In the background, John began playing the hauntingly beautiful theme music from On Golden Pond, then spoke over the score of Field of Dreams. “I’ll be gone for a few days to take my dad back home to Texas.” By this time, John had quit trying to mask emotions or to stop the tears that clogged his voice. His words quivering, he choked, “Thanks for sharing your dads with me—and letting me share mine with you—on this thing we call ‘radio.’ This is John Hancock—out for now.”
Ruth Hancock
The Nickel Story
Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing save the limits of our sight.
Rossiter Worthington Raymond
“Hey, Red, you owe me a nickel!”
Susan had bumped Frank while he was playing pinball in the bar where she waitressed. A red light flashed TILT and the game was over. Reaching into her apron pocket, Susan pulled out a nickel and flicked it to him, then went back to her work.
“I’m going to marry her someday,” Frank told the bartender confidently.
“Sure you are!” he laughed. “She’s been here a long time, and I’ve never known her to even go out on a date. Good luck!” Frank rubbed the nickel between his fingers, knowing it was his lucky charm.
Susan had made a life for herself as a young widow and a single mother. The last thing she was thinking of was complicating her life with a new man.
But Frank’s lucky charm worked—Susan knocked his socks off and stole Frank’s heart on their first date. Soon he had not only won her heart, but her daughter’s heart as well.
There were many hard times after their wedding. Frank was a military man who was shipped overseas, leaving Susan in the single-mother role once again. Another daughter kept her busy, and both daughters adored their daddy. The years passed by quickly.
Frank loved to tell the nickel story to anyone who would listen. His eyes sparkled as he spoke of his love for Susan. This was a man who truly loved his wife.
Their fiftieth wedding anniversary was a special day. Frank contacted me to do a floral arrangement for the church and a corsage for his bride. They renewed their vows on that Sunday morning following the worship service. Our band surprised them as they walked down the aisle by singing “their” song, “The Sunny Side of the Street.” Their walk became a dance as Frank twirled Susan down the aisle. What a celebration! It was a joy to be in their presence.
Soon after this wonderful day, Frank got sick. He offered everyone a smile and continued to glow with his love of Susan. Frank was never one to complain. Having a strong faith, Frank knew he would be with the Lord soon. After a few long months of suffering, he died.
All the seats at the funeral home were taken as we gathered to honor the memory of this dear friend. We were all inspired by him in our own ways. The minister spoke of Frank with such love and respect. We laughed, and our hearts were warmed as he shared memories of this special man. And then he told the nickel story. He said that Frank had called him a week or so before he died and asked to see him. While they visited, Frank took out his lucky charm. He had held on to that nickel for all of these years.
“Frank told me to keep this for him,” the minister said as he reached into his pocket and walked over to Susan. “He wanted me to give it to you today and to tell you to hold onto it. He’ll be waiting for you at the pinball machine.”
Hana Haatainen Caye
Bubba’s Secret Life
To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Stephen R. Covey
The oldest of four children and the only girl, I often found myself frustrated with my three little brothers. As an adult, I see them in somewhat of a different light, but they will always be my little brothers.
We have always lived close to each other, and although we did not see one another every day, we kept in touch. My parents owned a grocery store, which my father ran, and we ran into one another at the store.
“Bubba,” as I had nicknamed him when he was a baby, always came by the store before or after his shift. He was the oldest of my little brothers, and he was a deputy jailer at the county jail. To say that he was “laid-back” would be an understatement. His lack of attention to detail and tidiness often disturbed me. Being meticulous about my own house and property, I wondered how he could be so carefree and let things go. When he became a single parent, I worried he would not be able to “handle things.” After a heartrending separation and divorce, he met a lovely woman and things were looking up. I expected an engagement announcement at any time.
One sunny afternoon last August, I got a phone call. The woman on the other end started by saying she was with the local county rescue squad. I paid little attention as I waited for her to ask if we could make a donation. She did not ask for money, but did ask if I had a brother named Bubba. I offhandedly answered, “Yes.”
“Well, there’s been an accident.” There was a strange silence. I had been through this several times over the years. Bubba was hit head-on by someone who crossed the yellow line; his former wife had been in several rollover accidents.
Still undaunted, I asked, “Is he hurt? Did you have to take him to the hospital?”
When she did not answer, I guessed this was more serious. I asked again, “Is he hurt?”
This time she answered quietly, “Bubba didn’t make it.” The words echoed several times before they registered. What did she mean? “I’m so sorry . . .” I was numb, and her voice seemed to be fading away.
The next day, we met at the local funeral home to make the arrangements. It seemed like I was in the longest nightmare I had ever had. After picking out the casket and taking care of the family business, the pastor and Bubba’s fellow deputies began asking about the service. Since Bubba was not a member of a church, we felt the logical choice would be the chapel in the funeral home. It would be more than adequate for our little family and a few friends. But the deputy felt the service should be held at the new middle school because law officers from all over the state often come in when a fellow officer is killed. I doubted that many of them even knew Bubba. After all, he was not a road deputy, but a jailer in a small county jail. I imagined how much worse we were going to feel in that large auditorium with just our little family and a few deputies. My parents agreed that whatever the deputies thought was best would be fine.
Visitation at the funeral home was the next night from seven until nine. We arrived early, so as not to miss anyone who might wander in. We entered through a rear door and could barely make our way through the crowd. I wondered who all of these people were and if they were the unfortunate friends and family of another deceased person. As we neared the chapel where Bubba was sleeping, as the children said, I could see there was already a long line of people waiting to file through. Outside, traffic in our little one-horse town was lined up for more than an hour. People filed in for more than two hours. Who were these people? I thought. Well, as it turned out, my brother had a “secret life.”
He was a mechanic to those with car problems, a sitter for those with a baby in the hospital, a plumber to a desperate neighbor, a money lender, a lawn service, a moving company, a salvage man—each person came through the line with a story about how Bubba had been there for them in their time of need. No wonder he didn’t have time to vacuum or take the trash out. He didn’t have time to attend to those “important” details. He had “really important” business to take care of.
After the crowd had dwindled, we prepared to leave. As we were pulling out of the parking lot, I saw a sheriff’s car pull in with three men in prison whites crowded in the back seat. This was one of my worst moments because I already knew what the funeral director would later confirm. These inmates had begged to say good-bye to their jailer. After the mortuary was locked up, they were brought in through the backdoor and stood, chained together, in front of the casket weeping. They took their cigarette and snack money and pooled it to buy flowers.
We were not alone in t
hat big auditorium the next day—it was nearly full. Three pastor friends shared stories about their relationship with Bubba. Our youngest brother, Tracy, who has muscular dystrophy and has spent more than twenty years in a wheelchair, spoke. “People didn’t think I would be able to do this, but my love for Bubba is stronger than my pain,” he began. Tracy shared about his big brother; Gus shared about his partner; Joe shared about his friend; and Bubba’s son T. J. shared about his daddy. Bubba had surely been all things to all people. In many ways we were uplifted, but inside I grieved all the more over the brother I never knew. I saw how many different losses he represented.
The procession, with nearly a mile of police cars with their blue lights flashing, was estimated to be four miles long. People stood along the highway with their hands over their hearts. Maybe it was a show of respect or maybe their hearts were aching like mine.
All of my life I thought I was doing all of the right things—keeping house, caring for my children, attending church and sending cards to the sick. I hadn’t refused to help anyone, but I had not been out looking for the opportunity either. My priorities now seemed strangely ordered. Bubba’s secret life taught me what was “really important.”
Natalie “Paige” Kelly-Lunceford
My Son, a Gentle Giant, Dies
Bear with me this week, if you will, for a personal column.
It’s about my son Christopher. He turned seventeen last November. He died on Thursday. He was a healthy, robust boy on Tuesday. He got sick on Wednesday. And he died on Thursday.
You would have liked him. Everyone did.
He was a gentle giant, everyone’s best friend and the world’s leading expert. On everything. He was always cheerful. He was, says the foreman at the farm where he worked this summer, simply “magical.”
He was adopted. I say this with relish and love because adoption usually is mentioned only in stories about bad kids. In newspaper stories, serial murderers are adopted. Nobel Prize winners aren’t. It’s sort of a newspaper’s code for saying, “Don’t blame the parents. It’s not their fault he killed the neighbors.” But in this case, it’s not my fault he was such a great kid.
So we looked not alike at all, and he thought that was funny. I’m 5'8" and weigh about 160. He was close to 6'4", I imagine, and weighed around 300. He looked like a cement block with a grin. Once, a year or so ago, he introduced me to a friend. “This is my dad,” he said proudly. The friend looked at me, looked at Chris and then looked confused. “You should see my mother,” Chris said with a straight face.
I mentioned him in a column here last November 29— that was his seventeenth birthday. I wrote about the death of Finnegan, our old floppy-eared hound, and I told how when Christopher was six he and I had taken a trip. I asked him about our two dogs, Finnegan and a clipped-ear Bouvier named Mandy. “Who do you like the best,” I asked, “Finnegan or Mandy?”
“Finnegan,” he quickly replied, “because his ears are so big you can wipe your tears on them.”
He read the column that evening. “Did you get paid for writing that?” he asked. Yes, I did, I said. How much? he asked. I told him. “You know,” he said, “that column wouldn’t have been anything without that quote from me. I think I should get half.”
That’s the kind of kid he was. He always had an angle.
He was loving.
He loved everyone, especially his grandparents, but even his mom and dad. “I love you, Dad,” he’d say with meaning and without embarrassment. He knew that was unusual. The summer before last, he and my wife and I played golf one Saturday—he could hit a golf ball a mile, though you never knew whether it would be a mile east or a mile west—and he asked what we were doing for dinner later. “Mom and I are going out,” I said. “Do you want to go with us?”
“Nah,” he said, “I think I’ll do something with Joey.” I pushed him to join us. Finally, he said, “Look, Dad, you don’t understand. At my age you’re not even supposed to like your parents.”
He was funny.
“Dad,” he said a couple of months ago, “I know what I’d like for my next birthday—a handicapped-parking sticker. You know, there are a lot more places than there are people who use them.” I explained that it was unlikely that they’d give a robust kid a handicapped-parking sticker. So Christopher, who didn’t much care for studying, changed his tack: “You know, if I had one I could leave for everywhere I go ten minutes later—and I could use that time for studying.”
As a parent, you live in fear your child will die in a car wreck, and in his year and a half of driving Christopher did manage to wreck all four of our family cars. He hit a tree the day he got his license. (“It wasn’t my fault, Dad.” “Well, Christopher,” I said, “it was yours or the tree’s.” He knew that, he said, and then argued, almost persuasively, how the tree was to blame.) And last spring he backed one of my cars into another of my cars, which must be a record of sorts. He announced his other accident to me over the phone by beginning, “Dad, you know those air bags stink when they go off.”
But it was a sudden, initial attack of juvenile diabetes that killed him, despite medical heroics and fervid prayers. It is awful and horrible and sad, and no words can comfort his four grandparents, his brother and sister, his friends or his parents.
Yet his friend Tim Russert of NBC called Friday, devastated as we all are, and said the only thing that has helped.
“If God had come to you seventeen years ago and said, ‘I’ll make you a bargain. I’ll give you a beautiful, wonderful, happy and healthy kid for seventeen years, and then I’ll take him away,’” Tim said, “you would have made that deal in a second.”
And that was the deal.
We just didn’t know the terms.
Michael Gartner
Going On
My best friend, James, lived on the farm next to ours just outside a small town in Ohio. My father was the town doctor. Jim’s father was a farmer who could make anything he planted grow. My father kept a few head of cattle and some horses. The only thing we grew was fodder for our animals. So while Jim had to work a lot on his dad’s farm, I could get my chores done in a couple of hours.
After school we often walked the two-plus miles to his house. There was, on that country road, a bridge that spanned Twelve Mile Creek. The roadbed was about fifteen feet above the water and, in the spring when the rains made the water deep enough, we used to get naked and jump off the bridge a time or two on our way home.
It was a scary and, we thought, daring thing to do. There was also a sign that said diving from the bridge was forbidden, but it didn’t say anything about jumping so we believed we were on the right side of the law. There were plenty of boys in our school who wouldn’t do it, and that fact made us feel heroic.
After our jumps, we would sit on a rock in the sun until we were dry enough to put on our clothes. Those were the times we would really talk about stuff. Jim wanted to be a farmer like his father and his grandfather. He had the gift for it and the will to do it. I wanted to find a way out of my hometown. I wanted to see how people lived all over the world, to know how they did things, how they thought.
Unlike almost everyone else who had a goal closer to home, Jim did not discourage me or tell me that I ought to want what he wanted like lots of people do. If they farm they want you to be a farmer, or if they have a business they think you should have one, too.
Jim was easy about the plain fact that life would part us, that we would grow up into men who would not see each other every single day. Strangely, this was the part of my future I did not want to come about. Even though I was determined to leave town, I was also determined not to leave my friend. That made an interesting dilemma that we talked about now and then.
“Well, Bud,” he said one day, “there’s this about life. You can’t have something both ways. That’s just a fact.”
“I know that,” I said, “but because something is a fact doesn’t stop me from wanting it not to be.”
He laug
hed then. He had a huge laugh for such a little guy. I was about six inches taller than he was, and he was about six inches smarter than me . . . he liked to say that.
“Well, good luck,” he said. Then, “Let’s do one more. I feel like one more.”
And he got up from the rock, ran to the bridge, climbed up on the guardrail and balanced for a moment. The bright sun shone on him and made him look radiant. Then, instead of jumping, he dove.
He pushed off hard from the edge of the bridge, arched his back and spread his arms in one of the best swan dives I had ever seen. He seemed to hover in the air before he ducked his head, straightened his body and cut into the water.
We went home after that to his house. His mother was the best baker who ever lived, according to me. She made bread every other day so her kitchen always had that yeasty smell I loved. And in the spring she made nutmeg cookies . . . big, round, rich, white cookies that made milk taste better than you could ever imagine. And that is what we had that day, sitting in the kitchen talking to Jim’s mother as she worked. It seemed to me she knew almost everything, including the capital of Paraguay! It was no wonder to me that Jim loved her so much.
The next day Jim was not in school, and I thought his dad had kept him home to work on the farm because spring was a heavy-duty time for a farm family. But when he didn’t appear the day after that, I got worried. I was about to call him up when my dad called me at home and said he was coming to pick me up. That scared the daylights out of me.
Though I sometimes went on calls with him after school, I was always the one to initiate that adventure. He never called me to go with him. When I asked him why on the phone, he said he’d be home in a minute. And he was.