Snow Cones

I went into the kitchen to help put away groceries my father and mother picked up at the nearby Giant Supermarket. My parents had moved to Virginia to help my brother with the day-to-day difficulties a handicapped man with insulin-dependent diabetes will have. They moved in to help him – and then I moved in to help them help him.

My father opened the produce drawer and became quite agitated at the sight of a pint of strawberries gone bad – horror movie bad. Grayish-green fuzz was taking over the world, and only my father and I stood between it and the total annihilation of mankind. Zombie strawberries stood poised for the attack and swift action had to be taken.

Dad took the clear plastic container into the living room and thrust it towards my mother who was sitting on the couch peacefully working on her crossword puzzle. She was waiting for Oprah to come on.

“Don’t ever buy these again!” he yelled, leaning toward her with the intensity of an umpire calling the last play of the World Series. My mother looked at him with the same deadpan look a comedic actor gives his audience. I always refrained from laughing when she gave Dad that look. Well, almost always.

“When did we buy them?” she asked calmly.

“It must have been two weeks ago!” Dad's voice boomed, his deep, commanding voice still powerful even after twenty-five years of retirement.

At this point my brother had the misfortune, or fortitude, to roll his wheelchair into the living room from the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

“I didn’t know they were there!” he announced. I didn't know about them either, but my mind was stuck on “two weeks”.

Two weeks ago I had dialed 911. My brother was in bad shape. My father was insisting on taking him to the emergency room by car. My brother is a big guy – he had been a wrestler in high school before a brain tumor at the base of the cerebellum threw his world into a tailspin. Getting a barely responsive ex-wrestler out of bed, into a wheelchair, and then into a car was bad enough, but my brother clearly needed someone to make sure he was stable -- NOW. I pointed out to my father that putting someone with uncontrolled vomiting into a car with cloth seats might yield some less-than-desired results. Cooler heads prevailed. I dialed 911.

One week, two biopsies, several cultures, and hundreds of Jell-O’s later, my brother was discharged from the hospital. The results were not all in, but he would go for outpatient antibiotic infusion treatments for the next week as various results were relayed to us by the doctors. Two weeks.

In 1969 an eight-year-old boy made a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. He discovered that staying in the swimming pool provided excellent relief from mosquito bites. Once again he had spent much of the night in his non-air conditioned room facing the dilemma of which would be worse; being cooked alive under a makeshift mosquito net of bedsheets, or staying cool above the sheets while being eaten alive by Madrid’s finest mosquitoes. He opted for the mosquito net approach, but in the end he was both cooked and eaten.

The boy was not content, of course, to simply relax in this Olympic-sized calamine surrogate. He was making observations, making mental notes, and exploring his new environment. For instance, he noticed that the “floor” was not nearly as smooth as those in the pools back in the United States. Moreover, since this pool was meant for students of the colegio, the slope of the pool’s floor was not gradual from the shallow to the deep end. So it was that the skinny Americanito started walking through the water in search of that magic point; that elusive yet definitive border between the shallows and the great depths. He found it.

The boy had learned to swim when he was five, and from that time on he would not leave the water until thoroughly and deeply blue, shriveled, shivering, and smiling after each seal-like barking cough. But none of that mattered. The powers that be, mocking man and child alike, had used tile on that steep and narrow slope down to the deep end; a smooth, slippery, light blue tile that offered no purchase whatsoever. Everything the boy knew about swimming, everything the boy knew about water, vanished save one thing: water and lungs mix poorly. He panicked.

Seconds are an eternity to a drowning person. The mind’s timer slows to nearly a stop as the mind races through the records for a previous encounter with the present danger, hoping to find an immediate solution to an immediate problem. Arms flail ineffectively of their own volition even as the mind perceives that it may not get out of this one.

Two huge hands grabbed the boy by the waist and with unfathomable power lifted the boy out of the water and onto the side of the pool in a single movement. The boy coughed uncontrollably for a bit and looked up to his rescuer.

“You okay, Jim?”

I nodded yes.

My big brother, thirteen-years old at the time, gave me a little smile as he patted me on the shoulder, then he swam back to the far corner of the deep end, pulled himself up onto the ledge, and rejoined his quiet talk among friends.

The conversation had stopped with the ring of the telephone. My mother picked it up and we listened in:

Doctor…
Biopsy…
Thyroid…
Cancer…

My father returned to the kitchen and I heard the parcel tumble into the waste basket. I entered the kitchen and found him slumped over a bit, staring at the basket. I patted him on the shoulder and silently put the rest of the groceries away.

It came to me as I nestled the softened Italian ices into the freezer: If my brother wanted a snow-cone made of shaved ice from the summit of Mount Everest, I’d get it for him. And right there by my side, if not ahead of me, would be my father with the paper cup in his hand. Yes, he'd be complaining over the howling wind, but he'd be there.