Your mother has sent you off to the neighbors, so you won’t pester me, she says, but it makes me wonder about the impression I must be making on her this morning. The poor woman is very pale. She has not slept any better than I have. They put the television set in the parlor yesterday and spent the afternoon scrambling around on the roof rigging up an antenna.
The young men are terribly interested in these things. It makes them happy to do a kindness so perilous and exotic in nature. I remember, I remember.
Your mother has brought down my writing materials and the books she found on my desk, and someone has brought in a TV tray for my pills and spectacles and water glass. In case this is as serious as everyone seems to think. I don’t believe it myself, but maybe I’m wrong.
I fell asleep in my chair and woke up feeling so much better. I missed eight and a half innings, and nothing happened in the bottom of the ninth (4 to 2, Yankees), but the reception was good and I look forward to watching the rest of the season, if God wills. Your mother was asleep, too, kneeling on the floor with her head against my knees. I had to sit very still for a long time, watching a movie about Englishmen in trench coats who were up to something morose involving Frenchmen and trains. I didn’t really follow it. When she woke up, she was so glad to see me, as if I had been gone a long time. Then she went and fetched you and we ate our supper in the parlor — it turns out that whoever brought the trays brought one for each of us. Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.
We had a fine time, we three, watching television. There were jugglers and monkeys and ventriloquists, and there was a lot of dancing around. You asked for bites off my plate so you could decide’ which casserole and salad you wanted — you have the child’s abhorrence of mingling foods on your plate. So I gave you a bite of one after another, (guessing) Mrs. Brown, Mrs. McNeill, Mrs. Pry, then Mrs. Dorris, Mrs. Turney, feeding you with my fork. You would say, “I still can’t decide!” and we’d do it all again. That was your joke, eating it all up. It was a wonderful joke. I thought of the day I gave you communion.
I wonder if you thought of it also.
I went up to the church for a few hours this morning, and when I came home I found a great many of my books moved into the parlor, with my desk and chair, and the television set moved upstairs. This was your mother’s idea, but I knew it was young Boughton who did the lifting and carrying for her, or helped her with it. I am not angry about this. At my time of life, I refuse to be angry. It was kindly meant. And it had to be done sooner or later. It’s true that if I have to spend my twilight stranded with somebody or other, I’d prefer Karl Barth to Jack Benny. Still. I have my study. I don’t feel I need to give it up yet. Jack Boughton in my study. He may have carried this very journal down the stairs. After some fairly anxious looking around, which involved two trips upstairs, I found it down here, in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I never put it. That seemed like a sort of taunt, as if he had made a point of hiding it from me. I know I am not being reasonable.
I gave the sermon on Hagar and Ishmael today. I departed from my text a little more than I do ordinarily, which may not have been wise, since sleep was a struggle last night. Not that I couldn’t sleep. I would have very much preferred to have been awake. I just lay there, helplessly subject to my anxieties. A good many of them I could have put out of my mind, if I’d had the use of my mind. But as it was, I had to endure a kind of dull paralysis. To struggle within paralysis is a strange thing — I doubt I stirred a limb, but when I woke up I was exhausted, weary at heart.
Then young Boughton came to the service. That was nothing I would have expected. You saw him and waved and patted the pew next to you, and he came down the aisle and sat with you. Your mother looked at him to say good morning, and then she did not look at him again. Not once.
I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he believes. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham’s extreme old age is an important
