Part 1c

John pulled the car to the patient pick up area near the main entrance of the hospital and an orderly rolled Wendy out to the curb in a wheelchair. Her mousy brown, medium length hair was scraggly and windswept and matted to the back of her head in a rat's nest of knots.  She wore no makeup.  She looked so frail to him, despite the 60 pounds she had packed on this last pregnancy, and woah had she packed 'em on this time.  She used to - for the first few pregnancies, anyway -  stay so fit and trim, playing tennis all the time and he supposed that being in her twenties didn't hurt the cause either. There was still that fierce glow in her eye, a lioness protecting her cubs, it made everyone else fade to a distant second.

Wendy looked at him from her chariot, and there are things that you aren't privy to as a child that run through your parents' heads and they ran through her head.

They headed down South Country Road in a pleasant silence somewhere in the vast gulf set between contempt and the mutual telepathy of beloveds wrought of their 22 year marriage and dad decided to "hoop" the dock.  A dim, setting November sun cast an icy glow over the bay from behind them.  The thin grey clouds hung low and seemed to claw at them and compel them not to return.  Stay here at the bay for a moment longer, forget the children at home and their inevitable questions and needs and constant demands. Get in a boat and sail away. Walk on water.

In the distance the whistle reported the arrival of the 5 o'clock train at Bellport Station.

"Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoe,"  mom sang.  They laughed as they remembered the beef and cheese smelling, quite overweight, travelling song and dance man who had visited their church a while back, and shared that bit of musical humor in a nasally vaudevillian voice.

SELF-PITY, FIT-THROWING INTERMISSION HERE:  DISCIPLINED WRITING IS SO DIFFICULT!

I heard the sound of the pebble driveway crunching beneath the tires and ran to the door.  I can remember mom rising out of her door: clad in a hospital nightgown and shrouded by a raccoon fur coat, glowing and reflecting the radiance of the sun.  It was if she was the inspiration for both Galadriel and the Ice Queen from Narnia a quarter of a century in advance.  She walked into the house and we fell all over her with hugs and kisses and cries of how we had missed her.  I missed her most of all.  I was small enough to slip between the bigger kids and get really close to her, and old enough and aware enough to want her more than anyone else. Dad shooed us away and led her to the bedroom.

Of course, we all followed her.  She crawled under the covers, coat and all.  Dad removed his shoes and hung his pants and shirt on his mahogany silent butler, and slipped in next to her.  We all piled on the king sized bed, which back then seemed so much larger than the king sized beds of today.  I know they are still the same size and I have only gotten larger, but memories have a way of tricking into believing that perception really is reality.  The two parents and 7 present children all fit perfectly.  Christa, who had driven over five hours to arrive the night before, brought Ben in and laid him in mom's arms.

She sang in his ear, "lalaloo, lalaloo, oh my little star sweeper, I'll sweep the stardust for you," in her low rich voice, evoking a cello and Patsy Cline, or any of the altos of the past. "...and may love be your keeper, lalaloo, lalaooo, la. la. loo." (It seems as if the alto is a dying breed, everyone wants to sing up in the stratosphere these days.)  It strummed my heart strings, and would yours if you could hear it, and lulled Ben into an easy sleep.  Over the soft tones of her sometimes humming sometimes singing, Dad waxed poetic about the day I was born.  Through the years I have become hardened toward this story, and for a time it rang completely false for me.  A romantic notion that ill represented the actual feelings the man demonstrated for me, because he couldn't have, or failed to have, the ones he imagined he did.

"I drove home from the hospital that day, the angels were dancing on the bay, as the sun tickled the gentle waves the burning wind was whipping up on the no longer still bay.  The angels were singing! And I sang with them."  We all held our breath in lieu of covering our ears because he was about to break forth in his signature song, getting all the words wrong, and somehow escaping mom's correction driven by her strict adherence to pure song accuracy both melodic and lyrical. "HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH, let the hooooooooooooooly anthems rise!"  The next line was delivered with a fervor and a mixture of an irish brogue and an italian, operatic rolling of the "r", "AND the TERRRRRRRRRRRRORRRRRRRRR of the gibbet rise triumphant in the skies."  We would sing the song all wrong right along with him, his confidence signaling to us that these must most certainly be the right words, until in preparing for his funeral some 30 years later it turned out that he was stunningly 100% incorrect.