What Difference Do It Make? (18 page)
Entertaining Angels
This fella named Michael from Waco, Texas, wrote to us after he read our story, said he used to be pretty hard on homeless people. Now he's takin a homeless man to church. It's kinda sad, though, 'cause Michael says the other folks in the church look at him and his homeless friend like they is a coupla skunks.
That's what he says: “Skunks.”
Ain't that somethin? I guess some folks still thinks people got to clean themselves up on the outside before God can get busy cleanin up the inside. That ain't true at all. God
specializes
in turnin trash into treasure.
Michael said his new homeless friend don't trust the folks in the church, but that he is startin to trust Michael, went out to breakfast with him same as that time I went to that restaurant with Mr. Ron for the first time. Purty soon, Michael says, this homeless fella started openin up with his story. After that, one a' Michael's friends told him, said maybe that homeless fella was Jesus in disguise.
That might not be far off the truth. Jesus said whatever we does to the lowliest people, it's like we done it to him. And remember them angels Abraham entertained? They looked like your everday strangers, just some stray fellas travelin on down the road. But Abraham and his wife went on and treated 'em like honored guests. We needs to take a lesson from that. You never know whose eyes God is watchin you through. It might not be your teacher, your preacher, or your Sunday school teacher. More likely it's gon' be that bum on the street.
Ron
A
week after Christmas, the nursing home staff told me Daddy was going down fast. On the third day of January 2009, after an hour-long meeting with hospice, I said, as gently as I could, “Daddy, you understand, don't you, that you don't have too much longer on this earth?”
“Hell, yes!” he said. “I'm ninety-one years old, I got cancer, and I can't eat, but you ain't talkin to no dummy!”
“How about the two of us going for one last hurrah?” I said. “You just tell me where you want to go and what you want to do. Your wish will be granted, just like on that old TV show,
King for a Day
.”
Dad didn't hesitate. “Take me home,” he said. “I want to sit out on my porch, drink good whiskey, and smoke cigars.”
Of course, every one of Dad's requests, from going off the grounds without permission to ingesting harmful chemicals, broke most of the rules posted on the board at the nurses' station. However, I figured that for an old bird about to take his last flight, rules were meant to be broken.
Working quietly, I helped him into a wheelchair. Then I opened the door to his room, wheeled him casually past the nurses' station and out the front door, triggering an alarm that sounded like I'd just touched off a three-engine fire.
Dad just smiled and waved
adios.
“You're gonna get your ass in deep trouble, Buddy-roo,” he said as I loaded his skinny butt into the front seat of my Range Rover.
I smiled slyly. “Do I look like I care?”
“No,” he allowed.
“Do you care if
I
get
you
in trouble?”
A great big grin split his wrinkled face from ear to ear.
“
Hell,
no!”
We laughed like Butch and Sundance on the edge of that cliff just before they jumped.
Steering the Range Rover one-handed, I punched up my brother, John, on my cell phone and told him to meet us at Daddy and Mama's house. Then I called the neighbors I'd known most of my life. “I'm bringing Daddy home for a last hurrah. Y'all come on over and say good-bye.” On the way home, I stopped at a tobacco shop and bought five Romeo and Juliet cigars.
When we pulled up to the house, I carried Dad up to the front porch and set him in his wrought-iron rocking chair. As the neighbors started to filter over, I ducked inside to look for his whiskey.
I didn't have to look far. Right there in the front room, in the middle of the coffee table, like the centerpiece at a holiday banquet, sat the gallon of Jack Daniels Black Label I'd given Daddy for Christmas the year he turned ninety.
No reason for him to keep saving this now,
I thought. I stepped into my parents' tiny linoleum kitchen to rustle up an icy glass of Coke, then broke the seal on the Jack and poured my dad a drink.
On the porch, we lit up our ten-dollar cigars and remem-bered: the West Fourth Street slums . . . donkey basketball . . . the time a runaway horse pitched Daddy over a fence near the creek where we used to go crawdad fishing . . . and that feisty little Rusty Fay who used to ride down the street in a halter top on the back of her wrestler husband's Harley, driving all the neighborhood men wild whenever the bike hit a bump.
Earl's eyes grew warm and misty, whether from wistful reminiscing or the Jack Daniels, I wasn't sure.
“Boys,” he said, “I'm proud of you.”
John and I exchanged glances, telegraphing our surprise over hearing our daddy finally say something we'd longed to hear all our lives.
David, the neighbor who'd ratted Daddy out for taking mysterious truck trips, ambled over. Leaning up against a porch post, he said, “Earl, you made it to ninety-one, and you're sitting on your front porch with your two sons, sipping whiskey and smoking cigars. It couldn't get no better, could it?”
“It damn sure could!” Daddy said, smiling mischievously.
David's eyes widened. “How?”
“Ronnie could've dropped me off at a wild sex party!”
We all cracked up.
Looking across the street, I saw Mama and Daddy's neighbor of fifty-seven years emerge from her little clapboard house to see what was going on at the Halls' place. I stood up and walked over to greet her.
Louise, a former hairdresser and reformed smoker, had blue hair and a gravelly voice that reminded me of a frog speaking through a bullhorn. Pushing ninety herself, she still went down to the senior dance at the VFW every Monday night. During the years of my parents' physical decline, Louise faithfully took them loaves of fresh-baked banana nut bread.
I met her in her yard. “Louise, I brought Dad home for probably the last time,” I said, nodding toward the group on the front porch. “You've been such a sweet friend to him and Mama for all these years. I want you to know how much I appreciate it, and if there's ever anything I can do for you, you just let me know.
I'll do anything you ask.”
Louise broke out in a sly grin. “Ronnie,” she rasped, “there is one thing you can do.”
“You name it.”
“Well, you can let me run my fingers through your hair,” she said with a wheezy giggle. “I ain't touched a man's hair since Frank died in '76!”
I laughed and bent over at the waist. “Get after it, Louise!”
She reached out and got a double handful and, squealing like a schoolgirl, started rubbing both sides of my head like she was shampooing one of her weekly customers back in her salon. I laughed till I cried. Then she went over and told my Daddy good-bye.
Earl held court on the porch for a couple more hours, spinning tales and reminiscing as the afternoon sun turned the air gold. Around four o'clock, he fell silent for a few minutes. Then, in a somber and final tone, he announced, “I'm ready to go home.”
“Does that mean you're ready to die?” I joked.
“Hell
,
no! I'm ready to go back to the nursing home and take a nap!”
Just after midnight, a ringing phone roused me from sleep. “Your father took a long nap this evening, and when he woke up, he tried to escape,” the head nurse told me. “He made it about ten feet; then he fell.”
His left femur was shattered, she said, and he had busted his head open, had a nasty cut above his eye. I didn't feel guilty, but I did wonder if it would have happened if I hadn't contributed to his delinquency.
“We've called 911 and are sending your father to the hospital,” the nurse told me.
During a four-hour surgery, doctors at Harris Methodist Hospital inserted a steel rod into Daddy's leg. At the time, I wondered how much good it would do and whether they might be unwittingly aiding and abetting future escape attempts. But Dad did not awake from the anesthesia that day. Or the next. When he didn't wake up on the third or fourth day, I knew Earl Hall had made his last prison break.
Regan and Carson had come, and we all prayed over Dad. We gave him over to God and reminded Him that Daddy had prayed the sinner's prayer once and that we thought he had meant it.
Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I felt something for my father that I hadn't felt since I was a little boyâreal love.
On the fifth day, the ICU doctor came in and after examining Dad told us he only had a few hours left. The kids and I kept praying, sending him home with messages to heaven.
At about three o'clock on the fifth afternoon of his near-comatose slumber, Earl Hall suddenly awoke. I stood up and grabbed his hand. “Dad, we nearly lost you! Your oxygen level dropped below what it takes to live.”
“Well, that's a damn lie!” he said, instantly Earl again. “I knew exactly what I was doingâjust resting. Hell, I feel fine. Now, take me home!”
Three days later, Daddy's oxygen count fell again, and I was there to tell him good-bye.
Two days later, we buried him in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Fort Worth, in a plot he'd owned for forty years. At his funeral service, friend after friend of Daddy's surprised me by coming up to tell me how proud he was of me.
“He said you were a famous author, like that John Grisham fella,” one of his old buddies told me.
Even if I'd seldom heard such words of parental pride from Earl Hall's lips, I'm glad he thought them in his ornery old heart. At that moment, I vowed never to withhold kind words from the people I love. And I was glad I had found a way to love and honor my daddy on that front-porch afternoon, sipping good whiskey and smoking Romeo and Juliet cigars.
Ron
My New York partner, Michael, had called and asked if he could come see Deborah, and was on his way down. I had tried to discourage him and others from coming during these last weeks. Deborah had wasted away so that she barely raised the sheet that covered her. Her eyes had faded and seemed cruelly suspended in sockets of protruding bone. I wanted everyone to remember her as the beautiful, elegant woman they'd always known . . .
But Michael pressed, and . . . I said yes. Jewish by birth, he was not a particularly religious man . . . When Michael pulled up to the house at around 10:00 a.m., Mary Ellen and I were in the bedroom with Deborah, singing along to a CD of Christian songs, some of Deborah's favorites . . . The moment Michael stepped through the door, the song “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” began to play: “We are standing on holy ground, and I know that there are angels all around.”
As the song washed through the room, Michael looked at Deborah, then at Mary Ellen. “We
are
on holy ground,” he whispered. Then as though someone had kicked the backs of his legs, he fell to his knees and wept.
I
n early 2009, my partner, Michael Altman, gave a copy of
Same Kind of Different as Me
to Howard Godel, another prominent New York art dealer, who read it and passed it along to his wife, Melinda. The couple had a friend, Erin Cortright, who could relate to Deborah's story better than most.
In August 2008, at the age of fifty-two, Erin found herself inexplicably short of breath. She went to see an internist, who x-rayed her chest, pronounced her lungs clear, and sent her home with an inhaler. But a few weeks later, while hiking the hills amid the bell towers of Tuscany with Nate, her husband of twenty-two years, Erin felt a weakness she had never known.
In the middle of a dirt road alongside a sun-drenched vineyard, she stopped and looked at Nate. “Something's wrong with me.”
Back in the States, the diagnosis was not good. Erin had acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a rare form of the disease for which there is no known cure.
In October, Erin checked into a hospital for a series of chemotherapy treatments. Doctors had told her that chemo is effective in a small number of AML cases. In Erin's case, it wasn't. In January 2009, doctors transferred to her to Calvary Hospital, a hospice facility where she would wait to die.
“When I first got there, I was really sick,” she remembers.
“There was one night when I had multiple infections, a 104-degree temperature, and internal bleeding. I didn't know if I was going to make it.”
The hospice doctor and chaplain told Erin's husband to make sure her affairs were in order and to tell anyone who wanted to say good-bye that they should do so that night.
But Erin kept on living.
Two months later, during a visit in March, Howard and Melinda Godel gave Erin a copy of our book. Erin read of Deborah's strength, of her faith in the face of death. And Erin felt a kinship with Deborah. Like my wife, she wanted to see her son graduate from high school and college. She wanted to see him get married. She wanted to meet her grandchildren. But none of that was going to happen. Instead Erin was winding up her last days on earth, leaving behind a husband and son.
“Some might wonder how could someone in my position read a book like that?” Erin says. “Some might think it odd for someone to even give me a book like that. But I found it comforting. I could relate to it completely. I found it inspiring that Deborah put everyone else in her life first. I felt that if I met Deborah, her cup would never be half-empty but always half-full.”
When she finished reading the book, Erin realized that there was actually a good chance she would meet Deborahâin heaven. Though she had survived her brush with death in January, doctors assured her that nothing had changed. The chemo had failed, and the leukemia was still in charge. One doctor told Erin that AML patients typically live only two to four months after chemo failure.