Remembering parents

Can an 83-Year-Old Man be an Orphan?

My parents are now my ancestors. How can that be?

My earliest memory of my mother was her punishing me. Sad, right?

I was no more than two years old, and she had dressed me for some occasion. I am sure I was cute, clad in short pants with a bib front and straps.

When she let me out on the front porch, her adamant demand was, “Do not get dirty.”

Trigger warning: I did. I laid down on my stomach, as toddlers do. When she saw the front of my outfit covered with dirt, I was definitely in trouble.

“I told you to stay clean. Now you aren’t going with us.”

I don’t remember the destination, but I was not on the trip. I suppose I cried because Mom was mad, and I didn’t get to the mysterious event.

Only a short while after the missing-a-trip incident, Mom also got madder than hell at me when I tangled our poor dog’s leash around a post while a goose attacked him.

“Geeze, Mom, I was saving myself. Let the dog eat the bird.”

When I think of other times from my childhood, she was often the same. Or do I only remember little-kid traumas?

Spanking was still a thing when I was in my kindergarten years; once again, she was the punisher.

It was the burning-down-the-neighborhood incident, in this case. I experimented with matches in a dry field of tall grass across the street; the result was the fire department arriving with sirens blasting.

I probably needed some consequences. But when my more considerate father tried to tone them down with just a talking to, she hollered, “Give him a spanking. I told him not to even cross the street.”

My mother ended her life in pain. For a couple of years, she had struggled with falling too many times and sitting, unable to move while her back and knee pain was excruciating. She was a frail and anxious ninety-six when we admitted her to hospice to live her last few weeks.

One could say she outlived her good qualities. In her late 80s, she still walked the streets around our neighborhood. She volunteered in church events and puttered in her flower beds.

On my visits to the home where she lived for over fifty years, her friends and fellow church members always complimented her to me. They told me she always was kind and in good humor.

At her favorite breakfast place, The Cup, they would greet her by name. She would then immediately strike up a conversation, asking about their family.

It was always good for me to view her through her friend’s eyes. It adjusted the various bad memories into more happy times.

She did plenty of mother things. She fed us dinner. Too many salmon croquet gizmos, for me, but we didn’t go hungry. She washed dishes and clothes. She ran us around in the car when needed.

Behind our house was a rotted log with bees flying in and out. So in the approach I would often use in later life, I decided to get the honeycombs. I didn’t read up on how to do that, of course. Who reads manuals?

So, I found a burlap bag in the garage and set out to scoop up the hive to do what? You guessed it. I had no idea.

When I got to the log and reached down, the bees didn’t like it. They buzzed me, and I ran away, at least not completely stupid. That didn’t help. They started stinging me as revenge.

The following things were a blur. Crying, I went inside to find my mother for help. She didn’t panic. She took my shirt off, laid me face down on the couch, and went to get baking soda. She then made a paste to spread over the eleven stings on my back.

(To this day, I don’t know what kind of hive I found. Maybe they were plain old bumble bees or wasps. That didn’t change the extreme pain. Only the aspirin and nursing I got from Mom helped at all.)

My father was different. When I was still a pre-schooler, he played with me. He squatted next to me in one photo and stretched a rubber band, shooting a balsa glider high into the sky.

In high school, I spent many afternoons and weekends as a helper in his wholesale meat company, Turner Distributing.

The most fun was driving the truck while he wrote up invoices and guided me around the stores’ neighborhoods and meat markets.

We had a customer who I liked a lot. He cut off the ends of buns so that the hot dog stuck out on both ends. With mustard and relish, they were to die for.

Although his humor was often annoying, he seemed to like me. When I ordered ice cream, he reached out the cone toward me. Then when I went to take it from him, he lowered his hand at the last minute so I would grab the ice cream scoop instead of the cone.

I have many great memories of working with my Dad, but I went off to pursue a career as a pastor of churches. Not the best choice in the world, but so it goes.

My father didn’t end his working years well. Turner Distributing was gone because spinal stenosis disabled him. He walked with canes, still getting out there but with less quality of life.

He survived a severe heart attack at 53. Because I was a thousand miles away in ministerial training, I wrote letters almost daily to keep in touch. No internet in those days, and we still worried about the cost of long-distance phone calls.

Three years later, sitting in his recliner, popping M&M’s, he had a fatal heart attack. He was 56.

Finding myself reminiscing about my mother and father, both gone for many years, makes me incredibly nostalgic. Maybe it’s a combination of the parts of this story set next to my mortality.

The writing of memoirs is a popular way to expose these feelings. But one has to be more honest than usual, I suppose.

I didn’t tell you about the time when I did deserve a spanking. When we visited my grandfather, I liked to go out to the garage and play with his pet spider monkey. I was too young to do that without parental supervision, and the poor, tiny primate paid the ultimate price. I didn’t realize that poking at him with a lawn rake would be fatal, but, sadly, I found out that day.

It’s been said before, many times, that there are no mulligans in the game of life. Which begs the question, why do we worry about and struggle to change the past?

That was a rhetorical question, the answer to which may be that we like to waste emotional energy. Isn’t that absurd?

The way to do it differently is to enhance this day and make it the pattern for the future. In such a manner, we will never fear our mortality.