Night Walking

First, these old photos, one of my Dad and his sister Edna, in a field on their farm in Ontario in the early '20s. They are each holding a kitten. I think this is the only photograph I have of my father when he was a child.

The top one shows Dad four decades later, at the head of the family table in the late '60s. His first two grandchildren, Jim and Cara, are in this one.

It's now forty years later. He died in the early days of 1999.

***

I have reached the age my father was the year before I first became a father. By my age he had been a grandfather for fifteen years. I am scheduled to become one for the first time somewhere around the seventh anniversary of his death, quite possibly to the precise day.

A few days ago, the fourth anniversary of my mother's death came and went. It was also her own mother's birthday. She died in the middle of the day. He died in the middle of night.

My dad died the night before he was to meet my youngest child, Julia, who had been born two months earlier. On our recent trip to New York, she told me she is sad she never got to meet "Grandpa Tom." The morning after kissing her husband of 56.5 years goodbye, my mother came across the bridge from Ft. Myers to Sanibel and eagerly hugged little baby Julia...this was their first meeting.

Life and death, all compressed into such a short period. My mother didn't know it, but my second wife and I were fighting the night before, and she said she wanted to leave me; that she was never happy with me. I had gotten so depressed that I went out to a place to get something to salve my pain.

It was hard to wake up at 2 a.m. when the hotel manager banged loudly on our door. Her eyes were wide with terror as she told me: "It's your father. He's been taken to the hospital. It sounds serious."

It was serious. As I reached his bedside in the emergency room, he was unconscious, his body still convulsing leftward...a telltale sign that he had suffered a massive stroke. My Mom was there, frightened and disoriented. She had wakened up to the sound of him writhing on the floor, having been hurled out of bed by the violence of the stroke. He just kept repeating over and over one phrase: "I have to go...I have to go...I have to go."

She was so sleepy and confused that for a while, who knows how long, she just said, "You have to go where, Tom?" She didn't get what had happened, or why he wouldn't just stand up and get back into bed. Finally, still uncomprehending, she called her next-door neighbors. They rushed over, looked at my Dad, and called 9-1-1. They also called my hotel.

The doctors were relieved to see me arrive at the hospital, even in as disheveled a state as I obviously was. I had broken every NASCAR speed record over that causeway and over to Old Highway 49, one of my favorite roads in this country.

They didn't know how to tell my mother that her husband had absolutely no chance of surviving. After all, she was still at his side, talking to him, as if he would wake up soon and make everything okay. The head doctor took me aside and showed me the brain scans. The stroke was so extensive it had pushed his brain away from where it should have been; even if he somehow survived, he would have been no more than a vegetable.

So it was my job to explain this to my mother.

My mind drifted back to the drive there, before I knew that this was the end. I had so many memories of Highway 49 from so many years. Finally getting out of Georgia (where my only pleasure was "boiled peanuts") and into Florida! Finally streaking through the warm night with the windows down. The towns passing in the night. Towns that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (author of Cross Creek) had immortalized for me.

Then, nearer the coast, where the night air gets heavier and the ground fog starts to shroud travelers in mystery, other towns, some with marinas that had been the destination for sailboat races I'd participated in; offshore islands where I'd fished, eaten pink, fleshy, prickly pear fruit off cactuses (one of the most sensuous eating experiences you can ever have), while my lean, brown body was coated with sweat.

After almost dying in India from some combination of Typhoid Fever and Salmonella, I had been fortunate enough to retreat to these islands, courtesy of my first wife's family history. They had homesteaded a chunk of Sanibel Island. Her mother lived in the family cottage, on the Bay, facing the mainland.

Every afternoon that summer, I would drive across the island to the longest beach, which in those years, was always empty of people. I walked and walked, under the summer sun, rebuilding my strength. When I got too hot, I simply dipped into the Gulf of Mexico to cool off. Most of my body, except the part under my shorts, turned very brown. But one part of my body could not tan. It was my right rear thigh. Here, such huge doses of penicillin had been injected over and over, by Indian physicians, that I sported a huge purple bruise that I was very embarrassed about.

I'd weighed 160 pounds when I went into the Peace Crops; 133 pounds a year later, courtesy of all the dysentery that was inevitable in the Afghanistan of 1970. The diseases that ravished me in India left me weighing 97 pounds. The tiny nurses in Kerala nicknamed me "Gandhi."

Now, back in the U.S., walking the empty Bowman's Beach on Sanibel Island, I was rebuilding my strength so I could go forward and live -- for what, I suppose I was not sure. But this much I know. When my first wife said she wanted to have babies, I complied.

Later, when my second wife said she wanted to have babies, I complied.

Someone yesterday told me I must be a crazy man to have had six children.

Actually, if you believe in God, I came within a hair's breadth of dying in February 1971. For some reason, I did not die. My belief is that I saved myself. I did this by purposely slowing my heart rate (which was way over 200 -- I could hear the nurses' worried talking) to a level that wouldn't kill me. And somehow, magically, my body also stopped emitting fluids from every exit point, and also stopped rejecting the life-saving "drip" (intravenous fluids) that the doctors were desperately using to rehydrate me.

After all of this, and so much more (it took half a year to recover), I figured I was here for a purpose. Religion didn't grab me, but story telling did. For the longest time I have been a storyteller. I really hope these stories help other people surmount challenges and go on.

I did. And, miraculously, from a medical perspective, I'm still here, 35 years after I should by all accounts have perished.

That is the reason I have six kids. Do you now understand?

Tonight, as I walked two miles to and from another "curriculum night" at the school, these were the thoughts that came to me...

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