How and When It Started

Before school let out for the summer that year, 1977, Phil started coming to my empty classroom the last hour of the school day and sat at a front desk, while I worked six feet away. He usually carried no books, and rested his head on his folded arms, and perhaps slept. I always made one more trip to the office on the ground level of the building, to check my mailbox for notices, then we drove the 17 miles home.

There were only three of us living in the townhouse condo, with our older three children “grown and gone.” We had just bought the condo, located in a school district that was not where I taught, but not far from my husband’s office. In the fall Phil should be starting at a local high school, while I taught in another town. He had a motorcycle to get him there. (None of our children ever rode school buses to get to and from school.) Phil’s large bedroom was on ground level, along with the double garage, the laundry and a bathroom. Sliding glass doors of his room opened onto a postage stamp-size patio with a tiny bit of ground where we grew tomatoes, herbs, columbines, and an evergreen tree─some type of fir, I think─in a sheltered spot, for it usually did not grow in our geographic area. (My husband’s college major was forestry.) With a chair or two placed there, it could be a good place to rest and think, but not big enough for throwing a ball unless the catcher stood on the road behind ours, at a higher elevation. Alas, said ball could not make a return throw because of the sliding glass doors. So Phil designed ballgames on thick cardboard.

Phil had started high school, playing football, basketball, and baseball, with bowling on the weekends. Plus chess on his lunch hour, with no organized team, just with buddies. By the end of tenth grade, he gave up football, for . . . he was sick.

I had committed myself to full-time writing that summer in those pre-computer days, and after cooking about all day for four days, I began the great American novel on the following Monday. In the 1,500-square foot house, I had no writing room and took over the dining room table. Of course, I got nowhere that first day for I felt extremely bad that Phil had gone to spend the day at his big brother’s house so that I could write alone.

Then he took on a summer job, helping with the landscape chores at the condo complex. The first day of pulling weeds he got so tired that when he came in for lunch, he took a nap and slept all afternoon. This was not like him. I knew something was wrong, in addition to his likely being fired. I never knew if the boss, Dale Duffy, ever realized he was a sick boy that day.

Soon after that Phil rode his motorcycle home from somewhere, came up the stairs, dropped into his dad’s recliner and said to me in the nearby kitchen, “Mom, I’m sick.”

And he was.

To be continued.

♥