The Beverwyck Review

Stories and Poems from the Writers' Critique Group of First Reformed Church, Schenectady, New York

Category: Memoir (Page 1 of 2)

End of an Era

March 18, 2024 / / 0 Comments

By Dirk de Jong.

I had borrowed a friend’s pickup truck, an old red Dodge, and backed it carefully into the driveway, right up to the garage door. It was a warm day in May, mid-afternoon. 

In the distance, the escarpment of the Helderberg mountains was silhouetted against a steel-blue sky. Inside the garage was a big pile of stuff: a couple of file cabinets, the poplar board that had served as my desk, an office chair, paintings, books, clothes, dishes, a vacuum cleaner. I loaded everything onto the truck, sorting items that I wanted to keep from those I wanted to get rid of. I checked the ropes that secured the boxes and bags and the various odds and ends that were bulging from the truck. I pretended it was just a job – cleaning out old things – people do it all the time.

I had never been to the dump before and didn’t know what to expect. It was simple. I paid my fee and was told where to unload. I looked around. Most of the junk had been bulldozed over. Nearby, a huge machine was devouring old couches, dressers, and mattresses, after large metal spikes ripped them into bite-size chunks. I had come to the right place. I laid those possessions I was going to discard in the path of that monstrous machinery. I added most of the paintings, testimony to another time. Then I drove the pickup with the remaining objects over to the side and leaned out the window. I turned off the engine. I wanted not just to see the destruction – I wanted to hear the cracking and crushing sounds. I was not sure why – to make the moment real, perhaps? To mask the regret? I felt the ground shaking. My belongings offered no resistance.

After one pass, only the broken stretcher frames of my paintings were still recognizable. Then they were also gone, turned into random rubble. A curtain of dust seemed suspended in the air as I steered down the hill and out of the gate. The sun was approaching the treetops on the horizon. I drove to my friend’s house and took what was left on the truck into his basement.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“Mission accomplished,” I answered. 

He went into the house and returned with two bottles of beer. We sat down on the edge of his kids’ sandbox and drank in silence. It was still unusually warm for an evening in May.

They Forgot to Remember

February 26, 2024 / / 2 Comments

By Jessica Spencer Castner.

For my father, serene weather Sunday afternoons were for bicycle rides. Modern streets designed in uniform grids flummoxed or wearied his navigation. His inner compass was more apt to follow the contours of hills, waterways, trees, and stone landmarks. He consistently selected routes where roads paved over a deeper heritage, allusions to an older story. In Berrien County, Michigan, we bicycled along West and East Snow Roads, Stevensville-Baroda Road, and Hills Road. Routes that were once pre-automobile footpaths hugged the natural curves of the place to connect streams, rivers, early villages, fishing camps, forts, berry patches, and hunting grounds. It was easy to imagine the first human footfall following game trails on these roads, and picture oneself traveling as an echo of these subsistence times.

An athlete, I loved the physical activity in the bike rides and the challenges of the elevation rise and fall predating the grading of current Interstate standards. While I initially responded with teenage angst and annoyance, I learned forbearance to one of Dad’s peculiar ritual traditions folded into these beautiful Sunday bike rides. He had to stop at the old burial grounds along the way. With an eye roll and exasperated sigh, I’d camp myself in the enticing shade of a majestic tree as he began to wander among the headstones, grateful for the opportunity to stretch my still growing muscles and hydrate. Over the years, I came to appreciate some of the most beautiful sculptures in America are in our old burial grounds, places made pleasant and welcoming for the Sunday picnic gatherings and family reunions of generations past. Despite age-appropriate rebellious impulses, it would take less than five minutes for boredom to set in. The magnetic draw to be within conversational distance of parental unconditional love compelled my reluctant footsteps in his direction. It was easy to be in comfortable silence in Dad’s presence. Words somehow had greater value in their very thoughtful and careful supply.

In these random burial grounds where we had no known kin, there were two things that Dad seemed to either find or seek. The first was the Dara Knot. For no reason he could articulate or recall, he felt a meaningful connection to the Celtic symbol of deep and intertwined roots shaped into the Christian cross. When he happened upon it, he would stop and take time to admire the artistry of this imprint on the granite and marble memorial art. Sometimes he would wordlessly trace his finger along the looping paths of infinity. The second thing, the one he seemed to be searching for, was evidence of the families they forgot to remember.

“Here, Jessie. Look!” He would invite me over to his vantage point. “Look at this family. Look at the death dates, all around the same time. Think about the ages of the children. Let’s see….” And he would point to Mother, Father, a possible aunt or uncle and then with a deeply earnest solemnity, the children. The infant. The toddler. The school-aged children and teens. He’d calculate and state their ages, shaking his head as if he was the funeral home greeter ushering the grief of the survivors in the present day. “Someone could be missing here. Someone could have survived and had a full life elsewhere. Hard to imagine what it would be like to survive and go on alone. Alone without your family.” He paused. A drawn-out silence followed to allow the mind to consider the possibilities of near unbearable grief in survival. Then, his eyes would refocus from a gaze into the far distant past to holding direct eye contact with me to punctuate the importance of his words. “The whole family, all at about the same time. They forget to remember what it used to be like back then. They forget how hard it must have been.” He’d infer their deaths were from an infectious disease, listing off smallpox, measles, and influenza. Occasionally, he’d mention the possibility of a housefire before smoke detectors and fire department first responders, but usually he’d infer we bore witness to the victims of epidemic. Then, with a gentle hand on my shoulder, he’d convey the intended lesson of his words. “We don’t forget how blessed we are today. What a blessing it is to have vaccines, so your kids have a chance to grow up.”  

We knew Dad’s heritage and family culture was from one of the early families in North America, from subsistence times and long before industrialization. The family stayed relatively quiet about it. In very thoughtful and careful supply, these stories are told when they serve a meaningful and valuable purpose.

John Freeman was the name of both my 6th and my 7th Great-Grandfather. Theirs was the name of the farm site of the September 19, 1777, Battle of Saratoga. Refugees of violent conflict and displaced from their home and livelihood, an extended family migrated by footpath up Lake Champlain to where survivors found eventual safety near Montreal. Among these refugees was a Freeman family of mother Efellanah, father John Freeman, and an estimated eight or nine children. As today, displaced people of wartime violence are susceptible to other health and welfare problems. When smallpox ravaged the migrant camp, only three of the family’s children survived: Mary Francis at about age 14, Thomas at about age 13, and the youngest with a name meaning of “deer, doe, or gazelle” at about age 11.  This youngest doe orphan was my lineal ancestor and later mother-in-law to Abraham Truax, another family name with meaning in Schenectady history.  

The history curriculum and books for American school children frequently include the Battle of Saratoga as a crucial turning point and victory in the country’s independence. There, alongside with the stated names, National Park Service markers, and history retelling is the family they forgot to remember. There, hiding in plain sight and just below the surface is the young daughter refugee orphan of violent conflict and now vaccine-preventable epidemic. Imagine yourself as her, the namesake and metaphorical doe in the glaring headlights of history. At the tender age of 11, imagine having to face what must have been a frightening future. You are in a new and strange place having lost your community, your home, your grandparents, your parents, and the majority of your siblings. Politics and national loyalties may just barely be entering your understanding, but family love is a truth you’ve always known and now lost in sorrow and grief. Imagine the horror and aloneness of standing at the family burial ground as the youngest survivor.

As an emergency nurse scientist and public health expert, my teams see similar family horrors in vaccine-preventable illnesses even today. The telling of the story today serves a purpose and carries a meaning to inform how we value vaccines and take immunizations. In our family storytelling and rituals, we never forgot to remember. Today, we share for you to remember as well.

But My Pastor Said!

December 3, 2023 / / 3 Comments

By John Hargraves.

It was my first new car – a banging 1981 white Toyota Celica GT coupe with a 5-speed stick, blue herringbone seats and a center console 6-band stereo equalizer. I loved that car.

So, I kept it clean and paid close attention to imperfections. One day I noticed a slow leak in the left front tire and dropped it off at the Mobil station where they actually still did mechanical repairs. My office was only two minutes away.

Not too long after I returned my clinic, the mechanic called me. Sotto voce, he asked me to come back to the station right away. There had been an accident.

Soon on the scene, I discovered an elderly woman in the driver’s seat of a hulking green Buick LeSabre. After getting her tank filled, she had confused the gas pedal with the brake pedal. The mechanic had parked my baby Celica perpendicular to the pumps and she had broadsided it. I was astonished to see the GT’s width reduced to three feet and only the console’s equalizer appeared to be spared. The heavy chrome front bumper of the Buick had made a Jell-O mold out of the side of my car.  

The white-haired woman behind the wheel was a bit dazed but apologetic. I sublimated my nausea and channeled the good doctor. Discovering she was diabetic, I summoned a sugary coke from the mechanic, and she reconstituted. She was otherwise intact and fortunately had her seat belt fastened. Looking back now, I’m surprised that the mechanic did not call for paramedics. I guess he was killing two birds with one stone. 

The woman and I exchanged insurances, license information and phone numbers. The mechanic requested that I pay for my tire repair, eight dollars and change. The fact that I paid him is a testimony to the shade of chartreuse signifying how green I was.

Days later I learned my Celica was totaled out by my insurance company.  I ordered a new car which would take six weeks to arrive.  In the meantime, I had to rent a vehicle for $10 a day but had no rental coverage. 

I decided to call the woman who destroyed my car to see how she was doing. She was overjoyed to hear from me and thanked me profusely for attending to her at the accident. When she heard I’d be out $10 a day for six weeks, she said that the least she could do was pay me back by covering the rental costs. She insisted I come by her house the next day to make me lunch and pick up the cash. She told me she was a church goer, and this was the right thing to do. It felt good that this wasn’t just about a car accident anymore.

The next day she called me back right before lunch time. Sounding uncomfortable but firm, she told me I could not come by and that she would not be reimbursing my expenses. She had consulted with her pastor about what had transpired. He advised and warned her against opening the door to the admission of fault with her gestures.

“Really?” was about all I could muster. 

“But my pastor said!” she replied.

The Vietnam Guys

November 10, 2023 / / 2 Comments

By Richard A. Rose, Captain, US Army retired.

Over the total of my military and civilian careers, I have had the opportunity to work with many men who served in Vietnam.  While for most you never knew about their service, except for the wearing of a pin or the First Team (1st Cavalry Division) hat, others with which I worked did let me know tidbits of their time in country.         

TOM  

I worked with a man named Tom who was every bit the older version of the Marine Corps recruiting poster.  He had a razor cut short flat top, barrel chest, the look of a guy who never joked around. Tom had been one of those whose family had always been in the Corps and for whom volunteering was not only expected, but almost required.  He said that his big Irish family was made up of Marines and cops.  Most of the men were one and then the other.  So, when he was of age, the day after his 18th birthday, he went to the recruiter and volunteered.  He would be one of the almost 70,000 Marines who, in 1966, were carrying out ground operations against the Vietcong.  Tom was an infantryman.  His days were filled with movement to contact and search and destroy, and his nights were filled with ambushes, mortar attacks, bad chow, and little sleep.  To say that it took its toll on him is an understatement.  Tom always talked rather guiltily about that, saying that his dad and uncles had withstood the like of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Guadalcanal, so who was he to complain about Vietnam.

I always thought that Tom was a very religious man because he literally went to church every day before coming to work.   It was good thing that our building was basically across the street from a Catholic cathedral because I could look out the window and see him crossing the street from the church every morning.  When most people say things like “every day” they are probably using hyperbole, and really mean that is happens a lot.  But when I say that Tom went to church every day, it was literally every day.

Tom was in a tough state, it was late 1966 and he had just a few days until his tour in Vietnam was over.  He had been wounded and been decorated for bravery.  He said that they handed out medals for basically just staying alive.  One afternoon, standing in the pouring rain in a three-foot rice paddy, his squad came under withering fire from Vietcong well hidden in the brush.  Tom watched his fellow Marines cut down around him for about 15 to 20 minutes.  Crouching in the sloppy water, Tom said that he asked God to save him.  He said in that in that moment he felt the strongest connection with God he had ever had.  It wasn’t being afraid.  He said later that he wasn’t afraid, just sure that his time was up unless God intervened.  Tom told God that if he got out of this alive and made it home, he would go to church every day for the rest of his life, and he meant it.  Almost the second he made his “deal”, a formation of Army UH-1 Iroquois “huey” gunships came right over his position and completely took out the Vietcong firing on what was left of his squad.  The evacuation and medical choppers were right behind them.

Tom would say in a plain tone, “God kept his bargain, I keep mine.”

ED

I had the opportunity to work with Ed for about a year, when we were rolling out the AIDS/HIV Counseling and Testing Centers in New York City.  Ed was formally trained as a nurse, but I would come to find that his medical training had started in the Navy.  Growing up a Quaker, known as the Society of Friends, Ed was and had been his whole life, a pacifist.  Core to his beliefs was the rejection of military service and war, indeed the rejection of any form of physical violence.   When he said this, my next question was logical, “So how did you get in the Navy?”  

Ed, when he told me his story, just smiled, and said that in 1968 he had a problem being an American and also holding on to his religious beliefs.  The 60s were a tough time for him personally, as well as the nation culturally.  He reconciled the conflicts in himself by taking his draft notice to the U.S. Navy recruiter and letting him know that he would not fight in Vietnam.  He was, however, willing to be a Navy Hospital Corpsman on a hospital ship or the like, where he believed that he could fulfill his obligation as an American and uphold his religious beliefs.  Ed thought that this compromise was the best and honorable thing to do given that he just didn’t want “conscientious objector status”.  By doing this he was going against the thoughts of some members of the Society of Friends, but he believed that he could reconcile it within himself.

While Ed had done a lot of thought about the moral and ethical issues, he hadn’t really understood what he was saying to the Navy.  Would they train him as a Hospital Corpsman?  Yes, but after that training, Ed was assigned to provide medical support to a Marine Infantry platoon going to fight in Vietnam.  The only time that Ed did service on ship was during the trip from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, and then to Vietnam.  His tour of duty was being responsible for emergency life-saving medical care to Marines in the middle of fire fights, care to for Marines with jungle foot rot, for Marines with festering infections, and just being the overall “Doc” to his platoon.   Through all of it, he never carried a weapon, never fired a weapon, and only acted to save everyone he could.  

Ed’s goal to not be around the death of war was a complete failure.  He was perhaps more morally challenged than any of the Marines he protected, because as a pacifist, his mere presence amid all of that killing and death felt morally wrong.  While serving his tour, Ed realized that the elders were right, that he shouldn’t even be there, but he came to realize in the years later that his experiences in helping to save lives, perhaps made him a stronger and better person.  It made him more compassionate and dedicated to peace.

As we worked on the establishment of AIDS/HIV Counselling and Testing Centers during the AIDS crisis this strength came through.  While he had seen worse in his lifetime, his compassion and ethical strength made him a guiding beacon for so many in such a difficult time. 

MIKE & BOB  

A long-range reconnaissance patrol, or LRRP, is a small, well-armed reconnaissance team that patrols deep in enemy-held territory.  By April 1966, each of the four Battalions of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had formed LRRP units.  By 1967 formal LRRP companies were organized, most having three platoons, each with five six-man teams.  LRRP training was notoriously rigorous and team leaders were often graduates of the U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Recondo School in Nha Trang, Vietnam.  Such was the Vietnam experience of Bob and Mike; the Recondo legends.  Bob was the tall lanky distance runner type while Mike was more the 5’8” super muscular stereotypical commando.  Both were field medics and had gone through basic jump school at Ft. Benning in the same class after completing Army medics training.  They had met while in Medic’s school and were sent to Airborne.  Mike and Bob had been rivals competing for top honors in Medic’s school and competing against each other for the Iron Mike trophy in Airborne.  When they graduated from Airborne, they were both assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade (“Sky Soldiers”).  The brigade was the first major United States Army ground force deployed in Vietnam, serving there from May 7, 1965, to 1971 and losing 1,533 soldiers.  Brigade members received over 7,700 decorations, including more than 6,000 Purple Hearts.  Both Bob and Mike would be among those Purple Heart recipients, as well as earning Bronze Stars.   

The rivalry would continue in the 173rd, as each was assigned to a different LRRP.  Their patrol areas were different, rarely overlapping and they would only reconnect when they arrived at the base camp.  There they would share stories of missions, compare the remarkable feats of military medicine that each performed in patching up their patrol members and generally complain that the other just wasn’t as good as they were.  

When their tour ended, they were scheduled to fly back to “the world”.  Both had been talking about going home.  For Bob, home was western Pennsylvania, with its coal mines, steel plants, and farms.  For Mike, home was back to west Texas and the wide-open spaces filled with cows and oil wells.  But something had happened in their time in the Army.  Indeed, something had happened in Vietnam.  Neither had been from Hawaii, but both had decided as the plane landed in Honolulu, that they were not going back to their pre-Vietnam homes.  It just wasn’t home anymore.  The first leg home became their last flight anywhere.  

As civilians, they had transitioned to Honolulu Emergency Services as Emergency Medical Technicians and had both gone through the Mobile Intensive Care Technicians (MICT) training program.  Always gently competing and keeping each other on their professional “toes”.  Both had families, as stable or not as each could handle.  When I met them, at least six years after returning from Vietnam, they were still playfully handing out jibes about which one was the better this and the better that.  All said with a smile and a pat on the back.  Bob and Mike were truly friends who had been able to survive by having a friend who had gone through it with them.  Their comradeship was their greatest strength. 

LEWIS

I had worked with Lewis for a few years and always found him to be able to see the nuance in practically any situation.  Lewis was the Vietnam age but remarked on a few occasions that he didn’t go.  I suspected that the reason was a college deferment, or some other mechanism that lots of people used who avoided military service.  We were travelling on a train from New York City back to Albany and somehow the subject of my service in the Army came up.  He said that I must have been crazy to actually volunteer.

For some reason he talked quietly about the matter-of-fact version of how he avoided going to Vietnam.  Lewis had received his draft number and could see the writing on the wall.  He knew that he had three choices, two of which he discussed with his parents.  He talked about just going and probably being sent to Vietnam, it was 1970 and things didn’t look good.  He also talked about escaping across the Canadian border to evade the draft, becoming a criminal and draft dodger.  Strangely, his parents were ok with this option because they had no desire to see their son needlessly lose his life in what had become a confusing mess of a war.  The third option, which Lewis only spoke about in very hushed terms, was the option he took.  

Somehow, he was able to get medical documentation for a condition which would prevent his service in the military.  In other words, he made himself look medically unfit.  While he never did say how he did this, he did say that there were contacts that, in those days, could for a fee, have a medical history prepared which would pass examination and give him medication that would, for a short time, mimic the condition.  So, he reported, handed in his paperwork, and was subsequently declared unfit.  He never said what medical condition he supposedly had, nor how the actual process worked to get the documents, but apparently the “underground” was well situated to make it happen.  

Did he feel bad about his choice those many years ago? No, for he too had the feeling that if he gone to Vietnam, he would have never returned alive. 

The Cold

November 10, 2023 / / 4 Comments

By Richard A. Rose, Captain, US Army retired.

Bill remembered thinking when he got his draft notice that he was in trouble.  He didn’t have any reason for a deferment so it was clear that he would be drafted.  Conventional wisdom at the time said that you were treated better and had more choices if you volunteered rather than waited to be drafted.  All that seemed crazy to him now. He had volunteered, and he was told that he was to be a mortar base plate carrier in the infantry.  How exactly was that more choices?  A mortar is an indirect fire weapon which had a three-man crew: the base plate carrier, the tube carrier, and the ammo carrier.  Together they made up a mortar team.  Somehow the benefits of volunteering didn’t really come to pass even here.  The base plate is simply a 50-pound iron disk to which the mortar tube is attached.  To fire, the rounds were dropped down the tube until they exploded the powder bags, projecting the round high into the air.  So, basically Bill carried a metal plate.  

It was not a good time or place to be in the infantry.  It was November 1950, and Bill was assigned to the 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division in Korea.  What happened that November was something that Bill rarely talked about, except to say that he never wanted to be cold again.  From November 27 through December 13th the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir pushed people to their limits.  Along with members of the 7th Infantry Division and 1st Marine Division, the three regiments of the 3rd Infantry Division survived the extreme cold and overwhelming numbers of two Chinese Field Armies.  In the first few minutes of the first day in combat Bill went from being a member of a three-man crew to being the entire crew.  He carried the base plate, tube, and ammo. With the human-wave type of attacks by the Chinese army, the mortar went from being an indirect fire to a direct fire weapon.  Bill wedged the base plate vertically in the frozen ground, attached the tube and literally threw rounds down the tube creating a makeshift cannon.  The battle lines became set with the Marines on the west side of the reservoir and the Army in the east, with the Chinese surrounding both.  

Only once did he speak of the battle, relating a story of a night stuck on the frozen reservoir.  Bill and two others had been sent from the Army lines on the northeast side of the reservoir to deliver needed medical supplies to the 5th Marines near Yudam-ni on the northwest. This meant that they would be skirting the edge of the Chinese 27th Army.  To do this, they would take a jeep across two sections of the ice.  It was night, and they started slowly driving across the frozen water.  Once they got to the middle of that section of the reservoir, the Chinese dropped three mortar rounds on them.  The ice was cracked, and the jeep wrecked.  The three soldiers were thrown out onto the ice.  Bill had managed to grab the canvas bags full of medical supplies.  They were faced with a choice: stay put and hope for help; expose themselves and probably be killed on the spot with more mortar fire; try to slide back the way they had come; or creep on toward where they hoped the Marines were entrenched.  

Years later, Bill would laugh about the three of them arguing in the dark while laying prone on a frozen lake.  Years later, it would seem so silly and ridiculous, knowing how sound probably carried across the ice, that some Chinese officer was listening to them debate the best course.  If only he could speak English, he would have known their plan.  At the time, it was cold, it was dark, and they were terrified.  Eventually, they realized that staying put was a death sentence, and that they had lost their bearings not knowing which the correct way was to go.  They could see a small light on the coast and decided to slowly move toward it hoping it was the Marines.  They crawled across the ice avoiding any of the exposed water or cracked areas created by the mortar shells earlier.  

As pre-dawn eventually began to illuminate the shore of the reservoir, they could see far behind them the upturned jeep, and in front of them a frightening realization.  For the last several hours, without knowing it, they had been crawling toward a Chinese machine gun emplacement.  As the sun rose, Bill and his two comrades could see three Chinese soldiers staring right at them.  Were they still unseen in the shadows on the ice, or perhaps the Chinese wanted to shoot them as they got closer, or worse yet take them prisoner?  Exhaustion, cold, and fear drove them forward.  They quietly let each other know that they would go down fighting.  They might die on the ice and snow, but they would take those three with them.  The Americans braced themselves for a final mad dash toward the Chinese position with the one rifle and three bayonets they still had.  Strangely, Bill still carried the medical supplies.  

As the fateful time came, they clearly saw the Chinese soldiers. The machine gun was trained on them.  Yet no one fired.  The three frostbitten Americans moved as quickly as possible rushing the Chinese machinegun.  What they found would stay with them for the rest of their lives.  The three Chinese soldiers, waiting for their prey on the ice, were dead, frozen solid.  What had kept Bill and his two fellow soldiers alive was simply movement.  The Chinese stood still and on that frigid night died because of it.  

Years later, as Bill got out of his heated pool in the 100-degree heat of El Paso, Texas, he mused, thinking back to that dawn in 1950, and the promise to himself that he would never be cold again.

QRS Complexes

September 17, 2023 / / 2 Comments

By John Hargraves.

The summer after turning 18 I began to feel proud of myself. It was my last year at RPI in Troy and I was still hanging on to my 4.0 GPA. After flunking the road test the first time, I had finally gotten my driver’s license. Then I began volunteering at Samaritan hospital. They let me work in the psychiatric ward and the EKG department. I learned to sit with troubled minds and tried to understand patience. The moving squiggles on EKG paper fascinated me and I taught myself to decipher some of their meaning.

In November I learned from my sister that my father had been hospitalized for another heart attack. They didn’t do much in those days but put you to bed, give oxygen, inject morphine, and watch. He lay crying when I entered his room at Ellis. It was the first time I had seen him since I had the measles at 16. My eyes focused on the oscilloscope’s green light tracing my father’s heartbeat. “Hey” I said. “You’re in sinus rhythm. That big spike there shows the electrical activity of the big chambers of your heart. It’s called a QRS complex.”

My older brother, who had flown in from Denver, was in the room and my father turned to him. “Does he really know what he’s talking about?” he croaked.

After they removed his temporary pacemaker for heart block he was discharged. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my stepmother invited me for dinner. There wasn’t much conversation, but she was a good cook. The attention was diverted by the creamy mashed potatoes and crispy fried chicken with gravy. My father smiled and cut off chunks of margarine from a big stick to bless his huge pile of mashed potatoes. He wasn’t using butter anymore because that had cholesterol. Across the kitchen table I looked at him as we finished the big meal. I could tell he was feeling magnanimous.

“Maybe we should bury the hatchet,” he suggested.

“Umm, yeah maybe,” was all I could muster.

Before I left, I watched him giggle and open a five-pound box of Fannie Farmer chocolate candy and grab handfuls. He offered the box to me, and I reaped a harvest of the nuts and creams as I went out the door.

Early in January my sister called me. “The old man just died,” she cried. “He was trying to unlock the front door and had trouble with the key.” She reported that he collapsed. Todd, a neighbor, jumped onto the porch and tried CPR. He was taken by ambulance to Ellis and pronounced dead.

I remember punching the wall. “Damn!”

My brother couldn’t afford to fly back a second time for the funeral. So, we spoke for a short time on the telephone. “You’re an orphan now,” he pronounced. I felt lost and less proud.

A Prayer for Mrs. McKee

July 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

By John Hargraves.

Somehow she had learned about my situation and offered to help. I was about to lose my berth. My delicate chances of completing a Hail Mary pass would be forfeited. My plan for survival and to make my heavenly mother proud was an early admission into the RPI Albany Medical College biomedical program at age 16. Being homeless again would be a problem.

At 14 I had left my father’s house on Palmer Avenue after he remarried. We couldn’t get along and I was declared an emancipated minor. A gaping hole remained from missing my mother. My big sister tried to fill it with love and took me in for nearly two years, but finances forced her family to move out of reach. A friend’s family took me in for a few months as they prepared for a new baby. After painting the baby’s room I slept there not knowing the arrival would displace me at Christmas. 

When I got the news that I needed to find another place I must have prayed. Certainly not to God because He wasn’t my friend. 

Mrs. McKee prayed a lot. She was the elderly widow of a shop teacher at Linton High School and a devout Baptist. She said I could stay and do chores to earn my keep. Somehow she knew not to proselytize and to just love thy neighbor. 

We ate breakfast and dinner together everyday. We watched Marcus Welby MD and Medical Center on her color TV.  She would encourage me with positive words and a steadfast presence. The snow got shoveled and the lawn mowed. Mrs. McKee was the pillar of patience as I probed and tested her with my unwashed neediness. She never once mentioned the nocturnal cigarette smoke that billowed about my bedroom. I thought I was clever leaving the window open on winter nights and tossing the butts out the window. She never admonished me for hitchhiking to Albany to see my girlfriend and coming home late at night. 

That Spring, just before high school graduation, I got real sick with a fever of 105. She didn’t have a car, so she called my father who I hadn’t seen in two years. She had never spoken with him and was worried. I cried, hearing her stern voice chastising his refusal to bring me to a doctor. She won out. He arrived with stepmother in tow and brought me to Ellis Hospital. Koplik spots suggested an early diagnosis of measles. 

“Is that all?” scoffed my old man to the doctor.

On the way back my father generously stopped at the Central Market on Eastern Parkway. He bought me a bottle of aspirin and my choice of orange or the more expensive grape juice. I chose the latter. I didn’t see him again until his near fatal heart attack almost two years later. 

Mrs. McKee was proud that I graduated early and got accepted into the program. She must have known from watching those shows that I would emulate the motorcycling young doctors rather than the avuncular Dr. Welby. I never saw her again.

Pitching an Escape

June 19, 2023 / / 2 Comments

By John Hargraves.  

I diagnosed my father’s first heart attack when I was 12. He was having crushing chest pain and felt weak as he lay on his back in bed for two days. Two weeks later he saw a cardiologist who showed him the bundle branch block on his EKG. 

That summer he taught me how to drive the new LeSabre I helped him pick out. We always listened to ball games on the road. The previous year we had bet twenty-five cents a game on the 1967 World Series. He let me choose the Red Sox with Carl Yastrzemski and all his home runs. But he took my money because of Bob Gibson’s pitching for the Cardinals. He said pitching always beat hitting.

I guess we were both missing my mother in different ways. He started staying out late and sometimes drank scotch. I washed and ironed his shirts and asked him where he had been all night. A friend from the shop had a flat tire and needed help. There were many flat tires that year. 

He was drinking one night and I scolded him. “My mother must be rolling over in her grave!” 

He went to the silverware drawer and grabbed all the steak knives. Then he threw them in my lap and cried “Why don’t you just stick me with them?!”

Millie from Parents Without Partners crushed him by refusing his proposal. Then the red-headed divorcee down the street started making buttered mashed potatoes and fried chicken. He was gone a lot.

My feet hurt squeezing my size 9 feet into size 8 shoes the following summer.  I pestered the old man for new shoes. He wanted to wait for fall but I persisted. Reluctantly he gave in and we walked out to the Buick. I noticed a scratch on the front bumper and ran my hand over it, pointing for him to look. He became furious and slapped me hard.

“Look what you just did!” He bellowed.

“Forget the shoes!” I was crying.

“Get in the car!” His face was boiling.

I was scared of his hands.

He silently drove us for the first time to the Niskayuna Police Station. He told me to follow him inside.

“What can I do with this boy?” My father asked the staring officer at the desk. 

“What’s he done?” 

“He’s too much for me to handle.”

“There are homes where he can be placed if that’s the case.”

We left. He had taught me a lesson, smart boy that I was. 

“You heard what the police officer said, didn’t you?” 

We never got the shoes that day. I began pitching an escape.

April 4th

May 7, 2023 / / 1 Comment

By John Hargraves.

It was a Spring Day. I could smell the rain walking home from sixth grade at Van Antwerp. The sun was shining as it sprinkled. The next day I would learn that Martin Luther King Jr had been shot. My sister would be back home from Hawaii and my brother from Montana.  My father had made the calls. I was feeling good.

A week before, she was standing by the kitchen table. It trickled down her leg and a warm yellow puddle widened at her feet. She was nodding her head toward the right, moving her lips, and not making a sound. My father would take his first action after doing a week’s worth of dishes in the bathtub. He called Dr. Z.  

“Sugar diabetes can do this,” my father quoted the doctor. She went straight to Ellis, and they had started insulin. But the next day the nurses said a neurologist was needed because there were seizures. 

They found a brain tumor the size of an orange. My father told me the neurosurgeon was good and had worked for six hours straight. There was a risk of blindness because of where it had been.  But my father was glad because she woke up and could count his fingers. “We’ll get your mother back the way she used to be,” he said. She hadn’t been like that for a long time, so it made me hopeful. I went to school the next day. 

I hastened down Palmer from Story Avenue, past Grand Boulevard, The Plaza, and Plum Street to our first floor flat. After skipping up the gray front porch steps, I pulled the aluminum storm door open. Turning the brass knob, I pushed the heavy wooden door and stepped inside.

They were all in the living room. My sister turned to me with a sad grimace, “Mom died.” My father, crying, put me into an uncomfortable and unaccustomed hug. “It’s just you and me now son.” 

Then my sister explained how the hospital that morning had asked for them to come down. 

“The patient died but the operation was a success,” is what my father heard just before he fainted. “He really said that, the neurosurgeon,” my father croaked.

The back bedroom was mine and I went there. On the wall was my mother’s crucifix with Jesus on it. I had kneeled there earlier all week to beg and bargain. Now I was very mad. That lasted a long time. My sister said I should have cried.

Unhanging the Crepe

April 2, 2023 / / 2 Comments

By John Hargraves.

After driving nearly an hour, I arrived Saturday morning to start my twenty-four-hour shift. The Schoharie Valley was quiet, unlike the time when a small plane crashed. But that’s another story. My handoff was singing in Russian as he showered. This was back in the day when rural hospitals were happy to get anyone with a medical license for twenty bucks an hour.

Soft cries welled up from the family waiting area. In the empty ER she was lying on the gurney in the corner. Her breaths were shallow, and she was unconscious. Thin and emaciated, their matriarch was fading in God’s waiting room.

“What’s up?” I asked the triage nurse nodding toward the corner.

“She’s already admitted,” she said. “We’re waiting for the bed. He wrote the orders. DNR. Diagnosis CVA. The family’s been told. We’ve hung the crepe. She’s been unconscious since arrival. Otherwise, it’s a good morning. Go ahead and get coffee before we get busy.”

“Any labs back yet?”

“They should be back soon.”

I reviewed the ABCs: airway, breathing, circulation. All presently intact. It’s hard to do a localizing neuro exam on a comatose patient. 

“Give me an amp of D50.” 

“We know she’s not a diabetic.”

“Never hurts though.  It’s coma protocol .” 

I placed the needle of the syringe into the KVO line and emptied the ampule of glucose.

Elbow points against the sheets shimmered. The chest rose higher, and her head moved, startled. 

“Please get the family! And are those labs back yet?”

A soft hymn of tears entered the room, then quieted and erupted into a blissful chorus.

“Blood glucose was 29 milligram percent doctor.”

He peered in fresh and clean. I turned to him and spoke in English.

“Doctor, you’ll need to rewrite your orders.”

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