The Glove That Never Made An Error

The past week has been a sort of surreal, contemplative adventure. I especially have a bad habit of letting my days all run together in a monotonous drone. It was all interrupted last Thursday.
Tanner’s mom, Jo, called us that morning to inform us that Granddad Howard had taken another “turn for the worst.” Tanner and I went to work that evening and gave our employers the heads up that we might have to take a time off on short notice to travel to Portales. “It could be tomorrow, it could be six months from now,” I told my boss, Eric.

After work that night, I received a phone call from my sister. “I just thought you should know,” she prefaces, “Dennis Lihte died this morning.”

I suppose my reaction probably wasn’t that different from anyone else who loved Dennis, altough I’d like to think it was. I imagine that everyone had a flood of emotion rush to their tear ducts, a flash of a million memories in their brains. I returned to the couch and tried to exlain to Tanner who Dennis was, where he might know him from, what he meant to me. I was just  incredibly dumbstruck.

The next morning, the phone rang.
Jo.

“Who is it?” Tanner grumbled.
“It’s your mom, babe.”

He rolled over. We both knew what the call was about. I harassed him about it for a few more hours, but I understood why he didn’t want to get up, why he didn’t want to call back. Just like if I don’t open my phone bill, I don’t owe money. If he didn’t call back, Granddad Howard was fine.

He eventually did call. Granddad Howard had died that morning in a totally painless and peaceful way, as far as anyone can tell. The funeral was that Saturday. Immediatley, Tanner started telling his mom we would figure out some way to get there. We’d walk if we had to. Jo said it wasn’t necessary, Tanner’s dad was paying for our rental car.

I had a long drive ahead of me, which is nice when you have a lot of thoughts to sort out. How were the Lihte’s? How were the Powers? Why had everyone picked this week to die?

As we drove through the mountains in Ruidoso, the scattered thunderstorms nmroads.org had warned me about turned into a full blown hailstorm. Sheets and sheets of rain and hail fell around us as we crept along at 15 mph. In a situation that normally would’ve scared me out of my mind behind the wheel of a car, I felt strangely at ease. It was beautiful.

We arrived in Portales around 9pm and met up with Tanner’s family at Grandma Betty’s house (Tanner’s great-grandmother), where everyone was eating and telling stories about Howard. The stories continued over the weekend as more relatives and more food arrived. People weren’t talking just to talk. They wanted to share how they were going to remember Howard. No one felt the frail frame of a man weakened from chemotherapy was an appropriate way to commit him to memory. Obviously in comparison to everyone else, I knew little about Howard. My favorite memories of him were silly ones. Once, shortly after Tanner and I got engaged, we travled to Mulehsoe to spend Christmas with his family. When we arrived, no one was home but Granddad Howard. He sat us on the couch opposite the fireplace and told us he would build us a nice romantic fire…which constituted squirting lots and lots of lighter fluid onto newspaper. Another time I overheard him telling his great grandson Baylor how he was going to slice off his ears with his pocket knife and make ear soup.

All weekend long, everyone kept on saying over and over how much Howard adored his wife Marjorie, Tanner’s grandma. Tanner told me once about Granddad Howard’s nightly habit of smoking cigars and drinking huge glasses of Sangria out of the back porch. One night he’d had too much Sangria, wandered into the living room and started dancing in front of Marjorie. “I love you! I love you ! I love you!” he sang. “Get away from me, you ol’ drunk!” she laughed.

Jo, of course, had a way that she wanted to remember her dad. “He would always give-give you whatever he had. Everyone always had new clothes, new cars, before he even thought of himself, “she said, “Remember, Tanner? He always drove that old truck while everyone else had a new car.” She shook her head, “Anyway, I don’t remember what is was now, I just remember I was really sad, like, really, really depressed. I was in my room, and I was crying, and he came in with his old baseball glove. ‘JoLynn, this is my most prized possession. The only material thing I love in this world. I want you to have it.’ He said, ‘That glove never made an error.”

The night after the funeral, Tanner, Tabor and I made our way out to the back porch while everyone else slept. We passed around a bottle of Sangria and talked more. Comics. History. Stephen King. Family scandal. Everything eventually came back to Granddad Howard. Some of these stories were the best, because they didn’t deify the man. They were stories about his temper, crude humor, mistakes as well as triumphs. More Sangria. Tanner looked thoughtful as his thoughts turned to heaven.

“Granddad and I were looking over the corn harvest this one time, and he told me that he believed that maybe God saved a slice of heaven just for you. A space designed for you. A space He knew you would love and that you could share with Him. ‘This is my heaven,’ he said, ‘to watch things grow. To plant and hope and watch the harvest.”

¹ “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. ² In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.” -John 14:1-3