Jr., A Parable

This week, a friend and neighbor of mine, who shares my passion for theater, lost his mother. The event brought to mind this parable, which I like to pair with Hamlet's words, spoken toward the end of his play, regarding the timing of his own imminent death: "Ripeness is all..."

Jr., 1999

The hospital's north side faced the parking ramp. In front of this ramp stood a utility pole. And beside the utility pole (chained to it, in fact) was the Post-Trib machine. The front door of the dispenser was of cracked plexiglass, more or less transparent to the headlines. Was today's newspaper worth a buy? Well the window was there, and the headlines were there, to help a reader such as Norman Jr. decide.

Now, his father, more than once, had told him that he actually watched out the window every afternoon--in order to catch sight of him, Norman Jr., ransoming the daily from the machine, and then coming up to read the paper to him in his hospital room.

Norman Jr. liked the idea, of his father watching and waiting for him to show up with the news. It was such the opposite of the way it had been way back when he was a kid. Back then it was his dad who was the arriving one,  and back then it was he, Norman Jr., who would jump up from his alphabet blocks or red wagon or the television, and scamper to the front door, in order to hug the stout trees of his father’s legs and gaze up into the mysterious green leaves of his father’s bearded face. Then he would beg to know what his dad had done that day and what it was like out there in his dad’s world. But now, these days see, it was just the other way around. Now it was he, Norman Jr., who by reading the news aloud, could give to his father the gift of the news of the world: the world beyond his hospital room. The world beyond the utility pole and the parking ramp. The world beyond.

Of course, there was something sad about the change. But it was right too. This was just the way things went: roles always reversing themselves. Responsibilities changing hands. The globe itself turning daily on its axis.

So there he was that day, standing in front of the newspaper machine and looking in through the window of the machine at the headlines, with maybe his dad looking on from above. And this was the headline:

Norman Breezes, Sr., Passes at 5:34

That was really the headline. How it got there nobody knows. But Norman looked at his wristwatch: five o’clock. Okay. Okay. There was still time. Just barely, but still time.

He would just go in as usual. Go in and up the stairs. He would nod to the nurse at the third floor desk. Enter the room where his father lay. Smile. Sit down beside the bed in the armchair there. And, just as he had been doing for some weeks now--just read him the news.

HB