Routine

Three times each day, I had to soak in a tub for half an hour. A Sitz bath, the doctor said. And that is how my morning started. I would rise and strip the bandage from my wound, and sit in a hot bath for half an hour. If you are going back to bed after rising, I have to admit, it is not a bad thing. After that, I would lie on my stomach under a heat lamp to dry the healing flesh. That is when my mother would show up ready for work. I would lie there as she went about the business of sprinkling the area with an antibiotic powder and then packing the incision with gauze.

"My, this is really deep. I don't know how it is going to heal," she said that first morning of our new routine. I had nothing to say. I could only trust that it would. I could not see the thing nor did I want to try with a series of mirrors. My mother's reactions were enough.

Before eight o'clock, she was gone, and I was left to lie on my little rubber donut to read or to watch the little 13" black and white television with it's four stations. And so life became a routine. Usually, I would fall back to sleep for awhile with the t.v. on until mid-morning when there were some reruns of old shows that I could watch, Andy Griffith, The Beverly Hillbillies, Dick Van Dyke, Bewitched, and That Girl. At noon, I would have to climb back into the tub once again and wait for my mother to arrive on her lunch break. And once again, she would repeat the cleaning and powdering and packing after which she would make us lunch. I was eating big double decker sandwiches loaded with meat, and cans of Campbell's soup, and fruit and cookies and whatever else she brought into the house. When she went back to work, there was nothing to watch on television, but I usually fell into a food coma and slept for much of the rest of the day. At five, when my mother got off work, we went through the routine yet again and then she would leave in a hurry to get home. Sometimes, my father would come by, but he lived a long distance from my apartment, so I saw him mainly on the weekends. And so as the sun would go down, I had the night to myself with a pile of books and magazines and the little black and white t.v.

This might have been maddening for someone else, but for me, it was not so unusual. I grew up an only child and was used to occupying myself and being alone. Still, there was a spookiness about lying in a bare apartment day and night, eating and watching t.v. and taking baths and sleeping. I got to know the rhythms of the apartment complex, the activity of people going to their cars in the mornings and coming home at night, the scraping of shoes on the sidewalks, the metallic grating of starters, the dying of engines, the hushed thumping of car doors. There was nothing to do but lay and wait.

So I was not unhappy when Sherri came by one evening as my mother was finishing up with me. My mother and I looked at one another after the knock on the door. I heard my mother say hello and then, "Go on in. He's in the bedroom."

I stared at the door frame, waiting.

"Hi," she beamed with that toothy smile. I thought I'd stop by to see how you were doing."

Living in the little cracker box house with my father, I had not had company at home for of years, and so I was more than a little awkward and not sure how to proceed.

"Hi. Come in." There were no chairs in the room, nor in the entire apartment for that matter, so I wiggled and said, "Here, you can sit on the bed."

And within a few moments, my mother said that she had to go. She had a look in her eye when she told me she'd see me in the morning. Then I heard the front door close. I looked at Sherri. She was beaming.