It’s been getting harder and harder to write a weekly blahg. I have good intentions but things keep happening. 
The big thing is that my father had a stroke last week. It was a very mild one but it required him to be in the hospital for four days. My dad doesn’t do hospital stays so this put a scare into him and hopefully his commitment to quit smoking (a 60 year addiction) will continue. So far, so good. For those who haven’t thought about doing this then make 2012 the year you quit; if not for yourselves, then for those around you. I’ll tell you I’ve never felt so alone than those hours I waited at the hospital for someone to finally tell me that my father was going to be okay.
This week’s post is going to be a bit of a cheat but an enjoyable one nonetheless. This story, based on all true events, comes from my Christmas collection “Proof For Believing” and is one of my favorites. It talks about a relative of mine and given everything I’ve been through with my dad this past week, I thought it would be good to post here.
“Bye For Now”
Archie was my father’s cousin and he was always old when I knew him.
What I remember most about Archie was that he would come and stay with us children when my parents were out of town and that he drank.
Oh he didn’t always drink. He gave up drinking once or twice but he always took it up again. That’s what landed him in The Manor. If he had continued to drink at the pace that he had set for himself, it would have killed him. Instead, he perked up in The Manor and lived almost another ten years longer than anyone expected.
I used to go and visit him a few times a year but mostly just before Christmas. I would always try to convince him to come to my parents’ house for Christmas dinner and he’d always try to convince me there was some reason why he couldn’t leave The Manor. He always had some mysterious ailment conveniently at Christmas or some special event was happening at The Manor. It was funny, on other visits, not around Christmas, he spoke unfavorably of Manor events and told me he had always shied away from them. But I never got him to take the ride with me to my parents’ house. He was settled and that was that.
In his later years he always had a mind that was as sharp as a tack. He could always recall events from earlier in our lives and would always start a visit with “Do you remember…”
“Do you remember Dan’s wife Gloria?” Archie began during one Christmastime visit.
Dan is one of my younger brothers and never really had a wife named Gloria.
What had happened was that when we were teenagers I caught Dan listening to the radio in his room. This was around Christmas and the DJ was taking calls from callers who wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to friends and relatives.
I was a little stinker or maybe a big stinker because I was and am one of Dan’s bigger brothers. I thought it would be funny to phone and wish a very personal Christmas wish to Dan. It was just one of those things that suddenly possessed me. I phoned and said “I want to wish a Merry Christmas to my family and a special Christmas wish to my brother Dan and his wife Gloria.”
From Dan’s room, I heard this bellow. He had obviously recognized my voice.
Dan wasn’t mad at all. In fact, he thought it was funny and we both had a great laugh over it.
The biggest laugh occurred a few days later when Archie popped in for a visit. He immediately sought out Dan and asked him how Gloria was. Archie was also an avid radio listener.
Neither Dan nor Archie ever let me forget that one.
“Do you remember Dan’s transporter?” Archie asked on another occasion.
I had almost forgotten about that one.
Dan may want to shoot me for repeating this story but it’s one of my favorite episodes involving Archie.
Dan had always been a tinkerer. I would have said inventor but he never really invented anything. He’d tinker at something and manage to take something apart to create something else that never worked.
It would be at this point that Dan would point out the helicopter that our brother Todd and I had made out of scrap lumber and onto which we had tied an old furnace motor. We had planned to fly it to our grandmother’s house in another town. It would have worked Dan! Of course my arm would have been tired from turning that propeller all night.
But that’s all beside the point!
I don’t remember all of Dan’s devices but I do remember the transporter. If you’ve ever seen a Star Trek episode then you have to know what a transporter is. If you haven’t seen a Star Trek episode then my son Noah wants to know why because Star Trek is everything to him. It used to be Popeye and next year it’ll be something else.
But that is beside the point.
A transporter is a device that takes apart your molecules and transports them to a remote location and puts them all back together; hopefully in the right order.
One time, Dan decided to invent one while our parents were away and Archie was staying at the house. I don’t know what he had used to make the transporter but I’m sure the original components were fully functional before Dan began to tinker.
Now Archie was always a good sport. He never discouraged us from anything and there were many things he never reported back to our parents. If my parents are reading this, I deny there are any unreported incidents.
On this particular occasion Dan had built a transporter and was ready to test it. The house we lived in at the time had a few bedrooms in the basement and one of them had a light switch up on the landing that shut off all power to the room until you flicked the switch. That was my job. I was the flicker.
Dan had wired everything together and had plugged it in and I was just waiting for my signal to flick.
Archie was also in on it. We had explained to Archie what the purpose of the transporter was and that we might be whisked away to some far off location and, if Dan’s transporter worked, it was Archie’s role to inform our parents of our strange disappearance.
Of course that wasn’t good enough for Archie. He had to be right there when that device was turned on. He wanted to see it in action. He only begged us to excuse him for a few minutes before we began the experiment.
On his return, Archie was wearing a shawl and life-jacket. When asked what these were for, he replied that he just wanted to be prepared. He said that if he ended up in the artic the shawl would protect him and if he ended up in the ocean he’d stay afloat.
Neither Dan nor I wanted to point out to Archie that a shawl was hardly great protection against below zero temperatures or that floating in the ocean was one thing but sharks were another.
But that too, is beside the point.
The transporter didn’t work. When I flicked the switch, the whole works caught fire and some of the plastic components melted and left a stench in the house that took us two days to air out. That was one of Archie’s well-kept secrets. Again, if my parents are reading this, I deny everything. Ask Dan. It was his fault anyway.
“Do you remember Bryan’s five coats?”
I don’t believe this is a particularly funny story and I don’t know why Archie always seemed to bring this one up when asking me about Bryan.
I’ll pad out this story a little because there’s not much to it. I’m going to tell a funny story that my son insists on telling every time Bryan visits; much to the continued embarrassment of my best friend, Bryan.
One time Bryan came to visit me when I was a teenager. He walked into the house and said “Oh, someone dropped their chocolate cookie on the rug.” That wouldn’t be all that funny except I knew my mother had not done any baking that day. When I checked out the cookie, it turned out it was a dropping from our dog that had been stepped upon and made flat.
Noah loves that story. Noah, please don’t tell that story again when Bryan’s around. At least, don’t tell it more than five times in a given visit.
Now, on to the story of the five coats.
One day, during a brutally cold winter, I took Bryan to visit Archie at the apartment he was living in. It was always hot in there as old people have a habit of jacking up the heat until it’s only bearable for them.
Bryan didn’t have a decent coat so he wore five thinner coats to keep out the cold. When he began to peel back his layers, Archie just kept laughing and laughing.
That was one of Archie’s favorite stories.
I told you it was not that funny. But that story about Bryan and the chocolate cookie is a keeper!
I want to tell another story about Archie that he never remembered because he was sloshed to the gills at the time.
It might have happened at the same time that Bryan came to visit me at Archie’s place. I don’t remember exactly but I recall that Bryan was there.
This particular visit to Archie took place around Christmas because Archie had just received his Christmas basket that some group always gave out to lonely seniors so they could make themselves Christmas dinner. It did wonders to address their hunger but did nothing to address their loneliness.
Anyway, every year Archie would get this basket of food with a turkey or a ham and assorted vegetables and other goodies. He couldn’t eat it all. It was too much for him and he’d always call me to come and take away what he couldn’t use. He never had much of a stomach…at least not for food anyway.
On this one occasion Archie had a plastic bag full of potatoes that he wanted to give to me. I don’t know why he always wanted to give these things to me. Whenever I visited him there was always some other elderly person visiting him and who, like Archie, was always imbibing heavily. Maybe the other person’s stomach was set against food, too.
Archie and the two other seniors were well into their cups when he trotted out this plastic bag. Oh, there were potatoes in there alright but there was also the content of someone’s stomach. It took everything I had to keep from gagging.
I just told Archie that the potatoes had gone rotten. He didn’t act surprised. He quickly offered me a head of broccoli in place of the potatoes.
Bryan and I chucked the broccoli into a snow bank on the way home.
In the years that Archie was in the Manor, I was the only member of my family that visited with him. I had always tried to convince my parents and my siblings to drop in on him but it never happened. I was as successful at getting them there as I had been at getting Archie out.
I visited Archie a few times every year with the visits eventually dwindling to one in the summer and one at Christmas. We laughed at the same stories each time and Archie passed on family history that had been deprived from me when I was growing up. I suspect that these were stories that others would not have wanted anyone to repeat. But that didn’t stop Archie.
The last time I saw Archie was in the spring. An aunt of mine had passed away and I went to relay the news to Archie. He didn’t seem comforted that he had outlived her. In fact, none of us had expected Archie to live as long as he did. We were sure that drink would have taken him long before that. As with the end of every visit, Archie concluded with “bye for now.”
I had planned to visit Archie that Christmas and had settled on a date the following week as my schedule permitted. Christmas wouldn’t really start for me until I had visited with him and offered up one more time to take him home for Christmas dinner and have him excuse his way out of it again. It was a ritual I believe that both of us enjoyed.
A few days before I was to visit with him, he took seriously ill and was admitted to hospital. I tried to get away to see him at the hospital but they weren’t allowing visitors. He died shortly thereafter.
A funeral was held for Archie on the very day on which I was to have visited him at The Manor. My father and I were the only members of my family to attend. It was a short service and only a handful of relatives attended. He was cremated and buried next to his brother. Archie had finally left The Manor
On top of a podium, in the funeral parlor, next to Archie’s urn, was a picture of Archie in younger days. He was old even in that picture.
I wanted so much to take the photo with me as I have no pictures of Archie and I wanted something for remembrance. But it occurred to me that I had plenty to remember Archie by and most of it was of our visits and what he remembered. This was our final Christmas visit. I looked at the picture and, choking on my words, whispered “Bye For Now.”