O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer

I don’t know where the weekend went. As I lay my head down last night, all I could think was that I was too tired for the weekend to be over. Even so, I got back up and took a sleeping pill.

Thursday, I rushed out to grab a quick bite when I called Mom. It was to give comfort, not to find out the news. I had already expected that the news from her doctor would be bad. I was standing on the street corner, wind whipping my coat; her voice betraying the deepest disappointment (deeper than when I was 10 and she told me Uncle Harry had died, or when I was 16 and she found out I was gay, or when I was 17 and she found out that Puck was gay too, so there was no chance we were getting married,) because the doctor said she was going to die within two years.

She only hinted at “bad news,” she didn’t tell me that, giving me details about the three tumors that they found. I was brave because I still thought that the news was on par with, well, Aids. The type of cancer she has is supposedly manageable, though deadly. I was counting on the prognosis to be ten years, and I was hoping for fifteen or twenty.

I skipped lunch and went back to work, wrote you a note, packed up and headed to Woodbridge to give comfort. I tried to find a place to get a drink before I got to their house, but it was only 3:45 so no bars were open. Standing in one bar (the pub side of an Italian restaurant) when I found it didn’t open until 4:30; I pretended I was only there to pick up a carry out menu.

I went in the back way when I got to their house, because Mom was teaching piano in the living room, and I didn’t want to disrupt. Daddy was watching TV, the volume loud, his dog on his lap. That’s a sweet part. He adopted the dog when my (soon to be ex-) brother-in-law abandoned it along with the rest of his life. Once my sister, Joy, downsized to a townhouse, she was dropping Mindy off with my dad while she was at work. And it got to the point where Mindy didn’t want to go home. So, she stayed. Now she follows Daddy around and keeps him much more active, even if much of it is from his chair. Along with his hearing, and general thinking, his mobility is becoming challenged. He’s a real hard worker, and loves to get out and walk, cut down trees, ride his little tractor with a trailer full of leaves up to a gully in the back, stuff like that. He’d like to build stuff too, but he can’t cut straight to save his life. He loves to build sheds. He’s got two at this house. One of them is beginning to look like a white trash estate with all the additions he put on. Crooked roofs, precariously balanced support beams are the hallmarks of his current building style. To which, when faced with such a sight, my mom sighs and says “Oh Billy. . .”

This one time, when Rolf and I had been together for ten years, but didn’t even get to spend Christmas together, Daddy was handing out presents from under the Christmas Tree. And he handed me this big box and said “This should really be to both of you. I don’t know why it doesn’t say that.” And his eyes misted over, just like mine are now. It was towels.

We wanted to watch the “Hee-Haw” DVD I had bought him for Father’s Day. But he didn’t know how to do it . . . honestly, as rarely as I go downstairs in my own home to use the DVD player just to find that I have to pick through 5 remotes, I understand that it isn’t easy. So he yells for my mom, who’s on the other end of the house with a piano student.

“Chicken?” he yells. That’s what he calls her: Chicken, Pet, and Honey.

“Yeah?” she yells back.

“Come’ere, I’ve got to ask you something.”

So she comes in, calm and patient as the best little old lady piano teacher would be, with her Humpty-Dumpty-tummy arriving just a bit ahead of the rest of her.

It’s: “What do you want”. . . “We want to watch Hee-Haw and we can’t get the thing to work.” “Why hello, Vig, I didn’t know you were here!” “I thought I’d come and take you all to dinner. I found this great Italian restaurant just up the street."

As that all took about three minutes, and she had a student waiting for her, she set the TV on the right channel, and handed me two remotes with some rudimentary explanations saying I could figure it out . . . notably, she did not give them to Dad.

Her next student was pretty good. So, reminded of all the after school naps I took listening to music I’d heard hundreds of times; I fell asleep in her chair while Daddy watched Hee-Haw.

I dreamt I heard Mama teaching piano, and that Daddy was somewhere laughing.

That's all for now.

Thanks,
Vig

O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.