After a cross-country telephone call this afternoon from my always-upbeat sister, I am soaring higher than the law should allow.
It seems that yesterday a former colleague of my still-youthful brother-in-law, whom doctors insist is terminally ill, called him to make an unusual proposition.
Did he feel well enough to come in to work for a day or two?
Sure, my brother-in-law fired back.
These two days will fit in tidily, he said, with the five workdays he plans to put in next week on the way to raising enough money to afford a first-time flight for him and my sister to Los Angeles.
I was stunned, in the sweetest way.
Steering a path home from work through the latest East Coast snowstorm, my sister was fairly laughing as she related details I never expected to hear about a visit I never dreamed would happen.
Diagnosed two months ago with pancreatic cancer and told, bluntly, that mere weeks remained, the two of them have stepped up their living speed to about 75 miles an hour.
Dial 1-800-Where-Are-You?
Pal, if medics ever tell you that Destiny is doomed to be your bride, try to hire my sister to grace your presence during your closing waking hours. She will inspire in you a fight to stay that is so epic it will go into the history books.
Ask my brother-in-law.
He and she made their first trip Out West in late December, along with their almost-nurse daughter, to see their Homeland Security son, working his first post-college job.
On a weekend, Diane and I motored over to and through most of Arizona to visit them. Neither of us has laughed as heartily and as continuously since we were children.
It is not that my sister is the American joke-telling champion east of the Mississippi, just that it is against her law for anyone in the room to get his dauber down. Even Digger O’Dell, the most famous undertaker on radio in the 1950s, would have sulked and skulked out of my nephew’s home, discouraged and defeated.
May the Chuckles Never End
My sister shined all weekend as we celebrated the most fragile, the most precious gift of all, one more easy-breathing day of pure life.
The crisp morning desert air that Arizona wore like a royal cape tasted so delicious you wanted to encase it in a bowl and consume it for breakfast.
From where we stood, you could see clearly down a mostly vacant, two-lane, east-bound highway, practically across New Mexico, Texas and into Arkansas. With scant but valued advice from a team of urban planners, didn’t God build a fabulous world that you never, ever want to leave?
When we assembled for breakfast on the final morning of our visit, I was surprised to find my sister had prepared my cereal — the same way she did when we were children and I greased her palms in exchange for food that was too time-consuming for a young fellow in a hurry.
Taking her aside on the back porch, removed from everyone else’s hearing range, we embraced.
I confided, probably foolishly, I sure wished they could come to see us in Los Angeles for a whiff of life previously untasted.
“I wish we could, too,” she said through rare tears.
Dreaming works sometimes.
She and he are about to prove prayerful wishes can come true.
