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Living her life with today in her eyes
Published October 25, 2009
I suspect you’ve never heard of an ice cream bar called a Cheerio. I certainly hadn’t, until my sister Diane kept insisting that she’d eaten them on a regular basis as a small child in the early 1940s. Friends and family constantly told her she was mistaken, but she was adamant.
Then about a year ago we all got letters from Diane with verification — via Google.com — that she was correct. That woman can be downright headstrong when she gets her steam up. Not to mention just a tad obnoxious when she’s proven right.
Tomorrow is her birthday. She’ll be 70.
Now, before you go thinking I’m in that rarefied air myself, let me quickly interject that I was the baby of the family, the last package off the production line, the final apple in the crop. Pick any cliché you wish; the fact is there were enough years between Diane and me that she was married and out of the house before I had a chance to torment her the way I did our sister Janie, who had the misfortune to fall, as the middle child, closer to me.
So I grew up watching Diane from something of a distance. From my youthful vantage point she was always impressive, what with all that cheerfulness and banter, that stalwart confidence in any situation, be it warranted or not.
When she was barely out of her teens her first husband was killed in a car accident, leaving her a single mom with three very small children. Realizing that a high school diploma and a couple of years as a varsity cheerleader weren’t likely to take her very far in the work world, she enrolled in the East Texas School of Nursing in Tyler. I seem to recall lots of oranges and lemons getting stabbed with hypodermic needles during that training, and my 11-year-old throat and ears got looked into regularly.
While at that school she managed to get herself appointed — in spite of the fact that she had never been anywhere much — the student coordinator of a bus trip to New York City to visit the 1964 World’s Fair. She also sang in the school choir, standing ramrod-straight with other nurses-to-be in a live television broadcast, causing all of us in Oakwood, our hometown, to wonder if she was just moving her lips. For she had never, to our knowledge, shown either inclination or talent in regards to singing.
After being certified a licensed vocational nurse, she hired on in the office of a urologist in Tyler, a job she held until long after her three kids grew up and had families of their own. Then, at an age when many people retire, she went back to college to become a registered nurse. Her husband was working away down south in Dixie at the time, so that’s where she went to school, driving regularly between Tyler and Alabama on Interstate 20, stopping at Vicksburg on each trip to sit in a rocking chair on the porch of the visitor’s center to drink a Coke and watch the Mississippi River for a while.
She’s particularly good at that: sitting and watching. Visiting with anyone who will stop by, smiling at those who don’t. She’s retired now — her last job was as a station nurse in an adult psychiatric ward in a big hospital, serving a clientele that she could as easily manipulate into serenity as shut down completely with a single stern glare — so now she can sit and watch to her heart’s content.
Sometime or another I wrote, in this little corner of the paper, about an outing several years ago when my sisters and I were at the beach with our families and Diane and I ended up in a couple of lawn chairs watching the conclusion of a fine afternoon.
“I could stay in a day like this forever,” she told me. It reminded me of when a character in Truman Capote’s story “A Christmas Memory” says, “As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”
I hope Diane doesn’t leave the world before many, many more birthdays have come and gone. But when she does, I’m betting she’ll have found as much joy and laughter in her last day as in all her others.
And who could ask for a better life, or a better legacy, than that?
Happy birthday, Diane. I love you, and if they still made Cheerio bars, I’d buy you a couple of cases.
Award-winning author Ron Rozelle has written seven books. He teaches creative writing at Brazoswood High School. He can be reached at ronrozelle(at)sbcglobal.net.
© 2009 Ron Rozelle
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