Marbles
I began volunteering at the nursing home when I was in high school. A girl I was interested in who was in my church’s youth group had decided to help at the nursing home, reading to old folks no longer able to decipher words on a page, doing exercises and playing games with them. I decided to make that my community service project, too. On our first visit the director warned us that some of the residents had dementia and could get agitated. The girl I liked, who had the delicious name of Susie Leckerman, made a pot of of hot tea for a tiny, sweet-looking old woman and sat down with her to chat. The woman took a big sip of the tea, burned her tongue, threw the cup at Susie, smashed the teapot on the linoleum floor, and shouted to the nurse on duty, “Vicky! This bitch is trying to kill me!” Susie called her mother to pick her up. She arranged with the pastor to do her community service by watching little children while their parents attended adult Bible study classes. She never returned to the nursing home.
I was assigned to a sad-looking old man named Bud. I asked him if he’d like to take a walk around the block with me, or play a game. He told me maybe later, like next year. He told me he’d like to shoot marbles with me, but he had lost most of his. I asked him to tell me about himself. He shook his head and said, “I’m just waiting for the bus.” Seeing that I had no idea what he meant, he tried again, “I’m at that point in my life where I know I’m going to lose everything, but I haven’t lost all of it yet. Worst place to be.” I asked him if he had any family, but he didn’t answer. He just stared out the window at the parking lot and the strip mall across the street. I sat with him listening to country western music on his radio until my time was up. When I got up to leave, he gently patted my arm and smiled at me.
I went to visit Bud every Tuesday afternoon for the next few months. I never knew what to expect. Sometimes he would be alert and cheerful; other times he sat hunched and drooling wearing a paper bib that a nurse had put on him. A couple of times I talked him into walking to the sidewalk with me. He shuffled slowly. The trip would have taken me less than a minute, but Bud needed almost twenty minutes for the round trip, and when he finished, he was gasping for breath.
One time when Bud was particularly lucid, he reached out and touched my chin. “That cleft in your chin. I have one just like it, and so did my son.” I asked him to tell me about his son and a cloud passed over his face, as if he regretted having said too much. To change the subject, he asked me to tell him about myself.
“Not much to tell. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. I play basketball and saxophone, neither one very well. I’m not sure if I want to go to college.”
“Do you have any grandparents? You seem to be pretty comfortable with old people.”
“No, my parents are older. Their parents were gone before they adopted me, so I never had any grandparents.”
“You’re how old? Seventeen?”
“Next month.”
“You could be my grandson.” A strange, lost look came over him, and he retreated into the purgatory of confusion that more and more often kept him prisoner.
The next week, Bud was dressed in khaki slacks and a dress shirt. His long hair had been trimmed and combed, and he seemed sincerely glad to see me when I arrived.
“I want to tell you a little about myself and my son.” Hesitantly, he pushed a photo of a young man in an army uniform toward me on the tabletop. The young man had a deep cleft in his chin just like Bud and me.
“This is my son, Mitch—my only child. He passed away in Afghanistan several years ago, about a year after my wife passed. Before he died, he told me that he had met a girl and that they were going to have a baby and get married. I told him that it was best to do those two things in the reverse order, but I was so happy for him.” A sadness flooded Bud’s features, but he pressed on. “He died suddenly just a few weeks later. I never met the girl he was going to marry, and I never found out what happened to her or the child, my only grandchild.” He stopped for a moment and gathered himself. “But I know she lived in this city. The child’s birthday would have been this month, the same year you were born. I wonder. Could you be that child?”
I felt a hot rush of blood in my neck and face. I knew with absolute certainty that I did not want to know. I had a family, and I had no idea how finding a long lost grandfather would upset my parents. Bud saw the confusion and anxiety in my face and reached for my hands. I pulled them back without thinking.
“Don’t be upset. I’m not going to ask you to go any further with this. It’s enough for me that you have been a light in my life. It doesn’t matter if we share blood or not.” Bud smiled grimly. “Pretty soon I won’t even recognize you, anyway. I just want to thank you and give you my blessing. Can I do that?” I nodded. Bud took both my hands and spoke a brief prayer of blessing. I gave him an awkward hug and saw tears in his eyes.
Soon after that visit, Bud began a steep decline. On subsequent visits, if he could speak, his conversations consisted of only one or two brief sentences; then he descended into a peaceful blankness. He died the week before Easter. I never told my parents about Bud, his son, or his grandson.
Marbles
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