weightless

Somewhere in Illinios or Oklahoma in the 1960s my mom took the above picture of Dad, my brother Danny, and me. (I remember, I think, sleeping on one of those same air mattresses by night in our tent, finding myself united with the hardness of earth each morning, Dad reinflating it every evening by the power of his daddy-lungs.)

For a few weeks Tim and I have been swimming with his father, LeRoy, at the pool in their retirement community's rec center. My dad meets us there, too, on occasion, whenever his schedule is free and the painful neuropathy in his legs isn't too bad.

Despite my hampered mobility due somewhat to fibromyalgia and mostly to being out of shape, I love splashing about for half an hour. Tim, goggle adorned, becomes a submarine, and I only glimpse him voyaging beneath me. LeRoy follows a precise, set routine of shallow and deep water exercises. The days Dad is there, he and I visit in the deep end, he using a foam float and me treading--wafting my arms and legs in a fantasy of mermaid grace.

Of course I make for the hot tub the moment it's available. My dad can't join us there, because a while ago he had a pacemaker installed. Dad exits the pool slowly, his excellent posture undiminished, and heads for the showers.

I recall Dad commenting once in a parking lot, while a stooping, elderly man whose space we were waiting for slowly lowered himself into a car, "Will I end up like that someday?" At the time, not so many years back, it seemed unthinkable. Now, though his spine remains erect, Dad moves just as slowly, the lowliness of aging having provided him a humble process that he shares with me, as we visit and waft, weightless in the deep end, his wide blue eyes powerful still.

truckin'

In the midst of Holy Week, Tim got a truck. It ought to help in his constant gathering of wood for our household winter heat. I love that his new vehicle was built in the seventies. I also enjoyed watching Tim, in the rain, climbing all over the engine and hood of the vehicle which had sat in someone's yard for five years before the man I've known and loved all this time came to claim it.

I think Holy Week (according to the Orthodox Christian calendar) had a lot to do with my bemused enjoyment while I waited, in a stranger's driveway in south Eugene, to follow Tim and make sure he and his truck made it home. I was comfily seated in our "much newer" 1993 sedan, reclining and napping and praying by turns. Nearly 39 years of marriage to Tim has taught me that the waiting on vehicles is always a long waiting. Nearly seven years of Orthodoxy has shown me there are prayers as smooth as breath, as kind as a smile for a guy whose latest project will help us both and also provide him--my Eveready Bunny--with something fun to do.

There were two deer in the yard next to the one with Tim's new truck. Maybe a mother and grown fawn. They had no trouble, it seemed, hanging out beneath fir trees on the lawn (perhaps sheltered a bit from rain drops), until, that is, Tim started the aging truck's engine and let it run a while. Then, tails up, they hopped a fence and were off.

We drove home by way of Bimart, where Tim purchased new wiper blades so he could see better. Greeting us in our kitchen was Westley, ready for the special cat food our vet's been providing.

At eighteen, this kitty's survived three or so different seasons of anguish, where we thought he was done for. And yet he keeps rebounding, going and going sure as engineer Tim. Sure as rain in Oregon, sure as the love of the Christian God, in my belief, in the amazing constancy of carrying forward unto the ages of ages, when all good will be revealed, renewed, driven home out of the rain.