In late spring, when I was ten years old, my father received orders to return to sea.  In the fall of the previous year, my mother had taken a job as a cook in a nursing home to supplement the Navy’s meager pay and when Memorial Day came, she could find nobody to stay with me on my day-off from school.  I, like most children at that age, lived in an idyllic naiveté, wherein I believed that no more than some secret combination of promises and pleas stood between my parents and capitulation.  True to that form, I made my case as to why I should be trusted alone at home and as anyone older and wiser than myself might have guessed, I failed to persuade my mother.  She made the decision to bring me with her, to work.

I didn’t last long in the kitchen.  I withstood the dense heat that radiated off of the stainless-steel surfaces and the dissonant clatter of cookware and dishes.  However, the familiar look of restrained frustration in the faces of my mother and her coworkers as I hopelessly stepped in and out of their paths, drove me away.  So, armed with pencils, paper and a stack of Superman comic-books, I retreated to the common room to read, draw and pass time.

Everything from the plain, blue upholstered chairs, vacant walls and lonesome picture-window, reflected the sort of austerity and cheerlessness that had made me want to stay home that day.  Intent on distracting myself, I took a seat near the room’s only window and busied myself.  Somewhere between reading the stories in my comics and trying to replicate the drawings, I found myself distracted by the shuffling sound of uneasy steps on the carpeted floor.

The home’s residents began gathering.  Many of them used wheelchairs, but those whose joints could still bear their weight, ambled gingerly with the aid of walkers or canes.  In the spirit of Memorial Day, they appeared to be groomed with deliberate care.  No strand of brittle, gray hair seemed misplaced.  Their paper-thin skin showed little stubble, but for the difficult areas where it hung loosely from their faces.  The ladies relished the chance to don formal dresses, smelling of perfume while the men presented themselves, stoic in uniforms that still remembered their former physiques.  Even at an age when I was often scolded over lights left on, and dirty dishes abandoned at the dining room table, the informality of my faded jeans and t-shirt, embarrassed me.

After a moment, an immense man in a motorized wheelchair entered through a nearby hallway.  He slumped to his right and used only his left paw of a hand to engage the chair’s controls.  He was a Marine by his uniform, which stretched or sagged less than any other in the room.  Coming from a military family, I recognized a Sergeant Major’s chevrons on his shoulder.  On his chest, I spotted a Purple Heart, a Silver Star and a Navy Cross among the rows of ribbons.

Unlike the other residents, this man acknowledged no one as he parked his chair at a vacant table, adjacent to mine.  He seemed to neither expect nor hope for company as his expressionless face settled on nothing more than the white tablecloth before him.  He sat like the lone tree on an island, as indifferent to the outside world as he was inaccessible from it.

Driven, perhaps equally, by curiosity and comic-book induced hero-worship, I approached the man and claimed a chair across the table from him.  “Hello,” I said.

His left eye widened.  He spoke in a low, deep voice and slurred words.  “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“It’s closed for Memorial Day.”

His chest lifted as he inhaled.  “Seems nobody honors the dead,” he paused for another breath, “by doing something with their day.”

I gave a nervous laugh that must have sounded less awkward than I expected and the lively side of his face responded with an expression that I couldn’t read.  I offered my left hand to his.  “I’m Sam. It’s nice to meet you, Mr.,” I looked at the nametag on his uniform and fumbled with the pronunciation of what I would recognize today as a common Czech name.

He paused for several seconds before raising his useful hand to mine.  “Call me Joe.”

The rest of the group left for their mid-day meal, but when a nurse came to collect Joe, he resisted with a wave of his able hand.  “I’ve got company. Just relax. I’m not trying to tunnel out of here.”

Later, I showed him my sketches and he offered little more than a nod in response.

“Do you draw?” I asked.

“Not super people.”

“What do you draw?”

He hesitated, then cleared his throat.  “Is your mom a nurse?”

“No. She’s a cook.”

He took another long breath.  I had come to recognize this as a part of his speech pattern, whenever his statements consisted of more than a few words.  “Tell her anybody that’s done-in by a little flavor,” he paused, “isn’t long for the world anyway.”

With Joe, the day passed quickly.  He pressed me about school and civic duty.  When we reached the topic of sports, he complained about today’s athletes using steroids. “In my day,” he said, “men didn’t do steroids, we did pushups.  We did things right.”

It was hardly an applicable topic to a boy whose arms bulged only at the joints of his elbows, but I understood that Joe simply gave me the lectures that he wanted to give the world.  Knowing, or at least, believing that, made it easy to listen.  By the time my mother’s shift ended, I felt sorry to leave.

By the end of the school year, I became a fixture at the nursing home.  The rooms were still barren and bland and the laundry carts in the hallways still reeked of the soiled bed sheets of incontinent residents, but in my visits with Joe, I was enthralled.

As Joe became more comfortable with me, he began talking about his childhood and even self-censored many of his war stories.  One day, in mid-June, I found him surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper, sketching a picture of a rose. Even in pencil the shading and details were so vivid that it resembled a photograph.  Thorns protruded and threw shadows along the stem. The pedals softened along their edges and faded with the reflection of imagined sunlight.  Before I could ask, he began, “When my wife and I were first married, I stopped and bought her some roses at the florist.”

I hadn’t even known he’d been married.

He continued, “She told me not to do that anymore because roses cost money and we didn’t have it. The thought was enough, she told me.  So, I taught myself to draw. When I was overseas, I wanted to write her nice letters, but words aren’t my thing. I don’t know Shakespeare from a dirty limerick, so I drew roses for her.” He paused and took a deep breath.  “Since the stroke, I’ve been trying to get better with my left hand.” He looked at me with shrinking eyes.  “What matters in life is that somebody loves you. What matters after that, is that somebody remembers you.  That’s why I’m drawing.”

By the end of July, my mother stopped encouraging me to come to work with her and made arrangements for my neighbor to watch me during her shifts.  Joe’s health was declining fast, and I had not been prepared for it.  In part, it was Joe’s own doing.  When the pauses in his speech grew longer and more frequent, he’d assure me, “I’m just thinking. Don’t interrupt.”  When the nurses interrupted our visits, he’d say, “It’s just therapy. Don’t be nosey.”  Maybe my failure to read anything more into it, was a matter of choice.  As words, life and death are easily defined, but as concepts they are difficult to understand.  By the time I was prepared to say, “Goodbye,” it was too late.

I wish that I had known Joe in adulthood.  Maybe I could have understood him better, but then I am not sure if the private island of his existence was large enough for anything more than a child.  Maybe he wanted it that way.

What I did know of Joe is that he was angry.  He was angry because things cost too much and people said curse words on television.  He was angry because he outlived his wife and neither of their children survived birth.  He was angry because the lips that once spat at the polished boots of a Lieutenant General, could, by the end, scarcely produce the words that had nearly earned him a court-martial.  He was angry because the body that survived three wars, died faster than his will.