Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: ASKEW (06/07/18)
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TITLE: Tribute to the Girl Who Once Wore Two Hats in Boston | Previous Challenge Entry
By LINDA GERMAIN
06/13/18 -
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Dementia and weakness reduced her to a helpless little old lady in a hospital bed. I tried to keep her clean and nourished and comfortable. It’s hard to believe she’s been deceased for nearly one year.
The house is sold. I have moved on. It’s only now that the fog of exhaustion has lifted that I can appreciate the treasure of her charming, funny character.
She seemed to tap dance through life to the tune of her own song, and always a little off-key. Remembering the humor in her unique personality helps to erase the last picture of the dependent, confused, sometimes uncooperative responsibility she became.
She couldn’t cook but wrote a little cookbook. She took piano lessons, but the instructor told her to please stop. She tried to sew but made a dress with a zipper in the wrong place, and upside down.
One Easter at church, I glanced at her skirt and realized she obviously had put it on inside-out. When I whispered that she might want to slip out to the ladies room and fix it, she told me, “Don’t worry, no one will notice.”
Towards the end, I would try to jog her memory about some of her past antics. Once in a while, a sudden connection to a humorous event would leap out of who-knows-where.
In that last week, as I was cutting her hair, I asked, “Remember when you and I drove a hundred miles for my interview at the nursing school? “
I could see the glimmer of a tiny light clicking on in her compromised brain.
“Yes!” she responded with brief puzzling energy and spot-on recollection.
“You pawned your guitar for money for the trip,” she said, “and we stayed in that awful motel with the Murphy beds.”
I stopped, dumbfounded, and waited.
“It was upstairs,” she continued and then floundered as she grasped for details just out of reach.
I coaxed her. “There was something else about that tacky old place.”
She stared at me and giggled a little as the tiny light flickered on again.
“The floor slanted so badly I was afraid I’d get slammed back into the wall in that strange bed. I told you to keep the door closed so I wouldn’t accidentally whirl out to the porch and under the railing and crash land in the parking lot.”
She was right about that hilarious night back then. Two beds folded down from the wall, something neither of us had ever seen. As we had chatted across the room in the dark, a neon sign had flashed garish colors around the rickety blinds. At least the sheets were clean.
“I hope my shoes don’t slide away,” she had mumbled.
“…or we land on the first floor if there’s a strong wind,” I added.
Her final statement as she fell asleep that night was silly but so typically funny.
“Wake me up if I roll out the door.”
Maybe the memory of those comedic situations we shared in my youth helped to keep me on task in her final days when drudgery almost made me forget how she happily skipped sideways through life with refreshing naiveté and laughter.
In spite of her Lucy Ricardo moments, she loved the Lord. She prayed for dozens of people every day, taught Sunday school for little ones, and looked forward to the next adventure.
At a rest stop on a trip with my dad, she and I made the obligatory trip to the facilities. Imagine my surprise when she announced that she had always wanted to write on a wall!
As she searched in her purse for a pen, I told her I’d guard the door. In a few seconds, she ran out laughing hysterically.
“Get in the car, Ethel!” she yelled.
Dad was suspicious. “Okay, you two, what happened?”
I tattled. “Your wife just wrote on the bathroom wall!”
He didn’t ask what she wrote. She didn’t tell.
Years later, in that lop-sided cheap motel, she suddenly confessed, “I wrote Jesus loves you.”
Perfect!
Months ago, she gently rolled out of this wobbly life and into the strong arms of her Savior. I like to think that innocent wall-graffiti witnessed to some forlorn soul who needed a comforting reminder to embrace hope on the speeding train of time--and to smile once in a while.
We all need that.
_____
*True
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times of 'missing'. Well done.