Published: 20 May 2019
It had been six years since I had been here, inside the park at the 79th street entrance. I only lived a block from this south-east corner of Central Park, but I hadn’t stepped into any part of the park in all that time, certainly not right here where I had lost my will to live, where I had lost the love of my life right in front of my eyes.
It had been an ordinary evening for Chuck and me, we left our offices at Hunter College at 5 PM after we had each held office hours and met in the main hall of the Roosevelt Building, the center of the Humanities Educational Center at the main campus of Hunter University, a City University of New York (CUNY). We were both seven-year tenured professors and lecturers and we both maintained office hours three days a week, from 2 PM to 5 PM, Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. This day was our Friday hours and we were looking forward to our weekly dinner out on our way home. Our home was a nice old apartment in a “doorman” building two blocks away from the campus. We moved into it right after our contracts with Hunter had been signed and I stayed there after Chuck was shot by a teenager who had tried mugging us as we walked from the restaurant to our apartment, right at the entrance to Central Park at 79th street. We refused the young teen, but had offered him the takeaway container from the restaurant instead of the cash he had demanded, as we didn’t carry cash on us. He shot me in the left shoulder, and Chuck was hit in the heart and slumped dead at my feet.
I didn’t know I could feel the amount of rage I felt at that moment, the kid seemed transfixed by what he had done, an almost satisfied smirk on his face, but that didn’t last long, as my right fist made contact with his face and he too crumpled to the sidewalk as people started to gather and a park patrolman arrived on the scene to find me sobbing my heart out as Chuck’s blood oozed from his chest onto mine as I cradled his torso to mine as I sat on the sidewalk bawling.
I don’t remember much more from that night, but what I did remember was enough to keep me awake for most of every night for weeks, only getting through a full night’s sleep when I was in the hospital having my shoulder replaced with a new artificial one, the staff aware of my night terrors and they used some strong stuff to keep me knocked out for the night. Pills were prescribed for me upon my release, but the physical therapist had told me they were very addictive, so I started to cut them into quarters when I was home, after my first physical therapy session. The next day Chuck’s ashes were delivered to me at the apartment and I placed the urn on the fake mantle in our living room, where it sat for the six years I remained in the apartment.
A month after the shooting I returned to the classroom, and really lost myself in the classes and the work involved in them. I found a new normal, a life virtually without the friends Chuck and I had shared. I guess that after the memorial service the college had hosted, they just didn’t know how to deal with an almost 30-year-old widower who was so missing his mate that I was borderline suicidal. I knew my depression was off-putting to many and I knew that my fellow staff members at the college knew I was faking normalcy during my classes, but after a year and a half of therapy at the mental health outpatient center, ran by the medical wing of the college, I was feeling I could cope and get better. My mental therapist was an older woman who had a lot of empathy for me. She too had lost her first husband in her twenties. We spent a lot of time those first couple of months crying on each other’s shoulders and she really helped me get a lot of the grief out.
Of course, I had to testify at the teenager’s trial, but there was a certain amount of satisfaction in knowing he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, with a crooked nose. My therapist for my shoulder accompanied me to the trial, she was concerned about the effect the trial would have on my recovery, but except for the emotional toll, physically I was fine. The emotional issues were handled by my mental therapist two days after the trial ended. Doctor Grace told me at that session that I had to start thinking about what I wanted from my life, my new life without Chuck who had been my life for the past dozen years, since we met at freshman orientation at Amherst College when we were 18.
We had been assigned as roommates that first year and we continued to be roommates even when we graduated with our Master’s and our Doctorates not much later. We shared the train ride to our interviews at Hunter and we spent that same afternoon looking at apartments in the city, but only ones within walking distance of the main campus where we had interviewed. We were both offered positions and we flipped a coin to decide on either a two bedroom newer flat in a crummy neighborhood at $300 more a month than the three-bedroom older apartment in a “doorman” guarded building just two blocks from the campus. This apartment was ideal for us as it afforded us the chance to have not only a home office big enough for the two of us, but a guest room or added storage in the third bedroom. We made it our home and we did at first entertain, but as the workload increased and we began to work on writing our more realistic textbook, we were more and more reduced to entertaining colleagues from the college or visiting lecturers in our field.
The textbook had been submitted for publication consideration the month before Chuck’s murder and by the time I was back teaching a full schedule again, five months later, I had received notice the book was going to be produced and published by a famous university press. By the time my psychologist had deemed me over the worst of my problems and she was encouraging me to look into the future and decide what I wanted to be doing in that future, the book had been published and reviewed by the sages in our field of study and the book was deemed to be a thoroughly new approach and the future preferred text for the 21st century in our field of study.
I was told that the initial sales of the book were very good, and several colleges and universities were going to be using it as a required text starting with the next school year. It was then I had to decide what to do with Chuck’s royalties from the book. I had thought of a memorial of some sort, as I had done with a majority of his life insurance policy. Those funds had been placed in a trust fund that granted scholarships to worthy students in the field of Human Rights studies. There was enough to provide two good sized grants a year in Chuck’s name and I thought that would have pleased Chuck, being able to continue to help deserving students. His share of the royalties were banked until I could think of something useful that he could posthumously contribute to.
As I said, I had returned to my classes, but without Chuck in my life, I just found it so hard to concentrate on my student’s work and providing them the tutelage they deserved. Heeding Grace’s advice to envision my future without Chuck in it, I began to try to see into the future, and my future didn’t need all the constant reminders of Chuck in it. I knew that wherever I went in our neighborhood there was some sort of remembrance of my lost mate, just as there was in both the apartment and in the Roosevelt Building where we taught and had had our offices. In July of the sixth year without Chuck I got a call from my cousin, Tony, that his mother had passed quietly in her sleep in the nursing home she was confined to after a stroke she had suffered the year after Chuck had been murdered. I immediately told him that I’d be up to attend the services, it was the least I could do as Tony had spent several days with me to be able to attend the memorial for Chuck.
Cousin Tony was actually a bit older than me, about 40 at that time, but we had always been pals. It was Tony who told me during the week of the memorial service that I didn’t need physical reminders of Chuck around me because there was a good-sized chunk of my heart that would always hold my memories of him.
I made the train trip to Springfield where Tony collected me from the train station and drove me to his home in Amherst. It was good to see him again and the fact we had not seen each other in five years did not matter, since we talked on the phone or emailed at least twice a month, but we did have some catching up to do. His mom had been in the nursing home for the last seven years since a debilitating stroke had robbed her of speech and muscle control of her entire left side. The nursing home was a necessity because Tony was a confirmed bachelor who had a business he ran from home, the family home he had shared with his mother since the death of his father some twenty years before.
Tony was the first asexual I had ever come across. I never had seen him with either a girlfriend or a boyfriend for that matter, he had bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t relate to another sexually, but that didn’t stop him from being one of the most caring individuals I had ever run across. He had started his independent editing business many years ago, while still a student at Hampshire college. At first, he was editing papers for other students and that evolved into editing manuscripts for professors who had written books, and that evolved into him being offered editing work from various publishers who had writers in the New England area. He now employed five editors full time with a crew of ten “on call” editors who filled in when the workload called for it.
He had lived in his family’s home in Amherst all his life and since my branch of the family lived in nearby Hadley we were frequently together all our lives. My family consisted of my dad and mom and myself and my parents had died in a car crash during my sophomore year at college, and Tony and my Aunt and Uncle had stepped right up and helped me through that difficult period, but then I also had Chuck to help ease my pain, Chuck, who had been raised in foster care his whole life. He had been shunted back into the foster care system when at 11 he came out as gay to his foster parents and then he had lived in the DCFS dorm until he graduated from high school and aged out of the system. He had earned enough scholarships to see him through his college years and he reveled in our home life and our commitment to each other.
As I settled into the guest room of Tony’s home, he told me about the wake and funeral planned for his mother the next day. The wake would be an afternoon affair so her elderly friends had a chance to pay their last respects and the following morning she would be interred next to her husband. That would give us three days after to visit.
Tony’s employees would meet us at the funeral so there would be familiar faces to support him in his time of need, but he had had several years to get used to his mother’s imminent demise, so he was coping really well. The large Victorian he had been raised in was right off the town common, two blocks from the bustle of a three college town, the house being down a street from town green and some of his employees were themselves, graduates of these colleges, as were Tony and I. The part-timers, or the on-call crew, were mostly college students hired on an as-needed basis, but Tony was expecting them all to show up at the wake and some would even make it to the funeral the next day depending on their class schedule.
He showed me around, so I could see the modifications he’d had to make on the house to be able to fit in the workers and although most of their work was done on computers, he had set up workstations all over the former living spaces of the first floor, leaving the large kitchen space intact, but upgraded. The second floor had what used to be a den or home office for his Dad converted into a TV room and “relaxing” room for himself and his roommates, a 24 year old graduated student, Mary Chambers, one of his employees who I had met the last time I had visited Tony and his mother last summer, and an Air Force vet who was attending the University Of Massachusetts(UMASS) on the GI bill after his 3rd tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he had lost his right foot to shrapnel from a land mine. His name was David Weston and I hadn’t met him yet, he had only been living here for the last five months.
We (Tony and I) ate out that night and he told me that he had a lot to talk to me about after his mother was safely interred, and I figured he wanted to discuss his sense of loss for the mother he had lived with his whole life, never thinking of what he really had to talk to me about the day after the funeral. The afternoon of the wake was interesting in that there was hardly anyone my age(34) or even Tony’s at 40. The nursing home had bused over those residents that could make the six-minute ride on their minibus and Tony as the son and I as the nephew received them in front of the coffin after they had each paid their respects and then they were attacking the plates of cookies and the urns of coffee and tea that had been provided. Tony’s employees had arrived with us and then after the senior citizens had been past us there started to appear the neighbors and friends of my aunt who were not living at the nursing home, yet.
The part-time help arrived, and we spent some time talking to them and then Mary and the other occupant of the house arrived, greeting Tony first and then Tony introducing me to David, his newest roommate. I had no preconceived notions about David, not having run into him at the house the day before, but my first impression was one of strength. He just had an aura of confidence about him. He was definitely a looker and his expressions of condolence to both Tony and me were definitely sincere, you learn when one isn’t pretty quick in the grieving process. We snagged some of the remaining cookies after the parlor was emptied of mourners and we returned to the big house that Tony called both home and work.
Once there we each had a mixed drink that his mother had taught us as children, half a glass of water and the other half was ginger ale. She had called it “making water” and we used to laugh at that, as that was what our grandmother had called urinating when we were young boys. With ice, it was a great thirst quencher and the ginger ale helped to settle your stomach. We took our drinks and a plate of the bland cookies up to the TV room to catch the evening news and we found Mary and David sitting in chairs watching some program that was just ending, awaiting the evening late news. We shared the plate of cookies with them and Mary left to go to her room for the night, saying she’d see us for the funeral the next morning as she left. David lasted until the weather had been covered and then he too said he’d see us in the morning. Tony and I waited until the tag end of the news and then we each retired to our own bedrooms.
Yes, it did take a while to fall asleep, but it was mostly memories of my Aunt Hazel that kept me from dropping right off to sleep, and just as I was slipping into the land of nod a voice entered my head, telling me to get a good night’s sleep, and that he (the voice) had things well in hand, that he was seeing to my future, that he was proud of the scholarships I had set up in his name, and that he’d love me for all time and be waiting for me when my time came, when we would wait just a short time for David to join us. It was Chuck’s voice that lulled me to sleep that night.
It wasn’t the first time I had heard him while I was in a near-sleep state, or that I remembered what I thought were talks from him I had heard in my sleep, so it didn’t really freak me out, but what was that about David? I had just met him that day and except for general pleasantries we hadn’t even had a conversation yet. That remembered portion of his talk to me last night was what had me scratching my head in the morning as I went about getting ready for my aunt’s funeral, and preparing myself to be as solid a rock as I could be for Tony today.
The funeral was just as expected, there was a funeral mass said at my aunt’s church and then we all drove behind the hearse, Tony and I riding in his car and foregoing the limo the funeral home had offered. We had offered rides to his roommates, but they both had to work right after the funeral mass, so they provided their own transportation. Tony had told me that David worked for the University as an assistant in the Department of Veterans Services at the U and it was a part time-position, so he could attend the classes he needed for his secondary teaching certificate and a Master’s in Education degree. He had another year to complete his courses. Mary was holding the fort at Tony’s offices, the rest of the staff was attending the funeral and burial and Mary had been asked by Tony to man the phones and check on any manuscripts that had been sent in for editing, it being a weekday (Thursday) there was the distinct possibility work would arrive in some manner before the day was out.
The dreariness of the funeral was broken up by some of the mourners who rose to the pulpit and shared remembrances of my Aunt Hazel and some of the speakers told some really funny stories about her. Tony went up last and in the harsh light in the church, I thought he looked gaunt, like he had aged over 10 years overnight, or maybe just since we had entered the church after the coffin was carried in. He was pretty tuckered out as I drove us home after the internment and went right back to bed. My initial thoughts were he needed time for some private grieving, now that his mother was at her final rest with his father.
I prepared omelets for our lunch, and remembered to include Mary, which I almost forgot, as she was in her workspace in the former living room and editing, which can be a pretty quiet enterprise. When I went in to give her a warning that lunch would be ready in 10 minutes, she looked relieved and said she’d tell me why during lunch, and I went to check on Tony and give him the same heads up. He was lying on his bed in the former master bedroom and it looked like the two-hour nap hadn’t done him much good, but he welcomed my announcement and told me thanks, and he’d be down in a few minutes.
After lunch, Tony and I cleaned up to let Mary go back to the boring editing of a windbag’s manuscript of English Literature, or, at least from her viewpoint, his rantings of vitriol about Chaucer and all his cronies. Tony and I spent the next two hours discussing what had been on his mind since he had picked me up from the train station days ago, and had probably been on his mind for months and he had been holding it in all this time while he had gone through the motions of burying his mother, Tony had Fourth Stage Colon Cancer, and only a short time to live. Nothing could be done that would mitigate his circumstances, he had accepted that and was trying to get his affairs in order, and then with some painkillers, he was ready to wait to join his parents. The tumors were beyond operating on and trails of the tumors had spread through the colon walls and were taking new residence in other organs and cavities in his body. I held him as he sobbed this all out, and when he had gathered his composure, he asked me to please honor his bequest to me, his home, his business, and his funds, which he assured me were plentiful. Not only had he invested his father’s bequests to his mother and himself, but his business was earning him a figure in the close neighborhood of $255,000 a year profit and that too had been invested, taking only enough out to pay his own expenses and the expenses of the property, his employees’ salaries already taken out of the earnings before his profits were determined.
According to him, he was offering me the lifeline he didn’t have the opportunity to grab himself. He thought I would catch on to the editing business quickly, and of course the employees worked pretty independently and didn’t need supervision, only someone to be able to access his computers and determine how many hours each manuscript took to polish before it was sent to the publisher for printing or publication as an ebook or audiobook.
His news took me by surprise and his relief at being able to finally talk it out with someone was palatable. It definitely offered me a chance to change my future, but losing my last close relative was going to hurt, but as I thought about the situation after Tony went to have a rest, I realized that he was going to die relatively soon, no matter what. I could leave my position at Hunter and move up here to be with Tony for the remainder of his life, and learn from him at the same time, I’d need to if I was going to carry on his business and help keep employed the five editors and the part-timers as well. He was tossing me a lifeline and I saw that this was exactly what I needed, to fashion a new future for myself, with a bit of help from my cousin Tony.
The afternoon nap Tony had taken after our talk had him in a much better mood when he joined me in the den/TV room just before dinner time. He asked me to join him on a walk and since he seemed to have regained some energy, I agreed so he took me to the other end of the bedroom hall and showed me the quarters he had created for his mother when he had turned the first floor into his workspace just before she had to be installed in the nursing home. There originally had been four bedrooms at this front end of the second floor and he had constructed a true master suite for his mother, untouched since the week after it had been completed. There was a nice large unfurnished living room, a small kitchenette with a small table seating four to eat at, a large spacious bathroom and a really good-sized bedroom with a walk-in closet and a fireplace with a small seating area in front of it. Off the hallway with the bathroom was another smaller bedroom, about twelve feet by twelve feet. It was a fully contained suite, just needing some furniture to make it livable.
Tony told me he thought he could envision me living here, with my chosen belongings from the New York apartment, and running the business downstairs. He explained that the roommates helped defray the cost of the property taxes and utilities, and both paid on time like clockwork. He told me that after he was gone, I could even rent out his bedroom, the original master bedroom, and expect an extra four to six hundred a month for that.
While we prepared dinner, he talked some more about his work and I paid close attention to what he was saying, but he told me we’d sit down after dinner and I could take notes, but he had already prepared a manual of sorts on his computer, and he’d start that printing out after dinner. While we ate the two roommates appeared and we offered them servings from our meal, as there was plenty, and they each thanked us and joined us for dinner. During dinner, I learned more about both of them. Mary had started working as a fill in the first year Tony had started the editing business, and by the time she graduated from Hampshire College, she was so happy with the work that came her way that Tony had asked if she’d work full time for him. She was pleased and accepted his offer, but also put her name on the list for substitute teachers in town, as she wanted to experience some of the classroom time, she had originally thought she wanted to do. She told us that if she had to spend more time than she did in the classroom she thought she’d have quit teaching altogether by now. This way she could work on a manuscript on the evenings and weekends if she was filling in at one of the local schools during the day. She explained that the extra money would come in handy when and if she and her girlfriend ever bought their own home and began their own family.
David told us his classes in the Education Department were going well and he liked the instructors and professors he had this Summer and he hoped to be able to graduate a full year early. He had a part-time job at a hardware store in Hadley that he liked, but didn’t expect to be at it for longer than the Summer, his class workload would be too heavy for a part-time job to be feasible in the Fall. He expected to teach at the high school level, but he now was more curious about middle school teaching, he thought he might have more of an influence on younger minds, rather than high school students who were engrossed in sports, college apps, hormones, and peer pressure. He was studying to be a social studies teacher. He told us tales of living in student apartments and having to put up with the partying and all the activity for his first semester, so when a friend of a friend told him about Tony having a room to rent, he had come to see it and realized that the peace and quiet alone was worth what he was paying in rent.
Tony and I went for a drive after dinner, he had asked me to take him to see the sunset over the not too distant mountain, across the river. It wasn’t any more than a fifteen-minute drive from the big house in Amherst, but still, he asked me to drive. I should have realized that he was losing his battle to stay strong and alert, but we had so much fun remembering times in the distant past and our childhoods that I guess I just ignored the signs. After watching the magnificent sunset from a highway bypass, we returned to Amherst, stopping for ice cream cones on the way, just as we had when children. I told Tony I was leaving on the train in the morning, but only to resign from Hunter and arrange for the items I wanted to move up here to be picked up and the rest donated to a charity. He asked how long that all might take, and I told him maybe as long as a week, and he nodded, saying that should work out fine.
I was able to catch a bus to Springfield right at the common. Tony had offered to drive me to the train station, but he was pretty knackered even at 7:30 AM. I didn’t have the heart to take him up on his offer, so I walked the two blocks to the common and caught the bus. David was at work and Mary was with her girlfriend for two days as she was caught up on her boring manuscript. All the way home, first on the bus and then on the train, I mulled over what to take to Amherst and what to donate. I had every room pretty much sorted in my mind so once back home and caught up on my mail, which didn’t really take that long, I called a moving company I had heard good things about and asked for someone to come over and give me an estimate. While waiting I sat at my computer and wrote out my resignation letter to the college. That took me two hours, just enough time for the estimator for the moving company to arrive. He was an older man, someone I had seen around the neighborhood.
He seemed to be quite business-like and the estimate for the moving of my goods was reasonable. He asked about the items I was not taking and when I hesitated, he made me an offer that sounded reasonable to me also so we made a deal and he offered to have a crew come in and prepare everything being moved and to secure what needed to be packed before it was all loaded in the moving truck, he’d have everything delivered to Amherst within four hours of the loading, and he’d sublet the apartment until my lease was up in another six months, when he himself would take it over from the building owners. He told me that he was glad I was taking my workout equipment, as he was too old to be working out. I was going to say something about how it’s never too late to take care of yourself, but I had to get to the college and turn in my resignation. The mover had an opening in two days’ time so we signed the contract and we left the building, he on his way back to organize a crew for the move and I took my resignation letter to go to Hunter and resign.
With the news given to my department head and an interview hastily arranged with the Dean of the college over with, I returned to the apartment and packed up some suitcases, some with very personal items I wouldn’t trust anyone else to pack, and then one with enough clothing for several days so I’d have a ready supply until everything got unpacked in my new quarters at Tony’s house. With all this accomplished I was feeling pretty good about everything and decided to honor one of Chuck’s wishes and I took his ashes and divided them up into two separate containers and leaving half in the urn I packed that in one of the suitcases to take with me, and then changed into jogging clothes and took the container with the other half and set out for the park. I entered from the entrance I had avoided for many years, the entrance we had been mugged at and where Chuck had died.
I went straight down Terrace Drive to the lake and Wagner cove right by the Drive and to one of the benches by the cove and sat and told Chuck what I had decided and what was going on in my life. I followed his wishes and slipped the container out of the soft backpack I wore and slipped his ashes onto the shore of the lake right there where we had sat many a time, just talking over what was going on in our lives, even before we had moved into the apartment just a few blocks away. I returned to the bench and I must have sat there for a few hours, just wallowing in the memories just being there evoked in me. I should have been a basket case by now, but as It had gotten a bit darker, twilight, I arose to return to the apartment and felt like he was beside me and we were setting off on a new adventure. I called Tony when I returned home, and he sounded like he was having a good day, and his spirits rose as I told him all I had accomplished, and he was happy that I’d be there in just a few days.
I arranged for a rental car for the trip back up to Amherst the next morning, and being in the Upper East Side it was a convenient location for me to be able to pick it up myself and they had a small office in Amherst so I could easily drop it off after I got there. I didn’t want to be hanging around as my home with Chuck was packed up and dismantled, so when the packing crew showed up the morning of the move, I packed my suitcases in the rental car and took off, knowing the super of the building had been notified and arrangements had been made for me to sublet the apartment. The drive took me close to three hours as I wasn’t in a great hurry and there was some fair amount of Summer traffic on the interstate, but still, I was kind of anxious to begin my different life running Tony’s business and setting up my rooms at the house.
I reached Amherst about one in the afternoon, having stopped for a bite of lunch on the way, and once there I lugged my bags up to the second floor and stowed them in a closet in the suite’s hallway. Tony was downstairs and had greeted me with a big hug as he answered the door. He was working on a manuscript for a long-time user of his service, an author who was popular on the web as well as in print and Tony admitted to me that it wasn’t a genre he particularly liked, Gay Space Adventures, but it made for something totally different to work on, and he admitted he looked forward to each manuscript submitted. He shooed me upstairs and told me to get settled before returning for a few hours, so he could show me the ropes of what he was doing to improve the story he was currently working on.
We sat at his desk in the old living room, across from where Mary had her workstation and where she was editing away on a new manuscript. In approximately two and a half more hours, Tony was flagging, and by then the moving truck from New York had arrived complete with four burly guys to unload and move the contents of the truck to the second floor. I escorted Tony to his bedroom and settled him in for a nap before dinner and then went and directed the movers as to what items went in each room, not that they couldn’t tell the difference between the bedroom and the living room, but there were some ambiguous items and they did appreciate my advice. The gym equipment went into the smaller bedroom, and when it looked too full in there, I had some pieces put in the master bedroom in front of the fireplace and the settee and comfy armchairs intended for there now graced the bow window in the alcove of the living room. I now could use my Bowflex® by firelight in the winter.
Mary came up to help and before we knew it we had filled the kitchenette with some pretty good stuff, if I do say so myself. Things Chuck and I had collected during our marriage. By this time David was home from work and he stopped in to see what progress had been made and he pitched in by taking on the bathroom, constantly muttering about how great this spacious room was with a separate toilet room and a walk-in double shower as well as a full-sized linen closet. He did a great job of sorting and storing all my toiletries and towels and sheets while Mary and I took the living room and fussed about with it as she told me hilarious stories about her girlfriend, who was a high school girls gym teacher. Once that room was sorted we checked on David and as he was near done Mary offered to put dinner together for all of us as I had brought several New York steaks with me in the cooler and she said there were roasting potatoes in the pantry downstairs but she just might do everything on the grill on the back patio, which I had yet to see.
We thanked her and David and I went to tackle the bedroom, which by now had all the furniture in place, it just needed to be “made up” with the sheets and window drapes, the movers had also rolled out the big oriental in there and it already felt a tiny bit like home to me, with familiar things in new surroundings. David went out in the main hall and retrieved a step stool from a closet out there and he helped me hang the drapes and we then tackled making up the bed. We chatted the whole time and I found him to be really easy to talk to, as he listened to my tales of where Chuck and I had found various pieces as we unpacked the boxes the movers had brought up before I had paid them and gave them all a generous tip before they took off for their return trip to the big city.
He responded with appropriate responses and by doing so he opened up about his seven-year stint in the Air Force and about the incident with the landmine that ended it. He told me about the months of misery he had gone through in the hospital stateside they had transported him to and the months and months of therapy, both mental and physical he had to endure before being let out in society again. We had made a lot of progress and David asked if sometime I would allow him the use of some of the exercise equipment in the smaller bedroom. I told him that he was welcome anytime to partake of my torture devices and he chuckled and said, quite off the cuff, that if he could look as fit as I did at my old age he would gladly come knocking at my door. He said that with the first genuine look of mischief I had noticed, but I still told him I was less than ten years older than his 27 years. We had gotten just about every box and bag unpacked, between Mary, David and I, so David and I headed down to see if we could help Mary in the preparation of our evening meal, but not before I peeked in to check on Tony. He was breathing regularly and didn’t seem to be in any discomfort, so I left him resting and went on down to the big kitchen.
Mary had everything well in hand down there and was turning the potatoes on the grill, testing their doneness every so often, as the steaks wouldn’t take that long and she figured the spuds would take another 15 minutes before the steaks could be put on the grill. I used that time to look over the garden and the structure that Tony and I had once played in as children, it was a remnant of older times.
Art West brings us another story that we hope you will like. Email Art at: ArtWest at CastleRoland dot Net