Sunday, September 26, 1999

Three weeks from today it will be one year since we lost Hattie. October 17th. It falls on a Sunday this year, and Reverend said I can put flowers on the altar in her name that morning if I want to. I said yes before he finished the sentence. Yellow roses. She wouldn't want anything that looked like a funeral. She'd want something that looked like a Sunday.

Nia asked me at supper tonight what I wanted to do that day. I said go to church, come home, and eat. She said, "That's what you do every Sunday, Granddaddy." I said that's the point. Hattie liked a regular day better than a party.

Truth is, I don't know what I'll do. People tell you the first year is the hardest. The first Christmas, first birthday, first anniversary. They don't tell you what happens after the first year. I guess I'll find out.

Meanwhile the Mets are doing everything they can to break my heart, the way they've been doing since 1962. They were right in it, and now they can't buy a win, and the wild card is sitting there on the table like the last piece of chicken nobody will take. Nia sat up with me through the whole game Friday, doing her homework on the couch, and every time Piazza came up she stopped writing and put her pencil down. That child is a Mets fan now. I have done something right.

Wednesday, September 22, 1999

Two hundred and twelve.

I'm writing it again in case you missed it. 212. Second game last night. I haven't rolled a 200 game since 1994, and I haven't rolled that high since I was fifty years old with a better back.

I don't know what happened. I came out the first frame with a strike and then another and another, a turkey, and Otis started saying "Don't nobody talk to him," which of course is talking to me. Left a 10 pin in the sixth and picked it up clean. By the ninth frame the whole lane on either side of us had stopped to look. The young fellows two lanes down, the ones with the matching shirts, came over and stood behind the ball return. In the tenth I threw a strike, then another strike, and on the last ball I got eight and I didn't even care. The screen said 212 in big numbers, and Rudy hollered so loud the man at the front desk came to see who got hurt.

Here's what I thought when I sat down. I thought, Hattie would have written that on the sheet. She used to come every Tuesday before they put in the automatic scoring, and sit at the table with a pencil and her coffee and keep the score for the whole team, neat as church. When the machines came in she kept coming anyway and did her crossword. She'd look up when I bowled and say, "Well, Earl," whether it was good or bad. Just, "Well, Earl."

So I said it for her. Out loud. Clarence looked at me funny. I don't care.

Friday, September 17, 1999

Nia wants to learn to cook her grandmother's food, so we got down Hattie's recipe box from on top of the refrigerator. It's a green tin box with a rooster on the lid, and it's been up there since last fall because I couldn't stand to open it.

All her cards are in her handwriting. Some of them are in pencil gone gray, and some have grease spots and one has a coffee ring on it like a stamp. Nia held them like they were money.

We made the smothered chicken tonight. The card says: "Brown the chicken. Take it out. Make the gravy in the same pan. Put it back. Cook till it's done." That's the whole card. Nia said, "Granddaddy, how long is 'till it's done'?" I said till it's done. She said that's not a measurement. I said it was to your grandmother.

Nia burned the rice. Scorched the whole bottom of the pot, smoke alarm and everything. She looked like she was going to cry, and I told her, your grandmother burned the rice the first month we were married five times, and I ate it every time and said it was smoky on purpose. Nia laughed so hard she had to sit on the kitchen floor.

The chicken was good. Not as good as Hattie's. But close enough that I had to go stand on the back step a minute after.

Monday, September 13, 1999

Nia's settling in at school. She takes the bus to the college every morning, the same kind of bus I drove for twenty years before they moved me to the depot. She came home today and said the driver never said good morning to anybody. I told her in my day we said good morning to every soul, even the ones who didn't pay. She said, "Granddaddy, they have to pay." I said, you'd be surprised.

Tuesday, September 7, 1999

Opening night for the fall league. Our team is called the Spare Parts, which we thought was funny in 1987 and now is just the truth. It's me; Otis, who is 71 and our anchor and throws the ball like he's mad at it; Rudy, who talks the whole three games and most of the ride home; and Clarence, the baby, 58, still working at the post office. We have been bowling together on Tuesday nights for twelve years.

Last fall, after the funeral, I missed six weeks. Otis came by the house every Tuesday at 6:15 anyway and honked the horn once, and when I didn't come out he drove off. Every Tuesday. Didn't call. Didn't knock. Just honked. The seventh Tuesday I came out. He didn't say a word about it. He just said, "You got your ball?"

That's a friend.

I rolled 454 tonight. Nothing special. Felt good anyway.

Sunday, August 29, 1999

Nia moved in today.

My daughter Bernice drove her up from Baltimore in the station wagon with everything she owns, which was a lot more than I expected for a person who is nineteen. Three suitcases, two lamps, a television, a crate of records that used to be MY records (so that's where they went), and a box marked SHOES that took both of us to carry up the stairs.

She's going to college here in Queens, to be a teacher. She worked a year at a bank in Baltimore after high school to save up, and she could have gone somewhere closer to home, but she picked here. Bernice says it's because the school is good. I think it's partly because of me. I think her mother and her talked about Granddaddy being in this house by himself. I didn't ask. I don't want to know.

She's in the back bedroom, which was Hattie's sewing room. I moved the sewing machine to the basement last week, and I had to stop twice on the stairs. The room still smells a little like her, like the lavender she put in the drawers. Nia noticed. She said, "It smells like Grandma in here." And then she said, "Good."

Tonight there were two people eating at my table for the first time in ten months. She did the dishes without being asked. I think we're going to be fine.

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

The house is too quiet. That's all there is to say and I keep saying it.

I leave the television on for company. Last night I watched that new quiz show with Regis Philbin, the one with the big money and the spotlights and the music that sounds like somebody's about to get bad news. Hattie would have loved it. She would have sat right up on the edge of her chair and answered every question before the man on TV did, and then told me she knew it all along. I found myself saying the answers out loud to her chair. I got most of them. She'd have gotten the rest.

I still take down two coffee cups in the morning. I put the second one back. Every day.

No league till September. Tuesday nights are the longest ones.

Sunday, August 8, 1999

My name is Earl Mayhew. I am 66 years old. I came up from South Carolina when I was eighteen, married the prettiest girl at Mount Olive in 1957, and worked for the city transit 32 years, on the buses and then at the depot, and retired in 1995 with a watch, a pension, and a bad back. I have one daughter, one son, four grandchildren, and a bowling average I'd rather not discuss.

My wife Hattie died last October. We were married 41 years.

The lady who runs the grief group at church says it helps to write things down. My son-in-law gave me his old computer when he got a new one, and the senior center has a class on Thursdays, where a young man named Victor, who is very patient, showed us how to make a home page. So here I am, writing things down where anybody can read them. I don't know if that's what the lady meant.

I'm not a writer. I was a bus operator. But I figure a bus operator sees more of people than most writers do, so maybe it evens out.

I'll try to write every week. Tuesdays are league night, so it'll probably be Wednesdays.