One thing about aging is that you never really know how, when, or where you will be blindsided. I was in the shower yesterday getting ready to go out with the family for the big fireworks display at Lake Junaluska, and it occurred to me that this isn’t really something I do anymore, this showering at 5 or 6 p.m. on a Friday before going out to do something.
Just like that, I was twenty again, back for a spell in the house I grew up in, skinny as a stick but with thickening biceps from all the barbell curls in the basement, in that olive green bathtub washing my thick and lustrous hair with a big handful of “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” while Kansas belted out “Carry On, My Wayward Son” on the clock radio.
“Don’t you cry no more, NO!” Guitar.
Mom is in the kitchen frying perch and making mashed potatoes. She’ll open a jar of apples fetched from the root cellar to go with it. This is my favorite meal, one notch ahead of her spaghetti, as far as I am concerned. I’ll wolf it down and then go meet Stewart in town at the gas station or the bowling alley.
We’ll grab a twelve-pack of Michelob and some Tic Tacs and hit the road, heading maybe to Grandfather’s in Galax, or Tobacco Road, or maybe that new place down in Wilkes County. But probably Tobacco Road, especially if there’s a good band tonight, maybe Sidewinder or Avalanche or even Nantucket, who made it big enough to open for KISS with a song called “Heartbreaker.”
If it’s them, we’ll need to get there an hour early to get a table.
I can smell the fried perch even when I’m in the shower, even with the door closed. And the apples, sprinkled with cinnamon, warming on the stove. Will we be picking up Buddy or will he be riding with Shawn? Wonder if those Lane sisters from Hillsville will be there? It’s not yet clear which of them likes which of us, or the other way around. But something’s happening. We know that much.
What I don’t know yet is how absolutely precious this time is, partly because there is so much of it. Just about everybody I know and love is alive. One dead grandfather that I barely knew and hardly remember, my most vivid memory of him as he was laid out in his coffin in his own living room, his grown children filing up one at a time to see him, and then turning back.
I was startled to see my father in tears. And my grandmother, sitting at the kitchen table, stoic, composed, her eyes moist but resolute. I was nine. He was always looking for his liquor, and she was always hiding it. I found a bottle of whisky once in a basket of laundry, nestled like a rabbit.
He offered me a dollar to find it. She offered me two dollars to keep it hidden. There wasn’t much more to it than that. My other grandfather was a stern man, but he taught me how to shoot a gun and how to skin a rabbit and how to play “Wildwood Flower” on his old Martin guitar.
But he lived a long time. Too long. Well past the time when Alzheimer’s took the better part of him. I would go see him sometimes in the rest home. He didn’t know me at all. Or anybody else really. A nurse fed him little bites of fruit cocktail, which he accepted like a baby bird, his head turned up and his mouth open. There wasn’t much more left of him than that.
But I was a grown man by then, with a job and a mortgage, getting through a divorce, in therapy. By then, I knew too much. How fast this life can be, or how miserably slow. By then, I knew more about time than I really wanted to know. I could comprehend the end of it. By then, there was quite a burgeoning community of the dead.
Now here I am pondering which Medicare plan I should get on in November. All of my grandparents are long gone. My parents are gone, too. Classmates. Friends. Old roommates. About as many people on one side of the ledger as the other.
When I was in the green bathtub showering and looking forward to perch and mashed potatoes and fried apples and the thrilling array of possibilities on those endless Friday nights, time was an ocean. I knew there was another side, but I could neither see nor comprehend it.
When I was with my grandfather in the rest home, time was a lake. I could see the other side now, but not swim to it. Still so much water. You wouldn’t want to set out rowing for it.
When I went to the dentist a few months ago and we were discussing potential dental work relative to the amount of time I probably have left and whether this procedure or that one made more sense in light of the implacable facts of my own mortality, I could see that time is now a stream, one I could step across at any moment, the other side just that close, the community over there much like the one I knew as a boy, when everything seemed like it might stay just the way it was from then on. Why would I think otherwise?
God only knows what happened to those Lane sisters. Carry on my wayward, son. There’ll be peace when you are done.
Chris Cox will read from and discuss his new book, “We Didn’t Miss a Thing,” with well-known Hollywood actor/screenwriter Sean Bridgers at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 11, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva