Ramblings …

The Sweep Kiss

By Richard Skaare

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, but likely laced with embellishment—which my kids regularly have accused me of.

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.

And that’s all that I remember — or imagined … or can embellish.