One of These Days

“You know me,” he said. “I have a smile for everyone.” His smile, this one to illustrate, seemed to be for someone or something far away. I tried to count in my mind how often I’d seen him smile. Really? I wondered.

“It can cheer people up,” he said. “Even strangers you pass in the street. It could change their whole day.”

There was a pause. He cleared his throat, put his napkin to his lips and spit into it, then wiped his lips.

“I think someone stole my watch,” he said.

He’d had no watch for a long time, even before he came here.

Focused again, he continued. “And I’ve always said, ‘I’m okay,’ when someone asks. “I’m not the kind of person to say, “You know, since you ask,’ and then ramble on about how bad things are.”

He dropped his head back on the pillow. “You have to find your joy, you know. It’s out there. All you have to do is look for it and you’ll find it. And once you find it, for me, I’ve learned how to hold on to happiness for as long as I can. Even spread some around if I have enough.”

Reaching for my hand, he patted it.

“You’d better find some joy and hold on tight to it. That’s my advice to live on. Hold it hard because you never know when someone or something is going to try to strip it away from you. Hold onto it as if your life depended on it.”

He raised his head and turned to look at me. “And it does, you know. Believe me.”
His head relaxed back into the hollow space it had made in the pillow.

“Jeez,” he said. “And if it goes, when it’s gone, you have to start all over again, searching for it. You’ll find it. You have to. That’s what makes life worth living.”

Closing his eyes, he cleared his throat and rested, silent. I said nothing.”

“And,” he whispered, “My mother and father are working at the reception desk out front. You should say hi to them if you see them.”

His parents had passed away many years ago.

I watched and listened as his breathing gradually became slower. Reaching out, I clasped his hand. The slower his breathing became, the tighter I held it.

So that’s the advice he gave me the last time I saw him. What remained of the person I’d known. Lying there, thinner than I could ever remember him being, his face looking as if it might fold in on itself and disappear.

I’d never ever thought of him as a happy man. Maybe he was but just didn’t show it. I surely never felt as if he were spreading joy around.

He’d been a harsh man. And in that final stage of his breaking down, that’s what I thought about. His severity.

In many ways, I’m like him. People point that out from time to time. How I look like him, sound like him, have many of his gestures.

But that’s just part of me. The me everyone sees. I want to find joy. I do. I try to follow his advice. Sometimes I grasp it for a short time. But it does get stripped away too easily, as he warned it might.

One of these days, maybe I’ll hit the jackpot. Latch onto some kind of happiness I can ride all the way into the sunset. One of these days, maybe.