Another Kind of Gift

I sit in a chemo center with my little sister. She tells me how kind people have been—food, prayers, cards, letters, texts.

And she tells me about the gift from our father.

“I feel helpless,” my dad had said to me when he heard about my sister’s cancer.

His legs are lame, his hands hurt, and the three blocks of winter weather between his house and hers daunt him.

Still, he had an idea—one he felt reluctant to suggest.

“I could call her every day,” he said, “with a history lesson.”

Well!

But, you know, they’ve rarely missed a day.

For about an hour, Dad takes my sister away from her life to a time when our ancestors met secretly in caves to worship. And to long goodbyes when people gathered at the homes of departing immigrants to sing:

Now have come the time and hour
To travel to America.
The wagon by the door now stands
With wife and children, we will go.
And when we come to Baltimore,
We’ll hold our hands upraised
And shout a word of victory.
Now we’re in America!

My sister has heard about castles and milkmaids and plowboys. And about the years of driving dangerously, when people shouted whoa to stop their cars, and especially about an accident of her great-grandfather, which resulted in the death of a young boy.

My dad has talked about the distilleries of his great-grandparents and how a man who had too much to drink brought his horse into the house and commanded it to step over the cradle of his sleeping baby.

My sister now knows that my dad traded his suspenders for a belt when he was seventeen. And that his first suit with buttons, not hooks-and-eyes, was for his wedding.

And my dad even confessed a boyhood escapade—that sometimes, on his way home from school, he’d climb the steep bank to Strawberry Hill, an abandoned children’s home. And in the office of that empty orphanage, he’d browse with great interest through records of former orphans.

As my sister tells me all this, we’re here in the cancer center. Hopefully those in the cubicles around us are receiving their own gifts of support. But I wonder, how many of them get a daily history lesson from a ninety-two-year-old father?

“Dad helps,” my sister says. “He gets me into other worlds, shows me I’m not the only one with problems.”