May 26, 2013
I could tell. This time it was different.
“How are you doing? Are you missing her a lot?”
The three of us were sitting out on the back porch – on the smooth concrete pad that Dad poured, and roofed, and screened-in and then finally enclosed with aluminum storm windows many years ago. It was early May and still very cool in the shade. I had stopped by the house in Graham for a short visit after attending the funeral of a high school friend. I thought it very strange that Cindy’s funeral was held at the Newcastle Cemetery. I had no idea that she had a connection to the little town of Newcastle – a Texas town so small that it can be explored in a single day by a five year old on a tricycle.
While I was at the cemetery, I put a fresh cut iris on my Mom’s grave. I didn’t have a vase or anything to put it in, so I just laid the flower on the grave by the marker. The iris stalk was still weeping a bit where it had been cut and the moist purple petals seemed out of place on that yellow mound of drying brick-clay soil. The grave hadn’t settled as much as I had expected, probably because there had not yet been a good drenching rain. We sure needed one. While I was there I handed Uncle Delbert a flower too. Being a former Army sergeant, rancher and feed store owner, Delbert wasn’t really much of a flower guy, but I knew he wouldn’t object to a flower in his lapel on special occasions. Besides, I figured Mom would rather I do that than give her two flowers. Mom was an artist, a poet, and a farmer’s daughter. One would be enough for her.
Dad said, “Sure! Sixty-three years…” and, in one smooth motion Dad let out a breath, relaxed, dropped his shoulders, bent his head down slightly and extended his left hand just a few inches out to the side. And in that same instant, Dad made a simple, gentle, and unusually elegant gesture – a gesture so graceful as to be almost effeminate – a gesture stunning in its poignancy. Continuing in that single fluid motion, Dad rotated his left wrist back – turning his palm slightly up, and pinched his thumb down to his ring finger. Actually his thumb never touched the ring – it stopped just short and sat there hovering…hovering over a worn but glittering gold wedding band. In that same instant, I realized I had seen him make this gesture exactly the same way many times over the years – thousands of times. But this time it was different.
He reached out a little bit more, “When I get up in the morning, I make some Pop Tarts for breakfast and reach out to hold Lois’ hand so we can pray together.”
And on those mornings Mom would be sitting there already, sitting at the little kitchen table on the side nearest the fridge and her sink. Mom would be there, thinking and waiting, often having been up for several hours before them – before Dad and the sunrise – and she would be ready to talk to someone about what had happened in a dream, or what had really happened once upon a time or what she was afraid was going to happen someday – and she might be thinking that today might be that someday. Sometimes she would be right. And sometimes…often really…Mom would just stay quiet, knowing that talking doesn’t always make nightmares disappear.
And then Dad would come in, make a little breakfast, sit down, and reach out slightly. And in that one graceful motion, they would bow their heads, Mom would put her right hand in Dad’s left, and Dad would gently pinch her hand between his cracked and calloused carpenter fingers. Then Dad, with his sandpaper-like thumb, would very gently caress the softness in his life that was the back of his wife’s pretty little hand and start to pray for them – saying, although not always the same prayer, a prayer that always started this same way.
"Most Gracious Heavenly Father, thank you...”
