December 14, 2006
Thursday 

In our deepest moments, we say the most inadequate things.
             — Edna O’Brien, b. 1930
                 Irish fiction writer, from “Sister Imelda” 

As I said back in November, these are the days when I am in the Giant every day, although I haven’t yet had a two-times day. And every single time this week I’ve seen someone I know.

This afternoon it was Carol. I spotted her instantly as I turned down the baking needs aisle in search of bread flour. Carol lost her husband very suddenly in October. It was the second of the four husband deaths that occurred in my circle this fall. It was a hard, tragic death, our pastor said when he told the congregation, adding “and I hope I don’t have to say anything else about that.”

I don’t know Carol well. She and her husband traveled a lot on behalf of the many lay ministries they were part of. They were warm, well-liked people, so active in denominational affairs that we had to borrow a larger church to accommodate all those who wished to pay their last respects. I helped set up for the luncheon, but I had to leave before the last line of the last hymn in order to get to one of Lynn’s hockey games, and so didn’t have the opportunity to talk to the family then. Carol was in church on All Saints’ Sunday, the day we read the names of all of our members and friends who have died in the past year, but it was crowded that day too and I left without having the chance to talk to her. Or maybe without making the chance.

Carol was bent over, almost on her knees, reaching into the back of the bottom shelf of the flours section. What do you say to a recent widow, a young one (she’s not quite 62), in the baking needs aisle of the supermarket during the season of fruitcake and fa-la-la? I could have easily reached over her head, grabbed a sack of Ceresota Unbleached Forever, and been on my way without her seeing me. But I waited until she stood up, and I greeted her. And I did it because in 1963 I failed to do so for someone else.

I was in tenth grade that spring. Stewart was a year ahead of me. He was the first boy I’d ever kissed, under the mistletoe at a Christmas party when I was in eighth grade. Our parents knew each other, and he was friends with my cousin. In those days I nursed a crush on him, fueled by the infrequency with which I saw him, since he went to a boarding school and was around only on vacations. Somehow the interest didn’t last much past that one year, and when he enrolled in my high school two years later I said hello to him from time to time but otherwise didn’t move in the same crowd.

Stewart’s father operated a convenience store at a busy corner in the city near the capitol complex, and they lived over the shop. The father was murdered one night in a robbery, an event that marked for certain the feeling in town that the neighborhood was declining and the city with it. It was the event that would send my parents looking for a house in the suburbs.

I passed that store every day on my way to school. We’d drop my mother off at the capitol complex where she worked for the Department of Education. Then my father would drop me off at my school about a mile farther on before continuing on to the suburban school district where he taught.

Several mornings after Stewart’s father was murdered, I saw Stewart crossing the street as we stopped for the light at the intersection. I knew it was his first morning back at school since the tragedy. I also knew that he was going to be very late, since the bell was going to ring in five minutes and I myself was going to be cutting it close.

We should stop for him, I thought. It’s a long walk and he’ll be late. He’ll have to go to the office and get a pass, and then be conspicuous when he joins his first period class. When the light changed and we began to move forward I opened my mouth to say something to my father, and then changed my mind. Even the formidable Mother Francoise won’t give Stewart detention for being late today, I told myself. And he has to go to the office anyway to present his excuse for being absent. (“Dear School: Please excuse Stewart’s absence this past week. He was helping his mother with his father’s funeral.”) And what would I say to him anyway? Would there be an awkward moment when he focused on who was calling to him from a car, when he tried to remember who I was, while traffic swerved around us and my father became impatient? After how are you and I’m sorry, what would we talk about on the ride up the hill and the walk into school?

So I didn’t say anything, and we drove by, my father unaware that he was leaving undone a good deed that he surely would have wanted to perform had he known the opportunity was there.

I never forgot that incident. It is behind my efforts to train Lynn early in the social graces of condolence visits and sympathy letters. (At four she wrote such a letter to one of her grandmother’s friends whose dog had died, recalling fond memories of little Peaches and offering Christian consolation. The woman had it framed.) I told myself I would never let such an opportunity pass again, that I would never again fail to greet a bereaved person and try to say the right thing. In these forty-three years I probably have missed a time or two. I didn’t want today to be another.

When Carol stood up I said hello to her. I started to say who I was but she greeted me by name. We hugged briefly. I said the usual clichéd and inadequate things: How are you? and I’ve been thinking of you. She smiled, gave the appropriate responses, indicated her basket full of chopped walnuts and candied cherries and a ten-pound sack of flour. “I’m baking today,” she said. “Christmas cookies.” “Watch out for after,” I said, as if I knew. “It’s hard for everyone. All the vacancies of January, Linda Pastan calls it,” quoting poetry to her! She said she’d be going to South America on a trip she and her husband had planned with friends. “I’m going anyway,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

Tears welled up in her eyes then. We both smiled, and turned the conversation to where on earth do they keep the golden raisins, and won’t dark raisins do just as well in my baba au rhum. After they’ve soaked in the rum, who will be able to tell the difference, and who will care?

Forty-three years ago I didn’t do the right thing. Today, I think, I did. At least I hope so. 

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