Christmastime Courage: An EMS Story

The call comes in around six a.m. because that’s when old people tend to get up. Rain or shine, winter or summer, sick or retired – they like to see the sun rise. I’d been at a house fire the night before and my partner had been chasing transfers, so the page for the little old lady fall doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. We grouse around, find our boots, and set off in the early morning chill with the ambulance lights bouncing off the downtown Christmas lights and the new sun cutting the horizon.

                Feeling the lack of coffee.

                Our patient is supine on the floor of a living room that is rife with collectables, Santa wrapping paper and two walkers. The obligatory poinsettias on spindly end tables. Maneuvering the cot will be a difficulty, but not impossible, so my partner initiates that project while I tend to the fall victim.

                Almost certainly a broken hip, with the classic rotating of the ankle, the shortening of one leg. She rates her pain at a ten – on a scale of one to ten - in that quiet way the elderly have of voicing a difficulty without letting it own them. She had fallen, she said, in the bathroom, but Frank had helped her to get dressed and had gotten her this far before they both gave out.    

                “He was going to take you?” My question is abstracted; I’m listening for her blood pressure.

                ‘To the hospital?’ was the tag on my unfinished question, but she misunderstands, and answers a bit archly. “Well, he always has. Taken care of me.”

                And for the first time I see Frank. He hovers in the kitchen doorway on the telephone – small, thin and bent. Not looking as though he could take care of anything this morning.

                My partner has wrestled the cot into the living room, and from there it’s easy peasy – our patient is small, our cot a modern wonder. Pillows for comfort around the hip, two steps going down the porch, across a beautifully manicured lawn and we’re in the rig with a minimum of discomfort.

                I dash back for the jump kit, across the porch and into the living room. And for the first time I see Frank.

He’s crying. He had, of course, thought we’d left, and he’s leaning against the china cupboard with his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, when I come back in.

                He’s quick. His head comes up, hands mop his cheeks, and I notice how big those hands are, How rough, with their stubby nails and scarred knuckles.

                “Forget something?” he asks drily.

                Courage wears a lot of faces. But this face, here today, is the one that’s breaking my heart.

                He’d always taken care of her. And today he couldn’t get her from the bathroom to the front door. Always held her hand, and today we’re doing that. Slept with her for probably sixty years and tonight he’ll sleep alone. In one horrid and irrevocable moment, his life has changed utterly, and he wants to know if I forgot something.

                Yeah, I forgot to be kind.

                Courage is hardly ever about the rush you get when you dash into the house fire. It’s not about extricating the accident victims from the mangled car or even doing CPR on the SIDS baby. Courage has love and compassion at its core.

                So I put on my own courage face and breach the comfort zone between myself and this man I have only just seen; and I hug him. At first he stiffens, but then he hugs me back and for a long moment we just stand there like that.

                Finally I say, “Do you want to ride to the hospital with us?” and Frank and I walk out into the new morning.

 

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*Art Source

We Loved October

 I’ve always been a bit startled by the concept of a God who demands an accounting at the end of the day. The notion of “Where did you err?” is a frightening one, and the list, alas, all too long. But here - what if the question is “What did you love?” Will the list, again, be unending?

                I hope so.

                But for now, let’s stick with October. Dear God, we loved October. Every glorious, gold-tinged, sweet-smelling moment. We ate popcorn in the bleachers at the football games; we kicked leaves all over the yard; we laughed, hard and often.

                October found us strewing decorations all over the house like madmen. Jack-o-lanterns, witches, twinkling orange light strings. To hell with the diet, we gained extra pounds in cookies and millions of teensy candy bars.

                In Galena, we drank too much wine and sat on the porch of our cabin with the owls hooting and the crows cawing all around us. All night, we talked, laughed, reminisced.

                Three birthdays in October! Beautiful faces reflected in candlelight, family and friends gathered, another year whooshing past like the leaves blowing off the hill.

                We sang around a bonfire, we scavenger-hunted, we played dress-up with the delight of small children. We sat transfixed before the millionth showing of “Hocus Pocus” and got goosebumps crossing the yard in the dark after “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

                Halloween! The gem in the crown. The rush, the exuberance, the very air alive with expectation. Could there be anything better?

                Chocolate, rum, granny smith apples – all sweeter in October.

Life – yes, sweeter.

                And that Oogey-Boogey Man November lurking just around the corner? BOO! It's here.

An Ode to Tommy Pickles: Hero of the Millennials

Baby Boomers worry a lot about the next generation, don’t we? Funny kids, always on their magic phones, never in church. Chock full of news about spirituality and hashtags, but they don’t know how to balance a checkbook. We blame their video games for the violence in our nation, their lax beliefs for God’s new absence in America. We wish they’d learned more about math and less about the Perfect Selfie, am I right?

                Actually no, I’m wrong, we all are.

                Theirs is a generation of vivid color, bright love, universal acceptance. They not only like new toys and new ideas, they understand them, and while their God may not look like ours, I’m pretty sure He’s very much a presence.

                In short, they’re the Nickelodeon kids - the little ones we parked in front of morning cartoons while we brushed our teeth and fished Pop-Tarts out of the toaster. They did homework with Hey Arnold and learned about wildlife with Eliza Thornberry. But most importantly, they watched The Rugrats, and people, a generation weaned on Tommy Pickles can’t go wrong.

                Do you remember him lighting up your television screen with that big toothless grin? Toddling in and out of trouble with his diaper sagging and his “sponsitilty” clutched to his chest?

                “A baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do,” he said, and he did.  Tommy is the John Wayne of the Millennials - adventurous, courageous, and guided by the firmest moral compass known to man.

                He taught us about loyalty - always at Chuckie’s side, nudging him forward, encouraging. He didn’t let the bad monkeys take Dill away, even though a large part of hoped they would.

                Stubbornness? Did anyone ever dig in like Tommy when he was on a mission? Whether it was reaching the cookie jar or breaching the playpen wall, when Tommy Pickles had a goal he by God reached it.

                Tommy gave us an openness to different cultures and beliefs, accepting with fascination stories from both Jewish and Christian grandparents, noticing but not giving a hoot that Suzy and Kimi’s skin was a different color than his own.

                He taught us to be comfortable with ourselves and to have fun. “Nakey is good, Chuckie! Nakey is free!”

                Imagination? Tommy created whole worlds from his seat in the sandbox, and he took everyone with him.

                We needed Tommy Pickles; we still do.

                Take heart, people. He lives on in the hearts of the next generation.



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Summer Imp

Summer is for the child in us. You know her – the giggling, golden imp who sleeps until ten, wakes up with her hair in a tangle and doesn’t look back on her way to the lake. Bare feet, brown shoulders and sand in her swim suit bottom, that’s her.

I’m an adult.

I do adult-speak, adult thoughts, adult action all day every day, and sometimes I think I’ve completely forgotten the language of the child. Do you remember that easy happiness? Big, belly-aching laughter, tears on your cheeks, feet kicking with sheer exuberance?  The wonder found in waxing moonlight, Daddy’s Pall Malls and first kisses? The cold rush of creek water around your ankles, the whisper of ghost stories beside a campfire?

Summer beckons us backwards, calls us home.

Ah God, what heaven, to give up taxes and jobs and the tangle of relationships. To have a conversation that has nothing to do with car payments or dead people.

The child in us remembers, she knows how. If we let her out, she’ll play music on the car radio so loud your eardrums will burst. She’ll kick off her shoes, curse like Davy Jones and drink rum through a straw in a paper cup.

It’s summer! She’ll scream it before she belly-flops from the raft into the mossy green lake water. No school, no job, no bills . . . No worries.

Ah, there it is. No worries. That’s why she laughs.

And here is where we butt up against the impossibility of ever being her again. Because the adult has learned the fine art of worry and is loath to turn loose of it. Worry, it seems, is intrinsically bound up with every article in our grown-up arsenal – our spouse, our children, our house, our jobs. Our happiness?

Ah no. Draw a line. The worry could go – couldn’t it?-  if we let the laughter back in, if we allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the flash of minnows in creek water or the swoop of barn swallows above the hill. It’s still summer – it’s not too late – and I propose a compromise. Give the imp just a toe in the door. A day off work, a double scoop ice cream cone, pink toenail polish from the dollar store.

Soon enough, the leaves will fall and the taxes will come due. I say, let’s laugh while we can. Let’s eat watermelon and dance in the moonlight and for a teensy window of time, just be.

No worries.

Happy August.     

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Home to Maycomb

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by night fall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

I was probably ten when I first stepped into Maycomb and felt the drowsy July heat on the back of my neck. The light was different there – hazy and green, filtered through the lace of leaves and pink magnolia blossoms. The air – limpid and thick, sweet with Mimosas and sprinkled with fireflies. I padded barefoot though the soft dirt between the collard greens, shivered in Boo Radley’s shadow, and never wanted to come out again.

I have, in fact, returned every summer, and turning that first page always feels like coming home. Because Harper Lee’s magic is twofold; in reading her, I am transported not only Scout Finch’s childhood, but also to my own.  Open the book, and I am curled again on my grandmother’s couch. Sunlight is warped through the multi-paned windows; it throws rainbow prisms across the pages and the maple wood of the coffee table. Through the screen I can hear the indolent hum of bees and the long whistle of a bobwhite; from the kitchen the muted chatter of conversation. Water droplets traverse the length of my pink lemonade glass and Scout’s honeyed voice is as Southern as Brer Rabbit.

Anyone who denies the power of the written word has not read To Kill a Mockingbird.

Whenever the cynical half of my soul decries the value of an author career, I have only to remember the ten year old on the couch soaking Harper Lee into her soul the way sun tea takes on color. This woman’s words made me want to fashion my own; to create from sheer nothingness a world as layered and nuanced as the one I inhabited seemed a magic beyond comprehension, and I knew, even then, that I would have to try.

I’m still trying, and even on my most wretched day I’m forced to admit how much I love the by-now familiar process. Words, you see, are a gift.

"Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical. Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed yards."

I can see it, can’t you? Harper Lee is back, blowing through our lives like the sweetest Alabama breeze, whispering in our ears, bringing with her the all of the old magic. Never, ever, has a sequel been more anticipated.

My copy of Go Set a Watchman has been ordered and should be arriving in the mail any day now, at which time I’ll be off the radar for a bit.

I’m going back to Maycomb.

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Uniquely American

Art by Henri Peter

We put our flag away the weekend after Memorial Day, and here we are, unfurling it again on this gorgeous lavender evening, twilight hour thick with lightning bugs and the smell of fresh -cut grass. Down the block someone sets off a bottle rocket – whine and pop, laughter – and through the open screen I can hear the Jimi Hendrix version of the Star Spangled Banner. When we wrestle the flag pole into its bracket, the brilliant stars and stripes are glorious against the smooth purple sky.

            It’s good to be here, isn’t it?   Here, barefooted in my front yard in the middle of my town in the middle of my country. 

            And I love tonight – the carnival lights and the stink of spent firecrackers, the facepaint, the music, and all the rowdy raucous hullaballoo that is so us. 

So noisily, uniquely American. 

Here, tonight, we won’t question ourselves. Let’s not bemoan our property taxes, the healthcare system or illegal immigration. Instead, let’s remember who we are, where we came from.  We the people. The first ever, anywhere, to believe that a dream could be shaped into a government and made to work not just for a few, but for all.  We the people who absolutely could not wear the cloak of oppression, could never bow before a king or accept a class system. We the people made up of different religions, colors and ethnicities but yes, all us. All American.  

            Tonight, we’ll cheer about that. We’ll sing about a flag that waves in every hollow, on every mountain, across the prairie of this, our home. 

            Happy birthday to us – may we never take us for granted.

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A Father, to a Daughter

In my dream, it is a perfect October day. A sky hard and blue as ceramic, the whole world on fire with the crimson death of summer, harvest in full swing; it is the sort of day that a child takes wholly for granted. 

I am sixteen and I’m driving the best tractor known to man, an International 806. Pulling a full wagon load of corn up the incline to the main road and not thinking about the yawning ravine off to my right. Until I throttle the engine back and it dies.

Here is where the dream veers into the realm of nightmares. There had been noise – the growl of tractor engine, indistinct radio static, birdsong – but now there is silence. My hand reaches of its own volition, moves languidly, like a fat bass under water, and turns the key in the ignition.

The engine stays dead and the tractor begins a slow roll backwards. 

I am going to die.

But then a miracle happens. The wagon strikes something hard. The tongue bends - the crash of metal on metal exploding into the quiet - and the tractor comes to rest, cockeyed, back tires just on the edge of the path. A handful of corn dislodges from the load and drops off into nothingness, brushing elm leaves on its way down the abyss.

My legs are jelly, but I jump from the tractor, roll once in the hard dirt and sit up to see . . . my dad.

He had been following in the grain truck, had seen my dilemma and accelerated to catch up, stopping my roll with the nose of his truck. 

Fathers, you see, stand - always and implacably - between their children and the stuff of nightmares.

A mother is the indispensable giver of hugs and kisses, the untiring listening ear, the arms that hold you when you cry. Fathers don’t know what to do with tears, but they will single-handedly slaughter every demon in your universe and they will, if you let them, give you all the tools you need for life. 

My own father taught me how to work and how to dance. How to play poker and how to pray. When I couldn’t balance a check book he got out his pencil; when I drove home drunk he summoned an awesome and righteous anger. 

He has been, and remains, the only hero in my universe whose feet aren’t made of clay. 

Father’s Day . . . well, it doesn’t quite cut it for most dads, does it? Chocolate, or socks, or a blue work shirt hardly say what needs to be said. 

But I think he knows. A father, to a daughter, walks amongst the gods, is the brightest and most infallible star in her sky. Although he would laugh out loud if he were to read this.

And then I would be embarrassed.

Happy day, Dad! I love you.