Chapter 13 of 13
The book closes the way a long, good conversation closes — the talk loosening into whatever comes to mind. A fig tree in the yard whose old trunk died and which throws up green branches anyway. The aches of age. The world changed past all recognition in sixty years, and not, to John’s mind, always for the better.
There is no tidy summing-up here, because he is not a summing-up kind of man. There is only what he keeps circling back to: a gratitude he says he never earned, a wife he credits with the whole of it, a faith he would hand to the children ahead of anything else, and the one line he has used his entire life for the entire thing. Here for a good time. He has had one, and he will tell you so himself.
There’s a fig tree out in my yard, and that tree died. The old part of it, the main trunk, it died right out on me. But you know what it did. It just kept throwing up new branches off the side of it, beautiful green branches, like nothing at all had happened. The old tree is still standing in there. You just can’t see it anymore. It’s hiding. I look at that tree some days and I think, well, there you are. That’s about the size of it.
Because I’m in that zone now, and I’ll say it plain. When you get to be my age it seems like every morning you wake up and everything hurts. That’s the part that isn’t much fun. Everything hurts when you get old, and there’s no getting around it. That old bricklayer had it right, the way he told it — young you’re all flexible except the one joint, old you’re all stiff except the one. You’re too young yet to know what that’s all about.
And my memory, that’s the other thing. I can tell you about something that happened sixty years ago like it was this morning — every detail of it, every name. But ask me what happened yesterday and I haven’t got a clue. It’s gone. That’s frustrating, I’ll tell you. What I figure I need is a new brain. A new computer up top, because this one’s run its warranty out.
But I can still eat like a cow, I’ll say that. I eat and eat and eat and look at me, thin as a rail, always have been. Plain food, mind you — porridge, a piece of toast, an egg, some potatoes. None of this popcorn and nacho business. You eat plain and you keep moving, that’s the whole secret to it. Because here’s the thing nobody wants to hear: you sit and do nothing, your body goes right down the drain. Just like that. I’ve watched it happen. A man retires and sits in his house and that’s the end of him. Not me. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Nettie and I go to the gym in the morning. Then I come home and it’s coffee time. And then, well, then it’s nap time. In between I’ve always got the fence or some little thing, and I do it a section at a time, no hurry on it. Now that I’m retired, no employees, no jobs to chase down, my blood pressure’s come right down too. Hardly any stress at all anymore. I’m a happy man to have that whole business behind me.
Coffee with the old guys is worth something at my age — the BS and the laughs both. But after all these years here, most of my life now, I’ll still catch myself feeling like a foreigner at that table. I can feel it. I do. A foreigner, right here.
This spring we drove out to Medicine Hat for the granddaughters’ graduation, the twins. Two evenings of it. And I’ll be honest with you — if it hadn’t been for those girls I wouldn’t have gone at all. You sit there, and you sit there, and the speakers get up one after another, and it’s near enough the same speech every time. You listen to the same thing over and over. Four hundred of them graduating — four hundred — and that was just from the one school. Can you feature that? And our two, on account of the last name coming near the end of the alphabet, they were set way back in the second-to-last row. So you couldn’t very well get up and slip out halfway, could you. You had to sit it right through to the end just to lay eyes on them.
And the second evening was worse yet. They come in and they all sit down, nice enough. Then all of a sudden they’ve got to get up and go behind a curtain — I don’t know for the life of me why they’ve got to go behind a curtain — and then out they come again, one at a time, walking by real slow. Marching, they call it. That’s the word for it. Marching. Showing off their clothes is nearer the truth of it, like a fashion show. Now if I lived out there I’d have had a thing or two to say about it. But there you are. We survived it. And I was glad to be there for the girls, I truly was.
Can you imagine how much has changed in sixty years? When I was a boy it was wagons and oxen, and one telephone line shared the whole length of the road. Now every soul is walking around with a phone in his pocket. The whole technology of it, in sixty years. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think it’s getting better. I think it gets worse. Take the roads. In 1968, you drove into Vancouver of an evening, ten o’clock at night, you had the whole highway to yourself. Not another car. Now it can take you two hours to make a drive we used to do in fifty minutes. Two hours. Everybody in a hurry and nobody getting anywhere.
And if I went back to the place I grew up, that colony down in Paraguay, I wouldn’t know where I was. It’s all paved now, police and the whole works, like a city. You’d stand there and say, where the heck am I. I haven’t got anybody down there anyhow. Nobody knows me and I don’t know a soul. I had ninety cousins at one time — ninety — and thirty-some of them are already gone. They’re putting on a big reunion down there, a hundred years since the Mennonites first came, and they asked would I go. No. I won’t go. We’re stubborn people, Mennonites. I call them stubborn Mennonites, and I’m one of them, so I’m allowed to say it. What’s down there for me to go back to?
I’ll tell you what I don’t understand about the way things run now. The police. Nobody respects the police anymore. Everybody figures a policeman has got to be perfect, never put a foot wrong — well, that’s not true, is it. They’re only human. Same as you and me. No wonder they can’t get a soul to take the job. And the driving. People speed like the devil, weaving in and out — you’re going to kill somebody driving that way. You are. I saw enough down in Los Angeles that one time to be glad every day I came home to this. We’ve got it good up here and people don’t know what they’ve got. And yet they’ve made everything so safe over here you can’t get a thing done. I couldn’t be a framer today, not a chance. You can’t so much as stand on a roof now without a harness and a rope tied onto you. The stupid laws they’ve got. I framed houses my whole life on my own two feet, the good Lord and I, and we managed just fine.
Now I had my fill of rules growing up. The church back there kept a holiday, three days of it, and if a man worked on the second or the third day, they told him he’d go to hell for it. To hell — for working. And you know what, that’s not anywhere in the Bible. I looked. It isn’t in there. People make up their rules and then they hang you with them. That’s not the faith I hold to. The faith I hold to is simpler than all that, and it’s bigger. There’s still millions of people in this world who’ve never once heard about Jesus. Millions. That’s the thing I think about. I had a native fellow ask me, down in Paraguay, why God didn’t send the Mennonites sooner, because his own folks died never knowing a thing about it. I didn’t have an answer for him right then. But when I sit and think on it — the hard road that brought us all down there, every bit of it — I figure there was a reason. There’s always a reason, even when you can’t see it for looking. So when the little ones come around, I tell them. My great-grandson Lincoln, he’s all baseball, that boy, baseball morning to night. And I told him:
“Lincoln, you’d better get yourself ready and go preach the gospel. You go tell people about Jesus. That’s more important. That’s more important than baseball.”
And here’s the whole truth of it. The Lord has blessed me left and right, more than I ever deserved, and I know it. I’m a thankful man. People look at what we’ve got and they think, oh, John, isn’t he a smart one. It’s not just me. If it wasn’t for Nettie we wouldn’t be sitting in a house like this. You have to have a wife who’s with you all the way — out in front of you, half the time, pulling. Whatever I built, I built it with her. I made my mistakes along the way, plenty of them. But that’s how a man learns — you make the mistake and it teaches you, and it teaches you better yet if somebody’s good enough to tell you about it. And you never, ever let on that you know everything. I never pretended I knew it all. That’s exactly how I came to learn what I learned. If you want to get somewhere in this life there’s no secret to it — you work hard. That’s the whole of it. You have to work hard to get there.
As for the marriage — well. You only really find out who a person is once you’ve gone and married them. Things come up you never knew were there. Both ways, I’d expect. We were so young when we did it, so young and so green, we didn’t have the first idea. But you grow up together, that’s the thing. And a man can call himself the lord of his own house all he wants — that title doesn’t come free with the wedding. You earn it. You earn the respect, day by day, or you don’t have it at all.
People ask where we’ll go from here, Nettie and me. This house was the right house once — a big family, always somebody in it, always something going on. That doesn’t happen anymore, and those stairs get harder every day. So we’ll downsize, we know that much. Nettie’s started in about a townhouse. I don’t want a townhouse. What I’d like is just a house, flat, no stairs to climb. I’ve built enough for one life. And the kids are after us to move out to Alberta, to be closer to them. There’s family out that way that wants us near. It’s a nice little town. Part of me would go. But it’s a big move to make at our age, and you give up every friend you’ve got, and a man doesn’t get those back once he’s old. So I told the family, “Let’s deal with my surgery first. One thing at a time.” Once we know where we stand, we’ll make the decision, and not before. They even talked about all of us buying one big place together, with a separate unit in it just for Nettie and me, so they could look after us. That’s no small thing to hear, that they want to take care of you — after a whole life of you taking care of them.
I could live in Mexico, you know. I’ve thought about it more than once. The heat of it, the people, the land — it all feels like Paraguay to me, I believe I’d feel at home inside a week. But that won’t happen. I know it won’t. I’ll stay right here, where I am, till the day comes. And then it’ll be whatever it’s going to be.
People wonder how a man my age, with this thing ticking away in my chest, can be so easy about all of it. Well, I’ve got my theory about that granite room the Lord’s building me up there, and His contractor being behind on the supply. The day that room’s ready He’ll come and take me, and not one minute before. So there’s no use at all in worrying about it.
Here for a good time — that’s always been my line for it. And I’ve had one. I’ve enjoyed my life, every bit of it, the aches and all. I surely have.