The material below is from my upcoming book “Parkinson’s & Recreation 3 - the No Parkinson’s Zone”
“The most beautiful things are not associated with money; they are memories and moments. If you don't celebrate those, they can pass you by.”
Alek Wek https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alekwek783092.html
I met my mom at the ER of our local hospital to help her get dad out of the truck and into the wheelchair. Dad had not wanted to call an ambulance that night, opting for the comfort of the Ford Explorer. Waiting for several hours, we joked that he might be seen more quickly if we put dad back in the Ford and drive down the street and called for an ambulance!
Sitting in the ER that night brought the stark reality of life faced with the inevitable ravages of old age. I had never seen dad in any manner other than wise and practical. Now, his moments of incoherence caused my mind a bit of shock to say the least. Juxtaposed with my dad and the state of his health with the birth of my ninth grandchild early that same morning only caused the bittersweetness of melancholy to permeate my shocked mind.
Sitting there in that wheelchair connected to a bottle of oxygen, he began to push his feet back and forth as if he were trying to move. Fumbling with the air tank and hose connecting him to it, dad became more and more restless. Mom leaned over and gently asked him, “Where’re you going, Robert?”
“I’ve got to find the people I came with,” he replied.
The people he came with. That struck me so deeply in that moment. Mom came with him. My brothers came with him. I came into this world with him. How could he forget? I was taken aback by my dad’s confusion. Rather than focus on the darkness of that thought, I forced myself to think on the light. There in the ER I was at once with my dad in his present condition and at once back on the farm as a boy.
Our house. The old farmhouse. The house my grandfather, Samuel Washington Jernigan had built. The story goes that he had ridden his horse up from Mississippi during the 1930s and had settled on the 90 acre farm in Muskogee County three miles north of the small town of Boynton where he and grandma, Myrtle Mae (Snyder) Jernigan, had raised my dad and his two older sisters. Even though I was only 18 months old when my grandfather died, I somehow feel as if I knew him well.
I was told the story by both my mom and my grandma Jernigan of how proud my grandpa was of me. Of how he talked about me and bragged on me constantly to anyone who would listen. Of how he would tote me around and put me in the seat of the truck beside him and carry me all over the countryside, showing me off. Oh, the days before car seats and safety! Being with my dad in the ER somehow brought me to the comfort of such precious memories. And comfort me, they did.
For the first 18 months of my life, we lived in the former oil boom town of Glen Pool, just south of Tulsa. I tell myself that I remember those days, but more probably I recall the faded black and white photograph my mom has shown me through the years of that small gray trailer house with the small rickety swing set in the yard than actually remember. At any rate, I am there and I find peace in that memory.
When I was 18 months old, dad and mom bought the farm where daddy had grown up. The house was simple. No indoor toilet until I was 4 or 5. The water we drank still came from the well my grandfather had dug so long ago. As I remember the house I recall the winter winds causing the linoleum covering the kitchen floor to rise as the wind coursed through and between the cracks in the floor!
Mama had been so proud of the new cabinets daddy built in the kitchen and even more proud of the one room addition he made that gave us a proper living room on the east side of that little house. The living room was in the back of the house and everyone - even visitors - knew the back door was the official entryway. The living room gave way to the kitchen. Turning left from the kitchen was the freezer room where mom kept the large chest deep freeze where she stored the frozen vegetables raised in our garden and where dad stored the beef he had butchered each year.
Turning right from the freezer room, one came to the bathroom daddy added when I was a boy. No longer did we have to use the outhouse my grandfather had built back in the day. And now I chuckle to myself as I remember the day my mom came running from said outhouse as she pulled up her shorts screaming, “Robert, there’s snake in there!” Dad bravely dispatched the snake that had been dangling from the ceiling of the tiny one-seat toilet. Though I used to joke this memory had scarred me for life, I now saw the moment with deep gratitude. For what? Just the life it now infused with joy.
Just past the bathroom was dad and mom’s bedroom. Before it was their bedroom, it had been mine. In this moment I can see the gray wallpaper and the big leaf pattern that reminded me of elephant ears surrounding me with imaginary elephant stampedes. It was this room I shared with my aunt Carol Ann while she finished high school. As I think about those days, I am filled with memories that now seem quite absurd, yet somehow appropriate for a little boy. My bed was right next to the window. During my early childhood there seemed to be frequent UFO sightings. As the evening news detailed the reports of sightings and the occasional alien abduction, it was not lost on me that most of these abductions took place in rural settings…and we lived in a rural setting! Thank God no aliens ever actually appeared at that window - though I often thought they might!
After my aunt left and my brothers began coming along, this room became the bedroom of my parents. The same room I feared yet ventured into when I was about 12 years of age in search of my birth certificate. This was the age of conflict with my parents in which I was convinced I could not possibly have been born to such an uneducated people. The days in which I was convinced I was adopted! Rifling through their chest-of-drawers in search of documentation, I now find it hard to believe I ever had such thoughts! All it takes is one look in the mirror and I see both evidence of my dad and mom looking back at me! The older I have grown, the wiser my parents have become.
When my brothers began to come along, Daddy converted the attic space in that tiny farmhouse into a large room where I and my three little brothers slept. The room where I used thumb tacks to fashion myself a private room by hanging blankets from the ceiling! The same end of the room where I secured my privacy with the window facing the west where the woodpecker woke me pounding on the outside wall each and every morning! The same place from which I planned my escape whenever a tornado threatened. And just then, I am pleasantly startled from my journey through the old house.
After a couple of hours in the ER, my brother Sam and his wife, Leslea, join us. I find comfort in watching my sister-in-law take the initiative to relieve my mom in her effort to comfort my dad. Leslea is a nurse, but she is more. My dad and mom had four boys. Mom had often wished she had had at least one girl. And now before my very eyes, I realized her wish had come true four times over. As Leslea gently caressed my dad’s shoulder, I saw God’s blessing in a whole new dimension. Leslea was more than a mere daughter-in-law. She was a daughter-in-love. Quiet would be the way I have always described Leslea…but in that moment, I saw her as bold and faithful and gentle and strong and comforting and beautiful and needed and as being there - like a daughter to her father would be - should be - in such moments. I saw the blessing of God on our family. I saw just how blessed we are. And gratitude engulfed my soul. And, once again, I am seeing the old house.
Moving back into the kitchen and into the only other room - the front room we called it - one came to the west side of the small house. This is the room where we put up the Christmas tree each year - the tree my dad always fashioned a stand for with his own hands. The room where my mom would pin the many Christmas cards in row after row on the wall. The room where we kept the piano where I would find refuge in the coming years and their angst-filled days.
The actual front door of the house was more like the back door in our minds. If you came to this door and knocked, we knew you must be a stranger! It was in this room where my mom placed the coffee table daddy built for her in front of the small couch. The couch where she placed the two end tables he crafted for her, one on other end. The coffee table where mom kept the family Bible she read to us almost every evening. The room where the water cooler crouched like a dragon in the window spewing out that wonderful damp breeze on so many hot summer nights. The water cooler where me and my three brothers sat proudly dressed in only our underwear. The room outside where, on more than one occasion, I joined my dad and brothers as we peed off the front porch into the dark summer night.
I can still see the outside of the house, brown, grainy, sand-papery siding covering all four sides. The carport daddy built on the south side where he parked his welder and mom parked her car. I smell the dank mustiness of the times when my dad would have me crawl under the house through the tiny crawl-space to help him with plumbing repairs or rescue the puppies that had been born there. Like a maze, crawling beneath the floorboards always seemed so scary yet adventurous to me. Dad was always right there comforting me in the moment as he sensed my fear - and mom was doing the same from the floor above me, as she shouted her words of assurance from above. It was during such moments that I believed I could do anything…that I might find some undiscovered feature of the house…that I might uncover some long-forgotten treasure! Through the nooks and crannies between support blocks and floor joists, I wound my way below the house with my dad and glorious was the moment I emerged from each under-the-house adventure the conquering hero!
Glorious and relieving was the day my dad came home with the brand new antenna for the TV! Climbing up the ladder that day per his invitation to ‘help’ him secure the antenna and attach the wiring, all I could think was ‘I no longer have to stand with my hand on the rabbit-ears! No more antenna-boy for me!’ To me it was like we had just climbed the highest mountain or had touched the sky. I can still see myself up there with him as my little-boy voice cries out to my mom below, shouting, “Look at me, Mama! I’m up here! I can fly!”
In the front yard was a huge mulberry tree. Directly in front of that tree, between the house and highway 62 which ran north and south, we planted our first family garden. To the south, the highway led to Boynton and to the north, it led to Haskell. I recall thinking how busy that highway always seemed to be - until the day I realized just how much more busy traffic was in the big city of Muskogee in comparison! Later, that garden would be moved to the northeast of the house next to the old outhouse. I remember growing Indian corn and popcorn in that first garden from seeds I had planted with my own two hands!
Walking around to the back of the house in my memories, I find myself beside the old well-house and right next to the old elm tree where we had a tire swing. I can still recall the day dad told me when he and his dad had first planted that massive tree so long ago. Dad’s voice sounded so melancholy as he said, “I remember the day we first planted that seed, your grandpa and me. I could jump right over it…”, his voice trailing off in bittersweet memory.
That tree is gone now…but not the memory of it. Funny how certain memories never seem to fade. Memories of an old house. Memories of wind billowing up through floorboards. Memories of musty dirt as a boy crawls in its nether regions with his dad. Memories that bring comfort as I watch an old man who can no longer jump over an elm tree sapling and wonder, “Can you remember, dad? Remember?”