Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (17 page)

Two Words to Avoid, Two to Remember

By Arthur Gordon

January 1968

N
othing in
life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person—not only changed, but changed for the better. Such moments are rare, certainly, but they come to all of us. Sometimes from a book, a sermon, a line of poetry. Sometimes from a friend. . . .

That wintry afternoon in Manhattan, waiting in the little French restaurant, I was feeling frustrated and depressed. Because of several miscalculations on my part, a project of considerable importance in my life had fallen through. Even the prospect of seeing a dear friend (the Old Man, as I privately and affectionately thought of him) failed to cheer me as it usually did. I sat there frowning at the checkered tablecloth, chewing the bitter cud of hindsight.

He came across the street, finally, muffled in his ancient overcoat, shapeless felt hat pulled down over his bald head, looking more like an energetic gnome than an eminent psychiatrist. His office was nearby; I knew he had just left his last patient of the day. He was close to 80, but he still carried a full caseload, still acted as director of a large foundation, still loved to escape to the golf course whenever he could.

By the time he came over and sat beside me, the waiter had brought his invariable bottle of ale. I had not seen him for several months, but he seemed as indestructible as ever. “Well, young man,” he said without preliminary, “what's troubling you?”

I had long since ceased to be surprised at his perceptiveness. So I proceeded to tell him, at some length, just what was bothering me. With a kind of melancholy pride, I tried to be very honest, I blamed no one else for my disappointment, only myself. I analyzed the whole thing, all the bad judgements, the false moves. I went on for perhaps 15 minutes, while the Old Man sipped his ale in silence.

When I finished, he put down his glass. “Come on,” he said. “Let's go back to my office.”

“Your office? Did you forget something?”

“No,” he said mildly. “I want your reaction to something. That's all.”

A chill rain was beginning to fall outside, but his office was warm and comfortable and familiar: book-lined walls, long leather couch, signed photograph of Sigmund Freud, tape recorder by the window. His secretary had gone home. We were alone.

The Old Man took a tape from a flat cardboard box and fitted it onto the machine. “On this tape,” he said, “are three short recordings made by three persons who came to me for help. They are not identified, of course. I want you to listen to the recordings and see if you can pick out the two-word phrase that is the common denominator in all three cases.” He smiled. “Don't look so puzzled. I have my reasons.”

What the owners of the voices on the tape had in common, it seemed to me, was unhappiness. The man who spoke first evidently had suffered some kind of business loss or failure; he berated himself for not having worked harder, for not having looked ahead. The woman who spoke next had never married because of a sense of obligation to her widowed mother; she recalled bitterly all the marital chances she had let go by. The third voice belonged to a mother whose teen-age son was in trouble with the police; she blamed herself endlessly.

The Old Man switched off the machine and leaned back in his chair. “Six times in those recordings a phrase is used that's full of a subtle poison. Did you spot it? No? Well, perhaps that's because you used it three times yourself down in the restaurant a little while ago.” He picked up the box that had held the tape and tossed it over to me. “There they are, right on the label. The two saddest words in any language.”

I looked down. Printed neatly in red ink were the words:
If only.

“You'd be amazed,” said the Old Man, “if you knew how many thousands of times I've sat in this chair and listened to the woeful sentences beginning with those two words. ‘If only,' they say to me, ‘I had done it differently—or not done it at all. If only I hadn't lost my temper, said that cruel thing, made that dishonest move, told that foolish lie. If only I had been wiser, or more unselfish, or more self-controlled.' They go on and on until I stop them. Sometimes I make them listen to the recordings you just heard. ‘If only,' I say to them, ‘you'd stop saying
if only,
we might begin to get somewhere!' ”

The Old Man stretched out his legs. “The trouble with ‘if only,' ” he said, “is that it doesn't change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way—backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock, an excuse for not trying anymore.

“Now take your own case: your plans didn't work out. Why? Because you made certain mistakes. Well, that's all right: everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are what we learn from. But when you were telling me about them, lamenting this, regretting that, you weren't really learning from them.”

“How do you know?” I said, a bit defensively.

“Because,” said the Old Man, “you never got out of the past tense. Not once did you mention the future. And in a way—be honest, now!—you were enjoying it. There's a perverse streak in all of us that makes us like to hash over old mistakes. After all, when you relate the story of some disaster or disappointment that has happened to you, you're still the chief character, still in the center of the stage.”

I shook my head ruefully. “Well, what's the remedy?”

“Shift the focus,” said the Old Man promptly. “Change the key words and substitute a phrase that supplies life instead of creating drag.”

“Do you have such a phrase to recommend?”

“Certainly. Strike out the words ‘if only'; substitute the phrase ‘next time.' ”

“Next time?”

“That's right. I've seen it work minor miracles right here in this room. As long as a patient keeps saying ‘if only' to me, he's in trouble. But when he looks me in the eye and says ‘next time,' I know he's on his way to overcoming his problem. It means he has decided to apply the lessons he has learned from his experience, however grim or painful it may have been. It means he's going to push aside the roadblock of regret, move forward, take action, resume living. Try it yourself. You'll see.”

My old friend stopped speaking. Outside, I could hear the rain whispering against the windowpane. I tried sliding one phrase out of my mind and replacing it with the other. It was fanciful, of course, but I could hear the new words lock into place with an audible click.

“One last thing,” the Old Man said. “Apply this little trick to things that can still be remedied.” From the bookcase behind him he pulled out something that looked like a diary. “Here's a journal kept a generation ago by a woman who was a schoolteacher in my hometown. Her husband was a kind of amiable ne'er-do-well, charming but totally inadequate as a provider. This woman had to raise the children, pay the bills, keep the family together. Her diary is full of angry references to Jonathan's inadequacies.

“Then Jonathan died, and all the entries ceased except for one—years later. Here it is: ‘Today I was made superintendent of schools, and I suppose I should be very proud. But if I knew that Jonathan was out there somewhere beyond the stars, and if I knew how to manage it, I would go to him tonight.' ”

The Old Man closed the book gently. “You see? What she's saying is ‘if only; if only,' I had accepted him, faults and all; if only I had loved him while I could.” He put the book back on the shelf. “That's when those sad words are the saddest of all: when it's too late to retrieve anything.”

He stood up a bit stiffly. “Well, class dismissed. It has been good to see you young man. Always is. Now, if you will help me find a taxi, I probably should be getting on home.”

We came out of the building into the rainy night. I spotted a cruising cab and ran toward it, but another pedestrian was quicker.

“My, my,” said the Old Man slyly. “If only we had come down ten seconds sooner, we'd have caught the cab, wouldn't we?”

I laughed and picked up the cue. “Next time I'll run faster.”

“That's it,” cried the Old Man, pulling his absurd hat down around his ears. “That's it exactly!”

Another taxi slowed. I opened the door for him. He smiled and waved as it moved away. I never saw him again. A month later, he died of a sudden heart attack, in full stride, so to speak.

Much time has passed since that rainy afternoon in Manhattan. But to this day, whenever I find myself thinking “if only,” I change it to “next time.” Then I wait for the almost-perceptible mental click. And when I hear it, I think of the Old Man.

A small fragment of immortality, to be sure. But it's the kind he would have wanted.

Problem Solved

Anthony Miller
was acting oddly, even for a robber, when he entered a bank in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. He drew his BB gun, demanded money, and then asked the teller to call the police. Miller later explained that he wanted to be arrested so he could get away from his wife. It worked. He was sentenced to three to six years in prison.
Source: Associated Press

• • •

While I
was visiting my grandfather in the hospital, a nurse came in to check his blood sugar. Before she started, the nurse examined his red fingertips, which had been poked numerous times already, and said, “Hmm . . . which finger should we use this time that won't hurt too much?”

“Yours,” my grandfather replied.
Tara Vyn

The Day My Silent Brother Spoke

BY JIM WATSON

January 1992

I
t was
my mother's wedding day—a hot July morning in a small stone church in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. She was 60 and never more radiant as she opened this new chapter in her life. Outside the church, Mother called us together for a few serious words.

“Go see Grandma now,” she said. “Don't be upset if she doesn't know you.” Strokes and heart disease had left my 89-year-old grandmother lying crumpled and uncomprehending in a nursing-home bed.

As I drove through town, I looked around at my passengers. Here we were, the grandchildren: a banker, an entrepreneur, a musician, a lawyer, a journalist. And next to the window in the backseat, sitting quietly, was Page. How could this affect him? Probably not at all. He would never understand.

Page, my
younger brother by four years, has been brain-damaged from birth. He does not speak, cannot hear and sees poorly through his remaining eye. He stopped growing when he was five feet tall and struggles against obesity. A wall of autism shuts him away from the outside world. He spends most of his time lost in his own musings, nodding, laughing, clucking and crying at a pageant only he can see.

Growing up, his brothers played football, drove cars, made friends and dated pretty girls. Page stayed home, entertaining himself on a rope swing, staring at television or playing with a flashlight—his lifelong fascination. One by one, the rest of us went off to school, got jobs, married and moved away. Page traveled to dreary institutions and rehabilitation centers, where he learned the basics of reading and using tools. Now 34, he has a room in a private home and a job with a small workshop for people like him. He is on his own, and at last he is happy. But it wasn't always this way.

During his teens, Page struggled with the emotional overload of adolescence. Seized by fits of anger, he would burst into uncontrollable tears, rake his fingernails down his face until his cheeks bled or, frustrated by newly forming cataracts, jab at his eyes with pencils. He passed through several distinct phases, each marked by a peculiar ritual.

First there was ground-kissing. Every so often, for no apparent reason, he would stop in midstep, drop to his knees and give the floor or sidewalk a long, passionate kiss. Wiping the dirt from his lips, he would calmly stand up and, with an air of accomplishment, continue on his way.

Ground-kissing gave way to spinning in place. From a sitting position, Page would suddenly stand up, twirl around as if he were unwinding himself from an invisible string and then, satisfied, take his seat. He whirled three times—never more, never less. One Sunday in church, Page decided to “unravel” during the sermon. First, a rustle of papers and clothes. Then he stood, knocking a hymnal loudly to the floor. All eyes turned to investigate the disturbance. Children gawked, bewildered. I stared at the church bulletin, my face burning.

For years,
my reaction to Page's behavior was embarrassment, anger, resentment. Why him? Why me? I was sure he saved his most humiliating stunts for when we were in public. People stared. Page was strange. Did they think there was something strange about our whole family—about me?

As I got older, however, I began to understand that he had no control over his actions, that I could not judge him as I judge others. He wasn't trying to be difficult or strange. He was simply lost, never to be found.

As he drifted further away, I gave up trying to recover the brother I had been denied. Shame and anger turned into acceptance. In time, if I caught anyone staring at the frowning, clucking little fat man with hearing aids in both ears and pockets bulging with flashlights and magnifying glasses, I stared back defiantly.

Just before
we left for the nursing home, Mom had penciled the words “VISIT GRANDMA” for Page in large letters on a napkin. Yet no one expected him to grasp our purpose, to understand that this might be our last visit.

As I drove, other memories floated through my mind: memories of 80-year-old Grandma, arms like sticks, pushing her old power mower up the slope of her backyard, dismissing able-bodied volunteers with a shrug. Grandma's thin, shaking fingers carefully unwrapping Christmas presents to avoid tearing the paper, which she folded neatly by her side. And, of course, talking. Always talking.

The sound of Grandma's voice accompanies every memory of her. She spoke not in sentences or even paragraphs, but in entire chapters, convoluted and strung together by breathless “ands,” “buts” and “anyways.” We seldom asked questions for fear of opening the faucet. Instead, we listened, playing polite audience, nodding at appropriate moments even as we calculated how to steer her back to the subject (if we could remember it) or blurt out a quick thought of our own. “Oh, I
know
I talk too much,” she would sometimes sigh. “Your mother tells me I do.”

While Grandma could not listen and Page could not talk, they understood each other perfectly. In his silent fortress, Page was unaware of the impenetrable wall of words Grandma built around herself. She kissed him and smiled at him and, more important, accepted him just as he was. She never showed disappointment that he was not “normal,” but rather regarded him with fascination, patience and warmth.

One day Page broke a flashlight and brought it to her, hoping she could fix it. I remember her perplexed, earnest face as she fumbled with the cheap plastic gadget. She poked and wiggled the thing and finally, looking sorrowful, shook her head and handed it back to Page. He walked away, to return a few minutes later and try again. She fumbled some more, then gave it back; it was still broken. The next morning Grandma drove to the store and bought him a new one.

We arrived
at the nursing home and stepped into her room. The strokes had left Grandma trembling and unresponsive. The hollow, gaping mask that stared up from her pillow was the face of a wizened stranger. Her mouth hung open. Her wide misty eyes blinked and stared but appeared not to see.

I patted her small, frail hand, and my mind filled with images from a not-so-distant past. This very hand used to produce steaming loaves of the best bread on God's earth. This patient, loving hand didn't stop waving from Grandma's front porch until our car, packed with grandchildren, disappeared around the corner. Now lying limply by her side, her delicate, cool hand felt so soft I was afraid I might accidentally hurt her.

We stood around the bed, smiling uncomfortably, mumbling everything would be all right. My older cousin was the most at ease. “They treatin' you all right in this place, ol' girl?” he asked. I watched her face closely for a sign of recognition. Nothing. Silence didn't suit Grandma.

Stripped of her verbal armor, Grandma seemed exposed, vulnerable and—as I realized with sadness—suddenly approachable. For the first time, I was free to talk all I wanted. But I could think of nothing to say.

“We love you, Grandma,” I said finally, wondering if I was reaching her. My words hung in the air, sounding distant and insincere.

Page was standing quietly next to the window, his face brilliant red, tears streaming from his eyes. Just then, he pushed through the group and made his way to the bed. He leaned over Grandma's withered figure and took her cheeks gently in his hands. Head bowed, he stood there for an eternity, cradling her face and soaking her gown with his tears. Those of us with healthy ears were deaf to the volumes being spoken in that wonderful, wordless exchange.

I felt a rush of warmth deep inside me. It surged upward like an inexorable flood, filling my eyes until the room melted in a wash of colors and liquid shapes. As the picture blurred, my perception snapped into brilliant focus. How wrong I had been about Page. Far better than the rest of us, he knew the true meaning of our visit. He knew it perfectly because he grasped it not with his head but with his heart. Like a child unrestrained by propriety or ego, he had the freedom, courage and honesty to reach out in pain to Grandma. This was love, simple and pure.

I saw that Page's condition, for all the grief it brings, is in one sense a remarkable and precious gift. For among the many things my brother was born without is the capacity for insincerity. He cannot show what he does not feel, nor can he suppress urgent emotion. Inside him is a clear channel straight to the center of his soul. As I stood next to him, consumed by his expression of unselfish love, I stopped wondering why Page could not be more like me. At that moment, I wanted to be more like him.

We kissed Grandma, one by one, and slowly filed out of the room. I was the last to leave. “Bye, Grandma,” I said. As I turned to look at her one last time, I noticed her lips come together, as if she was trying to speak. Somehow, if for an instant, she mustered the strength to say good-bye. That's when I knew Page had reached her.

That afternoon by Grandma's deathbed, when none of us knew what to say, my speechless brother had said it all.