Around the Bend

When we were finishing the film about Mr. Jimmy Moore, my composer, John Keith, had the great idea to base the musical score on Mr. Jimmy's own footsteps.  John sampled his footfalls, using Jimmy's natural rhythm to give rise to the film's up-beat sound.

This May I got nervous as I searched for Mr. Jimmy on the crowded fluorescent-lit corridor at the VA nursing home.  The residents who could walk shuffled, gripping rails along the walls; many were wheelchair-bound.  What if he'd declined so much I couldn't recognize him?   But then he appeared. Though his face had aged a lot, I could never mistake the rhythm of that gait.

Mr. Jimmy passed away a few days before this Christmas.  His decline was rapid, according to his family, brought on by pneumonia, itself probably brought on by aspirating a food particle into his lungs.  It's painful for me to imagine Mr. Jimmy, who loved breathing hard on his runs, struggling to breathe and restrained to a bed.  Was he frightened?  I wish I could ask him how he felt, what he wanted, what he understood to be God's will in it all, what the final moment was like.  He  spoiled me by sharing so much about the defining moments of his life until now--including what it was like to lose his grip on his memory.  I grew to depend on him as a guide for life.

I am really struggling to say goodbye to my dear friend.  I slip into that particular form of magical thinking afforded by distance to pretend he is still "out there," and would answer my call, if I could just dig up the right phone number.  I enact the call in my imagination.  He would answer with his usual enthusiasm, "Well, HEY, Samantha!  How ARE you!?"  ("Hah are yew!?")  Before hanging up, he'd say, "You'll never know how much your call means to me.  I love you!"  ("Ah luuv yew!")

In between we might talk about things like running (of course) -- what to do about tight hamstrings?  How best to train for a marathon?  Should I run through a sore knee or plantar fasciitis?  What kinds of cross-training are best?   The merits of meat vs. vegetarian diets.   Or how running marathons helped prepare me for giving birth.  (I can still hear him chuckling during that one!)

Or about matters of faith and worship, where he remained an independent thinker.   (Though many of his fellow Southern Baptists eschewed alcohol, Mr. Jimmy believed Jesus wouldn't have turned water into wine if wine were evil.)  We might talk about Jewish and Christian ways of seeking a relationship with the divine.  Or about the relationship of doubt and faith.  In his reading of the Bible love trumped judgment.

Or about history-- lessons learned coming of age in the Great Depression (he theorized that the Depression was God's preparation for World War II, forging the fortitude his generation needed to fight and win.)  About the Mississippi of his childhood, the railroads, about cleaning up the mess the Germans made of Italian railroads, learning meditative techniques to survive intense pain and discomfort on transport ships across the Atlantic, and how such techniques can help in every- day life.  And about race -- about his hunting friendship with a Black man years ago, about the chasms between and shared fates of Blacks and Whites in Mississippi.

And always we'd talk about love and family-- How to handle constitutional differences with a spouse?  How to handle different stages with children?  What's the role of faith and Faith in marriage?   What was it like to say goodbye to his life partner?  What different kinds of love and friendship hold us in life after one's partner departs?

At the end of our chats, we'd usually remark again how unexpected it was to find such a friend in each other.  He'd be labeled a "Red-Stater," while I'd get branded a "Latte Liberal."  (What ridiculous labels!)  We were separated by 48 years.  His roots sank deep in rural Mississippi where he lived his whole life.  I can't get more Yankee, and I've wandered all over -- California, Mississippi, New York, Japan.  He attended community college, then devoted 42 years to dispatching on the railroad.  I've completed several degrees, and I'm still figuring out what color my parachute is.  When I moved in across the street on a short-term teaching assignment in 1992, we should have become nothing more than polite neighbors.  Instead he became one of my best friends. 

I recognize this point in The Story, when the protagonist has to say goodbye to the beloved mentor and step up to a new position in the Order of Things.  But I don't know exactly what that means, and I don't feel ready.  I am greedy for more -- more of his wisdom, his stories, his robust laughter and radiant smile, his quick footsteps that barely touched the earth, the comfort he provided that it's all going to work out down the road, around the bend.  From here on, I will need to listen for the rhythm of his footsteps to lead me where I can't yet see.