Payback Kiss
A broken foot, alone, a kind doctor, and all repayed years later with a kiss.
My mother severely injured — maybe broke — her foot back in the early ’50s …
— when I was four years old and my brother six,
— when my father was away at sea in the Navy,
— when money was tight,
— when we lived on the top floor of a double-decker house, and
— when we didn’t have a car.
In short, my mother was alone and trapped by her injury but too proud—maybe too stubborn— to seek help. The image I have of her back then was sweeping the kitchen floor by kneeling her leg with the bad foot on a chair that she pushed along.
Fortunately, her mother and sister happened to stop by a day after the accident. They were alarmed and rightly angry with my mother’s reluctance to call them. Rather than transporting her to the public health hospital an hour away, where the Navy would cover costs, they called their family doctor. He drove to the house, inspected the injury, and carted my mother off to the local hospital to have her foot set in a cast. I seem to remember that the kindly doctor did not charge us. In fact, I think he paid the hospital bill.
Now comes the really good part of the story, which I admit is almost all true — or possibly broken like my mother’s foot. Let’s just say it’s laced with embellishment—which my kids regularly have accused me of often.
Years later — in a new house in a different town and when I was a high school senior — I became friends with the daughter of that doctor. She was the craziest, most fun person I had ever met. I took her out on a date. We laughed ourselves silly, and I told her the mom story and her father’s kindness. At the end of the evening when I walked her to her door, I kissed her and said that the debt had been paid. Even if this last part is untrue, it makes for a great ending, don’t you agree?
And that’s all that I remember — or imagined … or can embellish.
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Got time for more ramblings?
Shabby Kim
My friend Kim didn’t offer much as a kid, even as a young adult. She wasn’t all that pretty, couldn’t sing well, and was much too timid. At least that’s what she told herself and why she read “The Littlest Angel” over and over.
Zipper Down
In her final hours, as she lay in her hospital bed, in and out of consciousness, surrounded by a gaggle of family members, my always smiling mother-in-law said something softly to me that got the room laughing loudly.
Last Meal Out
Natalie smiled constantly as she listened to the stories and hilarity of relatives and friends gathered near her. She was one of them but did not participate. Ninety-three years of joys and challenges and sadness had run their course. My mother was now dying. And then she got up and went out for Sunday dinner and grocery shopping.
All Bets Off delves into the common backstory and connected final chapter of two disoriented seniors.
Wild Rice Wild steps through 24 hours in the beleagured life of someone with both an awkward problem and a harsh memory.
For children comes a wonderfully silly story about, Stella Spoonbill Takes a Bathwho realizes she needs a bath for the first time.
Write Like Emily
When American Literature Professor Oscar Daub returned our college essays on an Emily Dickinson poem — mine was quite impressive, I thought — written on my two-pager was a large, red “D” and the words, “See me!” I hung back after class, somewhat anxious, not really angry, but expecting that I was about to experience something awkwardly eye-opening.