June 25, 2013
I enjoy mostly, I suppose, the fall season. Besides the warm days, cool evenings and the chameleon embellishment of the forests, there is also....football. Summer is okay, but it feels like a distracted teenager at a family reunion. We might be "into" summer, but summer is not "into" us. It is nervous, edgy, sweaty and "outa here" at the first opportunity. Winter? On a very few occasions, winter has done my bidding and offered a beautiful blanket of snow just in time for Christmas. Yet, come December 26th, I am fed up with the whole lot of it - the bundling, shoveling, huddling, crawling, shuffling, and sniffling. Spring? It has some cachet - if you're into flirtatious relationships. In our Rocky Mountains she cavorts a bit with summer, then winter, then summer, then winter - a confused lover. Summer always wins, but not without a fight. Winter has wooed spring's hand many a time to the dismay of high desert gardeners, covering our newly planted vines and seedlings with a fresh blast of "White Christmas" on Memorial Day.
There are other seasons, seasons of life as it were, that carry like joys, sorrows and challenges. As with the changing of seasons, we can move almost seamlessly from one season to another and barely notice the subtleties, the alterations, the new normal. We look up one day and spot a gray hair, or less hair. We find our body finally making payment, decades later, for that crazy wreck on the motorcycle or too many curve balls thrown. We ache, we hurt. We have to do a roll call each morning for various parts of our body to see if they are going to show up for duty. Such is life.
As many of you know, the sins of my youth caught up with me recently at the table of an orthopedic surgeon. His skillful hands made a number of repairs to my well traveled right shoulder. The tipping point came one day when I was adjusting a projection screen to the up position. As the screen slid into position, I heard (and mightily felt) a ripping sound. I froze in place, a Celtic Statue of Liberty, unable and unwilling to move. The modest effort to raise a projection screen followed years of hard play, sports, construction, remodeling, swinging babies, playing guitar and piano, manly handshakes and high-fives. After drilling 7 holes in the various bones, the good doctor placed within those holes 7 anchors to tie together muscle and sinew. My aftercare is the hands of a young Physical Therapist - a man that I liked when I first met him..
So, I received a call from my dad the other day that mom had taken a tumble down at their boat-dock. His information was understandably sketchy. He was pretty sure that mom had a broken hip, maybe more. The ambulance service was working to get her off the boat-dock and up a very long, switch-backy hill to the ambulance. Dad was in his workshop when he got the word from a young girl that mom was injured. His first inclination - as would be the first inclination of any man with a tractor - was to fire up the Kubota, scoop mom up in the bucket and bring her to the house. (We Kubota owners see all problems as engineering issues easily solved with our tractors).
With that phone call came the realization that I had entered a new season - an unwelcome one. I always thought it was little old ladies who broke hips. Not my mom. "Why, she is only...wait, she is 76 years old. When the heck did that happen?" As spring flirts between winter and summer, so too do men flirt between boyhood and manhood. Some things force us along the path - marriage, children, a mortgage, utility bills. But I know of no man - no honest man - who doesn't wish to remain, in most respects, a boy. We are all Huck Finn at heart. We fake the rest.
But moms with broken hips require an adult in the room. As so often is the case, the first adult on the scene was a woman - my wife. She said, "Okay, let's load up and get out there." We made arrangements to fly out the next day. I called my dad and he protested. "Oh, we're fine. We don't need you to come." He was wrong. Because he is a man (albeit, with a lot of boy still in him) he admitted it. He needed us and we needed to be there. (For one, how long could dad have survived on apple pie, pop tarts, and ice cream?) Behind the scenes we were able to make arrangements for long-term care for mom.
Mom is doing well - remarkably so. With 12 inches of titanium encased in her femur, she is shuffling about with the help of a walker and a steady hand on her back. She should be right as rain in a few months. But I'm not fooling myself. This is a new season. Moms and dads grow old and they move through life's autumn and then it is winter.
The aged Apostle Paul, in reflecting a bit on his own collection of years said this: So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. II Corinthians 4:16-18.
The cheerful little lady scooting about the house with her walker is one such person as Paul described. Because of her kind and simple faith, she has been surrounded by friends, flowers and family. She might have lost a bit of bone mass over the years and she definitely doesn't bounce off boat-docks as well as she used to, but her inner person is "being renewed day by day." I welcome this new season of being grown up if for no other reason, I do not have a choice. But there is also this - I am honored to have the opportunity to bring care and comfort to the one who watched and worried these many years over her little Huck Finn. Now it's my turn.