Painting in heaven

There was snow on the ground when I drove to his small house, struggling to find it at the end of a small side street. He stood in his yard and waved to me after I circled one too many times, I remember.

It was last January when I sat with him in a sunny studio, artwork covering every wall. I had meant to write about him ever since the previous spring, the hand-painted cards he sent to every church member hanging on my fridge for months as a reminder. It took him being hospitalized with pneumonia before I finally talked to my editors about him. He was 94 and I was afraid I’d already missed my chance.

That January morning he told me about painting, how he decided he liked art while serving in World War II, and how he started painting because he couldn’t afford the art he saw in stores.

He’d painted around 5,000 cards by then, affixing a red felt heart on the back of each one. And like he’d wanted when he first started painting, his walls were covered with his own artwork.

“I like to paint,” he said then. “And it gives God the glory. I’m painting things He has made.”

That quote ran at the top of the page, above his picture with the story on the front page.

I read yesterday that he’d died, the long struggle starting with a fall on the snow in that same yard two months ago.

And I wonder if he’s still painting in heaven? Only this time painting celestial scenes, not the earthly ones he’d painted before.

Story of their lives

She is five years old, playing alone on the playground, dark hair and eyes and a bouncy smile. She doesn’t seem to know the word stranger.

She’s talking to me – about Charlotte, how old she is, how cute – when she sees the boy driving the blue toy Corvette down the sidewalk.

“I’ve seen him before,” she says, then skips to the big concrete pad where older kids are riding bikes.

The boy in the blue Corvette just barely slows as he makes the curve and she jumps in and they’re gone, circling the concrete pad too fast. She’s laughing and he has great control of his car.

At a picnic table a man is sitting alone and I think she came with him but he doesn’t pay her any attention. I don’t know if he’s seen her jump into the boy’s car. The boy’s father has seen, tells him to slow down when he circles too close to a toddler, but he’s following another wobbly boy on a bike with a dog tugging on a leash.

The two are circling still when I leave, her dark hair streaming behind her, laughing.

They’re not even in first grade, and the stories of their lives are playing out on the playground on a chilly January afternoon.

Dollar store Santa

It was two days before Christmas and the rain would turn to snow by evening but this morning it was just chilly and we ran through the puddles to the Dollar Tree.

We reached the door at the same time as he did and he held it for us, protected from the drizzle by his umbrella. We were looking for trinkets for gift bags but I lingered over red Santa hats because she loves hats and she did look cute when I put it on her head and for just $1?

But dollars add up and it won’t last past this season so I left it.

We were in the toy aisle when he came up, umbrella folded under his arm. He pushed something into her hand and she stared first at him, then at the paper her fingers had folded around.

“Buy something nice for Christmas,” he told her. He never looked at me.

And then he was gone and she was unfolding a $20 bill in the Dollar Tree aisle.

We bought the Christmas hat, and I kept the extra gift for her I’d intended to return. And we left the store a little warmer than when we’d come in.

I’ve wondered about him since then, as the season came and went and our days slipped by filled with twinkling lights and gift wrap and gingerbread cookies and family gatherings and sleepy mornings. I wonder if he went to the store that morning intending to play Santa? Or if he saw us – me and a toddler in the rain – and thought we were struggling to get by this year and were making do with a dollar store Christmas? Or if her blond curls peeking under a Santa hat stirred some memory from long ago?

But I wish he knew that she didn’t let go of that bill until we reached the counter, and then reluctantly.

And that she’s loved that Christmas Santa hat more than the $1 it cost.

And that gift I would have returned? She plays with it over and over, stabbing big plastic blocks with the plastic needle and watching them run down the string to the floor.

And I wish he knew that we won’t forget our rainy morning run to the Dollar Tree.

People watching

We sit for a while on the black iron bench in the grassy, shaded area between buildings on campus, empty tupperwares and plastic bags all that remain from our lunch.

Across the sidewalk a man is sleeping, arms and legs flung wide on the grass, a handkerchief over his eyes. A summer camp just broke for lunch and 15 or so elementary-aged boys and a few girls are eating lunch on the benches and grass with counselors. At the performing arts building a small crowd of costumed people are milling about on the porch, though it’s summer and a strange time for dress rehearsals for plays on a college campus.

Here and there others are enjoying their lunches; two girls and a boy seated cross-legged in the grass; a man in suit (but without the coat) on a blanket with his back against a light-post turned outlet; an older couple with a small, curly-headed boy.

It’s a lovely, cool afternoon in the shade and we both have things we’re supposed to do, with a grandmother in town to spend the afternoon with the baby and so our time freed.

But we linger a few minutes more. The summer camp lunch break is over and the boys wander off, each one grabbing at the back of his pants in turn, picking wedgies, scratching itches.

And it’s been a long time, I realize, since I just sat and watched the people go by.

It’s been a long time, too, since I sat here at one of the computers at the library at the corner, watching my neighbors out of the corner of my eye, pretending to write while I listen. The lady behind the counter wishes for more parking (she thinks they should have more; there’s a bit of tension, it seems, between the borough and the library); the child waiting on his parents to finish their business is ready to be done.

And I realize just how narrow my focus has shrunk (what is in the baby’s mouth? where is she going now? who is she disturbing in this quiet place?). It’s nice to look up and around at the world once in a while, and just watch the people go by.

Waiting rooms

“Oh, they’re cute when they’re little, but it gets worse.”

The woman takes up two chairs in the waiting room, her large body spilling over the edges. A tiny toddler sits motionless on her lap, watching us all without a sound.

“Just wait until the terrible twos! And the teenagers!” She’s running a monologue, really, talking to her captive audience. Charlotte shrieked, delighted, when she sat with the toddler but the child just looks dolefully around.

The large woman is going on, about how she’s not afraid to “spank their butts” because her kids like the corner, so that would never work. Across the room a man in a Texas A&M hat is ignoring her, holding an infant that’s starting to fuss and trying to watch a four-year-old run across the room.

(“Been a while since I’ve seen a hat like that,” I told him before the large woman came in, and we traded hometowns. He’s from Abilene but his wife, standing at the counter talking to the receptionist, is local. “Do you miss Texas?” he asks me and I tell him I miss the sky, most of all. “Oh I know! You can’t see where you’re going here! They don’t understand what I’m talking about,” he says, but the infant is insistent now and the large woman has taken her place.)

She’s still talking, mostly about teenagers and their difficult-ness, when another woman walks in with a little girl dragging a soft blanket and smiling around her pacifier.

“Between 18 months and 2 years?” The large woman guesses immediately, and she’s right: 20 months. “Oh I’m good. I should be, with six children and all,” and then she’s off telling this new mother (who is white) how to preserve her dark-skinned child’s curls.

“All my kids are half black,” she says: stating her credentials on half-black hair.

And the child on her lap says nothing. He doesn’t move. He just turned a year, she tells me, but I think he’s smaller than Charlotte. Older – in the way he holds his body, the way his muscles are firmer and more controlled. But smaller. His dark eyes are too large in his pinched face.

We’re called in and I hear the large woman talking on. The Texas couple has left. But I’m wondering why the child is so small and the mother so large. I’m wondering why he doesn’t smile, or look around, or squirm or talk or laugh.

I wonder, absentmindedly tracing the fat rolls on my own daughter’s round thighs.

Crockett’s Mom

It isn’t until we’re turning away, us to continue our run and she to head home, that I realize we’ve never exchanged names.

Dogs’ names, yes. Breeds, behavior, health concerns with the one bulldog’s eyes, how they play? Yes. Our two dogs have sniffed butts and ears and genitals (and how Crockett jumped when Brutus pushed his enormous square bulldog head under his belly!), they’ve tensed and snorted and finally decided they were friends and Brutus had slobbered on Crockett’s back, but we didn’t know each other’s names.

Our own introductions were an after thought.

I pass her often, walking one or both of her English bulldogs. The dogs have watched each other from across the street, Crockett eager or anxious and alert. Some dogs he ignores, others he strains against this collar. The bulldogs were ones he’s always wanted to see.

This day she called out, wondering what kind of dog he is (that’s the most common question we get when we walk with him). After establishing that he’s not aggressive, she crossed the street and the dog butt-sniffing began.

Our own brief conversation was entirely centered around the dogs, punctuated by pauses to untangle leashes or encourage one or the other dog to calm down. And when we went our separate ways we nearly let it stay that way, known only as Crockett’s (or Brutus’) owner.

I think, if you asked either of them, that’s all that really mattered anyway.

Endings

The first week I started working for the newspaper, they sent me out to a buildings and grounds committee meeting for a school board far from us.

It was long. I was lost.

The next week was a voting meeting for that same school district. It went on for five hours in a crowded gym. I sat on bleachers on the side of the room, ate lemon heads between desperate note-taking, wished for more comfortable shoes and doubted my job choice.

Over the next three years I drove out there countless times, for regular meetings and special meetings and committee meetings and court cases, oh the court cases. One summer it seemed there was another hearing every week.

Most meetings security guards roamed the halls, mostly old men or very young ones who, I think, were there more for show than anything else. One group of residents always sat in the front, at first, then moved to the back, and – though they wouldn’t call it this themselves – they heckled everyone they disagreed with.

Once a fist fight nearly broke out between two taxpayers. The younger man didn’t like my coverage of the incident, said he was the victim and never participated in the confrontation, but I’ve always wondered what he said to make the old man’s blood boil. Another time – but I didn’t see this one – a board member and a tax payer nearly got into their own confrontation, or other reporters said so anyway.

But slowly the fight died out. Meetings got shorter. Decisions were made that couldn’t be undone and people stopped coming, stopped arguing and pleading and heckling.

“I want to see the district unified,” an incoming board member told me once, and while that’s years away, it doesn’t look as impossible as it did when I started. But things are lost, too. Schools are closed, children uprooted, older graduates without a place to call their home school.

I thought of that as I drove home last night, a light rain starting to fall and mist rising from corn fields in the valleys. I remembered driving that way so many times before, watching for deer grazing by the side of the highway under summer moons, creeping around snow-covered curves in the winter. I remember driving down toward the river and suddenly crossing a sort of wall into a fog bank, the sunlight extinguished just like that.

I had friends on both sides – amazing, really, when you think of it. It helped that I did live so far away. I clearly didn’t have anything to gain from any outcome. I talked about cattle with an old farmer who sat in on ever court hearing, dressed always in a green work suit.

I talked about tractors and summer plans with the couple from the other side, who faithfully attended every meeting and made snide (and funny) remarks under their breaths.

Once, the building locked when I arrived, I sat in the back seat of a pickup truck with another couple and talked about my baby, their grandbaby, until the building was unlocked.

That was the last time I’ll cover a meeting out there, I think. They asked me to finish out the budget season and then it will pass to someone else.

I won’t miss the drive. I won’t miss waiting an hour for the meeting to start because an executive session got out of control (and does so every time). I won’t miss the anger that boils under the surface, that made me cry on occasion because the bitterness is so toxic, it burns everything it touches.

But – and isn’t it always this way? – when you get any of them by themselves, they’re nice people. The people I will miss.

And it’s strange that something that was so much part of my life for three years is suddenly not there.

Running with dogs

It rained most of Monday and he whined at the windows and doors so when the rain stopped and cracks appeared in the grey skies we went for a run.

It was early afternoon and the sun breaking through was hot and mist rose from the wet pavement at the top of the hill, steam in the muggy air.

He’d given up pulling and trying to follow scents and check out trees and clumps of grass and now he ran beside me, easily, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth but head up. We’re working on that, running together, partners in afternoon exercise rather than opposing forces on either end of a leash.

Today he was doing well.

We saw her as we rounded the corner, heading back down the hill. She was weeding a wild flower bed of tall pink poppies and roses all tangled together, but she stopped and stood when we passed.

“Is this the first time you’ve run up here?” she wanted to know and no, I run there often, but usually in the evenings, not in the afternoon.

She must be in the back garden, then, she said, because she hasn’t seen us before. She wondered how old he was, and was surprised that he isn’t a puppy. There’s something undeniably puppy-ish in his face, in the short snout  and soft ears and eager eyes; everyone thinks he’s younger than his two years.

We ran on and she returned to her weeding. But stops like that come often when I run with him. Neighbors sitting on porches call out as we pass. “We’ve been arguing,” one woman calls one day. “How old is he?” The old man on the porch sounds pleased when I tell them; he must have guessed older than the woman. And again they want to talk. He’s so good, running like that, where did I get him? Their daughter got a dog from there too, he’s really good too. I need to come by sometime when she’s here.

I guess dogs get playdates too?

Often we take the baby, strapped in a carrier against my chest or sitting in her stroller. And then it’s hard to get far at all without being stopped. The baby smiles at anyone who smiles at her and the dog tangles himself in the stroller wheels and at every four-way stop we’re waved through, drivers waiting for us to pass so slowly.

We’ve had Crockett for a month now, just a little over. And already I recognize more neighbors than I did before. I guess dogs are good for that, too.

The baker

He started baking when he moved here, missing the white baguettes of his native France.

That’s the difference between here and there, he told me two years ago when I first met him and the two other women who opened the bakery just one block away from the office: there, bread is warm and ready every morning at nearly every corner, but no one bakes at home. Here? You learn to bake your own.

That he loved bread was clear then, the way he talked in accented English about learning to bake because he couldn’t find good bread anywhere in town.

What I didn’t know then was that he isn’t just a good baker; he’s the quintessential small shop owner in a small town.

The day the bakery opened the line stretched down the street and the shelves were bare long before closing time.

“This is your fault,” he told me when I stopped that morning.

He wouldn’t let me pay for the chocolate-filled bun.

Since then I’ve been there nearly every week, looking for baguettes and chocolate croissants and sticky buns after busy deadlines at work. Last spring my parents set up a sizable account as a sort of birthday-gift-that-keeps-on-giving, and now every time I see him he asks about them.

“She has a very nice Dad who said ‘she needs good bread,'” he told a new girl while showing her how to keep track of my account.

They all know me. They wondered among themselves when I was pregnant until sometime late in the summer when it was obvious enough to risk saying something. They ask about the baby.

But often, standing in line, I watch him dust flour off his hands and come to the counter, slipping rolls into bags and chatting with his customers.

“How’s your mother?” he asks the woman in front of me one day. “Tell her hello for me.”

He talks about running with one and family with another and when it gets to be my turn, he talks about the paper.

“I look for you in the paper,” he told me last week, dropping a baguette into a brown paper sleeve. “You’ve been meeting a lot of interesting people lately.”

And I said yes, I have been and that’s what I like about the job and I walk back out into the cold February sunlight and hear him talking to the next person.

I have met a lot of interesting people lately, I think as the bread warms my cold hands on the short walk back to work.

I’ve written about a lot of interesting people, lately, but I think the baker is as interesting as them all.

Were you on a cruise?

He wore a bright, short-sleeved button-down shirt with a mosaic pattern of Playboy covers in all their all-but-nakedness.

It was the kind of shirt older men wear to look relaxed, often with dress shorts, usually with Hawaiian patterns rather than near pornography.

And so in the first moment he crossed your vision, he announced his lack of discretion, his need for attention. The shirt made it clear, as did the strangely shaped Y of hair on a partly shaved, partly balding head.

The second thing you noticed is that he spoke non-stop, a machine-gun burst of words that piled into sentences, paragraphs, pages before you could slip in a stunned acknowledgement.

“I was on a cruise on the Carnival Glory and I spent two days in my room because I was depressed but I took my medication and came out for the New Years party and everyone said they liked my shirt and have you ever been on a cruise?”

A one-word answer from the white-blonde youth beside him, oversized headphones that would surely come in handy on this three-hour flight slid just off his ears.

“What’s your name? Killian? That’s my last name, Killian, Jerry Killian, I’ve never heard it as a first name before. I just got off a cruise, were you on a cruise? Do you have a girlfriend?”

The man’s hand was shaky and the way he spoke, you’d start to wonder if he was crazy or high or both.

We taxied away from the gate, finally, took our position and waited our turn the way you always wait your turn on flights leaving Dallas-Ft. Worth and the youth, he pulled the headphones over his ears and the man in the Playboy shirt turned to the window.

The baby cried, struggling to find sleep in this strange place.

But when her lids finally closed and her breathing slowed I heard him again, talking out the window to himself. He narrated the details: leaving Dallas, going to Pittsburgh, just got off a cruise, took the overnight hotel stay and nearly missed his flight, in the same rapid-fire burst of staccato words that mostly stayed quiet but would rise suddenly loud. I don’t think he stopped talking the entire flight.

Twice a stewardess responded to something he requested, and stood for what seemed like ages in the aisle, trapped by a monologue.

Halfway through the flight he dropped his credit card, told the stewardess every bill attached to that card and how he’d have to cancel everything if he couldn’t find it and she nodded, promised to find a flashlight so we could find it.

She asked me to look and there it was, trapped between the wall of the plane and his seat. The baby woke when I reached for it.

“Thank you,” she mouthed. And “would you like something to eat? to drink?” And so we had supper after all and the baby didn’t even cry though we waked her in the credit card retrieval effort and we landed just 30 minutes late in Pittsburgh, old snow reflecting the lights.

He turned around and saw us and “Aww, he flies good? It is a he?”

She, I corrected.

“Aww, well he flies good,” he insisted. “I was on a flight and there was a man with a military dog and he didn’t bark, he flied good too. Were you on a cruise? I was on a cruise.”