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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
July 31, 2005
Published as Poetry
circa 1985, and again in a WIP dated January 30, 2001.
© 2001 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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IV, 1970
© 1970 by Bud Grossmann
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LUNCH SOMETIME SOON
Last night I called you, but you said
you couldn’t talk. It’s just as well, I guess.
I didn’t know then what I’d called to say.
It was good just to hear your voice.
When Diane Takahata’s father, Harold Yoshimura,
was dying in St. Luke’s, Laura and I visited
him two, three, sometimes more times a week.
Hell, somebody had to. Except for Diane’s
sister, Darlene, Harold’s family
was nowhere to be seen. Diane
was in Oklahoma, of all places.
She came as often as she could.
Even when Harold was in good health, he’d been
hard of hearing. Conversations with him often took
surprising twists and turns as he replied to things we
never meant to say. Imagine how difficult it was for me
in Harold’s last months of life, when cancer had eaten away his
throat and he spoke in a hoarse whisper or in scrawled
notes on a scratch pad, imagine how difficult it was for me,
when nurses hovered about and Harold’s ill roommate lay nearby,
imagine how difficult it was for me to bellow, “HEY, HAROLD!
HAROLD, YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT DYING?!”
So I didn’t do it.
This Saturday night I’m going to a “Get Well, Philip”
potluck supper for a young guy with lymph cancer.
“If it doesn’t go into remission,” Phil’s physician told the
family, “he’ll be lucky to live three months.”
My God, it’s March already. Only three weeks from now
the Romans will nail Jesus to the cross again.
They’ll hammer those spikes through flesh, bone, and lumber.
With Death standing in my doorway, I’m a little uneasy.
I don’t see my number coming up anytime soon,
but I’m a little uneasy. I mean, who knows, y’know?
I want to grab life in both my hands
and hold on tight. I want to
hold on tight to love.
I want to hug you,
hold you,
cling to you,
my friend.
We hadn’t spoken—
you and I—
we hadn’t seen each other
in a month. A month!
But I would have called you anyway,
last night. The time was right.
I would have called.
A month!
Philip will be gone in three.
It’s three years this summer since Harold died.
You and me, you know, we gotta have
lunch together sometime soon.
I swear to God, if I had it to do all over, I’d walk hand-in-
hand with Harold Yoshimura and we’d wheel his tree with the
bottles and tubes on it down the hall to the nurses’
coffee-break room and I’d take him in and close the door.
Yeah, I mean it. If I had it to do all over again,
this time, I know, I would put my
mouth beside his ear and I would say,
“HAROLD! HAROLD! YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT DYING?”
♦
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