Pop and the Old Wine

The house was modest enough, in a nice neighborhood in Florissant Missouri.  They’d been in it since 1964 and this was now 1991.  It was midsummer and the days were long and hot.  Outside the sun shone brightly and inside the bedroom was bright as well because it was on the west side of the house.  Thank goodness for air-conditioning, it was comfortably cool in the room.

Pop had been confined to this hospital bed for more than a year.  His body had become stiff from head to toe.  He responded well to exercise once or twice over the past couple of years but now his particular kind of Parkinson’s disease manifested itself with this stiffness.

Rose, his wife, ministered to him day and night.  They had been teen-age sweet hearts in Germany and when he left in 1927 she followed him on her own, found him, and married him in 1936.  There was never any doubt that they loved each other completely.  Now, and for the past several years, she saw to his care and feeding every day; rolled him this way and that to prevent bed sores, combed his hair, and changed his bed clothes whenever necessary.

There were visiting nurses who came to monitor his vital signs and give him a bath several times each week.  He was well taken care of, his daughters visited with him often, staying longer in the living room but I’m sure the sound of their voices in the house was music to his ears.

Carola and I visited when we could, we lived away and came to the St. Louis area for Christmas and occasionally during the year.  It was on one such visit that I found myself in his room, talking to him.  From the time I started courting Carola, he and I would spend hours talking, mostly him talking and me listening, to stories of Spaichingen and his coming to this country and the way he got his career job at Wagner Electric in the tool department where he became night shift foreman and remained so until he retired in 1976. Now I supposed it was my turn now to do the talking.

On this particular day, I was alone with him at his bedside.  He strained to talk and managed to say, “Chon (he never lost his German accent), go down in the basement and get that wine and pour it for the people out there, it's not any good anyway.”  I said sure and continued to talk to him about what was going on with us. The visit wrapped up and we left.

A couple of months later when we were  visiting  he told me again “Get that wine and serve it to the company because it ain't any good.”  I still didn't know what he was talking about and passed it off.  When we finished talking, I left the room and joined the others. Then a while later I went back into his bedroom, got down close to his face and said, “Pop, you know that wine you wanted  to get rid of?”  “I gave to the people out there; they drank it and didn't know the difference.”

His blue eyes twinkled, his face got screwed up into a smile and he laughed.  He was so pleased to be finally rid of that wine.