PAST-INGS
Sometimes, when I go back to the hometown, back to the house and the wife, her sister and their mother that they tend to, awaiting her time to be in a nursing facility, inevitable as her fading memory, home on the days off, returned an alien, still in love with a woman changed by the past few days I wasn't there, feeling like a truck driver or a traveling salesman instead of like a worker who's job is an hour from where I called home and now call my home away from home, sometimes I visit Dean's grave.
Not a big deal. Not even out of my way, if you can call a trip to a cemetery anything but out of your way, Mom and Dad are buried at the end of the section Dean's on. They're near the Longs, their longtime neighbors. My friend Deb is only a few plots from him.
Plots. The last place of your earthly life is called a plot But the plot of your life has been the living, the mundane same mistakes everyone else makes, the simplistic decisions to solve complex problems which create a trap we never even sense as we step into it, personal Iraq's that create Isis monsters. The solving of a crime. The twists of love affairs or of the one love affair of our life. The search for that one person, only to find so many people think there is no ONE person, but a string of them and a corresponding flow in divorce court.
Dean's plot intersected mine when we played in Midget and Little Leagues together, back before America became aware it was insulting little people to call their own children midgets. though not apparently insulting to call them little. Dean and I were okay at it. We were on the same team one year. I recall he hit better than me but I could field. Next year, on another team, I caught fire and ended up an All Star, mainly because they had to pick two kids from each team, I think our team won that year but then we had a couple kids named Cuthbert and Crabtree who later pitched the high school to a state championship our senior year.
That senior year, neither Dean nor I were still playing. We weren't exactly friends, but we were friendly. Later that same year, we ended up as teaching aides to Ray our chemistry teacher from the year before, It got me out of gym and Dean ducked another class.
We graded papers, the T and F types. Sometimes the simple answer ones. And most of them were simple answer. It wasn't like Ray gave a lot of essay questions in high school chem. He was a big guy with a modest potbelly and Dean dubbed him "the Hamm's Bear". The bear was a TV mascot for the Hamm's Brewery and he pushed their beer on TV in the 60's. (You can Google him easily.) Ray had a Southern accent and a rumored taste for the hops, so it all kind of fit. Dean had that way with people, a way of spotting specific traits and the humor in them, cherishing the object of the humor. Dean himself resembled Ichabod Crane, the lanky slightly hatchet-nosed character of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", but like the cartoon character from the Disney cartoon rendition.
Ray had us do other things as well. We'd listen to a couple jokes, give an opinion on a teacher's tests. He had us do oil solubility tests apparently for a business using school equipment. I guess it was okayed by the administration because we never heard a bad word about it. I don't know if it got him pay or was for a school project or what. None of us ever asked. We had that CODE OF SILENCE thing, like we were cops protecting an invisible law, a type of integrity or maybe cowardice, Today it would have been texted and photoed and everyone in six countries would have chimed in about what a good or bad thing it was or if it misused school facilities and Nancy Grace would have been there with a Uzi dispensing anything but grace.
Dean merely asked me if I knew what it was for and I said, "Nope." I asked him if he knew what it was for and he said, "Nope." And we went about completing the study. I'm sure it was all above board and maybe the feeling of secretiveness shaded my view.
Sometimes, I got updates from Dean on his parties and a couple tales of dates. I was the recluse and loner and nerd and...whatever word short of creep you toss at me. And likely creep would have come from a few of my less genteel classmates. I was two grades ahead of the hometown woman I married but wouldn't know her for three more years. Plus I didn't have a car. THAT alone will kill a teenage love life. I was a little too strange and too straight.
We graduated and went separate ways. Our classmates formed the usual odd lot. Some of my nerd buddies went to U of M and I wandered to MSU. Some of us knew from the beginning what we would do. One became an optometrist, another a lawyer. Dave went to Germany during the 'Nam, came home during the amnesty. Charlie served. So did Guy. Mike talked about it over beers with me one evening at a party decades later. The tears were there, for himself, for his comrades, for the kids who hated him when he got back. Cancer took another Mike, then another friend. We are the same life story of every other generation marred by war.
I met Deb a little before I heard Dean died. Debra Sue. She lay on her back in a bed, a feeding tube run into her abdomen, her legs drawn up at the knees, her arms become like a preying mantis pose. Blondish hair mussed, a bit sweaty. Her eyes were blind. She was severely retarded. I helped take care of her for a time in an adult care home.
The first time I spoke to her, she laughed.
Pat, my coworker, said, "She just loves to hear any man's voice."
I know that was true, but I also know there were times over the years that she was hearing my voice. And I could only laugh with her.
If we dropped a coin on the floor from waist height and it made that chink sound, she laughed like it was a Robin Williams concert. We would take her mobile bed and run down the linoleum hallways with it and she would almost scream with laughter. Mind you, this was strictly against the rules.
She loved being outside and we had to cover her with a light blanket after a few minutes to protect her from harsh sunlight. She loved the moments when we didn't have to protect her, when the sun warmed her skin.
You could hear the laughter from the showers when she got sprayed during her bath time.
Sometimes at night, during bed checks, she would be awake and staring and not seeing, perhaps wondering what was there.
One of the aides would signal me and I would come in and whisper hello in her ear and she would again laugh.
We held a birthday party for her. Her mother and brother and step siblings came to see her. She had the time of her life, listening to her mother's voice, smiling as her brother held her hand, laughing like a hyena over the birthday song and the rowdiness around her. She didn't even stop smiling when she slept that night.
She couldn't speak, move or handle her own feeding, but she never cried that I ever saw. All was laughter. Even in that fearful darkness of a quiet night, all was laughter.
One week, she developed a fever and went into the hospital, The fever got worse, went into staph. Pat told me I should see her. I visited her one day, she would only smile at my voice, She was covered in sweat. I think even that perpetual joy couldn't quell a fear she felt. She passed away two days later.
I planted an iris and day lily beside the small stone on her grave. Sometimes they come up. I'll need to dig them up, split the new bulbs apart and replant. Once I'm gone, moved on to be nearer my grandkids or...gone, no one else will do it. I hear her laughing at the small ironies we build for ourselves.
Before she passed on, I heard from Dad that Dean died.
I saw him twice after high school.
I had heard nothing about him. I wasn't one to hang with the old gang and, frankly, most of my old gang was long gone, moved on to professorships, founding their own construction companies, mastering robotics, handling cost evaluations for major insurance companies. I admired their achievement and I still do. It was just never for me.
Dean, however, thirsted after that American Dream thing. I am certain of it because I met him by happenstance at the Kroger store one day years after graduation. I was picking up some groceries while Brenda slept from working third shift. He suddenly appeared in the aisle and said hello, told me he was working there as a meat cutter, it wasn't great but he made $40,000 a year and it beat working in a factory. He managed that in the first three sentences.
I'm sad to say I laughed out loud while I told him I WAS working in a factory. It was awful. In a way, it was like seeing an old friend become a stereotype. And must have seen a faure. He was more than that and I regretted my reaction as we parted almost immediately. I'm certain he was disappointed in my NOT doing "better."
A couple years later, I turned a corner during a summer art festival and there he was, standing beside a girl I didn't recognized from high school. She was holding his arm and talking to a couple. She was animated and I recall hearing (as I passed and was ignored by Dean who met my eyes a moment and looked away), " And he's got a house he's working on." After I was by, I looked back and saw him beginning to glow a bit as she praised him. I was briefly glad that he had a woman that supported his dream.
I was still working in the same factory, doing part time work in the adult care home with Deb and the rest of the "kids"when I went to see Dad to check some work someone had done on his house and he told me Dean was dead, He got killed in a head-on car crash. It was actually almost a year before I knew since Dad only related stories when they occurred to his generation and Dean's father had passed away, Dad and others blaming it on the fact Dean had been his pride and joy, the youngest child. They said Dean's dad died of sorrow, bad heart crushed by depression. I'm not certain there's that kind of romance in the case of dying so near the time of your son or even irony.
I only know losing a child does leave a space in your soul. Losing anyone leaves a space in your soul.
I know, I feel that space when I see the grave of an old friend I offended and never apologized to. Our mutual friend, Dave, head of the local prison ministry, regrets never leading Dean to Christ, who he doesn't know ever accepted salvation, a Dean who was too busy. I feel it when I walk by Deb's stone and think of bulbs so haphazardly planted. so untended by the sexton, when I think of the aide who told me her church believed our severely retarded couldn't go to heaven because they couldn't say they accepted Jesus, a Jesus they seem to think of as cruel despite his heart of love, a God who could look at anyone who had never heard of Him or who couldn't accept Him or who dies in the womb and know, KNOW if they would have accepted him, given the chance, and make the allowances we all make sometimes for our children. I feel it in front of my parents' graves.
And when I think of my long gone son.
So, walking like an astronaut in that spiritual space, sometimes, I visit Dean's grave.
copyright 2015 Will Hayes
