Replies

Let me share a story with you; I promise not to bore you.

In late spring of 1977 I had to leave my wife and son behind in California and make a trip to first, Ohio to meet my mom and then drive to West Virginia to my sister's house to go to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to be with my only sister while she underwent an operation for a brain tumor.

Growing up, my father's mother had doted on me at my sister's expense while my sister was the apple of my father's eye; in 1962, my father had gone fitfully to sleep one night after another in a series of weekly arguments with my long-suffering mother only to not awaken the following morning and, because of this, my sister had only me and my mother there for support at the hospital.

Day after day my mother and I made the 200 mile round trip to the hospital and my sister's house not knowing what the outcome might be.

We waited in the room common to all institutions complete with the unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the ever-present card table where people pretended to place the proper tile in its intended place.

For three days I watched as relatives of other patients picked up the tiles, worried them in their fingers and tried their best to make them fit where a piece must go or else the puzzle made no sense.

On the fourth day, they wheeled my sister into the operating room and we had no lunch that day while the jigsaw tiles lay unshuffled, abandoned with no one to force them into place.

Clocks run slow in rooms with no laughter or cries of sorrow and this day was no different as the clock on the wall seemingly moved back one full minute with each advance of the minute hand.

Still, the day went by in all its dull slowness until, at last, the doctor, who had been summoned all the way from Texas came in the room and sought out my mother and then turned to me with the news that my sister would be almost as good as new.

Well, that was good, I guess, but I asked him if it was cancerous and he said, it was not cancer but it was malignant for it couldn't be all removed.

He asked where my sister's father was and I said he had died almost 15 years earlier.

He said that my sister's first words after the surgery were, "Where's Daddy?."

After the doctor left the room I went back over to the abandoned puzzle and was casually sorting the tiles and just engaging in what used to be called a "brown study" when it suddenly occurred to me that there were two missing pieces.

I took one last look around the room before I took apart all but the borders of the puzzle, carefully scattered them about the table, smiled and then gathered up my mother and walked with a lighter step out the exit door.