stacked”—cake that I carried in my lap on the second trip, the backend of the van full again. We agreed to take the cake in and leave everything else to unload the next morning.

Dave opened the passenger door and I eased out with the cake, being careful to keep it upright. I planned to re-frost the top where we had removed just one tier and take it to the Nashville Rescue Mission where they would serve it as dessert for dinner.

“This cake turned out beautiful,” I said. I had obsessed over the cake, a home creation a friend and I concocted. My friend has decorated a wedding cake. I had not, and until the bouquet of red roses, dogwood, fringe plant, and crape myrtle transformed the monstrosity, I almost would have paid somebody to take it.

Dave told me several times, “People aren’t coming to the party for the cake.” Well, no, that wasn’t the reason they came to Mom and Dad’s anniversary reception, but I was still thrilled—okay, “relieved”—when several ladies said it was the prettiest cake they’d ever seen. They even said it was the best-tasting white cake they’d ever had.

Just as I sat the cake down on the turnip-green table, I remembered the extra hors d’oeuvres I’d brought home. “Oh, shoot, Dave, those leftovers are somewhere in the back of the van, under something.”

It was dark, and we had not turned on the floodlights (switches upstairs) on the back drive and patio. The only light turned on was the motion-detector fixture over The Cellar’s door and we have it set to turn off after sixty seconds.

“Just wave or run around in front of it—and I’ll find the food,” I said.

Dave propped The Cellar door open and stationed himself.

“Well, we may as well take this stuff in if I’m going to have to move it anyway,” I said as I lifted item after item.

“Yeah, no need to move it twice,” Dave said and came for his first load.

While I started to dig again, Dave headed inside, his arms full of candles, dried boughs of fall berries, and tablecloths. As he set his load down, pushing bags under the table, the light clicked off. He hurried back out to wave it back on.

“Hey,” I heard him holler, “Get away from there!”

I jumped. Dave wasn’t talking to me. He was yelling at a raccoon making a run for The Cellar’s open door.

Now, that raccoon wasn’t cold and he didn’t need a place to hide. He did not express admiration for Mom and Dad’s sixty-five years of marriage nor did he claim nostalgia for having known them for so many years.

But he did have a reason. The raccoon came for the cake.

***

The Calico Cat

Things come and things go. I became acutely and personally connected to the nature of change when I attended a Titans game today with a good friend.  We enjoyed our time together, even though I can easily say it was the worst football game I’ve ever watched. I am not a real football fan. I like the game, but I’m just not devoted. Now, my friend is solid, but despite the differences in the level of our sports-groupiness, we were equally embarrassed by our team’s loss to the Texans, 41-7. There was much discussion of “what happened” and “how on earth did we beat Baltimore a few weeks ago.” There was an early exodus from the stadium. And after each subsequent score by those Houston guys, another lot left.

This down-in-the-bottom will not last forever. The Titans will crawl (probably not “bound”) back up to become a much-admired leader in the NFL. It’s just the way of the game. It’s up and down, ebb and flow, yin and yang, drafts and retirements. It’s change.

The ravine is in a state of constant change. We build a brick pathway through a lush garden that was only scattered with sad little perennials last year. We tear down an unsightly wooden compost bin and re-seat it further down the ravine, hidden from public view on the backside of the apartment. We plant vines here, chop down others there. The seasons afford us the demise of okra and the rising up of turnip greens—a whole bed of turnip greens, and we gather the green tomatoes and fry them in cornmeal.

Dad and I make plans for next year’s garden. He’ll plant more Blue Lake green beans. I’ll move a crape myrtle or two. Whatever plans we make, Old Mama Nature will trump with her own design, sometimes adding too much rain or heat, a late frost, or a sinkhole. Change.

Even the critters have a way of changing here on the ravine. The first month we lived here in November 2009, we saw red foxes—two young ones who ran and played and sunned, a large family of raccoons, a humongous groundhog, and a feral calico cat who had kittens down in the ravine according to the neighbors. There were squirrels—a gazillion squirrels.

For the first few months, the foxes dashed in and out. The raccoons became indignant and refused our company. The groundhog was quite comfortable even though we laughed at him and named him Mr. Lockwood after the previous owner of our property. We watched the small calico stand off one of the foxes and chase him up the driveway and across the road. The squirrels danced and played in the trees.

By the end of the first year, the foxes multiplied and inhabited the ravine. The raccoons discovered nummie-yummies in our garbage cans and declared us to be keepers. The groundhog was pleased with our plantings so much that he considered the cosmos his personal food crop. The calico licked clean the platters of warm milk we left for her. Squirrels? Still plenty, actually more.

But then we saw the calico cat no more. A black cat from across the street occasionally strolled through the back yard, but no calico mama cat. The foxes moved on. Some of them developed mange. We think maybe some died, and that some left to find healthier quarters. Two skinny ones remained. The raccoons frolicked every evening. They were partial to leftovers containing fish or chicken. Grandpa trapped Mr. Lockwood—live, of course—when the old groundhog determined to mow down hollyhocks, bush beans, and tomatoes. We delivered the old gent and his friend, Junior, to a new home over at the agricultural center. The squirrels? They dig in every flower box. We can count on it.

Now there are also moles. As it turns out, foxes eat moles, and when they left… And then, there were cicadas, a plague of the seventeen-year variety. Turns out moles love cicada meat so they are fat and they are as plentiful as the tunnels in our back yard. We also think the cicadas told the box elder bugs that the sugar maple out front makes a fine abode because we’ve had thousands of box elder bugs. Change. Things going, things coming.

When we moved to the compound here on the ravine two years ago, we left a home five miles away, one that we just now leased to a lovely family from Florida. The grounds and plantings have deteriorated over the two years so we called in the landscapers and nursery guys to clean it up.

Yesterday, we stopped by to check out their work-in-progress. The landscaping truck and a trailer mounded with brush and debris from the yard took up the street in front of the house, so we pulled in front of the neighbor’s house up the hill. Dave got out of the van ahead of me and went to the front door to hand over some extra keys. I headed across the lawn, calling out to my old gardening friend, Ritchie, who knows that property as well as I do. Ritchie was supervising the work.

Just as I stepped into the corner bed, the toe of my sandal caught on a flat rock I’d placed there years ago for a stepping stone, and I fell onto the lawn, face down, flattened out. Ritchie and Paco came running, Ritchie asking “Are you hurt?” and Paco summoning all his English to ask me if he could help me up. I heard the third man call to Dave through the front door of the house, “She fell down. She fell down.”

“No, no, I’m not hurt,” I said.

Paco had a bit of difficulty understanding me when I said, “I’ll get up, but it’s going to take a while” so I had to tell him, “Come back over here. Help me get up.”

He understood my beckoning and ran to hold out his hand. I could not reach his extended hand because I was lying face-down, on my stomach… As I climbed his leg, grabbed the other hand at his side, and pulled myself up, he kept saying, “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I feel certain he did not understand when I said, “It’s not your fault,” but he smiled when I said, “I’m okay.”

“Ritchie, this looks great,” I said, sweeping my arm around the front.

The third man said, “You need to take a look at the back yard. I think it needs a little more.”

The pine trees needed a little more trimming. The lilacs might not make it, in spite of the careful and severe pruning. The yucca plants are making great progress in their quest to take over the bank at the end of the drive.

Ritchie said, “It does not look like your place. You are gone. It looks like you are gone.”

“Yeah,” I said, checking out my sore left hand. “But it looks good, Ritchie. It looks good, all cleaned up. It’s just a change.”

Ritchie took my hand. “Is it hurt?” he asked.

“No, no, just a little sore.” I rubbed off some of the dirt and grass that had pressed into the heel of my hand.

Later I told Dave I was really surprised I didn’t break something. We both laughed when Dave said he didn’t know I’d fallen until he saw me sprawled out on the lawn and all the guys running to get me up.

I got up. I’m a bit bruised but okay. Same for the Titans. This current wretchedness will not undo the team. They’ll come back and fans will be saying, “Can you believe it? They’re better than ever.” The grounds at Beech Tree Lane will come back. Things are different there, but things are just fine. The critters on the ravine will come and go, and some plants will die, some new ones will spring up.

Three days ago, I noticed a brown, orange, and white ball sitting on the fox feeding station, almost blending in with the autumn trees behind it. It was the calico cat. We haven’t seen her in a year, but there she was, fatter than she was the last time we saw her, curled up in the morning sun, looking toward our windows. She was back every morning after that, same spot.

I was away from home this mid-morning. She may have come to visit earlier, I don’t know, but I do know that the sun’s rays are very bright–and I bet warm–on the fox-feeding station right now and she has plenty of time before sundown.

***

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven…Ecclesiastes 3:1.

The Old Folks Go on Vacation

Mom and Dad are going to Nevada on Saturday and they’ll be gone for three weeks. I find that I am sad—not exactly worried, or anxious, but just sad to see them go, sad to wonder “What if they don’t come back?”

I remember having the same wigglies in my stomach and gnawing in my chest when my sons left for camp. There was this same question “What if something happens to them?” but I could talk myself out of worrying about the kids easier than I can convince myself to give it up about my folks. After all, Dad is 82 and Mom is almost 80. They’re closer to heaven than they’ve ever been before.

Mom had emergency gallbladder surgery on September 19. We’ll keep a follow-up appointment with the surgeon this Thursday, just two days before she and Dad board Southwest Airlines for a direct flight to Reno. She’s not 100 percent yet, but her zigzag, one-day-good-one-not-so-good recovery has propelled her to at least a healthy A-minus. She tires very easily and still has some discomfort in her abdomen. And she’s going to ride across country in an airplane. Is she really, really, really ready to go…

Dad is cleaning off the bank of the ravine in back of the property. He devised a clever system of laying a tall ladder on the bank with the bottom rungs and feet anchored against a big tree. Then he shinnies down the ladder with his tools. The trees and undergrowth support him as he makes his way across the bank, felling scrub trees and pulling heavy vines. When he gets tired—actually, he says when he is “about to get tired”—he crab-walks back to the ladder and climbs back to the yard.

The second day he went down the bank, I took his picture. He looks like a strong-as-an-ox 70-year-old farmer, maybe even younger, in worn overalls, a faded blue bandanna wrapped around his bald head for a do-rag. I hear him hacking through the brush as I write. He is happiest when he is working outdoors. I can’t help but wonder “Will he come home in as good a condition as he is now?”

My brother Denny and his wife Bev will host this trip. They don’t know—can’t know—all the “little things.” They are borrowing an SUV for Mom and Dad’s ride, and I hope they realize the need for a step-stool of some sort to get on the running board. They’ll have some bourbon for Dad and some wine for Mom, and I hope they aren’t surprised that Dad only has one drink per day—at 5 o’clock—and that Mom rarely drinks anything alcoholic these days. They’ll try to feed Mom and Dad well, and I hope they know that neither one eats much at any given meal but Dad has two or three bowls of ice cream every day (cookies and cream, or chocolate chip cookie dough) and Mom has to have her daily grapefruit.

We only have four more days to get ready for this trip. There’s a battle to be won with the Medicare Part D carrier that decided that Dad only needs one Protonix pill per day instead of the two that his doctor prescribed. Mom and I have waxed and colored and coiffed. We’ve discussed luggage and purses and outfits. Dad has made the wire cages that I need to winterize the roses and we’ve decided that I need to go buy the pansies pretty soon but wait until he comes home to plant them in the barn wood planter boxes. They’ve both given permission for use of the apartment for a guest house while they’re gone and they made me promise to find someone who needs the entire turnip green patch; after all, Dad sowed another one that will come in just about the time they get home.

This morning, Dave and I went to Waffle House for breakfast. A fire engine turned through the intersection and we followed it like two old people (or maybe like two teenagers). It pulled in the parking lot of the bank on the corner and the paramedics ran up a small hill to a dumpster. As we proceeded through the Wal-Mart parking lot to the restaurant, we saw the old man slumped over in a wheelchair wedged against the dumpster. A uniformed man, I think from the auto parts store next door, stood waiting for the EMT’s.

“Is he dead?” Dave and I asked each other. And then, “Why is he out here alone?”

“He’s obviously homeless. And it was cold last night.”

“And nobody cares for him. I don’t mean ‘cares about him.’ Nobody cares for him.”

It was cold last night, uncharacteristically so for this time of year. The ambulance followed shortly behind the fire truck.

Dave said, “I think that ruins breakfast.”

When we left Waffle House not too long after, the fire truck and the ambulance were gone. The empty wheelchair was propped against the dumpster.

“Oh, no,” I said. “That wheelchair won’t be there when he comes back.”

“He’s probably not coming back.”

“I wish somebody would take care of him.”

I wondered what happened to his children, or his nieces, or the grandchildren of his neighbors and friends in the old days, the ones who might worry now about his ice cream and his prescriptions and his ride. I wondered why none of the gazillion faith communities in South Nashville couldn’t adopt him as, I don’t know, Honorary Grandpa or something like that.

Mom and Dad will do fine, and Dave and I will, too. There are lots of us to care for Mom and Dad. Out there in the West, they’ve got Denny and Bev; grandkids Jim and Wendy, Angie and Joe, Jena and Mike; and seven great-grands who can’t wait to see Grandmama and Grandpapa. Please put the accent on the last syllable—Grand MaMA and Grand PaPA. The great-grands decided on those names for Mom and Dad several years ago.

***

The family that reunites…

Bites. Fights. Lights…Blights. Rights..or writes. Some of those may be true, but there’s no poem in this for me.

Mom and Dad didn’t go to church on Sunday. Neither had slept very well Saturday night. They both ached. No, they weren’t exactly “sick,” but they didn’t feel well. Sunday night proved not much better, so they were both dragging on Monday. It took them two days to recover from the family reunion.

Mom took her Rollator walker, Dolly, to the reunion for the first time this year. I guided the two of them over tree roots and loose rocks on the path to the picnic pavilion. “I just know they’re going to say, ‘What on earth are you doing with that thing?’ but I don’t care. There’s never a good place for me to sit anymore and I can’t get my legs under that picnic table. I’m going to sit on Dolly.” Mom had it all worked out and rehearsed by the time we got to the concrete.

Dad followed slowly, stabilizing himself with his cane on the rough ground. “Well, hello there, Sis, you did make it,” I heard him say to Aunt Elois. She’s the elder of the family now at 84. She was barely getting around, her voice weak. She won’t be at next year’s reunion. That’s the kind of thing you think, but you don’t say.

There are five remaining siblings remaining in Dad’s family, three brothers and two sisters. Each year, we believe there’ll be fewer the next. Every year, the “cousins”—that would be me and the rest of the children of these brothers and sisters—look older and older.

The Blair Reunion calls one and all, every year, the second Saturday in September at the Cedars of Lebanon State Park, Shelter No. 8—Don’t be late. Actually, my cousin Jerry Wayne is always late but we wait for him every year. This year he was on time. Being a Baptist preacher, you might think he’s a slam-dunk for the task of talking to the Good Lord on behalf of the Blairs, except that Daddy (“Toby” to the family) and Uncle Frank are also preachers. Frank Eddie is a Methodist. Toby was a Baptist and vows he’s still a Baptist even though he retired from the Methodists. Frankly (the “frank” has nothing to do with Uncle Frank previously mentioned), I’m not sure Dad’s a Baptist or a Methodist. You’d just have to talk to him to understand, and then you might not.

The other remaining brother, Francis Wilburn (“Bill”), has had a rough year. He had a stroke followed by the discovery of colon cancer. One of his sons brought him to the reunion. I heard somebody say, “Bill, nobody asked you to say the blessing.” He replied, in such a quiet and weak voice, that, being retired from the insurance business, it’s not his job to ask the blessing. He did say that he was glad to be there.

Jerry Wayne’s daddy, my Uncle Wesley, was a Baptist preacher, too. He was one of the first people to have open heart surgery at Vanderbilt—a valve replacement, I think. He was the first one of Shafter and Effie’s children to die.

Aunt Bessie, my dad’s youngest sister at age 69, is now in charge of the family reunion. It’s always been understood that the “girls” of the family will run the family reunion and nobody crosses them about it. I think Mammy Blair issued the command and the rest of the family hopped to. After Mammy died, Aunt Virginia, the oldest sister headed it up; she’s been gone for several years now along with Aunt Margaret, the next-to-youngest girl. Aunt Margaret never got a turn at being “boss” of the reunion. Aunt Elois was in charge for several years, but now she’s feeble—feisty, but feeble.

Aunt Bessie asked Jerry Wayne to pray, and “don’t take all day because we’re hungry.”

Jerry Wayne said, “How about Uncle Toby or Frank Eddie?”

“They don’t care,” Bessie said in a low voice to spur him on.

“What did he say?” Dad asked. He was standing right beside Jerry Wayne.

“I said, ‘Did you want to pray?’” Jerry Wayne answered, a bit louder than he normally talks.

“No, we’re too told,” Dad answered for both Frank and himself.

“Gracious Heavenly Father,” the prayer started. It ended with “I love you, Jesus. Amen.”

Some of us repeated, “Amen”—the men who are believers and the women who consider themselves liberated.

Food was everywhere, as usual. Four long picnic tables held courses of meat, salad, and vegetables. Desserts beckoned from the two tables adjoining the beverages and paper products. There are unwritten guidelines regarding the offerings of dishes:

1. Evelyn, my cousin three years younger, fries chicken—a lot of chicken. In addition to the legs, thighs, wings and breasts mounded in a two-foot by eighteen-inch aluminum roasting pan, she brings two cake pans of appetizers for a select group of the women: gizzards and livers. The aunts, mamas, and cousins who like gizzards are not “liver people,” and vice versa, but there are two of us who can, and do, go either way. We strategize to maximize our take. We watch the levels of the gizzards and livers, not an easy chore. The serving method for these delicacies is to leave the aluminum foil covering the pan (a coy encouragement for sneaking a bite) so if more than half the hands are reaching into the gizzards, the two of us know to eat gizzards first in order to get our share before they’re gone. Remember, the gizzard eaters won’t bother the livers, so they’re probably safe. By the time the Chaplain of the Year says “Amen,” the two cake pans are empty. When Aunt Bessie signals us women to “take the lids off,” some cousin fooling with the chicken always says, “I want you to look. There is not even a greasy spot left from those livers—gizzards either.”

2. Some of the rest of us fry chicken, too, but we understand that everybody is going to eat Evelyn’s first. No offense—no offense taken. It tastes just like Aunt Virginia’s.

3. Somebody always brings a pot roast, a ham, and some barbecue or meatloaf. There’s always pot roast and ham left, but not much meatloaf, and no barbecue at all.

4. There will be turnip greens, dressing, butter beans, corn, and green beans. Squash, sauerkraut, baked beans, and coleslaw are likely but not definite. Anything outside of those two lists of sides might be a culinary delight, just not expected.

5. Desserts will include pecan pie, chess pie, and chocolate pie; sometimes banana pudding. If you bring a new recipe of something sweet, don’t get tender when an unofficial vote is taken to determine if that one is worth squirreling away a piece to take home.

6. And, speaking of “taking home,” do not expect to take any of your dish home. There’s a small assembly, equipped with take-out boxes and Glad plastic containers, and they swoop in at the end of the meal, each vowing to “make me a plate to take home for supper.”

7. When all the seconds and thirds and supper-servings are finished, check your dish. If there’s more than a third left, bring something else next year.
I promised Aunt Bessie that I would make grape salad this year if she would bring Japanese fruit pie. She told me to make sure I brought enough for her to take some home. I did. I iced down a double batch. Aunt Bessie planned a little better for me. She brought an extra pie that remained in a Longaberger pie carrier under the table until we could put it in the van.

I think Evelyn will be in charge when all the aunts are gone. She seems so dedicated, something no one accuses me of when it comes to the reunion. Evelyn and I did discover one thing in common, though. When I first saw Evelyn on Saturday, I said, “Hey, you’ve got my shirt!” She was wearing a glitzy orange T-shirt studded with gold and sequins—just like mine!

“Well, did you get it at the Wal-Mart?” she asked, and we both laughed.
“I know, next year let’s both wear them!” I said.

When no one was paying attention, Evelyn and I agreed if we covered up our heads, no one could tell us apart. About the same weight and height, recognizable square bottom, same (ahem…) ample bosom, long skinny feet, freckly arms. We are kin. We hugged each other.

Evelyn ought to fry more chicken next year. I said I’d never bring another peach cobbler because nobody ate it. If I had brought that roast and had to take it home, I would not be cooking a pot roast again. One of the aunts-by-marriage said she’d remember to stop by Kentucky Fried on the way next year.

Aunt Bessie said she didn’t need to take up a collection this year because she had money left over from last year to rent the shelter for 2013. A few of the cousins circled up and vowed to bring some chairs that we could all get in and out of since some of the Blairs had such a hard time with the picnic tables and benches. We weren’t just talking about the aunts and uncles.

Tuesday morning, Mom announced that she was cooking a pork roast, butternut squash, and potato cakes for dinner. Dad cut a path down into the ravine and cleared off a third of the bank. When we sat down to the mid-day big meal, Mom said she thought maybe I ought to cook a pork roast for next year’s reunion. Dad said, “There’s never enough chicken.” Dave said there’s always way too much food.

I just hope somebody brings a guitar next year and we’ll sing—like we used to.

***

Things That Go Missing

I suppose I’m first on your list of “the missing,” if you have one.

“Meh.” That’s what they say on Facebook sometimes. I don’t really know what it means but it seems to fit. I have no good excuses for being absent from “On the Ravine,” although there was Vacation Bible School, Birthday Month (mine!), and a serious need to water several gardens by hand around these parts. I’ve also re-dedicated myself to the novel. “Meh.”

But there are things, not people, that have gone missing from my life and I’ve put them on a list.  I started the list two years ago when we first moved to the compound. I re-visit the list occasionally so that I can mark off items that have found their way to a new home, whether the abode is now in The Compound somewhere, or somewhere else. These things I find show up in totally surprising places, at unexpected times.

Dave says if I would put things back after I use them, I could always find them again, you know, a take-off on “everything has a place, everything IN its place.”   Well…  Meh.

Sometimes I find something on the list but forget to cross it off and by the time I need it again I’ve forgotten where I found it so it is, once again, a thing that I can’t find. Like the levelers for the porch furniture…and the gift certificate to Arrington Vineyards…and the elephant ears bulbs from last year. Dad put them in his garage, in a vented box of peat moss, and we both thought we saw them early in the spring. After some collective pondering, we agree that we probably sent the box to ThriftSmart with one of the loads of Christmas decorations…in November.

Now I put those table levelers in a zip-lock back with a label on the front that says “Porch Furniture.” I know that I have found them several times—in the laundry room down here in The Cellar, then in the janitor closet upstairs, and another time in my desk drawer. Today that bag is not here—nor there. There is a covered wicker hamper on the porch where we keep the plastic placemats and barbecue utensils and I’m wondering if I moved them to that basket. (Let me just stop and jot that note on my list here.)

Son Jade and his girlfriend (now wife) Anjie gave us a gift certificate to the vineyards down the road. That was two years ago, maybe three. I put the certificate in a file—labeled—so that I wouldn’t lose it. What I lost that time was the name on the label. I looked in several places for “Gifts,” and “Jade and Anjie,” and “Arrington.” Then, when we scheduled a family picnic at the winery, I touched ninety percent of my files, in seven different places, and found it in my deep file drawer in my desk. It was labeled “Arrington.” I don’t know why I missed it all the other times, but now I felt accomplished, maybe even victorious. I moved it to a “safe place” so that I could put it in my purse on the day of the picnic, except that I forgot where the safe place is. I will find it, unexpectedly, and it does not expire…

But I’ll tell you the missing item(s) that I’ve never seen anywhere yet and I didn’t hide them from myself. There are four of the eight glass inserts for a coffee table that Davidlee and his Family Moving crew packed and moved to The Compound almost two years ago. The other four were packed in a box of framed pictures and I cleaned them up and put them in the coffee table in the living room. I continued to empty boxes of wall art and photos over the next year or so. Then I decided that the coffee table was too large for the living room and moved it to garage storage. I still haven’t found the four pieces of glass, but now I don’t care nearly as much.

So what are you missing? Sometimes, when I talk about something that’s missing, it turns up. Really.

We haven’t seen any of the foxes for several months now. Have I talked about how much we miss them?  Meh.

Gardening: Things That Get Out of Control

For all you beginning gardeners out there, I have two words: crape myrtles and mint. (Okay, so maybe three or four words.) It’s hard to kill either one of them, crape myrtles or mint, and that is just a stroke of tillage triumph when you’re trying to
perk up a plot on a penny.

Mint? It will run and shoot and climb over and fill in gaps in your plantings that
you didn’t know you had. It’s a great groundcover—well, except that it gets
really tall and forgets there is such a thing as a boundary. If you are a mint
grower, there will come a time (if it hasn’t come already) when you run around
your back yard yelling, “Out, out, damned mint!”

I’m nearing that point with my acre of mint. It’s beyond me how it appeared in beds where I never planted it, 100 feet of concrete and 20 feet of grass separating the beds. But I just luvvvvvvvvv mint tea, iced or hot, and I have promised myself to put up enough mint in the freezer so that I can brew it up when the snow covers the flower beds and the concrete patio and the grass.Every time I water, I pull up more mint, whack off the roots, clean it up and freeze it in blocks of ice.

I also have crape myrtles, many, many crape myrtles. I tried to count them last week and I got as far as thirty and stopped. That doesn’t count the three mature Natchez whites we planted in the landscape plan when we first moved to the compound.

Last summer, doing “the Lord’s work,” I weeded a small area in back of the church that
had not been loved in a while. There were crape myrtle suckers everywhere from the two mature bushes flanking the sidewalk to the door of the fellowship hall. I dug up a little root and tossed each one into my old weed bucket. When I got home, I threw some water on them and started thinking about a place to put them.  Dad, bless his old sweet soul, dug up a long 2-foot-wide line on one side of one driveway and we named it “The
Crape Myrtle Nursery.” Dave helped me put them in the ground.

“What are you going to do with all these crape myrtles?” he asked, after we had sunk twenty in the row.

“I think I’m going to give them away.”

“To who?” he asked, leaning on his shovel and leveling his eyes.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll put up a sign at the mailbox that says, ‘Free crape
myrtles. You dig and fill hole, they’re yours.’”

When I saw the challenge on his sweaty face, I quickly added, “Oh, well, I’m going to use
the rest of these in the landscaping.” He watched me as I skipped around to plant eight shoots in the corner garden on the ravine, four in the long, skinny bed by The Cellar door, and another in an unplanned gap in the rose garden. I had four left, so I put a couple in pots and two in one of the front foundation plantings.

I think I might have lost four out of the whole lot, so I’ve started working on “placement”
for these little bushes—placement, as in finding new homes. But first I have to tag them so that I know what color they are. I have Hottest Pink-First Bloomer and Hot Pink but not Hottest, Pale Pink, and White. The two colors I covet most for myself, a deep blood-red and a soft lavender, I do not have. My friend Linda is coming to get some crape myrtles sometime this week. I’m going to let her have the biggest ones—a white one in that gap in the roses and one of the hot pinks by the back door, for sure.

That leaves all the ones on the driveway, and all that are in that back garden. That place, the back-corner garden on the ravine, is stuffed with a plethora of plantings. The crape myrtles have thrived in every spot, along with the crazy, out-of-control mint. A wild rose threatens to dominate a large section and the muscadine, ground ivy, and weedy bushes from the ravine encroach on the elephant ears and daylilies in one stretch. The crape myrtles don’t care. These tenacious little Lutheran exiles have found a home.

I watered at 5:30 this morning. I knew that by 7 o’clock, the heat would already drive me inside. When I wet down the front corner of the garden backing up to the ravine, I started pulling mint. I figured I could put up at least four quarts of leafy stems and maybe a couple of frozen blocks of leaves. I separated the more tender shoots from the large, woody plants with the larger leaves. The smaller ones would be stem-and-all to go into the teapot, the larger plants stripped for the leaves. I hosed myself down, changed out of my nasty yard duds, and packaged the shoots in The Cellar’s kitchen.

“Shoot,” I happened to think, “those leaves are still outside.” I grabbed a plastic tub
from the cabinet, dutifully tiptoed barefoot across the patio to the lawn where I had laid a dozen biggest branches of mint and started stripping the leaves into the tub.

My plastic bowl was almost full when Dave came along to hook up the new drip system on the roses. I asked him to show me the steps to start up this mini irrigation so that I can do it myself next time.

“What are you doing over there?” he asked after the lesson, nodding toward the
plastic container.

“Oh, I’m stripping these mint leaves so I can freeze them,” I answered.

That’s when I noticed that more than half—way more than half—of the leaves I had in
the tub were very smooth-edged. Mint leaves are serrated, jagged. I tore one of the smooth leaves and put it to my nose. It was pungent, but I wasn’t sure if it smelled minty or not; after all, I had handled so much mint that I could only smell mint. I stripped the next stalk and sniffed again. “Familiar,” I thought. I picked up the one remaining stalk and the scent came to me—crape myrtle.

Crape myrtle tea, was there such a thing? I laughed and tossed the big pile of leaves
onto my trash pile. Later, I thought to look for my newly almost-invented brew on Wikipedia.  I wanted to know if I came near to poisoning myself—or others.

There it was. There is a crape myrtle in the Philippines called “banaba.” Some research suggests that banaba extract may support blood sugar balance and weight loss. And, further down in the article, The leaves of the Banaba and other parts are used widely by the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan as a tea preparation. This tea is consumed as a natural means for a variety of reasons involving the kidneys, such as dissolving kidney stones, kidney cleanses, and kidney health in general. Research being conducted in
Japan shows much promise for this plant and its potential uses in the medical
community.

Looks like I’ve thrown away the makings of a potential elixir—but I have more. Maybe I’ll just keep a couple dozen of those little crape myrtles. Weight loss, huh?

***

ER, Vol. 2: Someone’s in the ER with Jer-ry…

I would have rejoiced at finding the ER after that stressful little jaunt, but first I
had to get through security.

“Ma’am, put your bag up here and walk through the scanner,” he said.

He continued to talk as I walked through the arch. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to
look through your bag. Do you have any sharp objects in here?”

“No. Well, maybe some nail nippers,” I said, which didn’t faze him as he spread and
pulled at all my pockets in my beloved Jen Groover Butler Bag.

“Okay, you’re good,” he said.

I took my place in line. I could see through the glass windows that the waiting
room was packed. People were sitting, sometimes two to a chair. People were
standing, and people were kneeling, or squatting, and yet there were a few
empty seats.

“I’m here to see Jerry Wong,” I said to the ER’s receptionist.

“You family?” she asked, as she thumped the keyboard.

“Sister.”

She didn’t even give me a funny look. She’s seen it all, I thought, things much stranger than me and Jerry Wong.

“I don’t have a Jerry Wong.”

“He’s on LifeFlight and I think I may have beat them here.”

“Probably. You know for sure he’s coming, right?”

“Yes. I talked to the Macon County EMS just about ten minutes ago and they said he’s
in flight.”

“Okay. Well, now, when they set down, it will take about fifteen minutes until they
bring him in,” she said, “so you just have a seat and then check in with me
again in fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, and sat down in one of three chairs in the small space directly in
front of her desk.

I watched the sick and wounded come in. A woman with pink, coral, and purple hair
was in great distress of some kind. Her daughter had brought her in. Two men in
wife-beaters whispered to each other and to the receptionist. She whispered back. One Vanderbilt employee was escorted by a co-worker. Another Vanderbilt employee was alone, and while she checked herself in, she read her I-pad and never looked at the receptionist. She sat down beside me until the lady with the pink, coral, and purple hair asked if she could have the seat. The Vanderbilt employee and I both vacated the seats.

I looked at the time on my phone. Oops, more than fifteen minutes had passed.

“Well, yes, here he is,” the receptionist said. “And it’s been exactly nineteen
minutes since you were up here the last time.”

They keep track of that. “Can I go back?” I asked.

“You sure can. Just let me give you a badge.” She pulled a worn laminated badge from
somewhere under the desk. “Now when you get up to those doors over there, stand
back because they’re going to open toward you.”

“Okay. So he’s in, uh, Room 10?” I asked as I looked down at number on the badge.

“Yes. It’s Trauma Bay 10, so here’s the way you get there.” She stood up and leaned
over the desk in the direction of the dangerous doors. Then she gave me the “left, right, left, right, right” challenge as I nodded, but she was so kind as to end it with “And if you get lost, just ask somebody in the hall.”

“Thank you,” I said and stood back for the doors to open.

I couldn’t remember the directions so I just followed the signs with arrows that
said “Trauma.” Jerry was in the last room on the hall. I suppose it would have
been the first room if I had followed the instructions.

I started around the curtain into Room 10 just as a nurse came out. “Mr. Wong?”
she asked.

“Yes.”

“This is him. Go on in.”

The body in the bed could have belonged to anyone. It was flat on the waist-high
bed. I checked the feet. They were dark, dark tan, had to be him.

“Oh, hi, Diana,” Jerry said when I got to the side of the bed. “Diana” sounded more
like “Dinah.” (It always did.) Then he added, “You come. I tell Dean… I told Dean to call you.”

“Yeah, well, I beat you here,” I said. “How was your ride?”

“You beat the airplane? I mean, helicopter?”

“Yep. So, how are you feeling?” I asked.

He couldn’t turn his head for the huge padded collar around his neck; he did not
move.  “Better,” he answered. “They give me some medicine for the pain. I think it helps. Wish I could go.”

“It’s going to be a little while before you can go,” I said. “Let’s let them figure
out what all you’ve done to yourself.”

“Well, I’m going,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you look like you’re going somewhere,” I said, teasing him.

“I can’t feel it,” he said.

“You can’t feel what, where?” I asked.

“You know, when I go,” he said.

“You mean…Oh, you mean ‘goooooo.’ Do you have a urinal in there?” I asked.

“Yeah. I feel like I have to go but I don’t feel it, you know, when it comes out.”

“Well, when you talk to the doctor, you’re going to need to tell him that,” I said.
“Are you finished? Do you want me to take that urinal?”

“Yeah. It’s kinda hard to go, you know, laying down.”

“But you went. And you didn’t know you went?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, I knew it,” he said.

“Well, I was thinking, you need to tell them that you can’t feel it,” I
said. “So, you were on the deck? Whose deck?”

Somehow he turned his head toward me, ever-so-slightly. “It’s Dean’s,” he said. Dean is
Jerry’s landlord.

He smiled at me and then nodded, just a little. “I was helping him.”

“I don’t remember a deck on their house,” I told him.

“Oh, it’s not on Dean’s house. It’s a trailer.”

“But not your trailer?”

“Nooooo,” he said, “I already have a roof on my deck.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember. We sat out there one day when I came to see you.”

“Well, it’s not really the deck. We’re putting on a cover. Oh, you know what? I think
a two-by-four broke where I was standing.” He was squinting his eyes as he thought.

“Why were you standing on a two-by-four?” I asked.

“To put a cover on a deck,” he answered.

I sighed, trying to be quiet about it. “Were you on a ladder?” I asked.

“No. Well, I climb up there on a ladder,” he said.

“Were you on the ladder when you fell?” I asked.

“No, I was on the ground,” he told me.

I was almost thankful to be rescued by a nurse’s interruption. She introduced
herself to Jerry and then to me.

“Mr. Wong,” she said, “can you tell me what happened?

“Well, I fell. I was helping my landlord on a deck.”

“How far did you fall?”

Jerry looked at me. “How far you think, Dinah?”

“Well, I didn’t see the deck, but Dean says twelve to fifteen feet.”

Jerry clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Well, no wonder I got hurt.”

The nurse got back in the game. “And you were building a deck…”

“It was already there,” Jerry said. Then he smiled and tried to nod.

“You were working on the deck,” she said.

“Not really. We were putting a roof,” he said.

The rest of the conversation went just about like the one I had with him earlier
until Jerry asked, “Can I have a drink of water?”

“No, I’m sorry,” the nurse said, “but you can’t have anything until we find out if
you’re going to have any surgery. Now, Mr. Wong, let’s check your toes. Can you
feel this?” She scratched his left leg.

“Yeah,” he said.

She worked her way around legs, feet, and toes. “So you don’t have any numbness?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Where?”

“In my back.”

“Well, you said you don’t feel it when you pee. You do feel the urge to go, right?”

“I don’t feel it,” he said.

“You don’t know if you have to go?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. I know I have to go. I have to go right now. Can I have that thing
again?” he asked.

“Sure.” The nurse reached into a glass-front cabinet and retrieved another plastic
urinal.  “The doctor will be in sometime soon,” she said as she put the handle of the urinal in his hand. I think I saw her shake her head as she left the bay.

A steady stream of nurses and doctors lined up to play Jerry as each tried to advance to the next level. Each match reminded me more of Abbott and Costello’s routine, “Who’s On First.” But I didn’t laugh out loud until the Haitian resident came in to make his assessment of Jerry’s injuries.

“Now, Jerry, what exactly were you doing?” he asked.

By this time, Jerry had started to shortcut the conversation. “I was helping my landlord put on a tin roof on a deck. Dean, he’s my landlord.”

“What? What were you doing?” the doctor asked.

“My landlord, he’s putting on a tin roof on a deck,” he said. “I was helping him.”

“Wait. What is this ‘putting on tin woof’?”

“You know. Roof,” Jerry said. “Tin roof.”

The doctor tried it out. “Teeeeeeeeen. Wolf.”

“Yes!” Jerry was excited.

The young doctor looked across the bed at me. “What is…teen wolf?”

“A cover. A roof. Top. Roof,” I said. I made a pointy gabled shape with my
fingers.

“Ohhhhh,” he said. “ He was building a roof. So what is this tin?”

“It’s metal,” I said. I wanted to tell him the chemical symbol for tin but I couldn’t
remember it. It was something strange. “Metal, like…people put tin roofs on…the
rain sounds good on a tin roof.”

“Oh, I see. Like zinc. He was putting a zinc roof on a deck,” he said.

“I don’t think we have much zinc roofing around here,” I said. “I guess we use tin
instead.”

“So what is tin?” he asked me—again.

Jerry was saying “tin roof” really loud, over and over, only it really did sound like “tin woof.” I shushed him and said to the doctor, now beside me, “It’s like … aluminum.”

“Yes, yes. Aluminum. So, like zinc.”

When I noticed Jerry’s mouth formed to say “tin roof” again, I waved my hand behind
me, in front of his face, and said, “Yes.” We just had to get through this exam.

“So, what do you do when you’re not falling off roofs?” the doctor asked.

That took a while to explain, but we got through it.

The dialogue didn’t improve much during the next fifteen minutes but the young
doctor from Haiti established that, while Jerry felt some numbness in his back,
it was not a sign of paralysis. He told Jerry that it looked like the broken vertebrae did not get squashed into the spinal column. He didn’t think Jerry would have to have surgery but, he added, “I have to check all this out with my boss.”

It wasn’t long before the “boss” came in, a young, cute blonde who might stand five
feet three inches tall. After the customary “Hi there, Mr. Wong,” she launched into
the examination that both Jerry and I had, by this time, memorized.

She ended the exam with the discussion of why Jerry couldn’t feel himself “going.” Jerry
said “okay” when she finished. I wasn’t sure I understood what she was telling us but I didn’t ask any questions. It had been a long, long day.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she told Jerry. “We’re going to get a brace to go on
your back and see if that will hold your back in one place so that that break can heal. And you’re going to have to wear that collar. It’s going to take a little while, but I don’t think we’re going to have to do any surgery, and that’s good news. Your ribs will heal by themselves. We’ll send you home with some pain medication.”

Pause.

“Isn’t that good news?” She leaned over the bed so that they were face to face.

“Oh, yeah. That’s real good news,” he said. He was obviously distracted by one
thought or another.

“Okay, then. You’ll go to the trauma unit for a little while and if you do okay there,
you can go home to get better. Someone will come to take you to X-ray in a few
minutes, and then they’ll take you directly to the trauma unit from X-ray. That
sound okay?” she asked.

“Oh, oh. Sure. That sounds fine,” Jerry said. “Thank you.”

She smiled and said, “No problem.”

Before she even closed the curtains to the bay, Jerry said to me, “You think she’s the
boss?”

“Yep, I sure do,” I said. “I’m always surprised, myself, when these doctors are so
young, but I guess that’s because I’m old.”

He didn’t say, “No, you’re not.” He was thinking of something else.

“You know, I notice something here. Mostly everybody that’s a boss here is a woman. I wonder why is that.”

An escort, an older man, appeared to take him to X-ray about twenty minutes after
the boss left. He told us that he would take Jerry to the tenth floor after the X-ray was done. “That’s where the trauma unit is,” he added. “They tell me your bed’s ready.”

“Well, Jerry, I think I’ll go on home, and I’ll just see you tomorrow upstairs,” I said.

“Oh yeah, that’s fine,” he answered. “Thank you, Dinah, thank you for coming.”

“You are so welcome,” I said. “You knew I would come.” I patted his hand, slung my
bag over my shoulder, and followed the rolling bed out into the hall.

I was beside the bed, even with Jerry’s head, when he said to the man taking him for the films. “Wait, wait a minute if you don’t mind.”

Then, I think he was talking to me when he asked, “I know what a nunit is, but what
is this ‘tommy nunit’?”

“I’ll see y’all tomorrow,” I said. The patient escort could explain that.

Jerry spent eight hours in ER, a night and day in the trauma unit, and a night in a
regular room. I was sure he’d be there longer, even though he kept telling me he was going home.

Dave and I kept Dean, his landlord, up to date. In one conversation, Dean told me how Jerry fell. “He had his left foot on the ladder, and tried to step up on the deck handrail and just didn’t make it,” Dean said. “He landed straight down on his head, bounced, and landed on his back on a stack of lumber. He broke one of those two-by-sixes when he hit.” Dean’s voice choked.

“I know it scared you,” I said. “He’s going to be fine.”

“I want to come see him when he can have visitors,” he said.

“Dean, he keeps telling me he’s going home. I can’t imagine that they’d let him, but let me talk to the doctor, or the nurse, or somebody to find out if he’s really going home. You might want to wait and just make one trip to take him home,” I said.

Jerry called me that last morning to tell me that he had been discharged. Dean was already on the way from Macon County to pick him up, should be there soon.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Then I’m not going to make it down to the hospital before you leave.”

“That’s okay. That’s why I call now, so you don’t make a trip today. I might not be here.”

“So,” I said, “Did you see the doctor this morning?”

“Well, I think she’s a doctor. She tells me do I know how lucky I am I’m not hurt worse?”

“And you said ‘yes,’ didn’t you?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. I told her everybody else tells me the same thing… Shoot, I thought I was
dead.”

“Well, we’re all happy you’re not,” I said. “Was this the same doctor that was down in
the ER?” I thought perhaps the young spine doctor in the ER continued her care in the
unit upstairs.

“Oh no. She’s a different one, this one. But now she looks a little like the other one. Maybe they’re sisters,” he said.

“But, anyway, it was another woman,” I said, baiting him.

“Yeah, a woman. I know she’s the boss. Actually I think she’s the owner,” he said.