Patience
This is what I worry about: my dad has bad asthma. He wheezes on a good day, sleeps with a mechanized breathing mask. “A cyborg,” me and my siblings joke. “Darth Vader.”
“Did you wash your hands?” I ask him in the kitchen. We’re all sheltered in place, seven of us together in Minnesota, though I normally live in New York. He soaps up, turns on the faucet. This poor man. I watch his hands like a piano teacher, pretending to listen about his trip to the bait store. “Yeah, but are you getting between your fingers?”
“Buzz off,” he says.
I know that look. I lay off, trail back into the bedroom I’ve converted halfway into an office. I pick up my book, The Once and Future King.
There are so many childhood books here, hundreds even, I didn’t take when I moved to the city. These old worlds — like the wizard Merlin’s upstairs room, its menagerie of stuffed birds and charmed glass, globes, fossils, ink-bottles, tiger claws and boars’ tusks, a cauldron, a tawny owl, Archimedes, who not only speaks but is quite funny—they’ve been a comfort while the pandemic has deadened so much of daily life.
“I will not,” Archimedes says, closing his eyes, refusing to greet Arthur. “I wish you would not stare at me so.” We know this story. Reluctance to meet what inevitably has arrived at our homes. Coronavirus. From the Latin for crown.
Meanwhile, Merlin seems unfazed.
I wish I were Merlin. He lives backwards in time, already knows what’s about to happen, no need for worrying.
How do we cope? My dad watches fishing videos. My step-mom sews face masks. My brother plays video games. I read. Sometimes, I meditate. I close my eyes and clear my mind. But the world comes flooding in. I keep thinking about lasts, already know where my head is going when I arrive at my grandparents’ trailer park in Bradenton, Florida.
Birdwatching is the neighborhood sport. It’s “exercise even,” their shaggy, silver-haired neighbor Eddie says at the patio table, “with all that looking up and pointing.” He’s got two bright rows of teeth he keeps readjusting.
We’re all here. My grandfather’s in his favorite chair, belly cradled between his long thighs like an exercise ball. Even my grandmother makes a rare appearance. Her bad heart can’t handle the heat, but it’s cooler than usual today.
A shadow circles above tall palm trees. “Is that a hawk?” I ask, pointing.
“Oh, that?” my grandfather says. “No, that’s a buzzard.”
“He likes to hang out here,” my grandmother says in her fried smoker’s voice. “He’s waiting for one of us to croak.”
“Oh.”
“But we’re not dead yet,” she exclaims.
By then, my grandmother had been dying for such a long time it was hard to know if she ever would. A bad fall. A heart attack. Broken ribs, an arm in a sling, emphysema, pneumonia, another heart attack. I recall as a pre-med student shadowing surgeons for a summer in Chicago. “It’s like dominoes,” one had said. “One thing goes and so go the rest. Kidneys tend to be the beginning of the end.”
But there she was, my grandmother at the table — lighting another cigarette.
And there she was again, the next morning before the heat. I’ve just woken up. “What’s going on,” I say, walking out from the trailer barefooted and drowsy.
Right there in front of everybody, a large white egret paces on the glass patio table. Eddie’s tossing slices of a hotdog and the egret’s nibbling them up. I slide, slowly, into a chair to join them, trying not to frighten the bird.
She’s strange and graceful, in a clumsy way. When she looks head-on, she’s cross-eyed and seems panicked. Her feathers are as white as a wedding dress. Her slim neck, painfully crooked, easily bobs back and forth as Eddie continues flicking hotdog bits. My grandfather’s got some too.
“Here, take this,” Eddie says, throwing a cold hotdog at me, which I catch mostly by accident. “Go on.”
I suddenly become shy, but I hold it out. I shake the hotdog a bit. The egret sniffs at me like a dog. She bobs her head. She claps her beak around the hotdog, tips her head back, and guzzles it down.
“Woah,” I say, my hand empty and exactly where it had been, as if frozen. “Did you see that?”
“Well of course we did,” my grandmother says. “We don’t miss a thing around here.”
“We call her Patience,” my grandfather says. “She stops by every once in a while. Some days, she comes right up to the door, starts knocking with her beak. She’ll wait around all day for a hotdog.”
When Patience has had her fill, she flies off toward water. Eddie tires of telling his same stories and heads back to his trailer, some work that needs fixing. Clouds diffuse the sun. A hummingbird flits to the feeder, then away. Lizards beneath the table dart between our feet, scavenging hotdog bits. My grandfather dismisses himself to watch afternoon reruns. The dying grapefruit tree chitters with indistinct bird songs.
It’s just me and my grandmother.
“That egret,” I say. “I’m gonna remember that for a long time.”
She smiles. The smile of someone who knows too much, a wizard. And I have the distinct feeling that she, wasting no time, was already remembering all of it — the egret, the hotdogs, me — right then.
Merlin tells Arthur who is not yet king that the only thing to do when you’re feeling sad is to learn something.
My dad knocks on the open door. I spin around in my office chair. He has a coffee for me.
I put down the book.
We are learning how to see.
Absolutely fabulous. Loved reading this and felt present at the table with your grandparents. Thank you.