Loving Your Ol By Kaitlin Jandereski
T
here was nobody in the hallway. The long corridor stretched from one end of the hall to the other—clean and eternally verdant, except for a faint, irregular, white stain by Mr. Kuzmich’s door, as if someone had accidentally blotted a tube of toothpaste on it and dabbed it dry with a frumpy towel.
H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 10
I twisted the golden knob to his door, sure he wouldn’t hear me if I knocked, even if I did so loudly. Mr. Kuzmich’s hearing was like an AM radio station, twirling around on a dancefloor of static, falling in step and out of step. On his bed, Mr. Kuzmich was sitting upright with his prickly gray, upside down mustache, cabbage green eyes and speckled brown jacket he thought was important to wear even while watching the Detroit Tigers on television. He had a popcorn bag placed on his lap—the kind that people sometimes use to feed the ducks. His jaw moved up and down, up and down as he gnawed at the buttery kernels. I looked around the room, giving him time to move his jaw up and down, up and down. The air tasted dead, like a sniff of old tree bark. I hate the smell of nursing home rooms. Mr. Kuzmich’s mustache latched itself onto his small lips as he smiled and said, “Sit down,” while he patted the Victorian blue seat next to his bed. I grabbed my pen from my purse and scooted myself closer to him so that we could write. The big hand on the clock passed the twelve about three times before Mr. Kuzmich and I had finished writing. I slid my blotted black ink on yellow paper over to him. This was an activity we had made into a ritual the past few months, reading and writing and reading each others’ poetry to each other, but this time, he could barely read it. His eyes squinted at it like he was trying to catch the glimpse of a one-quarter moon against a cloudy background of a midnight black fog sky. I could tell that he couldn’t read my words, which never used to be a problem for him, so I read it to him while he continued to lift pieces of popcorn up to his mouth. It was a
halfandhalf thing. One piece would reach his mouth, the other would drop through his fingers and onto his lap. Mr. Kuzmich never acknowledged that he kept dropping popcorn. It was as if it were the most natural and sensible thing in the world. I left him with a goodbye hug. Two months later, while I was in Indiana for graduate school, I received a paperback book of poems in the mail. It was one of the poetry books Mr. Kuzmich and I used to read together—before we would start writing, before his eyesight went bad. On the inside cover of the book, his wife had written me this note: “My husband is now with the Lord. I thought you might like this book of his. You two had some fond memories reading it together. If he were here right now, he’d ask when you’re coming over next and tell me to ask you to bring your pen, a pad of paper and your wildest imagination. I love you.”
