Settling in to Wait for God

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

HILLSBOROUGH, NC—(Weekly Hubris)—10/11/10—In personality, my wife, Margie, is no Diana, nor I Tom, but in situation we, too, are waiting for God in a retirement center, ours located in Burlington, North Carolina, a hop, skip, and jump from Hillsborough, our home for the past 15 years.

Readers of my earlier columns will recall that Hillsborough’s ambiance is literary. Burlington’s is not. Its bizness is bizness, though its nearness to Elon University means a chance to hear something literary, dramatic, or musical from time to time.

But literary or not, Burlington must become the place where I write, for Margie and I now perch in a fifth-story apartment, one high enough to put us above the flight path of a flock of Canadian geese, a dozen of which graze and defecate on a lawn out front and do their wellness exercise by beating their wings and honking their way from lawn to pond several times a day. So close do they come to our apartment that we encounter them eyeball to eyeball as they fly by. That experience may grow old but, so far, it’s been far more acceptable than having Bambi devour my rosebuds. Of Bambi or squirrels, we see nothing now.

Instead, we see lots and lots of old folks, and that’s something new for me. As a professor at Clemson University and, later, as a visiting prof at UNC-Chapel Hill and a frequent user of the UNC library after my teaching days were over, I had grown used to living among teenagers and 20-somethings. A grizzly prof or elderly home-comers sometimes presented faces and limbs of age in the youthful world in which I moved and had my being. But I dismissed them as misfits.

Somehow, they had not quaffed of the Fountain of Youth. Seemingly, I had.

Or thought I had. Fifteen years away from intramural softball, hundreds and hundreds of hours raking leaves and mowing lawns, trying to outsmart squirrels and find some plant a deer wouldn’t eat, and nursing Margie back to health after falls and infections evaporated every ounce in my bottle filled at the Fountain of Youth.

At 77, my mirror balked at lying to me. Undeniably, I looked as old as my high school classmates at our reunions. “Pay heed to the calendar,” the mirror chuckled. “You ain’t young no more.” (My mirror always insists on using my native Blue Ridge dialect.)

Being a voice of reason also, the mirror said, “Hie thee to a retirement center.” (My mirror also likes echoing Shakespeare, and thus addressed me pointedly: “Thou hast no choice but to forsake these familiar haunts and seek a habitation elsewhere.”)

“Damn your practicality!” I rebutted. “I’m too young to be shunted off to an old-folks’ home.”

Too young or not, here I am, settling in among old folks preparing to go, perhaps unwillingly, into that good night, many of them ambling along on their own legs, some depending on wheelchairs, some leaning on walkers, some dashing about on scooters, with horns far too quiet to alert even those of us with fair hearing.

To fill their days with something besides eating and chatting, they have several choices of things to do: needlework, reading, serving on committees, volunteering to work with persons with special needs, taking day trips to sites of local interest, or heading off campus for travel to such places as Bermuda.

Getting here was, for Margie and me, a tough job; the hardest part downsizing from a four-bedroom home in Hillsborough to a two-bedroom apartment. Loads of stuff went to Goodwill, many loads to relatives, a venerable piano to a neighbor, a major collection of books by and about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Wolfe to Appalachian State University. Out went over half our wardrobes and even our wedding china and crystal. Yet, with all the jettisoning we did, our place here is still crowded. More hard decisions await us. What else can we bear to toss?

Packing up and moving involved not only household goods and clothing but also the loss of a favorite project: a fern garden and amble in our backyard. Since ferns rank low on a deer’s food chain, I started a fern garden a decade ago, collecting plants from Lowe’s and Home Depot, local nurseries, Internet vendors, and my Blue Ridge farm. I took much pride in fostering their growth and much joy in showing them off to friends and relatives. They amply repaid me for all the sweat I shed for them. Leaving them cut deeply into my Waldenian instincts. My hope for them is that a committed fern-lover buys our place.

My amble among them, on a path of pebbles, took me by rocks I’d gathered from the Idol family homestead in Deep Gap, a couple of them cornerstones for a log barn built by my great grandfather, John Nicholson Idol. Before my property passes to other hands, I will remove these long-serving stones and return them to the family farm.

Meanwhile, I must decide how to while away my time, for nothing situationally funny seems to call on Margie and me to do our best imitation of Diana and Tom. So will it be shuffleboard, jigsaw puzzles, exercises at the wellness center, or something else to fill our hours?

Or, perhaps, for me, trips to the Blue Ridge to enjoy ferns prospering on my acreage there will be a boon of inestimable worth.

This I do know, I’m not going to pull a Bartleby and turn my face to a wall. If my fingers will work and my mind remains sane enough to turn a sensible sentence, I’ll write, write, write.

If all goes as well as I’d like, my final move will be the assisted act of settling my remains comfortably into an urn. Before that happens, however, I’d like to tap out “fini” on my keyboard.