Warning: Portions of this blog may be politically incorrect simply due to the time period referenced – the 1970s.
Last Wednesday I drove mother to the hospital to pick up daddy and bring him home. It was a bit like dé·jà vu, reminding me of the day so many years ago when Daddy and I rode to the hospital to pick up mother and my brand-new baby brother. Definitely a different emotion but a memorial event as well. More on that later.
I parked the car at the patient discharge doors, left mother waiting there in the car and hopped out to go up to daddy’s room. Mother had already called to alert him that we were there. Once all the discharge papers were finalized and laboriously reviewed, Daddy asked for his bathrobe and slippers. I felt like I was being transported back to my childhood when I saw the bathrobe.
It really can’t be the same bathrobe that he had when I was a child, but then I don’t really recall that he used a bathrobe often. So, perhaps it really was the one and the same.
The robe shadowed my memories of early Christmas and Easter mornings when we were gathered together in the living room as family. It then led down a trail to the memories of being the only child again (sorry brother dearest – love you but LOL) and the family of three.
Later in the day I asked Daddy how long he’d had the blue and deep rust colored flannel robe. He said his mother had bought it for him when he was in high school and had been admitted to the hospital for the first time. Grandma had purchased it from Paul Roses where she worked at the time in Northside Shopping Center. Now he was riding home from the home for what was just his second stay in the hospital ever, embraced in the flannel robe purchased for him by his mother.
The next day, company began to trickle in to visit daddy with each old friend’s stay overlapping slightly with the next, perhaps more recent friend. And all swapped great stories of the past about the land where I grew up and its history, families and friends that had come and gone, good times at auctions, church and fun memories. Then daddy began talking about someone trying to pull down a tree “back in the day” with his heavy truck – only to upend the truck and not the tree. After a few chuckles, daddy detailed about how he would pull down a tree using chains at the base of one tree and climbing up the other tree to hook a chain around it. Using the leverage of one tree against the other, he’d always successfully downed the tree.
As his story unfolded, images from my childhood began to emerge whereby I saw flashes of the steep hill in Gramps and Grandma’s back yard that began at the gated fence behind the bricked-in carport. There was a tree that needed to be pulled down, and another tree to the left of the gate that would be used as leverage. Daddy had the spikes on his shoes as he climbed up the tree while I watched from the ledge of the carport but firmly within the grasp of Grandma’s arms. This was the same ledge where she would shake the bits out of the bowl for the birds to feed on once she’d mixed homemade biscuits that were already baking in the oven. But the task that day was to ensure nothing, namely a five-year-old me, went over the ledge while the tree was being pulled down.
This was the same daddy, who may have within weeks of the tree event, also freed me and my brand new toy ring from the bobbed-wire electric fence as I was about the same age when that happened too. I’d had a good check-up at the dentist and got to pick out a pretty ring from the box at the dentist’s office – I want to say it was a marquise shaped topaz colored stone. But shortly after gaining my new shiny bobble, I carefully reached through a bobbed-wire fence to pet Molly the horse. When I pulled my hand back, the ring caught on the bobbed-wire which had been electrified. Daddy, my hero, came running out and with me screaming and in tears had me sitting on his knee while he firmly grasped the wire with his right hand and gentle untangled my ringed finger with his left.
Dé·jà vu it was. It was a week of electric shocks throwing me off balance. Yet I didn’t fall. Family and friends surrounded me. Regardless of how difficult the week has been and the news we’ve been dealt, I feel the love and compassion of those around me lifting me up along with my father.
Dé·jà vu on that ride to the hospital. The first ride was with daddy driving me and Grandma Gordon to the hospital to pick up mother and a brand-new baby brother. I suggested that we call him Charlie. That was my friend’s name at playschool. But my brother was named Benjamin after daddy’s grandfather – ironically whose full name was Charlie Benjamin. I sat in the backseat with Grandma and a giant-sized coloring book, content to color the big pictures with my crayons. Daddy parked beside the discharge doors, got out and went inside to get mother and the baby we were going to call Benji. Mother got into the car, cradling the baby in her arms for the ride home and I put the coloring book aside to peer over the front seat and get a good look at my new baby brother for the first time. His face was really red, so of course I asked if he was an Indian. Mother said no. I was disappointed. But my disappointment quickly faded when she asked me to crawl over the seat and join them up front which I promptly did.
We all rode home from the hospital together, a newly formed family of four.
Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.
Children’s Song – Jesus loves the little children
A Robynn’s Chirps 