Stories from the Steps

THE PRODIGAL GRIEF, A STORY ABOUT UNCLE DAVE: Maya Angelou wrote, “I answer the heroic question ‘Death where is thy sting?’, with it is here in my heart & mind & memories.” I seem to have too many friends grieving over recently lost loved ones & some gone a little longer or some 2-8 off suit or other poor hand life has dealt across the felt of its card table. I wasn’t planning on being among them today but here I sit, a week removed from the grief of selling my mom’s home due to dementia overcoming me in a church pew. Grief can come in a cardinal at a bird feeder, at dawn or twilight when God sets the sky on fire, a smell, or today, in the sound of streaming music. Regardless of time & distance, grief is a prodigal & it’s going to return home, in laughter & tears, in smiles & misty eyes, there are no rules to grief’s game & no schedule informing what day is game day. My brother in law, Uncle Dave to us, passed away on March 16, 2008 & today I return, a prodigal as memory runs to greet me. I returned as I chased another 1,000 words for an elusive book, backed by music, not with a tune from the band Alabama, a group he worked beside & played softball for & collected gold records with but Tanya Tucker, “Bring Me My Flowers Now” & Brandi Carlisle’s chilling lyric, “…we all think we have time, ’til we don’t…”. I returned, a prodigal going back to 1997, when we had time, each of us with children, each with one breaking an arm within days of each other. Pleasing to him only because he didn’t want mine stealing all the grandparents attention, or back to him helping me with home repairs because his sister’s husband was good with a chef’s knife & nouns & verbs & bats & balls but not a wrench or a hammer, to being in a fine French restaurant listening to the proprietor give the menu & David butting in after the first entree was named, duck breast with leeks, interjecting, “I’ll take the other one, I’m not eating anything with holes in it” & then me, my father-in-law Tom, & David trying not to laugh & incur the wrath of my mother-in-law,  or heading to Augusta National Golf Club & betting him lunch that he wouldn’t, as he normally would, run into someone he knew & being on the grounds less than five minutes, him in Ray-Bans to “disguise” himself, barely in the shadow of the famous clubhouse & having the sanctuary silence & my wallet broken by pimento cheese sandwiches by hearing his nickname “Hemp”, shouted through the Georgia pines. Occasionally, I drive by a golf course where David once clubbed a wayward drive off the first tee. I was bent over tying my shoe, heard club meet ball, a scream of “no!”, & then saw a driver hit the ground, bounce up & club head meet my head between the eyes. As he walked over to pick up the club & I gathered my senses, David asked, “how’s the head”? I replied I was okay & he said “not you, my driver”. It was funny then, funnier now. These & other tales still make me laugh & cry, both because they happened when we had time & they’ll never happen again, because we don’t. I’d love to hear him say bye like he did, emphasizing the see in “SEE ya!”, but I won’t. I can tell him though ’cause I’ll see him again, he’ll return sometime while he’s over there & we’re over here, that’s how the prodigal grief works,..’til next time, SEE ya, Hemp…