Gratitude, a Short Story by R. Craig Sautter
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Was it the early morning breeze cutting through yellow green spring leaves of the giant Cottonwood outside her second-floor bedroom window that lifted Lydia from the warm dream she seemed to instantly forget, maybe something about her mother Loretta? After all, it was her birthday, she almost instantly realized, remembering the celebratory round of drinks with Christella and Cecilia the night before. Or was it the rising sun reflecting off the second-story glass of her neighbor Sadie Jones’ old peeling Victorian that brought her to lazy consciousness? Both seemed to tenderly welcome her to her forty-ninth year, something she professed to those late-night friends to dread as “the gateway to fifty,” the loss of her relatively attractive and vivacious self, gray streaking through her unruly jet-black hair, to becoming invisible to those who used to flutter in her presence.
Both seemed to usher in her new year. She stretched her long taught legs beneath still warm, gray cotton sheets snug beneath the bright two-tone yellow quilt with long green tentacles and flowering white lilies that her grandmother had carefully crafted so many years ago and extended her bare arms above the pillowcase that had caught her lost slumbering excursions.
“Oh God,” she sighed. “Forty-nine, how’d I make it this far?” Then she remembered that Elliot hadn't been so lucky. “Thirty-seven,” she groaned. She didn't ask why anymore, but it was the reason she lay alone in their double bed.
“I wish I could remember something of each of those years. Maybe it would take another whole lifetime to reconstruct.” Nothing but fragments flashed in her memory: sandboxes, swings, tricycles, cornbread and beans, clowns, TV shows, malts, dances, CDs, wild dates, her mother's smiling ‘Good morning,' as she served those wonderful eggs-over-easy on toast.
She started to get up, slowly dragged her not-yet-tanned swimmer’s legs towards the edge of the bed to get ready for her ‘special day,’ to even stop for a minute to study her aging self in her old oak dresser mirror, to count possible new wrinkles near her eyes or on her forehead. “But what’s the hurry? Don’t I deserve to take it easy for once? I took the day off. Relax, dear, relax.”
She unexpectedly felt a tremor, a shiver down her spine, and fell back into her soft mattress, suddenly afraid that she'd see nothing at all in her looking glass, that she wasn't really there, that her whole long, adventurous saga was nothing but a nighttime illusion that would disappear with soft sunbeams blown away with the wind. “’Maya,’ is that what the Hindus call it? Lives that are nothing, constructed out of nothing, the futile deceptions of Ego? A broken story I’ve told my laughing self that was never there?” She grabbed her head to steady herself and tried to think herself back into existence.
“Forty-nine years, that must be something.” She tried to do the math, “That’s 365 days times 49 annum. Quantas?” She got confused. The math was too taxing, too early. She gave up. No calculator to rely on. But later that afternoon, when she returned from the hospital, she keyed it in while she ate yogurt and strawberries. “Wow, 17,885 days!” she shuddered. “Where did they all go? They’ve vanished into mist as I will soon enough, like Elliot has.” She chewed another strawberry. “I eat, therefore I am, overweight.”
She wanted to go back to sleep but knew she couldn't. She tried to center herself before launching into her daily tasks, but felt in no hurry. “After all, it’s my day, as they say, and I've been so lucky,” she reassured herself. “So many good people doing so many good deeds that brought me to this moment.” She knew she could never capture her own complete history, could never recount all the generous people who had helped her on her way. So instead, she started to give thanks to the people closest to her, those who had blessed her journey. It felt sort of like a prayer, a sacred ritual she had ignored for way too long.
She hesitated for a few seconds to order her list, then began her recital. “Thank you, mother,” she whispered. “Thank you for everything.” She suddenly remembered one of her earliest images, looking up from her crib at her mother’s kind, always welcoming, face. Then she remembered how, for as long as she could recall, they sang together every morning. One of those earliest favorites leaped up, and she started involuntarily to sing; “The bear climbed over the mountain, the bear climbed over the mountain, the bear climbed over the mountain to see what he could see.” She let out a silly childish giggle. “He saw another mountain. He saw another mountain. He saw another mountain, that’s what he did see.” She imagined the big, fluffy black bear, like her dear, old rag doll animal, Ah Bear, lumbering along over logs and boulders. “So the bear climbed over the mountain, the bear climbed over the mountain, the bear climbed over the mountain to see what he could see.”
She closed her eyes and wanted to cry, but couldn't. “Oh, mother, we must have sung a thousand songs together. God, how I miss those moments.” She fell silent for a second, then remembered a song they had sung while they drove down to her college the first time, one of her mother’s favorites when she was in school; “All you need is love, All you need is love,” The Beatles, of course.
“Yes, all I needed was love, and I got it, plenty of it, thankfully.”
She suddenly soured. “Sure, but she needed a good doctor who knew what he was doing instead of misdiagnosing a heart murmur.” Lydia was still bitter about that, but it had been long ago.
She returned to her mission. “And thank you, Daddy, too. I love you still, always will.” She recalled how every evening at 4:30, sun or rain or snow, he came trudging through the front door after his long, first shift as supervisor at the plastics plant, and how she would run to hug him. Then he would go clean up and return for dinner at 5:00, always promptly at 5:00, before he washed some dishes to marginally help, and retreat to the front room to sit down in his wicker rocker with his pipe filled with Cherry Blend or some other exotic smelling mix to read the morning paper or some thick book before retiring at 9:00, always at 9:00. She loved to crawl up onto his lap before he went to bed, even when she came home from college and they would laugh together and he’d tell her some zany story. “Oh, Daddy, thank you for loving me, for loving mother, for never discouraging my loony ideas, my wild streaks. For never doubting me.”
And since she had started her ritual of gratitude, she felt compelled to thank others as they welled up in her still sleepy mind. After all, how often had she ever done this, and who knew what was next? Maybe she’d never see fifty. Maybe she was already hallucinating on her way out. She reordered the line-up and thanked Elliot, of course, his parents Rita and Ellis, her grandparents Matilda and William, and the ones she never met because they were gone before she arrived, Orville and Ruth. She thanked her sister Elizabeth and little brother Price, their wedded ones and children. Then she started on a long list of friends beginning back in the third grade, Lilly, Rebecca, Laura, Pinky, Becky, Camille, Shirley, Jan, Moon, Keisha, June, Christine, Billie, Edna, Joy, Mollie, Maria, Carmen, Susan, Lottie, Rosa, Lee, then the boys, oh those high school boys, Mitchell, Randolph, Ken, Francisco, Weldon, Denny, Steve, Richard, Jonathan, Miles, David, Charlie, Duane, Jamal, Georgie, and of course Darius who took her to their Junior and Senior Proms. Then she fell for Lazaro, then Mike and Derrick, before Elliot. She thanked them all as if she were reading from a hymn book, as their faces smiled at her like happy mug shots in her school yearbooks.
She sat up and propped two pillows behind her back against her recently repainted rosette wall. And of course, there were all her college friends, especially Gloria and Diane, Marcella, Sandy, Sally, Harrison and Quincy, Roman and Carlos, Bob and Bob and Bob, and Roberto, whom she still met for drinks every few months. Then she started on her friends at work, her still close amigos Monique and Aspin, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She even uttered the names of a few teachers and coaches.
“How many people inhabit Earth these days?” she wondered. “Six billion? Seven billion?” Even if her list of gratitude expanded all morning, how many could she thank for their good deeds, their loyalty, their encouragement, their forgiveness, for showing her ‘the way’? A hundred? A couple of hundred? Certainly, she had more than enough support. “But what percentage of all of us climbing over Terra Firma are they? Infinitesimal. It’s crazy. Such an intricate strand of being, of living, of helping, multiplied by so many whom I will never know, never even look upon. And each of them with their own thread.” She paused, then frowned, “And with a few thousand agents of destruction mixed in to keep the rest of us in chaos and tragedy.”
She had just started on her recollection of friends in her latest reading circle when her bedside phone jolted her back into the morning of obligations. She was surprised to see the number, her neighbor Sadie. She rarely called. “Lydia, Antonio was running, fell, and cut his head on the edge of a table. It’s bleeding something horrible. I’ve got it wrapped in a towel, but blood is seeping through, and Edvardo has the car today. Can you drive us over to St. Mary’s?” She was gasping as she nearly screamed her plea.
”Yes, yes, of course, of course. Meet me out front. You know my blue Ford. I have to throw on something first. I’ll click open the doors on my way down. Just climb in. Don’t worry, Sadie. We’ll be there in a few minutes.” She leaped out of bed, slipped into her jeans, pulled on an old NYU sweatshirt, tied her gym shoes and started for her bedroom door.
Then she stopped cold, turned around, and glanced at her oval dresser mirror to reassure herself. “Yes, there I am,” she quickly smiled.
Yes, she WAS, there, and now off to help someone else, the great circle of caring.
R. Craig Sautter is the author, coauthor, and editor of 12 books, including two of poetry: Expresslanes Through The Inevitable City and The Sound of One Hand Typing. His most recent is Chicago Hitman, A Confession, subhead, "How I Helped Assassinate A Chicago Mayor and (Almost) a President-elect of the United States." His short stories have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Evening Street Review, Catamaran, Deep Overstock, Evening Universe, Apocalypse Confidential, Valiant Scribe and elsewhere. He was the 47th president of the Society of Midland Authors, and served two terms on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Advisory Board.