EUNICE AND GRANDMA

by Mary Elizabeth (Leach) Raines, (c) 2024

Eunice helped my grandma die. Let me go back.

When I was a kid the early 1950s, I used to visit my grandparents in rural Wisconsin. One of my favorite treats was accompanying them when they took us into town to an establishment called the Dairy Bar where they bought their milk and butter. It had a rack full of penny candy, a small counter with stools, and, most importantly to me, ice cream—lots of it. You could buy a milkshake with four scoops of ice cream in it for 20 cents, and for a quarter you could get a malted milk made with five scoops.

To my young eyes, however, the ice cream cones reigned over all else. A large single dip cost a nickel, a double scoop cost seven cents, and a triple dipper would put you back a whopping dime! This has to do with the story that follows. Read on.

I met Eunice as an adult when my widowed grandmother, Hazel Nelson, already in her 90s, became too frail to live on her own and had to move into the healthcare center in the same small town as the Dairy Bar. I moved into my grandmother’s former home to be nearer to her. Eunice was the recreation director at the center.

She had been born only eight years before me, but the rift between our generations was enormous and she seemed far older. While my peers were the earliest to get excited over the emergence of a band called the Beatles, hers were the earliest to swoon over a singer named Elvis Presley. Young women in my age group burned their bras and fought loudly for women’s liberation. Young women of Eunice’s age mostly wanted to become good church-going mothers and housewives. My generation became vehement hippie protestors. Hers adhered fiercely to the social mores of their time while attracting as little attention as possible. This made Eunice a good fit for the even more conventional residents of the nursing home, like my grandma.

Plump in a friendly kind of way, Eunice wore blue-rimmed glasses, and her short blonde hair was permed into layers of curls like stacked yellow sausages. Rural Wisconsin women preferred to avoid any show of emotional expression, and so did she; her facial features, while round and sweet, were always prim, and smiles were rare. This meant that you couldn’t read what was going on with Eunice by looking at her, but over time I learned that she felt things deeply, and her affectionate heart was enormous. A tiny peek into those emotions could be gleaned by looking at the color of her cheeks because, tight lips notwithstanding, she blushed readily.

Eunice loved her job and she really understood the residents at the healthcare center who, like Grandma, all had their roots in the same area and shared similar values. These oldsters were Her People. In her role as recreation director, Eunice arranged for their entertainment, providing the kind of gentle fun the elderly residents enjoyed the most: little nostalgic van excursions to the nearby countryside, funky hometown bands that played the hymns and homespun music that they had grown up with, simple crafts, “jobs” folding tablecloths and napkins, and regular bingo games where the prizes were apples.

That Grandma enthusiastically participated in the bingo games shocked me. Grandma, you see, was a devout Babtist, as she pronounced it. She had converted from the much more pagan Lutheranism in her teens. As such, my grandma did not believe in dancing, drinking, or anything resembling gambling. This included playing cards. I still remember the only time she ever scolded me. It was when I visited her once as a teenager and pulled out a deck of cards I had brought with me to play solitaire. For some puzzling reason, however, bingo met with her approval; she often kept her apple winnings tucked away next to her in her wheelchair, carefully wrapped in a napkin.

Grandma had grown up humbly in the late 1800s and early 1900s on a poor but self-sufficient Wisconsin farm. Her family regularly ate mush and salt pork, and not much else. She once told me that they had grown a lot of oats. When I asked her if they made oatmeal from it, she chuckled at my ignorance. “Them oats was for the horses, not people,” she exclaimed. This was as close to being haughty as I ever saw her get.

Even as a child, Grandma had to work hard. During the long dark days of Wisconsin winters, she stayed indoors on the farm doing household chores and cooking. As a result she got Ricketts, a disease that stems from children not being exposed to enough sunlight. It gave her severely bowed legs, worse than a cowboy’s, that never straightened out, although that wasn’t too obvious since she always wore longer dresses.

Grandma met my grandpa in the early 1900s. She was 16, and he was a few years older, a thresher who ran a huge steam-fired machine and traveled across the midwest helping farmers harvest their crops. They met and courted when his crew came to her family’s farm, and eventually they married. Later, as cars began to replace horses and steam engines, Grandpa became a Ford mechanic and opened a garage. The couple raised their family through the Great Depression without having much money, but this was not unusual; surviving on the edge of poverty was the same for all of their neighbors and friends. Grandma had to be frugal of necessity in those days, and she continued to live modestly throughout her life, even after she became a widow.

As she aged, she shrank. In her last few independent years, she was so short that when she would drive to the Dairy Bar for milk or to services at the Baptist church, her head couldn’t be seen above the steering wheel. People would turn to stare in wonder at the car that appeared to be driving itself.

Being that small, her appetite was tiny, and, as noted, she was frugal, so at the healthcare center, in addition to the apples she’d won in bingo, she was in the habit of wrapping up any leftover food from her meals in napkins and storing it next to her in the wheelchair for later on, even though later on never came. You didn’t waste food, you see. One day when she was 101 years old and I was visiting her, I smelled something really bad and discovered a large stinky piece of leftover fish that she’d hoarded from some unknown meal, all wrapped up in a napkin and stashed next to her in the wheelchair.

Eunice, who acted as a kind of mother hen, understood these sorts of things. She went out of her way to satisfy the simple needs of her residents, and she always treated them with gentle respect, even after their minds stopped functioning well, as Grandma’s sadly did. One day when Eunice came to work, she discovered that the not-always-conscientious aides at the healthcare center had wheeled my by-now very elderly grandma out into the main lobby where the residents congregated without dressing her. Grandma was still wearing her nightgown, robe, and slippers. Eunice’s face grew bright red, and this normally quiet woman went ballistic, reaming out those who were responsible and shocking the entire staff. She did this because she knew that my modest grandmother would have thought it positively indecent to let anyone see her in her nightclothes. Wisconsin farm women simply did not do that, and Eunice was their protector.

Although Grandma always seemed overly stodgy to me, I learned that as a young woman she went through a period of rebellion the way that most of us do at that age. She never burned her bra, but she did something almost as outrageous. Back in the day, women’s drawers (e.g., underpants) were a form of shorts that were slit open all along the crotch. This must have made visits to the outhouse easier under those long skirts and petticoats. Grandma shared with me that shortly before she got married, she did something extremely progressive. Sitting in her parents’ living room and using little stitches, she hand-sewed shut all of the slits in the underwear of her new trousseau! She told me that one of her uncles watched as she was doing this and grumbled at her the entire time for having such outlandish newfangled ideas.

I learned something else. Throughout her life, even into old age, my grandma always wore stockings that were not held up by anything, but instead had the tops rolled down to just above the hemline of her long dresses. I always thought that was incredibly frumpy of her, until I discovered that rolling your stockings down was a rebellious and frowned-upon fad with young women in the early 1900s, one that naturally drew severe disapproval from older folk in the same way that sewing up the crotch of your drawers was, or the way that piercing certain body parts is today. By rolling her stockings, Grandma was actually making a strong and trendy fashion statement. Who knew!

Despite possessing such modern inclinations, she could never bring herself to accept the idea of women wearing pants, which her daughter—my mother—and, of course, I were both inclined to do. It particularly distressed her when we would go out in public wearing pants.

“Women oughtn’t to wear pants,” she would fuss. “It’s not in the Bible.”

“Well, why not, for goodness sakes?” my mother would retort. “After all, Jesus wore a dress.”

Thus, when the aides at the healthcare center for the second time made a mistake by dressing Grandma in someone’s sweat pants before wheeling her out to the main hall, Eunice once again blasted them. I later discovered that on her days off, with her own money, Eunice would shop for clothing and other trinkets for the elderly residents, many of whom, like my grandmother, had no income beyond the meagre Social Security that the healthcare center took from them. Eunice knew what each one of them liked, and what kinds of things gave them comfort.

Once when I was visiting my grandma, a larger-than-normal crowd, including outsiders like me, had gathered to hear a concert that Eunice had arranged. It was being given by a group of musicians who were more widely known and professional than the usual local fare, so the spacious recreation room in the healthcare center was packed. During the middle of the concert, a tall gangly resident with Alzheimer’s jumped up from her chair, moved to an empty space, and began spinning around in circles, dancing wildly to the music. It was embarrassing. Eunice rose and without expression quickly approached the woman. I waited for her to help the resident back to her seat, using her usual kindness and diplomacy. Instead, Eunice hooked arms with the woman and danced right along with her. They continued until the song ended. That someone as reserved and proper as Eunice would do this still brings tears to my eyes. It’s a perfect example of how exceptional she was.

When Grandma reached 104 years of age, she began to die. As an adult, she had always grown her own vegetables, and she began buying health food at what she called “the nutritious store” decades before it became popular. The result was that her body outlived her mind, which had started to deteriorate when she was in her late 90s. Now, finally, her body was ready to stop as well. There was no particular disease that struck her down. One morning she simply didn’t awaken, and she never would again. Instead, she lay there in her bed for a number of days, comatose, breathing more and more slowly with an open mouth. When she had been younger and lucid, she had told me with both pride and love shining in her eyes that she was the one who had given me my first bath when I was a newborn baby. I thought it only fitting, in a full-circle way, that since she was with me at the beginning of my life, I should be with her at the end of hers. During those final fading days I would come to the healthcare center and sit in a rocking chair at her bedside, where I would chat gently about the weather and the neighbors, play hymns now and then on the tape recorder, swab her drying lips with moisturizer, and otherwise keep her company. She had read the Bible nearly every day of her life and it was precious to her, so although it wasn’t my thing, sometimes I would read passages of scripture aloud, even though it is doubtful that she knew.

And this is where Eunice helped my grandma die. She would frequently come into the room to spend a few minutes with us before she was called to be elsewhere. At those times she would speak to my unconscious grandmother, encouraging her. “It’s okay, Hazel,” she would say softly. “You know what to do. It’s all right to leave. You know how to do this.” Eunice fully understood about death, and she also understood Grandma. After a week or so, my grandmother died peacefully.

Several years later I was working as a hypnotherapist, and Eunice decided to see me. She had always been just a bit roly-poly, and now she asked me to give her hypnosis to stop her addiction to sweets, since losing weight was necessary for her health.

There was a sad story behind this. Eunice had needed to take time off work for a serious heart surgery that wound up having complications. The healthcare center where she’d worked all her life had recently been sold to a corporate group, and it was no longer the locally-run place in the town where everyone knew everyone else. When Eunice finally recovered and was ready to return to her old job, the new management told her in a hostile way that while she could have the position back, she would have to start all over again at minimum wage and she would lose her many years of accrued benefits. She refused. Eunice was already in her 60s, her husband was unable to work, and they had been financially wiped out by medical bills. This normally placid woman cried as she told me the story. What that place did to her was beyond cruel. I was glad that Grandma was no longer there.

My heart went out to Eunice and I invited her to have her hypnosis sessions for free, or, if she wanted to pay, no more than $10. Because she was proud, she insisted on paying. When she came for an appointment, she would place her $10 bill on the table with a trembling hand. For her, that ten dollars was what several hundred dollars would be for anyone else.

Eunice turned out to be an excellent candidate for hypnosis and it worked well for her, helping her to avoid excess sweets. She loved her sessions and periodically she would return with a ten-dollar bill to have another one. Sometimes, as part of the hypnosis, I invited her to create what I called a special place—a wonderful place of her choosing where she felt especially happy and peaceful. She particularly loved that part of the session. Whenever I asked where her special place was, she always answered that it was flying in an airplane up high in the clouds, which I found rather curious.

As she continued having appointments and we got to know one another a little bit better, I discovered to my surprise that I had actually first met Eunice in the early 1950s when I was just a little girl. It turned out that during her teenaged years she had worked at the Dairy Bar where, if you recall, Grandma used to take me for a treat. Eunice had been the girl back then who had sold Grandma her milk and scooped out my ice cream cones. How I loved having that association with this kind woman!

Eventually Eunice gained enough trust in me to share a special secret. It turned out that the special place she went to during hypnosis wasn’t flying in an airplane at all. She confessed that she had only told me this because she wasn’t sure that I would understand. She revealed that her special place was actually up in heaven, lovingly surrounded by all the former healthcare center residents she cared about so much who had died. They would throng around her, and she would be filled with indescribable peace and joy. My grandma, she told me, was always one of them.

After a few years, I moved out of the family home in Wisconsin, and we lost touch. Just a short time ago I came across Eunice’s obituary online. I believe that she must be having a wonderful time in heaven. I hope she says hi to Grandma for me.

***

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A CORNER OF HELL

by Mary Elizabeth Raines, © 2023

After she took what would be her last breath, she decided to stop breathing. There was a great satisfaction in that—in choosing to end those final frantic gasps for air that really weren’t working. Yes, a little bit of a physical struggle followed, the cells of her body protesting, but it wasn’t that bad. And then she died.

It had been, she concluded, a fine life.

What happened next was not what she expected.

She found herself alone, facing a high wall made of dull and slightly mildewed concrete blocks—and they weren’t the pleasantly morose, romantic sorts of blocks like those you’d find in a Louisiana cemetery. Instead, they were completely boring. No matter in which direction she turned, all that stood before her was the wall. Other than that, she couldn’t make out where she was because a thick gray fog surrounded her—and once again, it was fog without drama. It wasn’t mystical, like the London fog in a Sherlock Holmes story, nor was it the kind of soupy-salty oceanic fog that makes you want to snuggle up in a comforter, sip something warm from a mug, and open up a good book. This fog was so boring and bland that it didn’t even drip with despair. It had no personality whatsoever.

Wherever she was, it was horribly noisy, too. There was an irritatingly loud and irregular background sound that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was a little bit like the start-and-stop noise of her neighbor using his weed whacker for hours on end that used to drive her crazy.



She felt itchy and uncomfortably hot. This further annoyed her, but oddly, when she checked to see if she still had a body, it didn’t seem to be there. Despite this, her senses were intact and she was keenly aware of her surroundings. Since these  surroundings were unpleasant, this was not necessarily a plus.

When she was alive, she had watched a lot of people describe their near-death experiences on YouTube, and because of what they’d shared, she had been expecting that she would feel a huge relief after the ordeal of dying. Released from the bondage of their earthly bodies, many near-death experiencers related that they felt a sense of freedom. And peace. And boundless love. Exhilaration, even! These were the promised goodies. But what she was experiencing was not even close to that. Instead, she just felt depressed, and even that wasn’t the sentimentally syrupy self-indulgent kind of misery that can be weirdly comforting. No, hers was simply a dull, nauseating hopelessness.

She wondered what she could do. It then came to her that in one of those near-death encounters she’d listened to, they said that if you were in trouble in the afterlife all you needed to do was to ask for help. She decided to give it a try.

“Help,” she said. She waited a few seconds. “Help. Anyone there?”



Even though she was only giving lip service to this request and not asking with any particular commitment, to her amazement she suddenly felt a wise presence standing next to her. There was no blaze of light, and certainly no rustle of angel wings, but there was…someone. She couldn’t see this being, but it felt kind of male.

They began to converse, and this was the only aspect of her experience thus far that resembled what she’d learned from the near-death YouTubes, for neither she nor the presence actually spoke out loud. Instead, they could sense one another’s thoughts telepathically.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Just think of me as a guide,” he responded. “Why did you ask for help?”

“I don’t know where I am. I’m confused,” she said.

“Goes with the turf,” he sighed.

“The turf? What do you mean? Where am I?”

There was a pause. “I can’t put this any other way, and I only speak truth, so I’ll have to be blunt. You, my Precious One, are in hell. You died. This is your own personal corner of hell.”

If she’d had an actual voice, she would have been shrieking. She couldn’t have been more astounded than if she’d been hit by a bolt of lightening. “Hell? This is hell? I’m in hell? You’re saying I died and I went to hell!?”



“Yes. That about sums it up.”

“But…but…hell?” she sputtered. “How could that be? I don’t even believe in hell!”

While there was no thought-form response, it seemed to her as though the guide was shrugging.



“It’s not fair,” she continued with a great deal of vehemence. “I was a good person and I lived a good life.”

“You did?”

Pondering this, she realized with a measure of embarrassment that she had never done anything particularly heroic, nor had she committed any spectacularly notable deeds. On the other hand, she had never done anything especially evil either. She should not be in hell.

She proceeded to let this guide know that. “Yes. A good life,” she said. “Well, pretty good, anyway. Like how I always voted for the nice candidates, you know, not the mean, greedy, corrupt ones. That was good of me, right? Oh, and how about this? You know that time I took care of my neighbor’s cats when she went on vacation? I didn’t snoop around her house, not once.” As an afterthought she added, “And I was always honest.”

The guide didn’t say anything, but she sensed him challenging this.

“And I visited my grandmother every week in the nursing home,” she continued defensively.

He spoke up about this one. “Really? You visited her every week?”

“So, okay, almost every week,” she said with a little chagrin.

“Almost every week?”

“Well, I mean I tried to visit almost every week. At least I thought about visiting. But give me a break. It was smelly in there.”

“You didn’t like the smell?”

“Good grief, no!” The nursing home had smelled dismal. The overly warm air in the U-shaped building stank of a distinctly unpleasant combination of long-lingering scents dominated by the strong stink of stale urine. As she remembered that unseemly fragrance, suddenly the air around her changed. It began to smell exactly like the nursing home.



“Who did that?” she said to the guide suspiciously, wrinkling her non-existent nose. “Did you do that?”



“Not me so much as you. Everyone’s hell is unique. It takes a while to get the mix of misery just right. Your memory spiced it up a little bit, that’s all.”

“I need to sit down,” she said.



“How are you going to do that without a body?”

“Now you’re being rude. I called for help. You’re not being at all helpful.”



“On the contrary,” he replied. “Demons are rude. I’m not a demon. I’m a guide. I have no choice but to speak the truth, so I am simply being realistic.” He gave her a moment to take that in. “You called for help, and I am here to help. Go ahead, please. Ask me whatever you want.”

She stopped to think for a moment, remembering several stories of people who had been granted wishes, but who totally screwed up their chances by asking the wrong question or by being misunderstood.

Reading her mind, he said, “I’m not a genie in a lamp, and I don’t grant wishes. You won’t mess this up by asking for the wrong thing or by me mishearing you." With a chuckle he added, “No matter what you say, you’re not going to get a ten-inch pianist.” (He was referring to an old dirty joke that used to be told on Earth about a guy whose wish was heard incorrectly by a genie. Think about it.) “So feel free. Ask away.”

She retorted with some vehemence, “Isn’t my question obvious? Why am I in hell?! I do not understand why I am in hell. It’s not fair. Like I said, I was a good person! I really was!”

“You’re ranting now,” he said, interrupting her. “I realize that you’re hoping to change your status by pleading your case with me, but it doesn’t work like that. I can’t wave a magic wand and zap you out of hell. What I can do is tell you the truth and help you troubleshoot.”

“I’m ranting because being here doesn’t make sense,” she cried out with frustration. “I already told you: I was a Very Good Person!”

“So you said. Let me try to explain. Yes, we will acknowledge that you were mildly good in your own way, although certainly not to the degree that you think you were. Even so, what put you in hell—what you did wrong—had little to do with neglecting your grandmother so much. Or, speaking of honesty, of that time you cheated on your taxes. Because, FYI, we know all about how you wrote off that trip to the Carolinas as a business expense, when it was, in fact, purely a vacation.”


She squirmed, or would have if she could have, and then said, “But if those things aren’t the reason I’m in hell, then why are you even bothering to tell me?”

“I’m pointing out some elements of your life that could stand improvement and that may have escaped your attention.”

“Let’s try this again: why am I in hell?”

“All right, then. Straight to the point. It’s because of that invention of yours.”

“Invention? What invention?”



“The fruit and vegetable stickers you invented. You were the very first one who came up with the idea of making those little adhesive labels with bar codes on them and fastening them onto every piece of fruit and every single vegetable sold in grocery stores.”



She was aghast. “And that’s why I’m in hell?”

“Yes.”

“That is so unfair! You’re right; I thought it up, but did I ever profit from it? No! Not one dime! They stole it from me. I never even got credit for coming up with the idea!”



“Nonetheless, it was your idea. You were the first to think of it.”

“And you’re saying that’s the reason I’m in hell?”


“Yes.”

“How could that be? This is screwy. I don’t understand,” she cried.

“It seems that you have no clue as to how much unhappiness your invention caused.”



“What unhappiness? It was a great idea,” she protested. “Everyone said so! The bar codes let people know if their produce was organic or conventionally grown! It showed country of origin! And it saved so much time for the cashiers at grocery stores! All they had to do was to scan the produce and the price would pop right up on their cash registers. They didn’t have to bother with memorizing stuff any longer. Those stickers were a wonderful thing!”

She still couldn’t see the guide, but she got the impression that he was shaking his head sadly.



“Sorry, but you didn’t help at all. Quite the opposite. You see, your invention took away something quite valuable from those clerks.”


“You’re kidding! What?”


“Back in the old days, grocery store cashiers had to memorize not only every kind of fruit and vegetable the store sold, but also their prices. They took great pride in those skills.”

“I still don’t understand. What did I personally do that was so awful?”

“You took it all away with those labels. You dumbed down the entire job. Instead of the rich stimulation cashiers used to get, their brains turned into robotic puddles. Nowadays all they are required to do is to scan mindlessly. And worse, self-service machines are increasingly taking away their jobs. It’s all because of you. You see, in the early days before your invention we considered being a grocery store cashier a high calling indeed. You had to have a great memory, and you needed to be both fast and courteous. In fact, many celestial beings who reincarnated to be of service to humanity chose that as a career path. We have quite a lot of grocery store cashiers on the Other Side.”

He indicated the Other Side of the wall. She got a quick glimpse of a ray of indescribably beautiful luminous light, accompanied by the enticing smells of strawberries, lilacs, and chocolate. It created an immense yearning within her, but the vision disappeared as quickly as as it came.

“That’s heaven over there?” she said. “Just over the wall? Smelling like strawberries, lilacs, and chocolate?”

“Yup,” said the guide.

“Heaven smells like strawberries, lilacs, and chocolate?”

“Yours does.”

She mused on this for a moment, and then pulled herself back as the nursing-home scent began to take over again. “And hell smells like nursing-home pee?”

“Yours does.”

“But it isn’t fair! How could I have possibly known that inventing the stickers to put on fruit and vegetables would be bad for the grocery-store cashiers?”

The guide sighed. “It’s not just that. Let me give you a Life Review to show you more of the trouble that your invention generated.”

[Note: When people die, they are given a Life Review where they are shown the impacts that their lives have had on other people, both the good and the bad. And they don’t just see the results. They feel it all, too.]

She was suddenly slammed with many thousands of little scenes, kind of like videos, which featured people of all ages, sizes, races, religions, IQs, and personality types. These people had one thing in common. At some point in their lives, each one of them had been miserably tormented by the bar-code stickers on produce. 

The most common scenes were of hosts and hostesses trying to arrange beautiful bowls of fruit who wound up foiled and frustrated by the ugly stickers that were too firmly attached to their fruit to remove. Her soul picked up each ounce of frustration that they felt.


In another example, one which made her cringe with disappointment, she observed an impoverished old lady on a fixed income who had decided to indulge herself by spending her last dollars on an expensive, blushing pear that would be ripe in about four days...except that when the woman pulled off the sticker, she also pulled off a big chunk of skin and pear flesh, guaranteeing that the pear would begin to brown and rot before it had the chance to grow ripe.

She experienced the profound embarrassment of a fifteen-year-old boy in his school cafeteria who was having lunch with a girl he was trying to impress. He suddenly realized that, along with the apple he’d bit into, he was chewing on the little label. His face turned red. The girl began to mock him.

Over and over she experienced firsthand the distress and frustration and annoyance of the thousands upon thousands of people who had ruined everything from tomatoes to nectarines by pulling off the stickers, or who had found little bar codes floating in their soup, or who'd discovered stickers stuck on their shoes, or who had felt sickened after seeing the awful little labels leering up at them from their otherwise organic compost bins. On and on it went.

There were many such scenes, each one centering around the labels she had invented, and each one negative. Granted, the bad feelings were pretty mild and faded away quickly, but because of the sheer numbers of incidents, the resultant unhappinesses had coalesced into a big huge mess, kind of like an enormous ball of twine, but uglier. And stickier. A sticky sticker mess. And she was to blame.

“Okay, I get it. People were frustrated,” she said. “But it’s not like I built condos that collapsed, or bribed senators, or shot anybody, or polluted the water. No one ever got sick or died from my invention. It’s unfair that I was sent to hell for it.”

“Nobody got sick that you know of,” chided the guide. “Most of those labels are made of micro-plastics. Eating a piece of plastic wrap probably won’t kill you immediately either, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you. As for your being sent to hell, you have to realize that it’s in large part because an enormous number of people have cursed you, and continue to do so. Every single one of our thoughts are actually prayers, you see, even the ones that we haven’t designated as such. More folks than you would ever want to know have grumbled that they wish there would be a corner in hell reserved for whomever invented these stickers. That’s you. This is your corner.”

She whimpered.

“And yes, while the unhappiness you created was admittedly low level, there have been and continue to be so many negative experiences that the sheer numbers have created an enormous collective cry of anguish. As a matter of fact, other than a few big shots who have profited from them, we couldn’t find a record of a single individual who has ever expressed pleasure or gratitude for these labels you invented.”

“But I honestly thought I was helping! My intent was noble! That’s got to count for something! Up until I got the idea for the stickers, cashiers had been mis-pricing produce. A lot of money was lost.”

The guide seemed to shake his head. “As I said. The bottom line is that your invention served only to help a handful of rich people get richer, with the sad byproducts of diminishing the roles of cashiers, and generating enormous frustration within the general public. This is not something that gets a gold star from You-Know-Who.”

She frowned. She was feeling more miserable by the moment. To make things worse, the weed-whacking sound was now mixed with an overlay of loud, vibrating thumps, not unlike the thuds that used to drive her crazy that emanated from the subwoofers in the cars of teenagers who used to drive through her neighborhood. She winced.

“So I’m stuck here in misery for eternity? Is there any way out?”

“I was hoping you would ask that! You know, I’m not allowed to volunteer information. I have to wait until you ask for help,” said the guide benignly.

“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently.

“And you might want to take a long, hard look at your impatience, by the way” he scolded. “That’s not helping your case.”

She sank dejectedly.

“But in answer to your question: it’s not easy, but there’s always a way out,” he said, softening.


For the first time, she felt a glimmer of hope. It was accompanied by an uplifting sound like someone playing a glissando on a xylophone. 


“You guys are good with the sound effects,” she said.



“Thank you. I thought it would be a nice touch,” replied the guide. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed to her that he was beaming a little bit at the compliment.

Just then she got a swift, blurry glimpse of other nearby corners of hell similar to hers with tormented people trapped in them. The sight went away as swiftly as it had come.

“Sorry,” said the guide. “The glissando slid open a bit of a window there. My mistake.”

“So it’s not just me? There are others here who’ve been put in their own private corner of hell?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied.

“Does everybody who is sent to hell get a corner?”

“No, not at all. They’re reserved especially for those who’ve had thousands upon thousands of people specifically wishing that they would be sent to a special corner in hell. As happened with you.”

“What evil did those people do–the ones I just now saw?”

“They’re the ones who kept making the seats on airplanes smaller and smaller.”

She shuddered for a moment. Then she said, “So how do I get out of here?”

“The best way would be to have those whom you have wronged forgive you.”



“But my life review showed that there were thousands of people who were irritated or frustrated by my invention.”


“Yes, more than a million actually,” he said. “And continuing.”

“Do they all need to forgive me for inventing the stickers before I can get out of here?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any chance of that happening?”

“Not a chance in hell–so to speak.” The guide chuckled at that little play on words, and then grew serious. “If it were to occur at all, it would take millennia.”

She slumped.

“You see, mankind would have to evolve to an unheard-of level of goodness before people could even understand, much less embrace, the concept of forgiveness,” he said. “And when they reach that level, they’ll be busy forgiving the obvious crimes done to them: the things like murders and infidelity and robberies. After millennia, I doubt if anyone, even the grocery-store clerks who’ve lost their jobs, will remember their irritation with fruit and vegetable bar-code labels long enough to forgive you.”

“So if I have to rely upon forgiveness, I’m pretty much doomed to stay here in hell forever?” she said.

“Yes, I’m sorry to say. That’s the picture.”



She suddenly understood the Biblical descriptions of hell as being a place where people gnash their teeth. If she still had teeth, she would be gnashing them. 

“Please, is there any other way out of this place?” she begged.



“There is,” he said. “Provided you ask for help.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing?” she snapped.

He shook his head. “There’s that impatience I was talking about.”

She winced. “Sorry. But what else would you suggest?”

He did the spiritual equivalent of taking in a long breath. “Your best bet would be to return to earth. To be reborn.”

“Are you kidding me? Return?” she said with surprise. “That’s reincarnation. I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

“You didn’t believe in hell, either.”

“So you’re saying that reincarnation is true, then?”

“Let’s just say that it’s complicated, and it’s not quite what people think,” he said. “Nevertheless, apart from forgiveness, being reborn looks like it’s going to be your best opportunity to escape.”

“Well, if it’s a choice between standing here for eternity smelling stale pee and staring at this concrete wall, okay, I definitely choose being reincarnated,” she said. 

“Hold on. Not that simple. If you want to escape being sent back here again, in your next life you will be required to balance out all the negativity that you created.”

“How can I do that?”


He thought for a moment. “Here’s one plan: we could send you back as an infant who chokes to death on sticker. That might pay off the karma.”

“That’s horrible! And how could that even happen, to choke to death on a tiny little label?”



“It would take some doing,” he agreed. “Maybe we should choose something else to balance out the evil you’ve created.

“Are any other options?”



He thought for a moment. “Possibly. But only if you are willing to go back and in some way make up for the suffering that you have caused. It would have to be your sole life’s mission.”

“If I agree to be reborn, will I remember this conversation and what my mission is supposed to be?”

He shook his head. Or its auric equivalent. “No.”

“Then how would I even know what it is that I am supposed to do? Would you program me ahead of time?"


“No. If I instilled in you the knowledge of precisely how to find redemption, the game would be up. You’re going to have to figure this one out for yourself.”

“I’m confused. How can I make up for the harm you say I caused if I can’t even remember what my life’s mission is?”

“Easy-peasy. Here’s the way it works: with your permission, we would send you lots and lots of life experiences to point you in the right direction and give you the chance to balance out your karma. All humans have free will, of course, so we can’t guarantee that you will accept your life mission, but it should wind up being pretty obvious.”

“Sounds like an impossibly long shot,” she said.

“Oh, don’t worry. You would get plenty of nudges.”

 “You think that I should go back, then?”

“Yes, that’s my recommendation.” A new thought hit him and he brightened. “And if you agree, we could even arrange it so that you go back as a crazy person! Crazy people can effect enormous change. In fact, most of the big shifts that have happened to humanity have occurred as the result of a crazy person.”

“I guess I could do crazy,” she said dubiously. “It sounds better than being a baby who chokes to death.”

“In that case, and again with your permission, we will program you to have lots and lots of miserable experiences with the stickers on produce. That’s how karma works. You’ll ruin countless pears. You’ll be embarrassed in school lunchrooms. You’ll be unable to decorate with bowls of fruit. You will suffer enormous sticker karma.”



She sighed. “I can’t stand looking at this wall one more moment. Bring it on.”

 

People snickered about the crazy lady who marched back and forth all day long in front of Safeway carrying a picket sign and loudly protesting the little bar-code labels that were still being pasted onto fruit and vegetables, and still just as frustrating to peel off.

Over time, however, the crazy lady became a Thing. Tourists began going out of their way to drive past and ogle her. Sometimes they gave her money. Both The New Yorker  and The Guardian published clever articles about her. The Discovery Channel aired a documentary about the crazy lady and her mission. She drew scads of attention to the unworthiness of produce stickers. In her own peculiar way, she created waves from which, in a few decades, a new movement would spring.

Every night, after she was done picketing, the crazy lady always went loyally to the nursing home that smelled like pee to visit her grandmother.

The End

 

If you liked this story, please check out Mary Elizabeth Raines' collection of short stories, THE MAN IN THE GPS AND OTHER STORIES, on Amazon. 

Since this story is copyrighted, please do not copy or excerpt or use to train AI machines. Feel free, however, to link to this post! 

THE RUNAWAYS

by M. E. Raines

I MET HER at the Copley Square subway stop in Boston. We exchanged cursory greetings. Then, with no warning, she grabbed my hand, turned, and charged toward the stairs. It made me laugh. I stumbled along behind her, climbing from the dank underground into the golden autumn sunlight. When I caught up to her, our footsteps immediately fell into a familiar, easy sync.
        It had been more than 50 years since I had last seen her, and yet she had the same exhilarating effect on me that she’d always had. She made me come to life. Over the years there were many other women with whom I’d tried to establish the same effortless rapport, but the result was, at best, a shallow wish-it-were-so-I’ll-pretend-it-is imitation, and more often than not a miserable failure. Being a musician, I have always been keenly aware of the rhythm between two sets of footsteps. With these other romances, I’d had to shift my stride in some way to compensate for our lack of compatibility–often needing to truncate or, in the case of one Amazonian beau, elongate my steps and the cadence of my pace to match theirs. Walking with her after so many years was not only smooth. It was like rejoining a lost part of myself...a lighter, braver, happier part of myself.
        She’d found me when she accidentally stumbled across a YouTube of one of my performances. She had immediately looked up my manager and contacted him. He was, as usual, off-putting. Even though he grumbled at her, he reluctantly caved in to her request and forwarded her cell number to me. I understood. She has always been hard to resist. When I called her rather nervously, our conversation was swift because she was headed out the door. She let me know that she was going to be in Boston, but beyond that, there was no time for such exchanges as, “What are you doing now? Are you married? Do you have kids? Where do you live?” Our chat had consisted only of making quick arrangements to reunite at the subway stop near her hotel, which was solely her idea, because everything was always her idea. She hung up right after we had made these casual plans to meet. I didn’t have a chance to ask her to text me when she arrived or to offer any details about how I look now, such as, “I’ll be the one wearing a gray wool coat with a rose in the top buttonhole.”
        It seemed stupid not to have planned more carefully. After all, it had been a long time–over half a century!–since we had last seen one another. And I am normally an extremely detail-oriented man. That has often been a stumbling block in my life, irritating those around me, but on the plus side, it was a contributing factor to the discipline it took for me to become a reasonably well-known concert pianist, the rare classical musician who is actually able to make a living at it.
        Sitting gingerly on the grimy blue plastic seat of the subway while being tossed from side to side (which was a weirdly nostalgic sensation, since I hadn’t been on a subway in decades), as the train rounded its final corner, I worried about that lack of detail in our hasty plans to meet. I have always been a worrier. How in the world would we find one another? What if she were standing in front of me and I completely overlooked her and went back home? What if she was late? And if so, how long should I wait for her before giving up? Or what if I approached the wrong woman and inappropriately embraced a stranger who would accuse me of sexual impropriety, resulting in my picture as a pervert on the nightly news?
        Another worry was that that the stench of the subway would permeate my clean clothes and displace the subtle but elegant aftershave I had splashed on my cheeks. I looked deceptively casual, dressed in khakis and a shirt that gave the impression of being more informal than its price tag would indicate. It had taken a long time for me to groom myself and to settle on what to wear so that I would appear reasonably attractive, yet blithely indifferent. My costume was intended to disguise how deeply, even obsessively, I cared about this meeting.
        There was no need to worry. I recognized her wide forehead and round squirrel cheeks the moment I stepped off the train. She still had the same lopsided grin. And I realized with relief that she had no problem spotting me because she knew exactly what I looked like from watching me on YouTube. We smiled at one another and then, immediately after saying hello, she grabbed my hand, as I said earlier, bolted energetically toward the stairs, and led me, trailing after her, into the  late afternoon light. Just like that. So many decades had passed, and we had scarcely spoken, but I immediately felt the familiar sensations of being in her energy field. It was a good feeling, like skinny-dipping in the clear, warm water of a friendly swimming hole. It had always been so. I became different when I was with her. I became better.
        The last time I’d seen her was the day that she moved away from the house next door to mine. She was seven, only a few months older than me. Up until then, we had been inseparable. Wearing that same lopsided smile that was on her face now, minus a few baby teeth, she had given me a clumsy goodbye hug. In response, I’d bashed her arm gently with my fist. She grabbed the spot, faking pain, and pretended that it had hurt her. I laughed. She always could make me laugh. Then she climbed into her family’s turquoise Nash station wagon and they drove away. I was sad for a long time after that.
        Back then, she was about my height. Now, walking on the Boston sidewalks, while I wasn’t all that tall, she seemed scarcely to have grown. The top of her head barely reached my shoulder. When I looked down, I noticed her pink scalp showing in patches underneath her thinning gray hair. I found that strangely reassuring.
        I had long since become quite portly. And bald. Over the years, I would sometimes imagine what she might look like as a grown-up. In my mind, she easily blossomed into a busty female with a charming figure, the kind who could get away with wearing clinging low-cut dresses and skimpy swimsuits. Even at seven, you see, she had turned me on a little bit. We sometimes played doctor and examined one another very closely.
        My lusty imaginings of her adult appearance proved to be completely wrong. Like me, with age her body had shifted and expanded, so her tummy protruded more than a little–actually, not too differently from the way it had when we were children. It amazed me that her hair, despite thinning, was still cut in the same style: short and messy and billowing with loose curls. I used to see those curls as sleepy unkempt kittens that were just on the verge of waking up and pouncing. The only difference with her hair was that then the kittens had been dark and plump, and now they were gray and far less puffy, with those bits of pink showing through. As for me, I’d lost most of my hair except for a few ridiculous and wayward wisps on the sides of my head. I kept those wisps. Shaving one’s head was for younger men. Even when I’d had hair, it’d never been either very thick or attractive, but I still wanted to keep what little I had. I hated having gone bald.

 

WE FIRST MET when we were around four years old. My parents had planted me in a playpen in our garage, which they had placed in front of the family car. They then opened the wide garage door and went back into the house, leaving me there alone. They did this often. It was their version, I guess, of allowing me to be outdoors by myself. My parents were kind of freaky, although nothing they did seemed out of the ordinary to me at the time. I was used to this imprisonment and I was content to hum music and play with a few toys until my jailers decided that it was time to bring me back indoors.
        On that day, seeing the open garage door, she had wandered over from her yard next door, stepped inside, and stood there, staring at me. I looked up at her and her head full of kittens. It was like an angelic visitation. I wasn’t even sure at first that she was real.
        “Why don’t you get out of that thing,” she finally said. It was a demand rather than a question.
        I stared at her, confused.
        She was determined to spring me. “Stand up and come out. I want to play with you.” Then she reached a chubby little hand toward me to help.
        It had never occurred to me to do such a thing, but I felt obliged to cooperate with her command. Clamoring over the edge of the playpen with its varnished wooden spindles, especially with her hand grasping mine, wasn’t easy. I have never been agile. The heavy miniature prison cell almost overturned when I made my first timid attempt, but after a few more tries, I succeeded.
        We walked to the garage doorway where we stood side by side for a few moments, tracing the iridescent oil stains on the concrete with the toes of our sneakers. Mine were red. Hers were blue. She was chewing bubble gum and blew a little bubble, which she promptly popped. I gazed at her in envious fascination.
        “How do you do that?” I asked.
        “You don’t know how?”
        I shook my head.
       “You’re supposed to blow bubbles. That’s why it’s called bubble gum.” At that, she pulled a still-wrapped piece of pink gum out of her pocket and gave it to me. This gesture permanently cemented my adoration of her. Even now, I can taste that peculiar fruity-ish taste that belongs only to bubble gum.
        “You got to chew it a lot first. To get it soft.”
       I was obedient. We began to chaw noisily together, and as we did so, we started to giggle for no reason at all, which was to become our habit. Then she demonstrated how to blow a bubble–well, as best as a four-year-old can. Under her tutelage, I soon learned this very important childhood skill. We were now officially chums.
        As I eagerly practiced blowing bubbles, she wandered around the garage for a bit, fingering the snow shovel, lifting and banging shut the little metal door to the gas cap a few times, and squatting down to trace the numbers on our car’s license plate. Then, looking bored, she said, “We have to get out of here.”
        “Okay,” I said. She grabbed my hand to lead me outdoors. With some trepidation on my part, we stepped from the shelter of the garage into the sunshine. I looked nervously back over my shoulder at the safety of my playpen.
        “Let’s get way way way out of here.” She thought for a moment. “I know what we can do. We can run away from home! Lulu and Tubby did that once.” Lulu and Tubby were characters in a popular comic book called Little Lulu that was about a little girl. Every child back then knew who Little Lulu was, even four-year-olds like us.
        The thought of running away from home worried me. “If we run away, where are we going to go to?” I asked.
        She thought for a moment. “California,” she said. She had no idea where California was, or that it was a state, or what a state was. She had heard her parents say the word, though. It was a good-sounding word, and she knew that it was a place.
       I pondered this for a moment. “Do they have pianos there?” This was a supremely important question.
        “I don’t know,” she said.
       “Because if they don’t have pianos, I’m not going.” My eventual destiny was already beckoning me. Whenever I sat at the piano and tried to play, my parents actually encouraged me. I was something of a child prodigy, able to pick out tunes and harmonies even at the tender age of four. They never spanked me when I was at the piano. It was my safe place.
       “Well, okay. We won’t run away, then. Some day we will, but not today.” She looked at me with that lopsided grin and a twinkle in her eye. “Today we will just be lost.”
        “But where will we go?” I asked, worried.
     “The woods. Lost children always are found in the woods,” she said, beginning to stride from the driveway to the sidewalk with confidence.
        “Okay,” I said. I didn’t exactly know what being lost meant, except perhaps for Hansel and Gretel, and they had found a gingerbread house. Maybe there would be candy. It sounded pretty good to me.
        Our street had a dead end. There were about half a dozen trees there. I knew from Hansel and Gretel that forests had trees. So the end of our block must be a forest. As if she were reading my mind, she turned and headed toward them. They were only a few houses away.
        At first she trotted ahead of me, but I caught up to her. This was to be the first of many times to follow that we walked side by side in perfect sync. I felt light-headed. When we got to the trees, we wandered around them and for a while pretended that we were lost children. Then we made up some delicious laughter-filled now-forgotten games, playing in the way that four-year-olds do. But lunchtime was approaching and we were both getting hungry. I also knew that if my parents found me out of the playpen, I would get a spanking. So she went back to her house, and I returned to the garage. It was easier climbing back into the playpen than it had been getting out.
        This was the beginning of the best relationship in my life.

I LOOKED DOWN now at her gray kitten curls and pink scalp in wonder. We found a coffee shop and went in, where we sat across from one another in a booth that had high wooden sides and red fake-leather seats. I loved being with her again. It was as if no time whatsoever had passed.
        We talked. She told me how much she loved my music, and said that she’d often thought about me throughout the years, as I had thought of her. I learned that she had been married, and was only recently divorced. Despite having had plenty of my own affairs (but never with anyone whose stride matched mine), I felt absurdly jealous. A man who wasn’t me had married her, lived with her, and made love to her.
        As for me, I had long since learned to channel my passion into my music. That was my life. There were no romances any longer, if you could have even called them that. Most of my past affairs had been with women who’d played in the symphonies where I had been the guest performer. I’d also had–and still had–a few nutty groupies and stalkers who, it seemed, were into Grieg and Rachmaninoff, although I was not remotely interested in touching them.
        Coffee now replaced bubblegum as our primary choice of oral distraction. I listened, transfixed, as, while sipping her brew, she shared stories of her pursuits of a number of unfulfilling career paths. None of them had stemmed from necessity, for her marriage and subsequent divorce settlement had kept her fixed financially for pretty much the rest of her life. But she seemed to yearn for some kind of professional identity. I could see how it would be hard for her to find a job that matched the vibrant enthusiasm of her spirit.
        For a while, she said, she had made jewelry which she had tried to sell at craft fairs and on Etsy, but with little success. She proudly lifted a gaudy necklace of beads and gemstones from her chest that was an example of her past creations. Then, shoving it across the formica table, she gifted me with a bizarre-looking keychain that she had crafted. I smiled and nodded pleasantly, but I realized that she was not talented enough to flourish in jewelry, or keychain making, or in any of the arts, for that matter. If she had possessed a true artistic flair, she would have been better dressed and done something with her hair. Instead, she was frankly kind of frumpy. I didn’t mind. She looked fine to me. Despite my silent criticism, it was a pleasurable conversation. And, as always, we periodically broke out into joyous laughter for no reason at all.
        She shared that after the jewelry-making gig, she had worked for a while as a tour guide and jeep driver in Sedona, and sold essential oils on the side. The tedium of jabbering at the tourists while driving over the same trails day after day, month after month, wore on her. She wound up wrecking the jeep one afternoon, which put a quick end to that career. She told it in a funny way, but I suspected that although she was a great person to walk next to, and quite probably an amusing guide, she was almost certainly an awful driver.
        She said that she was now into photography, and pulled out her phone to show me a few of the photos that she had taken. They were not very good, but instead were as off-base as the necklace she wore. Photography to me is like peeking into someone’s windows and watching a party that they are having. She should more rightly be the person partying, I thought, not the one on the outside looking in.
        “I envy you,” she told me with a sigh. “You have always known what you were going to be.”
        As we finished our coffee, she suddenly said, “I’m on my way to France. Paris. My plane leaves Logan Airport tomorrow. That’s why I’m in Boston.” She impulsively grabbed my hands. “Hey, why don’t you come with me? I’ll buy the ticket! C’mon! Run away with me!”
        I stared at her in shock.
        “They have pianos in France, you know,” she laughed.
        “But...but it’s impossible,” I said, shaking my head and feeling more than a little distress at her sudden invitation. “My manager has me booked solidly for the next three years. Three years! France isn’t even on the concert schedule.”
        “So what? Ditch the schedule. Come with me!”
        I felt pangs of yearning for this improbable and impossible temptation. The turntable of my mind began to spin. I had stopped getting spankings from my parents when I was about 12, but I’d known my manager almost since that time, and he had ways of scolding me that were nearly the equivalent. I didn’t dare disappoint him. He was old now, and the one who’d been responsible for most of my success as a concert pianist. Ditching the bookings and running away would also be a sure way of getting spanked from another source: my wallet. I adamantly refused to live off the money of her former husband. I shook my head. The idea of running away with her was not just impractical; it was absurd. We scarcely knew one another.
        I said no. A sad and unexpected sense of emptiness gripped me right after I said it.
        It was getting late. I walked her to her hotel room, where we suddenly kissed. This surprised both of us. I liked it, but I soon pulled away and we did not go further than that. It wasn’t that her body and gray curls were unattractive to me. I was tempted. But why bother, when she was already determined to disappear from my life again, after such a brief reunion? She seemed disappointed when I left.
        The next day I put my keys on the keychain she’d given me, picked her up at her hotel, and drove her to the airport, where I gave her a long goodbye hug. I resisted punching her in the arm. Then I found a place to park where I could wait and watch her plane take off. At least, I think it was her plane. I wasn’t sure. I cried anyway.

SAD ENDING

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, after a concert that was particularly poignant due to my sorrow at losing her again, I succumbed and had sex with one of my groupies. She gave me herpes.

 

HAPPY ENDING

IT TOOK A few weeks, but I finally cancelled my upcoming concerts and bought a ticket to Paris. I told my manager over the phone. He was furious. I thanked him for the years of success, fired him, and then hung up on him. It felt good, like escaping from yet another prison, this one built on money.

        If you are lucky enough to have someone who makes you feel lighter, braver, and happier than you have ever been, someone who makes you come to life, you should go for it. She and I lived happily ever after.

 

ACTUAL ENDING

BOTH ENDINGS ARE true. She helped me out of my prison and into the light, and all that ensued and continues to this day has been quite sweet.

        On my first night in Paris, I told her about the herpes. She laughed. “Oh, that? No big deal. Everybody has herpes.”

        Her jewelry, to my astonishment, became trendy and popular with the Parisians. The keychain she’d given me, which I still have, is worth quite a bit of money.

        Also, I discovered that the Europeans, unlike Americans, are absolutely wild about classical music and concert pianists. And they have lots and lots of pianos there, just as she promised.

The End

© M. E. Raines, 2022

If you liked this story, you just might enjoy a collection of short stories by this author entitled THE MAN IN THE GPS AND OTHER STORIES

And please enjoy a visit to our new bookstore, THE LAUGHING CHERUB BOOKSTORE

 

Goodbye, Henry

by Mary Elizabeth (Leach) Raines

My friend, Henry Mollicone, died of cancer on May 12th of this year (2022). I will always connect Henry with jamoca almond fudge ice cream. Read on.

He was my only friend (as opposed to acquaintance) who had his own Wikipedia page.

We were students together at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music in the 1960s. Henry, a year older than I, was an absolutely brilliant pianist and the school’s most lauded student composer...and boy, his competition was stiff! I was a piano major, but the composers were my preferred crowd: they were all guys, all absolutely brilliant, and mostly geeky. My people.

An Italian from Providence, Rhode Island, Henry was quite short, but he had a commanding and confident presence. His appearance fluctuated. He often looked slightly nerdy for sure, as befitted his title of composer...but once in a while, in the right light and in the right mood, he could almost be seen as handsome. Along with being talented, he was incredibly intelligent and quirky. And he had a certain aloof charm.

I was pretty sure that he preferred blondes and babes, but once Henry quite spontaneously asked me if I wanted to get some ice cream with him. I was surprised by his invitation, and pleased. We walked a few blocks from the conservatory to Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor, where I feasted on jamoca almond fudge.

[An aside: As an admitted foodie, I tend to remember past events by what we ate, even dates that I went on more than half a century ago. While I remember the food clearly, I don’t always remember the guy I was with.]

I do recall Henry quite clearly on that occasion, however, and the delightful chat that we had. Up until our encounter, while we had socialized in the same group, I’d always held him on a bit of a pedestal, and I was more than a little shocked that he had asked me out and seemed to recognize that I was, after all, a girl. Our conversation over ice cream was one of sweet discovery, and I was happy to discover that this impressive and rather famous fellow was, after all, a swell and vulnerable human being.

After our treats, we went to his apartment in Copley Square. It grew late, so rather than walk me all the way back to the conservatory dormitory in the dark, we decided quite innocently that I should spend the night, and he invited me to climb into his bed. Henry lay next to me in the bed, of course.

Although I had never been romantically interested in him, with his warm body next to mine, I suddenly realized to my surprise that I was attracted to Henry. We wound up making out, as college-aged kids are prone to do, especially when they are kind of tired and their guard is down. His kisses were delicious, even better than the jamoca almond fudge had been.

We were both awfully drowsy. Nevertheless, I wanted to push our make-out session to the next stage. When I tried, he whispered quite tenderly, “No, you’re not that kind of girl.” While kissing my neck. (Or maybe I was kissing his neck. I forget.)

Gosh, I tried ever so hard to convince him that yes, I was that kind of girl, but he stubbornly resisted and there was nothing I could do to change his mind, so our encounter never evolved beyond pleasant necking.

He certainly liked me well enough to kiss me. Who knows? Maybe he got snuggly because of the sugar high from the ice cream. In looking back now, I wonder if saying that I wasn’t that kind of girl was a nice way of telling me that he wasn’t that into me, because there were other girls who entered his life who, it seems, were that kind. Then, too, I wasn’t blonde. Sigh.

I never held it against him, nor did I pine for him. Well, not much (read on). Should a romance have ensued, I would have been a satellite to Henry’s star, which is not a role that could ever suit me. And he was more than a little bit crazy, although I confess that this quality in a man has never particularly deterred me.

Here’s why I would have been a satellite. Henry was an amazing composer and a brilliant pianist. I have gone to lots of concerts by the top symphony orchestras and soloists in the U.S., yet the best performance I ever heard, hands down, was one given by Henry in the late 1960s. He played the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

I arrived late, just as he was beginning to play, and rather than go up to the plush room where the audience had assembled, I sat all by myself several stories below in the magnificent courtyard, an eclectic and elegant mixture of ancient Roman, Renaissance, and Medieval design, sitting amidst statues, ornate columns, fountains, lofty arches, and (at the time) hundreds of fragrant Easter Lillies. The music poured over me in a cascade of ecstasy. Henry’s concert touched my soul in a way that has never since been replicated. Which kind of makes me wonder how that other performance might have felt, had he not decided that I wasn’t that kind of girl.

 

Afterwards, when I went to congratulate him, a trampy looking brassy blonde in a too-tight dress–someone who was obviously not a fellow music student–moved close to him and began to nuzzle him. She did not appear to be the type that you would imagine was much into Liszt. While she might in reality have been a Very Nice and Cultured Person, from my depressed perspective, she was obviously that kind of girl. The kind I wasn’t. I was jealous, and went home without congratulating him.

The last time I saw Henry in person was in the early 70s after we’d finished our conservatory studies. I was trying out as an actress for a big-deal professional children’s theater in Boston. To my amazement, the audition accompanist seated at the grand piano onstage was none other than our very own Henry! The director and his critical accomplices sat in a little clump below in the darkened theater, staring up at me.

First I performed a monologue. Kiddos, I must confess that I was good. The director and his gang actually applauded me! Wow!

Unfortunately, next I had to sing. I handed Henry the music, and maybe said a quick hello, but my thoughts were on the audition rather than on him. The tune I sang was from Anthony Newley’s The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. This was my first time singing for an audition, and to my horror, my voice did not come out at all in the mellow, rich way it had sounded in my apartment when I was practicing the song. The noise that emerged from my choked throat was creaky and croaky and weird. In short, it was an abysmal audition. When I was done, the director dismissed me with a terse, expressionless thankyouwe’llletyouknow. I grabbed my music–I couldn’t even look at Henry–and ducked out of the theater in humiliation as fast as I could.

[Another aside: In later years, I actually did get singing parts in musical theater, but that was because I always played either a comedic or a deranged character, so my voice didn’t have to sound pretty. In fact, if I had a beautiful singing voice, it would have been a deterrent to those roles, alas.]

Back to Henry: he and I did not connect again until about ten years ago, after I had moved to Sedona. My son and I commissioned him to compose/improvise a piece for my sister on her 70th birthday; she loved it! By this time, Henry had become quite an esteemed composer. He had a fair amount of renown–I mean, jeez, his own Wikipedia page!–although I always thought that he should have received even more fame and recognition than he did.

In our renewed friendship, while our conversations were only occasional, he was always enthusiastic and warm...until a few years ago, when I inquired how he was doing, and received an odd and somewhat cool email from him saying that he’d had some medical issues. His communications stopped then. I later discovered that it was cancer. A mutual friend, the one who called to tell me that Henry had died, shared that my former ice-cream date had fought valiantly for his life for about four years, but the cancer finally got him. Darn it.

If you are a musician, a singer, or an opera or a choral conductor, you must absolutely check out his music. Even if you don’t fit in those categories, look him up on YouTube, and get a dose of beauty and wonder!

Below is a YouTube of him improvising a song based on the notes that correlate with a person’s phone number. Take a look and a listen–it’s shorter than two minutes–and you will see how adorable and gifted he was.

Now you get to compose for the angels, Henry. Jamoca almond fudge ice cream will always belong to you. How lucky I was to have known you!