Last Gifts

The old man tipped back his porch chair and watched the distant fireworks sparkle in the summer sky, the last Independence Day of the passing century. On the far side of the globe 45 Star American flags streamed over a new territory called the Philippines, but here in the Kansas farmland it was summer wheat that rippled in the late evening breeze.

He discovered, to his utter astonishment and immense delight, that he was a young man again, all muscle and energy with eyes able to see over the horizon.  Ready to be, if not polished, then burnished by whatever lay out there waiting.

A shadowy figure on his right tipped back her chair. A warm hand folded over his and he knew it was his wife, as a young woman with startling cornflower blue eyes, just as he always pictured her even after 50 years of sometimes, mostly, matrimonial harmony. He was at her side when she passed a decade ago, but nothing about that felt out of place now.

There were other figures present too, his children -- a son out in the Pacific with the Asiatic Squadron, a daughter covering sports for a New York paper.  And a firefly's glow, bright then fading.  This was the other daughter, too young to have a name, resting on a hilltop.

There were grandchildren and great-grandchildren, brothers, uncles, aunts, sisters, and many, many friends made loved and lost over a long, well-lived life. Some grown up, some young, some living and others not, all out of time but just as he wanted them. Dogs he knew: a favorite childhood mongrel, a companionable retriever (as a grinning puppy, although he knew the Old Guy was snoring at his feet).

Other images: his mother, also a young woman (is this how she sees herself?), a fishing expedition to a neighbor's pond as a child, sunfish dangling on a string. 

Then later: dry-mouthed fear in the Shenandoah Valley, Confederate bullets snapping through a cloud of acrid gunsmoke.  The scene changed, and he crouched behind a dying horse bristling with Sioux war arrows, scraping a burrow in the Montana ridges with a tin coffee cup.

Time moved: the first hard years busting sod on this very farm, his wife, burned brown in the hot sun, shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows working alongside.  Abundant crops one year, a locust harvest the next, but the mortgage getting smaller until  one day they burned it.  

Pleasures and disappointments, sorrows and glories surfaced, flashed into view and whirled away: births, deaths, weddings, funerals, a picnic, all to the delighted laughter and freely streaming tears of the old man and his ghostly entourage.  The now-old woman at his side entwined her fingers with his and he read her thoughts through her touch, a line from an old parlor song, hard times come again no more. 

It was a good life, all in all, he thought, satisfied with all of it. 

But sometime after midnight it ended (because it always ends). As a final gift of the gods, the old man never knew when his final moment came and went.

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

I find this beautiful, enchanting, and very well-written. A final going away present, gifted by the omnipotent one. I hope to do as well. Highly entertaining, my friend.

[The Last Dragoon]

Thank you sir. I think we all hope for that kind of ending.