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I will miss him terribly! Strong, vital, a plethora of
humor, his working hands always smelling of a strong scent
of cinders and soot, always carrying a rather far away
sadness that he denied when questioned, "You
O.K."? "Couldn't be better if I tried, of course I
haven't tried anything lately". He would raise his
eyebrows in the truest of Groucho Marx style and made
everyone forget we might have glimpsed a pensive look of
sadness only a minute or two before. I often wondered if the
sights of retrieval from fires had left their inward mark
upon his soul as a fireman.
It was definitely easy to like him now, but it had not
always been that way between John and myself..
There had been a thirty year history of hard feelings that
began one hot day in July when my husband and I stopped on
the last leg of our journey to Los Angeles asking to take a
nap and asking for a glass of cold water to quench our
thirst. I was eight months pregnant with my youngest son,
and I fell into an instantaneous sleep as I sat on his sofa,
after listening to a seemingly endless diatribe that
proceeded my slumber, about his activities in the churches
new organization called "The Circle Of Mary" whose
sole purpose was to bring women into a shelter situation to
help heal and mend and fortify before they were once again
ready to face the world.
The next thing I knew I felt the strong shake of my
shoulders telling me I had to go before Dee got home.
"Dee doesn't like Hippies and you have to leave before
she gets here. I waddled to the door and looked back at his
look of relief. I was deeply hurt. I knew that if any of his
family members had asked for a short-lived haven, it would
have been there for them without question.
So after that day I drew my invisible barrier and refused
for thirty years to attend any function where I would again
be in the presence of such blatant hypocrisy. I stayed
behind the line I had drawn with a strong sense of
satisfaction. But something happened along the way, Life!
And the way that this element changes things for you when
you least expect the ragged and battered gift box placed in
your lap.
It was three summers ago in Missouri that John and I were
forced together on a mission of mercy, working together to
revive his Mother, taking our turns watching over the
frailty whose life force ebbed and made its way to recovery
with our vigilance and help.
We had time to talk and lay openly the wounds that refused
to heal even after that length of time. Strangely he did not
remember the incident at all and had wondered for so many
years what it was that had kept us away. We finally managed
to put a band aid on our wounds, shook hands and even
exchanged some hopes for the future as a family together.
Within months he was dead of a massive heart attack, making
jokes as he rode in the ambulance all the way to emergency,
and then his voice stilled.
So I stood silent and shocked as I watched the priest place
the small brown opaque plastic Tupperware box in the granite
square, using a red tube of DAP to seal his ashes into the
four by six inch slot that would hold the remnants of a life
lived and now past.
It was over, or so I thought, until one night John came to
me in the middle of the night as if in a clear and definite
visualization and asked me to watch the coming scenes.
"Remember"! He said with his usual joviality that
gave no hint of a specter.
He had pulled up in a white Jeep, jumping out of the vehicle
sporting white shorts and a white shirt, with epaulets that
held four gold stars on each side and wearing a white pith
helmet, ready for an adventure into the interior of the
unknown. I wiped my hands on my apron and then he asked me
to get his brother.
"You can't come along on this one." He expressed
to me. I watched as my husband climbed in the Jeep beside
his brother and they took off for a rather large airplane
hanger that suddenly appeared on the horizon. I could see
the first few feet inside the vast hanger. Every square inch
was covered and divided into small open faced cubicles on
the right and on the left, as far as the eye could see and
beyond, until it dissolved into a conglomerate of shadows
and shapes with a small lane in the middle for the vehicle's
progress in what it was John wanted to demonstrate to Deino.
Only The first few cubicles were distinguishable to me. Each
had a sign that hung to the side and above the open cubicle
was it's specific date, beginning with the year of John's
birth. The first cubicle contained toys and baby furniture,
the shadow of his nanny sat with her arms folded in the
ghostly rocker holding a wrapped figure that moved under its
blanket and cried loudly. The next open cubicle was the year
after that and inside that year were more toys, different
toys, and a mother and father arguing and the baby sitting
on the floor and crying with its arms up in distress. The
room had changed, the mood had changed, the light had
changed, the baby had changed.
I stood motionless against a bright electric blue sky and
looking up at the one white growing globe of light above me.
Warm, inviting, hovering, conscious in its positioning. I
was mesmerized by the feeling of total and complete peace
and the luxury of an absence of worry or turmoil, everything
was vividly colored beyond the first Technicolor experience.
Every sound was distinct; grasses rubbing against one
another, the dried chaff against the counter point of the
growing points of green. Flowers like individually plucked
harp strings as they pushed themselves through the ground in
pursuit of the light.
Timeless! An Ozone tube! A surrealistic moving montage!
I can not say how long I stood transfixed, And then I heard
the vehicle once again and looked to see them stopping
before the last two dates on the left hand side of the
immense hanger. They pointed and laughed, and John took off
his helmet for a minute and then swung by the very last
cubicle. They were silent, staring into the moving scene as
he was being wheeled into the emergency room. John and Deino
turned to hug one another. There was another long moment and
then the vehicle came within feet of where I had been rooted
to the spot. John waved a hearty good bye and Deino jumped
from the Jeep as it was turning to take off. We stood
waiting in the direction of the future, arm and arm.
"Tell Deino what you saw Jobekah" John requested
as he disappeared through what had once been the territory
of the hanger, but had dissolved just as quickly as it had
appeared into another new, fresh scene of panoramic vistas
likened to the Serengeti Plains, unencumbered, vast,
perfect! And the winds began to blow again, And the sun
became a shade darker, And the birds began to sing And the
flowers were already leaving the season.
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