The morning hadn’t started well.
After the fact, my beloved and I blamed it on the stress that accompanied the situation we’d been dealing with for the past ten days.
She’s in hospice, you know.
“She,” being Miss Alice, my mother-in-law.
Palliative care.
It sounds so cold and clinical; but hospice is anything but cold, and it most certainly is not clinical.
It is kind, caring and staffed with people possessed by a passion to ease the suffering of those who can no longer do so for themselves.
Insomnia had left us thrashing about in the thick sludge of exhaustion, the effects of which had been compounded by digestive systems that apparently had, unannounced, determined to go on extended leave.
In short, no nutrition and no sleep conspired together to produce an early morning phone conversation that had been less than, well, beneficial.
You might as well know that I’m not the sort to simply leave things alone—a reality that works, at times, to my beloved’s profound vexation.
I’ve tried to change.
No, really, I have!
But I just can’t walk away when I know there is something that remains to be said, an action that needs to be taken or, at times—more often than I care to admit—an apology that begs to be delivered.
This was one such time...the apology thing.
So, I showered and shaved; put on some pretty snappy duds, even if I do say so myself, and headed for the hospice facility.
On the way, I decided to stop in at a nearby St. Arbuck’s to collect a couple of coffees and a wedge of sumptuously moist cinnamon swirl coffee cake.
Yes, I know...blatant bribery!
Go ahead and call it for what it is, I don’t mind.
I’ve learned to go with what works.
And that definitely works.
Most of the time.
The neighborhood in which the hospice is located is, um, different than my neighborhood.
I believe the current PC description would be, “economically distressed,” a designator that could be, sadly, applied to many Las Vegas neighborhoods that previously enjoyed an entirely different distinction.
The people were different as well, at least when compared to my St. Arbuck’s.
They too seemed “distressed.”
But there, as in virtually every coffee shop I’ve ever patronized—both in the States and abroad—there was a collegial camaraderie that pervaded the atmosphere; a sense that those who gathered were involved in a shared experience; that, sink or swim, they would do so together.
And isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?
British poet John Donne said it best, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...”
With these thoughts rattling around in my head, (a head that, for the record, seems to grow ever more empty as the years roll by, a reality for which I have no explanation whatsoever) I got into my car and prepared to drive the remaining four blocks to hospice.
But at that moment something caught my eye.
Something so startling; something so stunning; something so unexpectedly out of the ordinary that I simply had to stop and stare.
For how long I know not...but stare I did.
The morning sun had just crested the top of Sunrise Mountain; its rays like drops of liquid gold saturating and transforming the valley below.
A wheelchair-bound man of some years, homeless by the looks of him, sat in the empty parking lot, cup of coffee in his hand, face upturned toward the shimmering light, a smile of consummate pleasure transforming his craggy countenance.
He sat there, bathed in the warm, uncommon ochre radiance .
And sat.
And smiled.
And sat some more.
Finally, he sipped his coffee...slowly, languidly, pleasurably.
What I found so stunning about this scene was the fact that this man who was more distressed by far than anyone else I had seen that morning, had, as Bernard von Bülow coined, found his “place in the sun.”
Literally.
Engaging my often overly romantic, artiste’s imagination it wasn’t much of a stretch at all to picture him in that exact spot, each and every morning awaiting that moment when night turned to day; the cold was sent packing and he could experience a moment of private joy.
And it didn’t cost him a thing.
The coffee? From a gas station on the corner that gave it away for free.
It made me think of Miss Alice and this present journey upon which she has unwillingly embarked.
The days grow cold.
The night is upon her.
The light of life grows ever dim.
But step, by step—breath, by ragged breath—she moves inexorably toward a different kind of light.
Toward her place in the sun.
