A Smile in the Dark

In a recent post, Mr. Schprock contemplated his mortality in The Human Condition, which inspired me to comment on his blog that he had inspired me to borrow yet again from him for one of my own blogs. That was approximately 11 hours before I actually sat down to write and, frankly, I can't remember what aspect of his post I was going to spin off.

But I have spent the day thinking about what he wrote, and what is in my mind right now is a whirl of thoughts: some I've had for a while, some I hadn't thought about in a long, long time, and some that Schprock rattled loose in my brain today. I've been planning a post about my elderly father, but I'm going to need a large chunk of time for that one. I've also been mulling a post about my dog, also "elderly." What it all seems to be centering around right now is the sense, and the fear, of loss. I know I'm looking at the last years of my father's life. My dog, the first ever that was all my own, and which I've had since she was eight weeks old, is probably in her last year of life. My wife and I had to have her dog put down in the summer of 2004, and losing him was like losing my own.

I guess the first real sense of loss I ever felt was when a neighborhood friend died. I was probably around age 14 or 15. I come from a large family, so the concept of losing a loved one wasn't new. My paternal grandmother passed away when I was six years old. Four years later my father's brother died from lung cancer at age 55. Though these people were family, I wasn't all that close to them. Each of their deaths was a shock, and there was sadness in my heart, but I didn't really know them all that well. They weren't a part of my daily life.

I was an active kid, running all over my neighborhood playing with other kids on a summer day until night fell, and my mother would have to call me in. I was age ten or so. These were the heady days of the 1970s, when kids fell out of trees and got hit by cars and fell off their bikes...and nobody was sued over it.

Mr. Martin lived at the other end of the block from us, in the second house from the end. He lived alone, with the exception of his dog, Shep, and I would often see Mr. Martin walking with Shep up or down the block, on their way to the local grocery store or to the bakery. I never saw Mr. Martin without Shep. No one ever did. Mr. Martin was blind, and Shep was his guide dog. That's today's term. Mr. Martin told me that Shep was his "seeing-eye" dog. I have always loved dogs, so whenever I was outside and I saw Mr. Martin, I called to him and talked, and patted Shep on the head. Shep was a good-natured German Shepherd, as all guide dogs need to be (good natured, not necessarily German Shepherds), and she always accepted her head pats with appropriately subdued joy.

I was intrigued by the obedience displayed by Shep, and I was amazed that Shep wasn't just listening and following Mr. Martin's orders, but she was acutely aware of the world around them, and was actively guiding and protecting her master. As they approached a street Shep would halt. If Mr. Martin tried to step into the street when a car was coming, she would hold him back until the danger was gone. If there was an obstacle on the ground before them, she would guide him around it. So I was drawn to the pair whenever they were out.

One summer Saturday when I was near death from boredom, my mother suggested I walk down the street to see if Mr. Martin needed to have his lawn mowed, and to offer to do so if he did. I figured he already had someone else doing it for him, but I followed her suggestion, anyway. I knocked on his door and asked him, and he told me that he was just about to do that himself.

Huh? How could a blind man mow his own lawn? I actually pictured this crazy cross-hatch pattern in the yard with tufts of wildly growing grass untouched all summer long. Mr. Martin walked to his garage (there was even a car in there, but he told me he didn't drive it much anymore!) and pulled out the lawn mower. He then went back into the garage and dragged out a section of extension ladder, the kind you lean up against your house to get up really high. I watched him as he laid the ladder on the ground and felt along it to make sure that it was lying parallel to the sidewalk. Then he pulled the one end until it reached the walk to his front step. He started up the mower and maneuvered it over to the ladder and pushed the wheels against the ladder rail. He then pushed the mower along the ladder, cutting a perfectly straight line to the end of the ladder. Next he grabbed the ladder by the side farthest from where he had just cut, flipped the ladder over onto the freshly mowed patch, and then ran the mower back along the edge, cutting the next strip. He did this, maneuvering the ladder down the length of the yard and following the same pattern until the grass was all cut. He came up to me and said that he was certain there were strips and clumps of grass that he had missed, and that he would be happy to let me take the mower and cut them for him. I finished that, and he invited me in for a glass of ice water. I asked if he had any "pop," and he told me he was diabetic, so he couldn't have that stuff in the house.

I was amazed at how self-sufficient the man was: he cooked for himself, he washed his own clothes, he did his own shopping. He told me that whenever he cashed a check (I would imagine now that it was Social Security, or perhaps a pension or disability -- he lost his sight in adulthood) he asked the teller at the bank to identify the bills for him, and then he would bend the corners of the bills according to their denomination so he knew what he was handing to a store clerk. And at the store he would ask the clerk to then identify the bills in change for him so he could do the same thing.

I peppered Mr. Martin with hundreds of questions, and he answered all of them with good cheer and a smile. I regularly stopped by to help him mow his lawn or sometimes read his mail to him. He showed me his braille typewriter and gave me a basic lesson in the Braille alphabet. I began to visit him just to visit. During the summer it was probably once every other day or so. In the winter it was more difficult, but I would stop by on weekends every once in a while.

One summer day I was playing "guns" with a bunch of the kids in the neighborhood. This particular time it was sort of like hide-and-seek with toy guns. If one of the other kids saw you, pointed his gun at you and yelled "POW," or "BANG!" or made his own trademark sound effect for a gunshot, then you were out. It was no-bounds, so that meant it wasn't confined to someone's yard, or a block of yards. It covered the whole block, both sides of the street. I had sneaked down the alley and let myself in to Mr. Martin's back yard, but he was on his back porch and heard me open the gate. He called out to see who it was, and when he heard my voice he welcomed me in. I told him that I was hiding from my friends, and he invited me to stay a while. I neglected to tell him that we were playing guns, and while we sat in his kitchen drinking ice water, I pulled my realistic toy pistol from my pocket. Suddenly Shep started barking and growling in that plaintive way nice dogs will do. She was pretty old and didn't move from her spot, but she made quite a racket. Mr. Martin yelled at her to quiet down, but she wouldn't. Finally he asked me if I was doing something she didn't like. I told him that I didn't think so. Then he asked me if I had anything in my hands, and I told him I had my toy gun. Mr. Martin smiled and said, "Give it to me, please." I did, and Shep stopped howling immediately and lay her head back down to the floor. Thus disarmed, I finished my ice water, chatted for a little while longer with Mr. Martin, and then I made my way back to my friends.

The next summer I paid Mr. Martin a visit, and Shep was gone. When I asked him about her he told me that he had to take her to the vet to put her out of her misery. That was probably the first time I ever heard that phrase. I asked him if he was going to get another dog, but he said no, that he was too old, and that it would take him too long to get used to a new dog. I asked him how he got around without her, and he told me that one of his sons came around every few days to bring him things or to take him places. I remember he looked very sad and lonely.

It was merely a coincidence of time and timing: my age, advancing to junior high school, meeting a new core of friends and having more things to do and places to go during the summers, but I gradually stopped visiting Mr. Martin. I was approaching my teenage years, and he was just an old guy down the street. He didn't need some gangly kid coming around all the time.

A couple more years and I was in high school. I couldn't recall the last time I had ever seen Mr. Martin. Then one day my mother told me that Mr. Martin had passed away. She was going to pay her respects at his wake, and she asked me if I wanted to go with her. I can't recall today the reason I declined, but I didn't go. I remember thinking that I wasn't affected by the news of his death. It was a shame, and all that, but I didn't really know him.

When my mother returned from the funeral home I asked how it was, were there a lot of people there. She told me that it was just his sons and a few people from the neighborhood. I know she didn't say it in this order to cause me guilt; my mother wasn't wired that way. But she told me that she remembered how I used to go down to his house all the time, and then I didn't visit him any more. He died a very lonely man.

And suddenly the burden of the man's final, lonely years bore down on my shoulders. I felt that I could have, at the very least, dulled the sting of his loneliness by stopping in for a visit every now and then, like I did when I was a little kid. But I didn't, and his life in the dark was intensified by silence and solitude. I remember that night. When everyone else was asleep I lay in bed thinking about Mr. Martin, wishing I could turn back time, wishing I had not been such a selfish teenager, wishing I had spent more time lighting Mr. Martin's darkness. Grief and shame were upon me. I sobbed into my pillow for what felt like hours. It wasn't that I felt responsible for his loneliness, but I sure felt like I had done nothing to ease it. And, deep down inside me I realized I had lost a friend, someone I had cared about, someone who had, by mere, humble example, taught me important lessons, not about life, but about living, about playing the hand you're dealt with dignity and self respect.

A sign of how powerfully I feel his loss and my guilt to this day: I've spent the last half-hour writing through tears. I haven't thought about Mr. Martin, not in any depth, for several years. But whenever I do think about him, I remember mowing his lawn, Shep, and the incident with the toy gun. And I remember lying there the night of his wake, crying uncontrollably, grappling with the pain of my own ignorance.