GRANDMA HUGEN
Rodney J. Hugen
I see her face, ancient, lined, severe.
Dark eyes, intense, staring behind the old rimmed glasses
that I remember from long before we carried her box to the grassy Iowa fields.
Old eyes that saw her husband to his grave - and much earlier - her eldest son,
a war hero, who drove back into an ammo dump holocaust to save his dying friends.
Pieces of his Coast Guard jeep were scattered all over rich Nebraska farms.
For a while, then, it seemed she resigned her way to the insanity of death and pain,
chasing ghosts and grandpa with hate filled eyes and raging anger,
or so I’m told, but she must have rallied when I knew her as a kid
because I don’t remember her as mean.
In later years her baby boy died, gasping his life away
from a conspiracy of choices, weather, dust, and Camel cigarettes.
He tore both of our hearts in two, but we were miles away from each other,
and could not share the bleeding.
I wandered through brilliant tulip gardens to find her wood floored room
lost in the Old People’s Home, which is what they called it
back before it became pejorative and impolite.
It was late morning, the sun lambent through the frame window,
It shone softly on the gently scalloped words of the ancient Bible held in gnarled hands
just inches from her nose. She looked up when I knocked on the half open door,
and sat framed in the dusty grace of light streams
that slipped through cobwebbed windows and I will always remember her
caught in that moment. “It’s me, Grandma,” I said and she greeted me
by my given name and not the name by which I’m known,
and I was suddenly a kid again, sneaking pink peppermints,
and pale orange elephant peanuts from the kitchen cabinet by the Fridgedaire.
Naughty and loved, like I always feel now and felt around her then.
We talked for a while, of Dad and life and things that might have been,
and she asked me if I would read the Psalms for her.
I took her Bible in my hands, and she bent her tear stained face
toward the Giver of the light. She knew the words before I said them
and mouthed them silently to another world.
A world I could not see, but knew was close.
Before I left, I knelt beside her brown stockinged feet, pillowed on the age-old hassock,
and prayed an inside prayer. Silent. Alone. Together.
We both knew it would be the last time we would speak to each other,
as we murmured soft goodbyes and I checked my watch
to see if I would make it the sixty miles to Des Moines in time to catch my plane to life.
When I looked back she was holding the large print Bible to her nose,
but her eyes seemed somewhere else. |
