Thankful

Posted: Monday November 29, 2010 under Lead Myself

“Do you think that’s news?” the dad asks.

A first-grade girl was teased for liking Star Wars, and the mother stands up for her on CNN.

The son doesn’t bite. Barely looks up from his book. He’s heard it before. Same question. Same beef. “I’m sure to somebody.”

The dad shuffles to the restroom. He’s in there a long time. His bladder.

“Now that’s news,” the son says later.

The dad watches the President and daughters pardon two turkeys for Thanksgiving. “I beg to differ,” he says.

“Good news to the turkeys.”

He wants to sound less cranky. In the truck, it was mostly the cigarettes. Three on the drive over. Bits of ash flaking off, flying around, settling somewhere. The son said nothing. The dad has heard all he wants to hear about the cigarettes … has threatened to punch the next person in the face. The son sends signals instead: open window, head turned away, hand to his mouth.

The guy at the tire place a few months back said he couldn’t believe a truck this old smelled so new, said it sort of laughing, like there was something wrong with that. The guy would have loved the dad’s truck, the son thinks. A farm truck. An American truck. A truck truck. Looked like someone set off a hand grenade in it. In the son’s truck (the small, foreign-made, new-smelling truck), the dad sits on an old folded-over sheet in case the diapers aren’t enough. The son’s idea.

The dad is in the restroom again when a younger black man comes out of treatment with a cane and a bad limp. Bone cancer in his leg, he tells an older black woman sitting next to his wife. “See what kind of pain medication they got me on.” He shows the woman his prescription. “Heavy stuff.” He laughs. They all laugh. He sets his cane aside and makes coffee, talking across the room. Something about a grandchild. He looks too young to have grandchildren, the son thinks … and to have bone cancer. The wife tells the woman she has no children of her own. “Don’t talk like that,” the man says. “My children are your children … what’s mine is yours.” She smiles. “I know.” They laugh.

The man leaves his cane and limps to the restroom door. Locked. He knocks. The son tells him someone is in there. “Oh. Okay. Man, I really got to go,” he laughs, holding himself. It might be a little while, the son says, smiling. The man knocks on the other door and they let him back into the treatment area. The son hears them laughing.

The son wishes the dad had been in the room to see the man laughing about his leg, laughing about his pain, laughing about someone being in the restroom. The dad is young too. Not yet 70. Younger than Chuck Norris. The dad would not have laughed about someone being in the restroom. Says he would. Insists he is the most positive and patient and content man alive. May even believe it.

Insists the doctors have all told him to smoke up. Might as well. Really? the son used to ask. What doctor would say that? Doctors have two things in common: bad handwriting and wanting everyone to stop smoking. What doctor worth his stethoscope would take away a person’s hope like that? Maybe if the person had weeks to live, or months … for certain. Maybe. But that wasn’t the son’s dad. A bad heart, sure. Very bad. Bad kidney. Bad brain. Some stomach problems. Some bladder problems. Lots of problems, really. Too many. The dad lists them all with a collector’s passionate precision on a sheet of paper around a clip-art figure that looks like a CSI corpse chalk outline. (The dad’s favorite show.)

They’d seen the heart doctor the previous day, before the second radiation treatment. A happy-seeming man. A man the dad said he loved. That loved him back. Like the urologist and neurologist and oncologist and primary and all the nurses. Like the guy at the tire place, probably, if the dad had met him. “When you go to the doctor, do the nurses hug your neck?” the dad had asked the son.

“How much cigarettes do you smoke?” the heart doctor had asked the dad in his thick accent. A question the dad hated. A question the son loved. The son smiled. Waited.

“A little,” the dad said. The son said nothing.

“You must work on that.”

The man with bone cancer in his leg comes back. Limping, talking, laughing, no hurry to leave, now standing by the exit with his wife, in front of the restroom door. The son thinks, now, it might be best if the room is calmer and quieter when the dad comes out. It is. He’s thankful.

Prostrate cancer is the latest update to the dad’s CSI sheet. They beat it in 2002, but it’s back. And it has spread. That’s why he asked the son to drive up from Florida. Radiation to his pelvic bone, ten days, 40-minute drive. The other brother would come up next week. Shared duty.

Today is the third treatment. The third drive from the trailer where the dad spilled his pills that morning and wasn’t sure if he’d taken his Klonopin. A cluttered trailer not much bigger than the son’s motel room up the road. A trailer with just a few mementos from the dad’s life of high-end homes and cars and personal drivers and scenic corner offices in tall buildings around the world. A trailer behind the landlord’s house on a farm.

“I’m ready to go,” the dad had said somewhere between the small trailer and the small waiting room, leaves spinning down from the Georgia trees, swirling up from the road, autumn air rushing through the open windows, staticky Christmas music on a country station. The son didn’t bite. He’d heard it before. On bad days. In bad stretches.

“I’m going to keep fighting because I know it would be hard on you and your brother and your mom, but I’m ready to go.” The cigarettes not withstanding, the dad was not ready to go. Not in the son’s view. Ready, yes, of course, in the way that everyone is ready sometimes, but no. He did want to fight. Not in the same way the son would, maybe. Not in the same way the son preferred or understood, certainly. But he did want to fight.

The dad talks to other people in waiting rooms, tells them what he’s in for, his prognosis. It’s not the way the son would do it. Yesterday the dad was less tired and more talkative than today. Took every opportunity, the son thought, to tell people he was suffering from pretty serious cancer, that the outlook was not good. The son told him how unhealthy that kind of talk was. Thinking it so can make it so, the son said. The dad denied being negative. Took exception. Then he hollered back through the pharmacy drive-up window: “What I meant to say is this cancer isn’t that bad and we’re gonna whup it.” The woman inside said that was real good to hear.

A voice called for the dad. He put down the chocolate malt the son got him at Dairy Queen. Left the stocking cap he’d worn snug over his bald head in the open-windowed truck. Shuffled toward the door without a word. Bare feet stuck in a pair of dirty Crocs, one orange and one blue, as always, to show support for the son’s alma mater. Bulky blue insignia-covered jacket from his time as a tour boat captain on Catalina Island covering the nearly bare buxom women inked up and down both arms. Sweatpants covering the men sized S/M diapers, $12.50 a pack at the local Dollar Store.

This cancer isn’t that bad. The son agrees.

That man …

The water-skiing, fish-cleaning, Frisbee-throwing life of the party.

Who laughed easily, fixed problems easily, solved puzzles easily, did everything easily.

Who earned a college degree at night working full-time to support his small family.

Who coached his boys’ softball team and managed to win the championship while insisting that every kid play.

Who had his first heart attack 30 years before, pitching softball for his church, and he said he was ready to go then.

That man is indestructible.

Back in Florida, the phone rings. “Thanks for coming, son. You really helped me out.”

“You bet, dad. It was a great Thanksgiving.”

They both laugh.