Philip Martin is on vacation. This column originally appeared on Dec. 28, 2008.
Yanko had to spend Christmas in a rehab hospital. His daughter Karen hated it, but what are you going to do?
Not that it was all that bad, though he probably should have been discharged a few days before. After all, they'd fixed his medicine, which was probably the problem in the first place. His doc at the V.A. had prescribed too much of it and it had worked too well at slowing down his heart rate.
They got him moving around pretty good and his breathing was OK, so he only had to use oxygen at night. They showed him how to walk in place if he couldn't get down to the mall and do his circuits with his cronies and flirt with the girls at the food-court McDonald's who sold them coffee at senior citizen rates.
The little patch of moisture in Yanko's lungs had cleared up and he felt pretty good--as good as you can feel if you make it to 91 years old. Yanko figured they could have sent him home.
But he knew why they didn't; the insurance company told the rehab hospital it would pay 100 percent of Yanko's bill for up to 20 days. (After that, Yanko would have to pay 20 percent of the bill.) It cost almost $1,000 a day to stay in the rehab hospital. Do the math. Yanko was going to stay for the whole 20 days.
Or he could sign himself out. But if he did that, the rehab hospital couldn't take any responsibility for what happened to Yanko. Geez oh pete, what a crummy business. They get you coming and going.
Not that Yanko was complaining. It was all right. He liked the doctors and the nurses and especially the physical therapy guys. He liked the exercises they had him do, and the food was good. There were plenty of people to talk to, because Yanko has never been a shy guy. And he was better off than most of the other patients.
His girlfriend Jean, who'd taken him to the regular hospital in the first place when he started having trouble breathing, lived close enough to the rehab hospital that she could come every day. And she did, except on those rare days when she couldn't get her head on straight. Yanko's sister Goldie came by too. So did brother Pete. And grandsons Nathan and Kirt.
Daughter Barb didn't come because she and her husband Carl are in Florida for the winter. And that's OK because she couldn't really do anything in Cleveland. She calls every day. So does Karen, who has a job in Arkansas and didn't even find out he was in the hospital until she called Barb after she couldn't get Yanko on the phone for a few days.
Yanko doesn't like the weekends at the rehab hospital because there's nobody around to make him do his exercises. Sure, he could he could still do his steps, even if he was sitting in a chair watching the Celtics and the Lakers, but it wasn't the same without anyone watching and encouraging him.
His neighbor was driving his car up and down Yanko's driveway a couple of times every day to track through the snow and make it look like someone was coming and going from Yanko's house.
Yeah, it was nice of him, but his neighbor's an old retired guy. What else did he have to do?
Bernice had all her family around her at Christmas.
Well, not all. Brother Mike died last year and brother Mandy the year before and brother Buddy the year before that. Mama was gone too, but that was a few years ago and had she not she'd be close to 100. So Bernice couldn't have expected to have her around, though you never really get used to someone's absence, even if it's something you understand and even count on.
Daddy has been gone almost 40 years. She still thought of him.
And her son, he wasn't there, though he'd called. And her youngest wasn't quite there; she was arriving the day after Christmas with granddaughter Nicole. The other granddaughter was there with her husband and her babies.
Sisters Lois and Patricia and Edith were there, Lois with husband Ken who was starting to look like a little old man with his gray mustache and crow's feet.
And daughter Jackie and her husband Porter, who live a few houses down, drove over with a carload of shiny wrapped presents, mostly for the little ones.
Bernice's husband Jesse was home from the hospital and seemed better. His daughter and her fiance, who were also visiting, had found him unconscious in a chair one afternoon last week. They thought he was asleep but when they couldn't wake him they got worried. Somehow they wrestled him up and out into the car (he's put back on all that weight he'd lost and then some) and took him to the hospital.
Bernice was at work at the law office when they called and said he'd been admitted. She'd stayed at work until the end of the day because she wouldn't have been any use at the hospital.
She worried he wouldn't be home before the holidays but he made it. Again. His old dog, 16 and blind, made a lap on Jesse's blanketed girth.
Outside it was a beautiful Christmas day, 74 degrees and partly cloudy.
In his home office on Christmas Eve, he opens a book of Miller Williams' poems and reads:
They'd leave living behind and go back to what
they were before they were born. Who can recall
a lot of discomfort in that? Like as not,
we're all of us going no place at all,
a nowhere with nothing to pay, nothing to do,
no one to do it with and no one to care. . . .
Still we stand at the beds of those who leave us
and cherish the seconds. Still our best dramas
depend on the death scenes,
which all the religious
tell us are not periods but commas.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 12/26/2017