Passing Through (eBook)

Chapter 3

I don’t remember the nurse taking me by the hand and leading me back to the front of the doctor’s office. I was back in the car and driving home even before I realized I had left. I had written and handed over a check for the visit, stumbled through the waiting room, and found the car in a hazy blur.

Diabetes.

All I really knew about the disease was that it was something old people got later in life, not young, healthy, ox-strong college men with their futures an un-trod carpet rolled out before them. Maybe the nurse was mistaken. Maybe the test results were off; certainly, that kind of thing happened all the time. The blood test wasn’t exactly done under ideal, controlled laboratory conditions. Besides, I didn’t feel Diabetic.

I had heard the word often enough, of course. I knew I had what doctors called a “family history.” My mother always said her mother was a “Bad Diabetic.” I sarcastically assumed that when she was younger, she fed her sugar habit by holding up candy stores with her used insulin needles. Those early reusable metal syringes were, after all, nasty-looking affairs more resembling torture devices from the Middle Ages rather than delicate, life-saving medical tools. My family had a dubious history at best. Mom had diabetes at some time in her life, but she claimed that a preacher at a faith healing tent meeting laid hands on her and cured her. I didn’t see any old time faith healing tents on the side of the road as I drove.

*

When I got home, I went straight to the kitchen. There was nothing like a white bread, mayo, and cheese sandwich to calm the nerves. So, I had two of them, just in case.

Mom was at work.

My mother had always been old, old and imbued with the strength that comes from the Atlas-like labor of carrying a family on her bent shoulders. The long and troubled southern road she had traveled through the Depression and Second World War showed in cartographic lines etched deeply into the soft tissues of her dark face. Every picture of her looked like an old sepia photograph of Sitting Bull posing on the plains, his favorite Winchester repeating rifle in his weathered hands. She was old even when her hair was a rich sable and full and I was a plump toddler in a kiwi green jumpsuit she had made for me on an old Sears sewing machine, bought “on time.” She was over fifty when she adopted me, the eight-year-old only child of her divorcing daughter. Having a grandmother for a mother meant I was spoiled from the outset. When we went to the grocery store, I would snag a pack of hot dogs while we were shopping and I would eat them all before we got to the register where she would hand the clerk the empty bag.

A few years later, she endured her own divorce and reentry into a job market unfriendly to a longtime housewife, but she went back to work with no education and after years of working in the mill and did what was necessary to keep me fed and clothed and in school. She took menial, tedious jobs, working third shift in a local nursing home and sitting with patients in the hospital or in the patient’s home. She was a kind of nurse who stayed with elderly patients, usually those suffering from Alzheimer’s. The patient’s family needed help or simply didn’t want to be bothered until it was time for the reading of the will, so Mom stayed with them until they died. Often she would stay full time, taking a few hours off every couple of days to take care of things at home, pay bills, buy groceries, and cook, leaving days of leftovers for me in the fridge. Being a caretaker for someone else’s family member was a harsh way to make most of a living. Just under five feet and scarcely a hundred pounds, helping the elderly and infirm in and out of bed and pulling at them left her worn and exhausted in the short time she actually spent at home. My mother was a workaholic grown of financial necessity.

Born on Columbus Day in 1923, my mother was also something of a founding member of the “I love you, eat this” generation. Having grown up in the midst of the Depression, then the rationing of World War II, Mom found a way to stretch her earnings to keep food in the house; her pantry was a well-stocked mini A&P. An accomplished and prolific cook before she went back to work, she coated everything in flour or cornmeal and tenderly fried it brown in lard or bacon grease. Gravy, be it brown, white, redeye, or sawmill, was considered a beverage in our house. We ate like field hands the poor, plentiful southern meals dressed richly in creams and sauces and real butter, sided with piles of homemade biscuits and cornbread.

We lived in what used to be called a trailer before “mobile home” and “manufactured housing” entered the marketing vernacular, a phrase invented to make aluminum rectangles sound more attractive as homes. Our twelve foot by seventy-four foot metal home was too hot in August and too cold in February, but I never realized we were poor, testament to my mother’s labors.

*

I had skipped Friday morning classes for the doctor’s appointment; I could swing by Mom’s work in the evening and tell her. I put the books for my afternoon classes in my charcoal-grey plastic Samsonite briefcase and got back in the car. The drive to school was about forty-five minutes on a two-lane road if I didn’t get behind a sluggish yellow school bus or lumbering logging truck.

I was attending Piedmont Tech majoring in business. I was able to carry a double class load by taking day classes in Greenwood and taking night classes three days a week at a satellite campus near my home in Newberry. Where class attendance was not requisite, I wandered in for the pre-test reviews and took tests. Since I wasn’t working, maintaining a B average was easy enough even with the slight exertion I was putting into it. Weekends were when I expended serious effort, though not in anything as prosaic as academic interests. Weekends were, after all, for partying and I had to conserve my energy.

Classes that afternoon passed unnoticed. The word “Diabetes” seemed to keep appearing in the chalk scratched on every blackboard. I was paying even less attention than usual. After my last class was over, a friend asked me if I would be around for the weekend. I lied, telling him I had things to do at home. I didn’t want to answer questions. I decided I would wait to see Mom, too. Diabetes was terminal, I thought.

Saturday morning I slept late. When I did get up, I stopped by the bathroom, then went straight to the kitchen. After filling the copper tea kettle and setting it on the stove to heat, I tore open six packets of instant grits, poured each one into a large bowl, put two pieces of bread in the toaster, and waited to see if the kettle or the toaster would be ready first. The smell of warm toast filled the air. The kettle started to whistle just before the toaster popped.

Cheese and real churned butter turned my Jethro Bodine bowl of hot grits a shade of orange almost matching the large glass of juice I had poured. Mom knew someone in town who churned real butter and sold it in round, pale yellow pint blocks that had flower designs molded into them from the pattern in the bottom of the mold. We kept several of the butter blocks wrapped in wax paper in the refrigerator and freezer. I cut generous portions from a chilled block of the yellow dairy goodness. Using the toast like a spoon for the grits, I ate through the first two pieces quickly, reloaded the toaster and poured more juice.

Breakfast in our house had always been a large, ritualistic affair. Weekdays mom would wake me early so I would have time to eat a large plate of cheese grits, sausage, eggs, and toast before the bus came. My mother was from the generation that showed their love by cooking large, southern meals that generated generous leftovers for days. Even as poor as we were, our pantry shelves always bowed with plenty and our refrigerator was filled with glass gallon bottles of milk and orange juice, blocks of Reagan cheese, and logs of beef bologna. We ate like lumberjacks preparing for the day’s work.

*

When I finished eating, I put the dishes in the sink, and took the last of my orange juice with me to the couch to watch Saturday morning cartoons till noon. We got four channels on the tornado-damaged Channel Master antenna, and our television was too old to have a remote control, so I sat on the television end of the couch so I could reach out and change channels.

*

When I was eight or nine years old, I used to walk to the Newberry County library downtown several days a week with a neighbor who walked his dog, Boy. He loved that old dog as much as he would have his unborn children. Boy was a large Labrador  with a quiet, gentle disposition, and I enjoyed the walks downtown, the big yellow dog leading, stopping to sniff and mark regularly. The neighbor had long since moved to Florida, sending news a few years later of Boy’s death. We learned the neighbor died shortly thereafter. I hadn’t wandered into the library or, for that matter, walked any considerable distance since childhood.

After the cartoons went off and the Saturday afternoon replacement window and vinyl siding commercials came on, I got up and fixed two sandwiches and sweet tea for lunch. I wanted more information on the disease, wanted to know what was happening inside me. I owned a computer, but the Internet was still years away from being an instant source of information. I needed the library.

When I finished, I shrugged into my leather jacket, then drove to the library and its sepulcher-like...