The day John didn't show

Greg is an able guy with a whole left side whose usage left him when he had a stroke, a bad one. Word on the street is that he took some drugs, cooked some meth--I don't know. His dinner plate sports a little inch-high aluminum fence the cook puts on so that he can eat without pushing his lunch all over the table. He has only one functioning arm and hand.

He told me a couple of lunches ago that John, a third member of our table's bunch, had been having headaches that morning at breakfast (I'd already finished when they'd eaten). He said he didn't know how John had fared after breakfast that morning, so he wandered over to Rosemary, John's wife, a saint who's distinctly troubled with Parkinsons. She comes into the lunch room in a machine that stands her up as if she were attacking her food. No matter--she's a saint. 

So Greg stops pushing his dinner up against that little silver wall his plate comes with, puts down his fork, backs up his wheelchair, then forwards it across the center of the lunch room floor and sallies up to Rosemary, who been eating lunch herself by this time, painfully slow but progressive. 

I didn't hear the conversation, and John is still a no-show. If people don't show up at Heartland, you send out the posse. In this case, a word from John's wife will be all anyone needs. Sometimes she talks to me, halfway across the room, without looking up from her food. It's always pleasant. You'd expect nothing less.

I don't hear the news until Greg swings that wheelchair back around and heads back to home.

I wait until he goes after his food. "What did she say? I ask him. John's a Trump man, has got all the accoutrements--cap, shirt, maybe even a flag--I don't know. He's also got a wonderfully droll sense of humor that emerges in a whisper and a smile. Headaches aren't killers. Chest pains--here--are reason to beware.

Greg looks up from his place across the table from mine, gives me half a stare maybe, as if to say the news he carries is worth more than he bargained for.

"She said, 'Pray for him," and he goes back to pushing goulash up against the fence around his lunch.  "That's all--'pray for him.'"

John came back to dinner that night in fine spirits. I don't know that I prayed for him. Should have. I don't know that Greg prayed either, but John's okay. 

On Wednesday I'll leave Heartland, having taken up residence here for just about two months. To speak the truth, I don't know if I'll walk out of here any more gracefully than I walked in, which is not to say, dear Lord, I'm no healthier.

And bless Rosemary, will you?