A verse for today:"We love Him because He first loved us." 1 John 4:-10
“Ronny, would you hurry up! Your dinner is getting cold and your family is in here eating alone! Ronny! Ronny? Honey can you hear me out there? I have been hollering your name for the longest time! Ronny I am not bringing your plate out there again, it is just too daw gawn cold for that! How you even sit out there in the first place is beyond me. Ronny, are you listening to me? Ronny?”
~~~
“Jocelyn Haynesworth?”
“Yes?”
“I am Dr. Jay Recedeen. I am caring for your husband.”
A solemn-faced, “Yes?” was her only reply.
“Well, we aren’t exactly sure what happened to Ronny. It is possible that he had a minor stroke, but that would not explain any symptoms except for his unconsciousness.”
“What other symptoms?”
“Mrs. Haynesworth, your husband is in a coma.”
“Oh God. Oh God, this can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.” She buried her tear-stained face, the one that had been worshipped for so long by one man, in her delicate hands, that she longed to enclose in that same man’s powerful fingers.
I was three and three quarters years old at the time. My sister, who was in first grade, had just learned fractions and had passed her much-envied wisdom on to me, so when Dr. Recedeen asked me how old I was, I replied to him that I was three and three quarters. He gave me a grin that I’ve learned to read as a pilot would a meter and said, “Three and three quarters eh? I’ve got a little boy about your age.”
I just stared up at him, an awkward stare, unsure what to make of this man. After what seemed like eternity itself, I remembered my manners and gave a halfway smile that even at that age I knew would send him away satisfied. It was my father’s halfway smile.
~~~
There she is: Macy Haynesworth. She’s been my best friend since we were kids. Twenty-three years later she still calls me almost everyday and we have dinner 3 times a week. I can’t believe she’s stuck around this one-horse town for as long as she has. I’m glad she has though. I can’t imagine my life without her, but then again I’ve never had to. God, she’s beautiful. Those dark green eyes cut straight through any wall I’ve built up to the world.
All of a sudden a tug on my pant leg pulls me from my day dream. The sound of little feet scampering back and forth behind me brings a smile to my eyes. She’s gotten good at this game; the only thing that gives her away is the light-up dump trucks on the side of her little boots. She’s a tom-boy, just like her mother. “Now who in the world could that be? Rosie Haynesworth maybe?” Her giggles are a dead giveaway. “Nah, it can’t be Rosie.”
“I don’t know anyone named Rosie.”
Her best attempt at a masculine voice nearly had me doubled over from laughter. She was really turning into her mother’s girl. A second later she was zooming through the air, her little mid-section tightly secured in my hands. If only she had been mine.
“Hey Mace.”
“Morning Jesse.” It seems like a mediocre greeting to a curious onlooker but we both know that the other can read those two words like a book.
“So, how about it little miss? You ready?” I helped Macy into my old, beaten-up canoe then lifted Rosie to her mother’s lap. As I climbed into the driver’s seat in back, Rosie announced that she wanted to steer the boat today. Objecting to such determination would have been a crime of the worst kind, so Macy and I played a careful game of hot potato to get the wiggly little girl to me. She sat on my lap with her paddle in hand, concentrating with all of her might to follow my every stroke. She wanted to be perfect at it, just like her mother.
In high school Macy dated the starting wide receiver on the football team, Nick Satton. Most of the girls in town were crooning over him by the eighth grade, but not Macy. She had some magic ability to resist the charm of the small town hero, but he couldn’t say the same of her. He fought for that girl nonstop until middle of our junior year of high school when she finally said yes. Senior year they were voted “cutest couple” in senior superlatives. Then, sometime between spring break and prom Macy wound up pregnant. Nick got a football scholarship to Notre Dame, a long way from our little town outside of Tulsa. The day he left I went with Macy to her five month doctor’s appointment.
~~~
“Yes dear.” She was asking me to make a pot of coffee.
“And if you could, put a little cream and sugar in it, just like you know I like it, honey.”
“Yes dear.” It seems like that’s all my vocabulary consists of anymore: yes-dears and if-that’s-what-you-wants with the occasional as-soon-as-I-get-home thrown in to spice things up a bit. Thinking about it that way, I see that I am what most women would call a good husband and most men would refer to as whipped. Forty-three years, four months, and sixteen days I’ve been doing this, answering to the calls of the women in my life. When we I married Charlene we were the definition of love birds in its most blissful sense. She twenty-three year-old farm girl from a wealthy family in North Dakota and I was a twenty-six year-old sailor born and raised in Savannah, Georgia. My mother was an artist and my father a merchant. They were the first encounter I had with love. Yes, they loved each other and my brother, Tom, and I, but they loved everyone else in that city too. Mama would make quilts, jackets, pretty much every article of clothing you can imagine for the homeless and every night before Tom and I would go to bed, she would let us hug each one of her creations. As we pulled the soft cloth against our bare chests and pressed our little faces into it, she would tell us that we were planting seeds in the gifts, seeds of love. She used to say that we did this so that no matter where the people who received the clothes ended up, they would always know that they were loved. My mother believed in love more than anyone I’ve ever known and to this day I am in awe of it.
“Ben, is the coffee ready?” So this is where I’ve ended up.
“Almost dear.” Forty-three years, four months, and sixteen days. Those who say time flies and have never been married are just vomiting words.
On Thursday nights I go downtown to what I tell my wife is a book club for retired men. The book club is composed of two men, Bill O’Jonsohn and I, tonight at least. Bill is a columnist for the Savannah Star. I’ve already read the most recent National Geographic and Time magazines so I’ve settled for the local paper. Every week it’s someone different. When no paper or magazine is available I am joined by the likes of Anderson Cooper, Ross and Joey, or Cory, Sean, and Eric. Our man-cave rotates among the waiting rooms of central hospital. Sometimes it’s oncology, sometimes long-term care, sometimes cardiac. The boys and I try to avoid the trauma ward and Intensive Care Unit, though. The people who occupy those chairs are anxious and agitated. They have their eyes pealed and their ears poised for any sign of a physician, nurse, secretary they recognize who might be able to give them the slightest bit of information about their loved one. These are places of desperate and devastated people. There eyes shine like a gateway to the pain that their shattered hearts contain. Even if the sick or injured survive, those who spend too much time in one of these rooms do not come out unscathed. Ever.
Today I am in the long-term care. A young woman with brown hair is also here, sitting across the room with her daughter who looks to be about seven or eight. They have the same eyes, a deep, piercing green. There is something about the mother that holds my attention, though. I can’t put my finger on it but I am incurably drawn in now. After a few minutes a nurse come out to greet her and leads the pair out of the waiting room and down a long hallway. My wife has said for years that my curiosity cannot be tamed, and she is one-hundred percent correct in this statement. After they have been gone a moment or two I am unable to contain myself any longer so get up and begin down the hall.
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