Treasury of Joy & Inspiration
Page 7
At about this time I had to decide if I would attend the annual fund-raising dinner of the Creative Coalition, an organization of people in the arts. The dinner was scheduled for October 16 at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. I felt obligated to go, especially because Robin Williams was to be honored for his charitable work.
Still, I worried about making the trip into Manhattan. It would be the first time I would be in public since my accident in May. Would my muscles go into a spasm as they often did? Would I have a pop-off?
Dana and I talked it over and decided that the psychological advantages of going outweighed the physical risks. We dusted off my tuxedo, and on the afternoon
of the 16th, I braced myself for the unknown.
For nearly five months I’d been cruising in a wheelchair at three miles an hour. Now I was strapped in the back of a van driving into the city at 55 miles an hour. As we hit bumps and potholes, my neck froze with tension, and my body was racked with spasms. Once at the hotel, I was quickly transferred to a suite with a hospital bed to rest. The whole experience was more intense than I had anticipated.
At last it was time for me to present Robin with his award. For a split second I wished a genie could make me disappear. As I was pushed onto the stage, though, I looked out to see 700 people on their feet, cheering. The ovation went on for more than five minutes.
From that moment on, the evening was transformed into a celebration of friendship. Later, as we bounced through the Lincoln Tunnel back to New Jersey, I was so excited I hardly noticed the rough ride. Back at Kessler, Dana produced a bottle of chardonnay, and we toasted a milestone in my new life. I’d made it!
I made up my mind—I wanted to breathe on my own again.
On November 2 Bill Carroll, two doctors and a physical therapist brought in the breathing equipment, took me off the ventilator and asked me to take ten breaths.
Lying on my back, I was gasping, my eyes rolling up in my head. With each attempt I was only able to draw in an average of 50 c.c.’s. But at least I had moved the dial.
The next day I told myself over and over that I was going home soon, and imagined my chest as a huge bellows that I could open and close at will. I took the ten breaths, and my average was 450 c.c.’s. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought.
The following day my average was 560 c.c.’s. A cheer broke out. “I’ve never seen progress like that,” Carroll said. “You’re going to get off this thing.”
After that I practiced every day. I went from seven minutes off the ventilator to 12 minutes to 15. Just before I left Kessler, I gave it everything I had and breathed for 30 minutes on my own.
I’m happy that I decided to keep living, and so are those who are close to me. On Thanksgiving, 1995, I went home to spend the day with my family for the first time since the accident. When I saw our home again, I wept as Dana held me. At the dinner table each of us spoke a few words about what we were thankful for.
Will said simply, “Dad.”
Life in These United States
When our last child moved out, my wife encouraged me to join Big Brothers. I was matched with a 13-year-old named Alex. Our first outing was to the library, where we ran into his friend.
“Who’s he?” the friend asked Alex, pointing to me.
“My Big Brother, Randall.”
The boy looked at me, then back at Alex. “Dude, how old is your mother?” Randall Martin
“Information Please”
By Paul Villiard
June 1966
When I was quite young my family had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished oak case fastened to the wall on the lower stair landing. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I even remember the number—105. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother talked to it. Once she lifted me up to speak to my father, who was away on business. Magic!
Then I discovered that somewhere inside that wonderful device lived an amazing person—her name was “Information Please” and there was nothing she did not know. My mother could ask her for anybody’s number; when our clock ran down, Information Please immediately supplied the correct time.
My first personal experience with this genie-in-the-receiver came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn’t seem to be much use crying because there was no one home to offer sympathy. I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway. The telephone! Quickly I ran for the footstool in the parlor and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up, I unhooked the receiver and held it to my ear. “Information Please,” I said into the mouthpiece just above my head. A click or two, and a small, clear voice spoke into my ear. “Information.”
“I hurt my fingerrrr—” I wailed into the phone. The tears came readily enough, now that I had an audience.
“Isn’t your mother home?” came the question.
“Nobody’s home but me,” I blubbered.
“Are you bleeding?”
“No,” I replied. “I hit it with the hammer and it hurts.”
“Can you open your icebox?” she asked. I said I could. “Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it on your finger. That will stop the hurt. Be careful when you use the ice pick,” she admonished. “And don’t cry. You’ll be all right.”
After that, I called Information Please for everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was, and the Orinoco—the most romantic river I was going to explore when I grew up. She helped me with my arithmetic, and she told me that my pet chipmunk—I had caught him in the park just the day before—would eat fruit and nuts.
And there was the time that Petey, our pet canary, died. I called Information Please and told her the sad story. She listened, then she said the usual things grown-ups say to soothe a child. But I was unconsoled: Why was it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to whole families, only to end up as a heap of feathers, feet up, on the bottom of a cage?
She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, “Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in.”
Somehow I felt better.
Another day I was at the telephone. “Information,” said the now familiar voice.
“How do you spell fix?” I asked.
“Fix something? F-i-x.”
At that instant my sister, who took unholy joy in scaring me, jumped off the stairs at me with a banshee shriek—“Yaaaaaaaaaa!” I fell off the stool, pulling the receiver out of the box by its roots. We were both terrified—Information Please was no longer there, and I was not at all sure that I hadn’t hurt her when I pulled the receiver out.
Minutes later there was a man on the porch. “I’m a telephone repairman,” he said. “I was working down the street and the operator sad there might be some trouble at this number.” He reached for the receiver in my hand. “What happened?”
I told him.
“Well, we can fix that in a minute or two.” He opened the telephone box, exposing a maze of wires and coils, and fiddled for a while with the end of the receiver cord, tightening things with a small screwdriver. He jiggled the hook up and down a few times, then spoke into the phone. “Hi, this is Peter. Everything’s under control at 105. The kid’s sister scared him and he pulled the cord out of the box.”
He hung up, smiled, gave me a pat on the head and walked out the door.
All this took place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Then, when I was nine years old, we moved across the country to Boston—and I missed my mentor acutely. Information Please belonged in that old wooden box back home, and I somehow never thought of trying the tall, skinny new phone that sa
t on a small table in the hall.
Yet, as I grew into my teens, the memories of those childhood conversations never really left me; often in moments of doubt and perplexity I would recall the serene sense of security I had when I knew that I could call Information Please and get the right answer. I appreciated now how very patient, understanding and kind she was to have wasted her time on a little boy.
A few years later, on my way west to college, my plane put down at Seattle. I had about half an hour between plane connections, and I spent 15 minutes or so on the phone with my sister, who lived there now, happily mellowed by marriage and motherhood. Then, really without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown operator and said, “Information Please.”
Miraculously, I heard again the small, clear voice I knew so well: “Information.”
I hadn’t planned this, but I heard myself saying, “Could you tell me, please, how to spell the word ‘fix’?”
There was a long pause. Then came the softly spoken answer. “I guess,” said Information Please, “that your finger must have healed by now.”
I laughed. “So it’s really still you,” I said. “I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during all that time . . .”
“I wonder,” she replied, “if you know how much you meant to me? I never had any children, and I used to look forward to your calls. Silly, wasn’t it?”
It didn’t seem silly, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I told her how often I had thought of her over the years, and I asked if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister after the first semester was over.
“Please do. Just ask for Sally.”
“Good-bye, Sally.” It sounded strange for Information Please to have a name. “If I run into any chipmunks, I’ll tell them to eat fruit and nuts.”
“Do that,” she said. “And I expect one of these days you’ll be off for the Orinoco. Well, good-bye.”
Just three months later I was back again at the Seattle airport. A different voice answered, “Information,” and I asked for Sally.
“Are you a friend?”
“Yes,” I said. “An old friend.”
“Then I’m sorry to have to tell you. Sally had only been working part-time in the last few years because she was ill. She died five weeks ago.” But before I could hang up, she said, “Wait a minute. Did you say your name was Villiard?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down.”
“What was it?” I asked, almost knowing in advance what it would be.
“Here it is, I’ll read it—‘Tell him I still say there are other worlds to sing in. He’ll know what I mean.’ ”
I thanked her and hung up. I did know what Sally meant.
Life in These United States
The topic of our seventh-grade science class was the first cloned animal—Dolly, the sheep. We discussed how scientists removed the nucleus from the sheep egg cell and replaced it with the nucleus from the parent cell. The students were fascinated, one in particular.
“This is amazing,” she said. “I had no idea sheep laid eggs.”Aimee Caruso
• • •
On Halloween, I’ve been known to hand out games, pens, pads of paper or gift certificates instead of candy. Last year, noticing a runny nose on one of my trick-or-treaters, I offered a tissue to the child. Just as she was reaching for it and thanking me, another group appeared on the scene. One of the newcomers exclaimed, “Oh, no, she’s giving out Kleenex this year!” Pat Arata
• • •
It was fall harvest, so my brother and sister-in-law took their grandsons, Brandon and Connor, to visit their first farm. Brandon had never had a candy apple, so Nancy bought one for him.
“Connor, would you like one?” she asked.
“Say no,” Brandon whispered to his brother after taking a bite. “There’s a real apple in there!”Ann Whittle
The Dream Horse and the Dining-Room Table
By Billy Porterfield
December 1994
condensed From Diddy Waw Diddy
Since he was a kid on the Oklahoma prairie, Daddy loved the sweet, nutty smell of horses and mules. He had grown up working them in the fields. On Saturday afternoons, he had raced horses in country fairs. He liked being in the saddle so much that he used his for a pillow in bed. It took some doing for Mother to get used to that.
If horses were Daddy’s passion, working on oil rigs was his job. He was an experienced roughneck on a drilling crew. The money was good while the rig was running. But when a well was finished, the drilling crew had to move on. So our family drifted from job to job through the oil fields of Oklahoma and East Texas.
Daddy staggered drilling work with roustabouting: looking after existing wells and tank farms. The hourly wage was lower than on a rig, but the work was steady, the check came every week, and the company provided a house. These were never fancy, but our family made them home, however short our stay.
It was at one of these lease houses in Texas that Daddy bought War Cloud—a white-eyed, dapple-gray stallion. War Cloud was Daddy’s dream horse. Every dawn before work, he spent an hour in the stable, feeding the stallion crimped oats and brushing his coat. Evenings, he road until sunset.
He outfitted War Cloud’s stall with every amenity: running water, a salt block, a tack box, blankets for every kind of weather, and a cabinet with all the ointments and pills an ailing horse could need. There was even a fan to keep the flies off.
Mother claimed the stable was furnished better than our company house. She tried to pretty things up for us, making oval throw rugs for the living room and bedrooms. Our floors were so clean you could eat off them. But she still wasn’t satisfied. We ate at a table a neighbor gave us. It was rough and unpainted and she kept it hidden under oilcloth. Mother wanted a real dining-room suite.
One day she spotted a varnished walnut table and six chairs in the nearby town of Benavides. She could see it at home, covered with a lacy white tablecloth. But the set cost $100. At that price Daddy wouldn’t even look at it. Had the woman lost her mind?
So our tiny mother put her dream aside and went on with her days—kneeling down, scrubbing the linoleum, standing out back at the roller washing machine, or bending over the ironing board, pressing jeans with a heavy steam iron. She smelled of soap and scorched cotton. We used to say Daddy wore the only starched, ironed underwear in the oil patch.
Mother had such a passion for spit and polish and the rightness of work that she was in perpetual motion. But all along, we sensed she was strangely fragile. In the fall of the year Daddy bought War Cloud, she finally pushed her body beyond endurance and came down sick. She ran a fever, had chills and vomited all over the place.
An old Mexican doctor came out from Benavides, bent over the bed and realized that Mother, already run-down and anemic, had eaten something spoiled. “She has ptomaine poisoning,” he said. “It’ll be touch and go because her fever is so high and she’s terribly dehydrated.”
Mother lapsed into a coma. We thought she was going to die. She came out of it, but then she kissed us all and settled into a strange calm.
Fay Talbot, a neighbor, moved in to keep Mother full of aspirin and liquids. Every morning she bathed her in bed and changed her gown and sheets. Each day, the doc drove the 15 miles from Benavides. He said there was nothing to do but wait and pray.
Daddy slept on the living-room divan. One morning, he went out to the stable, where he thought we couldn’t see him, and bawled. This rough man babbled to God, promising anything if his wife would get well. “I’ll sell War Cloud, I’ll buy that new dining-room suite, if only you’ll bring her around.”
We were never quite sure if it was Daddy’s prayer, the old doctor’s medicine, Fay Talbot’s nursing, or her own drive,
but Mother did recover. The day she thought she’d get out of bed and try her legs, Daddy slipped out and hauled War Cloud to the stock auctioneer in Benavides. He sold his pride to the highest bidder for $150.
Why he then went out and got drunk has always been a matter of family debate. I lean to the side that has him drowning in self-pity for losing his head and making such a promise to God. When it came down to death’s door, he chose his wife over his horse. But now death had been set back, and his wife was on the mend. He might have figured he could have got by without losing either.
Anyway, after stupefying himself, my father staggered to the furniture store and bought the dining-room suite and a lacy white tablecloth. When he got back to the house, we kids—laughing and whispering—helped him set it up. Then we helped Mother out of bed and walked her to the dining room for the surprise.
“Well,” Daddy asked, “what do you think?”
Mother’s heart rose. Daddy had done a wonderful thing.
Then her heart fell: It was the wrong suite. This tacky furniture was not walnut, it was plain oak, painted blond.
She looked at her husband. She looked at her children. Tears came into her eyes.
“Why, Daddy—my darlings,” she said, leaning onto her husband, “it’s perfectly beautiful. I love it.”
Mother used that suite for 37 years, moving it wherever we went. One day, she stripped the painted finish and discovered a lovely natural grain in the wood. Then she stained it the deep walnut she’d always wanted. After Mother died, my sister took the table for her dining room.
We knew Mother was right. Painted or not, Daddy’s table was perfectly beautiful.
Quotable Quote
The miracle is this—the more we share, the more we have. Leonard Nimoy
His Gift of the Future
By Marc Lerner
June 1995