People who know me well, and there are several, know my story and know why I was not involved in my two sons’ lives as they were growing up.
I wanted to be, I truly did. But I simply wasn’t able to do or be what I could and should have been. It is the greatest regret of my life.
The boys – Dylan and Eamon – are men now, both married, and each with one child. My elder son, Dylan, and Mickie, his wife, have a beautiful daughter, Chloe. Eamon and his wife, Jennifer, have a marvelous little boy, Aidyn.
Over the last several months, my sons and their wives have sent me two hundred pictures, maybe more as attachments to e-mails. There are pictures of birthday parties, of visits to the zoo in Denver, of Aidyn wearing a leather jacket and of Chloe wearing a Barack Obama sweatshirt at an election rally. How great is that!
There are pictures of Aidyn and Chloe together and pictures of the kids with my sons. There are pictures that make me laugh aloud and some that make me want to weep for joy and for sadness at missed opportunities.
God, I feel so fortunate to have these boys and their wives and children in my life right now, no matter how peripherally, no matter how impermanent the contact is.
I print the pictures out, pictures of the two kids, my two grandchildren, and Lynne buys frames and I hang them, as many as I can, on a wall where I see them as I work. Chloe and Aidyn. A dozen pictures so far, and more to come, I’m sure.
I used to think the grandparents I knew were saps. No kid, I knew, could be as beautiful, as smart, as perfectly charming, as the grandchildren these idiots talked about. Now I know I was right. Oh, their grandchildren were okay, I’ll give them that. They were cute, maybe. And perhaps they weren’t quite as slow as they appeared in the pictures these proud grandparents showed me. Maybe someday they’d look more presentable.
But if you want to see a truly beautiful child, or a baby as smart as a little engineer, drop in my room and look at the wall over my desk. Those kids, that Chloe and that Aidyn, they’re really something to see. Trust me. They’re worth looking at.
Looking at their pictures, I sometimes forget what's going on, that tomorrow I have to get chemo, or that I may never see them or get to hug them. I forget cancer and think only good things, for a while. And that's wonderful.
Showing posts with label joy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label joy. Show all posts
Monday, November 17, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Good Day
It’s amazing. Some days are bad. Very bad. And then, just when I start to think all my days are going to be bad, I have a day that’s so good it can hardly be believed.
Today is a day like that. Good, I mean. Wednesday, two days ago, was one of the bad ones.
On Wednesday, I had chemo. I was only able to walk about 50 yards along the sidewalk leading from the hospital’s front door to the parking lot before I had to sit down and rest. I was nauseous on the drive home, so much so that I pulled off the road to puke. I spent the rest of the day in bed except for a few minutes I devoted to working on that day’s entry for this blog.
Yesterday was so-so. But that’s okay because it turned out to be just a transition.
Today’s been great. I woke up feeling good. No nausea. I had some energy. The drive to the VA hospital was pleasant: traffic was light, it was cool, the sun was just coming up. The crossword puzzle I brought with me was not quite impenetrable and I was called on time for my appointment.
Linda Vesley, my therapist, was, as always, wonderful and understanding. I enjoy the time I spend with her. She helps, she's funny and smart, and great company. The stuff we talked about was sobering, but the session was pleasant.
The drive home was good. The Symphony Orchestra of Ireland was on the radio playing Mozart. I didn’t have to vomit.
Now I'm up from my nap. I’m going to write a bit and I expect the writing to go well. I’ll read and enjoy what I read. There won’t be any bills in the mail or, if there are, I won’t open them. I expect to eat something unhealthy but enjoyable and then waste my time watching a movie. Lynne and I will not argue about money or anything else.
I’m not going to complain, today, or try not to, because this is one of those rare days when I feel happy to be alive.
Many people who know me well believe I’m a curmudgeon, a grouch, a cynic.
And I am, kind of. Or maybe the problem is that days like this don't come along all that often when cancer's in the picture.
Anyway, I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.
Today is a day like that. Good, I mean. Wednesday, two days ago, was one of the bad ones.
On Wednesday, I had chemo. I was only able to walk about 50 yards along the sidewalk leading from the hospital’s front door to the parking lot before I had to sit down and rest. I was nauseous on the drive home, so much so that I pulled off the road to puke. I spent the rest of the day in bed except for a few minutes I devoted to working on that day’s entry for this blog.
Yesterday was so-so. But that’s okay because it turned out to be just a transition.
Today’s been great. I woke up feeling good. No nausea. I had some energy. The drive to the VA hospital was pleasant: traffic was light, it was cool, the sun was just coming up. The crossword puzzle I brought with me was not quite impenetrable and I was called on time for my appointment.
Linda Vesley, my therapist, was, as always, wonderful and understanding. I enjoy the time I spend with her. She helps, she's funny and smart, and great company. The stuff we talked about was sobering, but the session was pleasant.
The drive home was good. The Symphony Orchestra of Ireland was on the radio playing Mozart. I didn’t have to vomit.
Now I'm up from my nap. I’m going to write a bit and I expect the writing to go well. I’ll read and enjoy what I read. There won’t be any bills in the mail or, if there are, I won’t open them. I expect to eat something unhealthy but enjoyable and then waste my time watching a movie. Lynne and I will not argue about money or anything else.
I’m not going to complain, today, or try not to, because this is one of those rare days when I feel happy to be alive.
Many people who know me well believe I’m a curmudgeon, a grouch, a cynic.
And I am, kind of. Or maybe the problem is that days like this don't come along all that often when cancer's in the picture.
Anyway, I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Obama
Yesterday was quite a day.
I had chemo in the morning and felt sick all day, as usual. But that was okay.
I forced myself to stay up as late as I could watching the election results. As states were declared, some for Obama, some for McCain, I thought back. I remembered how, when I was a boy in Chicago, the only Afro-American I ever saw in my neighborhood was a woman – I never knew her name – who did chores for the families on our street. She baby sat for my brothers and me once, that’s all I recall.
When we moved to Clearwater in 1958, the beach was segregated, as were the schools. Blacks would often step off the sidewalk and stand in the street as whites walked by. My only contact with a black man was when I worked in a restaurant, first as a dishwasher, later as a line server. My boss was a 20-year-old with moves as graceful as a dancer. I drove him home after work one day. He refused to sit in the front seat with me, saying he’d better sit in the back. Not for his sake, but for mine. "It’s too dangerous in my neighborhood if people think we’re friends," he said.
During my one year of public school, I saw no people of color other than a janitor. When I went to Catholic high school in Tampa, I was surrounded by young men whose families fled Cuba during the revolution. They were all wealthy, so they had little to do with me. There were no blacks at all.
In the service, things were different and by the time I went to college things had changed, a bit, at least in Chicago. I was a politically active hippy. I found time to Still, help register African-American voters on Chicago’s South Side and marched with Jesse Jackson when he was an unknown. I remember the smell of tear gas and remember reading about the riots in Selma and Montgomery. I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would be elected president of the United States.
So that's why yesterday was quite a day.
As a consequence, I can understand Michelle Obama’s words when she said she was proud of the United States for the first time in her life. She could have said it better, but, hey, I can understand. I’ve never been more proud to be an American than I am today.
And, man, am I glad the cancer let me live long enough to hear Obama’s speech.
I had chemo in the morning and felt sick all day, as usual. But that was okay.
I forced myself to stay up as late as I could watching the election results. As states were declared, some for Obama, some for McCain, I thought back. I remembered how, when I was a boy in Chicago, the only Afro-American I ever saw in my neighborhood was a woman – I never knew her name – who did chores for the families on our street. She baby sat for my brothers and me once, that’s all I recall.
When we moved to Clearwater in 1958, the beach was segregated, as were the schools. Blacks would often step off the sidewalk and stand in the street as whites walked by. My only contact with a black man was when I worked in a restaurant, first as a dishwasher, later as a line server. My boss was a 20-year-old with moves as graceful as a dancer. I drove him home after work one day. He refused to sit in the front seat with me, saying he’d better sit in the back. Not for his sake, but for mine. "It’s too dangerous in my neighborhood if people think we’re friends," he said.
During my one year of public school, I saw no people of color other than a janitor. When I went to Catholic high school in Tampa, I was surrounded by young men whose families fled Cuba during the revolution. They were all wealthy, so they had little to do with me. There were no blacks at all.
In the service, things were different and by the time I went to college things had changed, a bit, at least in Chicago. I was a politically active hippy. I found time to Still, help register African-American voters on Chicago’s South Side and marched with Jesse Jackson when he was an unknown. I remember the smell of tear gas and remember reading about the riots in Selma and Montgomery. I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would be elected president of the United States.
So that's why yesterday was quite a day.
As a consequence, I can understand Michelle Obama’s words when she said she was proud of the United States for the first time in her life. She could have said it better, but, hey, I can understand. I’ve never been more proud to be an American than I am today.
And, man, am I glad the cancer let me live long enough to hear Obama’s speech.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Bread
I go to the grocery store every morning. I could, I guess, go once a week or maybe twice like most people do but I like stopping in after I attend the morning fellowship meeting I usually go to. Anyway, it seems as if we’re always in need of something: milk and diet soda and coffee-cream are almost always on the list along with the diet food my wife eats with amazing consistency.
When I was a boy, growing up on Chicago’s south side, my mother often sent me to a bakery for a loaf of fresh bread. I’d run the two blocks from the apartment building my parents owned to 79th Street and turn west to run along the street in front of Our Lady of Peace Church and then cross Jeffrey Boulevard to the bakery.
There was a newsstand on that corner, 79th and Jeffrey, where a short, dark, old man sold the Tribune and, I guess, magazines and cigarettes. In those days, if you were in a car and wanted the newspaper, all you had to do was stop, roll your window down, and honk. Joe, I think that was his name, would fold a paper in half (unless it was Sunday, when the paper was too thick) and run to the car to deliver it, all for a nickel.
I don’t recall the name of the bakery, though I do know it was run by an elderly couple. It seems like all neighborhood stores then were operated by gray-haired husbands and wives who, for some reason, hardly ever spoke to each other. The bakery couple was no exception. They didn’t speak to each other, but they knew every customer by name, even the customer’s children, like me.
It’s funny, I don’t remember the name of the bakery, but I do remember the husband who worked behind the counter seemed always to have flour on his hands. "How can we help you?" he’d ask. I’d tell him I wanted a loaf of white, thin sliced, or of pumpernickel, thin sliced, and he’d slap his hands together and laugh as if I’d just told him the best joke he’d ever heard. "You got it," he’d say. "You got it." And then he’d put a loaf of bread in automatic slicer that fascinated and frightened me.
He knew, somehow, that I loved to eat the end slices from the loaf of still-warm bread as I walked home. He never handed them to me, though. He’d take them, a slice from each end, and wrap them together in paper and hand them to me without a word. Maybe he did that for all the boys who ran errands for their mothers. Girls, too, I guess, though almost every family in our neighborhood had at least one boy big enough to send to the bakery.
The grocery store I go to these days is big and modern. It sells lottery tickets, outdoor furniture, cosmetics, greeting cards, Miami Dolphin tee-shirts, appliances, and other inedibles as well as food and drink. I’m there so often that the women and men who work the front registers know me on sight and always ask how I’m doing. The manager calls me by name.
That’s nice. But what’s really nice is the huge bakery in the back of the store. I stop there almost every day for a loaf of thin-sliced pumpernickel or something called White Mountain Bread. There’s a baker behind the counter, a middle-aged woman named Judy, who always says hello. She knows I like bread thin sliced and knows I like bread warm. She can’t always give me warm bread. I understand that. But when there’s fresh break cooling on racks in the back of the huge bakery she grabs one for me and puts it in a slicer that looks and sounds exactly like the one from Chicago almost sixty years ago.
I asked, once, for the end slices from a loaf of pumpernickel she was slicing and she handed them to me with a smile. I like that. Now she always gives me the end slices of any warm loaf she slices for me.
Isn't that something?
When I was a boy, growing up on Chicago’s south side, my mother often sent me to a bakery for a loaf of fresh bread. I’d run the two blocks from the apartment building my parents owned to 79th Street and turn west to run along the street in front of Our Lady of Peace Church and then cross Jeffrey Boulevard to the bakery.
There was a newsstand on that corner, 79th and Jeffrey, where a short, dark, old man sold the Tribune and, I guess, magazines and cigarettes. In those days, if you were in a car and wanted the newspaper, all you had to do was stop, roll your window down, and honk. Joe, I think that was his name, would fold a paper in half (unless it was Sunday, when the paper was too thick) and run to the car to deliver it, all for a nickel.
I don’t recall the name of the bakery, though I do know it was run by an elderly couple. It seems like all neighborhood stores then were operated by gray-haired husbands and wives who, for some reason, hardly ever spoke to each other. The bakery couple was no exception. They didn’t speak to each other, but they knew every customer by name, even the customer’s children, like me.
It’s funny, I don’t remember the name of the bakery, but I do remember the husband who worked behind the counter seemed always to have flour on his hands. "How can we help you?" he’d ask. I’d tell him I wanted a loaf of white, thin sliced, or of pumpernickel, thin sliced, and he’d slap his hands together and laugh as if I’d just told him the best joke he’d ever heard. "You got it," he’d say. "You got it." And then he’d put a loaf of bread in automatic slicer that fascinated and frightened me.
He knew, somehow, that I loved to eat the end slices from the loaf of still-warm bread as I walked home. He never handed them to me, though. He’d take them, a slice from each end, and wrap them together in paper and hand them to me without a word. Maybe he did that for all the boys who ran errands for their mothers. Girls, too, I guess, though almost every family in our neighborhood had at least one boy big enough to send to the bakery.
The grocery store I go to these days is big and modern. It sells lottery tickets, outdoor furniture, cosmetics, greeting cards, Miami Dolphin tee-shirts, appliances, and other inedibles as well as food and drink. I’m there so often that the women and men who work the front registers know me on sight and always ask how I’m doing. The manager calls me by name.
That’s nice. But what’s really nice is the huge bakery in the back of the store. I stop there almost every day for a loaf of thin-sliced pumpernickel or something called White Mountain Bread. There’s a baker behind the counter, a middle-aged woman named Judy, who always says hello. She knows I like bread thin sliced and knows I like bread warm. She can’t always give me warm bread. I understand that. But when there’s fresh break cooling on racks in the back of the huge bakery she grabs one for me and puts it in a slicer that looks and sounds exactly like the one from Chicago almost sixty years ago.
I asked, once, for the end slices from a loaf of pumpernickel she was slicing and she handed them to me with a smile. I like that. Now she always gives me the end slices of any warm loaf she slices for me.
Isn't that something?
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