The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

I don’t remember where I saw the picture. All I remember is the little girl in brown curls and a white dress riding on back of the alligator. There was a bridle and she held onto the reins as though she were on a pony. The alligator’s mouth was strapped shut, I think. It was a black‑and‑white photograph. Possibly taken in the twenties, or thirties. Somewhere in Florida, of course. The future ain’t what it used to be, it read. I think it was a postcard, but I never read the back to see who it was addressed to, or to read what they had to say.

 

I checked myself in to the only available room they had left at Blue Pines Nursing Home. After my last trip to the hospital, I realized I am not able to do it alone anymore and that someday the light would go out and the thought of me being alone in my house for days or weeks until someone found me frightened me very much. Ellie, my dog and last best friend on this earth, passed in the fall and I had unexpectedly outlived Bob the turtle, by two full years so there was no one who needed me left. The old house would be sold and my kids and grandkids would get a bit of money they might spend on their kids. Maybe they would take a family vacation and think a little about me.

 

I stand and unpack my things. It is a nice room. A quiet room and there is a view of a mature ridge of blue pines from my window. It is winter and it snowed more this year than it has in forty years, they said on the news. Tomorrow it will snow again. It’s warm in the room and the floors are laminate wood and the staff seems nice and they offer to help me unpack and they give me a schedule of activities on a piece of light blue paper that lays on the bed with fresh linens. There are pine trees on the top of the paper and clip-art birds and it reads, “A busy body is a happy heart.

 

I unpack myself, but thank the staff for their offer. I inspect my room. The TV is nice. The bathroom is clean and bright. The shower has an aluminum rail with a grip to hold on to. There is a vase for flowers and I wonder if someone left it. It makes me sad to think about the last person who slept here, though I don’t know him or her at all. Maybe they got better and went home, I tell myself.

 

She is standing in my open doorway. I don’t know how long she had been there, but she is there. I think maybe I died and didn’t know it and she is the first person to greet me in Heaven, as it should be.

 

“Hello, Floyd,” she says.

 

“Hazel Hampshire?” I am stunned. She frowns, but not in the way a person usually frowns. There is a warmness to it, which sounds strange to say. She lost her smile for me long ago because I let her lose it, but I remember still when no smile compared to it. When it burnt on her face like wildfire. I never lost mine for her. I wonder if my dentures are in, so I touch my mouth realizing they are and I smile with the confidence of Fix‑A‑Dent and forget it like an old fool and she frowns back at me the way she always did. “What are the odds?”

 

“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking,” she replies skeptically. After all these years, she is still leery of me. Like normal people who don’t live in Florida are of alligators which they would never in a million years saddle and ride.

 

Fifty‑three years may have passed, but I don’t see them on her. She doesn’t wear age. Not even in gray. She is as beautiful as the day I met her in a smoke‑filled barroom where she had the audacity to approach a stranger and say, “Hello, my name is Hazel.” I don’t remember what I said back to her, but we wound up in my car and I invited her home to watch a movie we never watched. Whatever movie that was has left me, but I’ve spent fifty‑three years wondering what it was as though it was as important as the meaning of life.

I never particularly thought of myself as a lucky man. I never won a lottery I never played, or stumbled upon a buried treasure I never searched for. But how lucky could someone be? A beautiful woman with a heart of gold approaching you and saying hello and waiting for you to reply to her. And again, fifty‑three years later.

 

The future then was brilliant. It was bright and it was clear like a brand-new car on the showroom floor. And I was always hopeful that we would be together for the rest of our lives and be playful and laugh the way we did for those few years that were gone before I knew it. A couple cars, a few vacations, three or four summers. They had all replayed in my mind at times, in dreams, or through the lulls of an ordinary life. Life had been very ordinary without her. I was happiest then and there has never been a doubt that Ms. Hazel is the love of my life. I ask her if she does any of the activities on the blue piece of paper and she says the things she does are full and suggests I do something else in another class. I laugh and ask her why she stopped to say hello to me if she doesn’t like me.

 

“Because eventually I knew I would run into you. So, I thought I’d go ahead and get it over with. I’m next door.” She doesn’t say goodbye and disappears. That night I stand at the wall and put my hand to it as though I can feel her. I can hear people laughing on her TV. I say something to myself and hope she can hear it, but I start to cry so I turn on my television and watch a cowboy movie. Then I get up and put that vase away so I don’t have to look at it anymore. Sometime later, I fall asleep.

 

I get dressed early the next morning and wait to hear her door open. 7:30 sharp, it opens and I come out as fast as I can, which makes me think of Bob the turtle who, as the joke went long ago, would outlive me because he was then only a year‑old and he could live well past eighty, they said at the pet shop fifty years ago. I ask her to have coffee with me and she asks why, but eventually she agrees and we have coffee by a large picture window with a good view of blue pines and a sloping snow‑covered hill. Her friends, who she normally drinks coffee with, say hello to her and she introduces me just as Floyd, but doesn’t say anything else so I fill them in on who I am and what I have done in my life for a career, and how many grandkids and great grandkids I have, and what they all do, while Hazel looks out that window.

 

She doesn’t give me anymore time of her day other than morning coffee and I am not sure why she gives me even that. But every morning I get up at 6:00 in case she is up early and I wait to hear her door open and when her door finally opens I pop out for our impromptu daily meeting. She is my sunrise, if ever I had one. She looks out the window as I talk and reminisce about this and that, what I can remember. She tells me she likes to look at the birds and I smile because birds used to frighten her, but she doesn’t remember that, she says. She likes them from the window and she always tells me when she sees a cardinal or a blue‑jay. And that makes me happy because she doesn’t frown when she says so and I like to think she tells me because she wants to let me in. Even old men get high hopes.

 

Every morning I give her something, a gift, like a letter, which I don’t know if she reads or not, but that I write for her anyway. Sincere love letters that I have written over the years in my head that I finally put to paper. Or I will give her something I made when they have us do crafts. She lied to me. The classes she takes are not full, but I don’t take them because I don’t want to intrude. I walk past the door and look in and see her and she is smiling at what she is doing and I don’t want her to stop smiling which is why I didn’t try to convince her to stay with me fifty‑three years ago more than I did. I gave up on us because I wanted her to be happy and she said she would never be happy with me because of what I did to her. So, I give her simple things I wish I could have given her had we got married and been together. I proposed to her once and she said yes. She planned our wedding and then I ruined it for us both. I don’t talk about that now. But I remember the white flowers and ribbons on top of the mason jars she said we could fill with marbles or tea lights.

 

One morning, I gave her a mason jar topped with a similar white orchid and ribbon. I put a battery‑powered candle in it and it was very pretty. It took me weeks to find the right orchid. A bus takes us to the mall and the grocery store, but their flower selection is terrible. The girl at the grocery told me it was not prom season, but she could order one but it would cost me an arm and a leg. I said okay. I found the perfect battery‑powered candle to put in it and gave it to her thinking it would be well‑received and she might smile and realize how much I love her, despite all these years and the old ghost. But she stood up and left our table and she didn’t talk to me for a whole week. I made no further mention of it when she finally agreed to have coffee with me again. I imagined she shattered it and threw it away.

 

She says her great grandkids call her “Gigi,” because great grandma is too much to say and it wastes too much time, one of them told her. She says she likes the name Gigi. I smile and say it sounds French and she frowns at me, but I can tell it is not really a sincere frown. It is only a reluctant smile. There is progress in that smile‑frown, for she has spent so much of the last few months actually frowning at me. And sometimes as we sit there, I wonder if she really does only think of the bad things. Or if ever in her room at night, she thinks of some of the good. That indescribable feeling that you are with the person you are supposed to be with and all is right with the world.

 

In a rare moment of talking to me, rather than listening and gazing at those birds, she asks me what my great grandkids call me and I say they hardly call me at all. They call me great grandpa because they don’t have to say it that often. They live in Minnesota, I explain, and California, or Florida. And I say they sometimes forget my number, but I always get a Christmas card and sometimes a birthday call. Maybe they ride on the backs of alligators, I tell her. She gives me a strange look because she forgot how a month ago or so I told her that the image of that little girl riding the alligator from the postcard is often in my mind. They don’t ever come back here, I tell her. There is no real reason for them to. There is only me now. Ellie and Bob are dead.

 

She asks why I never left and went somewhere else, to live with them or to be someplace warm. And I say I don’t know, Hazel. I buried my heart here a long time ago and I suppose I grew roots. She says I am not the kind of person who grows roots and I shake my head and say she has no idea and how I wish that she did. I want to ask her to marry me again, but I don’t. It might upset her. But there is a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I am going to regret it, so the proposal stays on the tip of my old tongue.

 

As she looks out the window for winter birds, I am quiet. I drink my coffee. I don’t tell her I did think of going other places. But I figured if I left, there would never have been a chance that we would have been together again. I saw her once in the grocery. The back of her head as she was pushing a shopping cart. I watched her get into her car and drive away from the BMV another time. I saw her at the fair a few times with someone else and kids that looked like her. I saw her around Christmas in the mall one year. But I don’t think she ever saw me. How I wish I would have said hello, but every time I saw her she seemed busy, or she was smiling and I didn’t want to be the reason for her to stop.

 

But I exhume the thought, deciding not to keep it buried. I have nothing to lose. So, I tell her I thought if I moved there wouldn’t have been a chance. A chance for what, she asks. A chance that you might fall in love with me again. She gets mad and I think she is going to storm off and not talk to me for another week, but she doesn’t. She sits there and looks out the frozen window. And from time to time for the rest of the morning it looks like she wants to say something to me, but she doesn’t say anything at all.

 

Lost time you can’t get back, and some mistakes you can’t mend. It hardly matters now, I tell myself. The only thing that is for certain is that I must have done something good in a former life to be here now. Drinking a cup of coffee with her and watching birds out a cold window. Maybe God had some kind of pity on me. We don’t talk about the people that came after. Not one mention. And they don’t come to visit. It is as though they have somehow been erased. I don’t know if she remarried or not. If her husband passed away, or they divorced, or if there was more than one. Or if she told him she loved him and that she never felt this way for anyone before. Or if she thinks of him when she sits with me. I don’t know any of it. And I don’t know if I want to know. Or if she wants to know about me. But it hardly seems important to a couple of old folks with a foot in the grave. We simply knew for whatever reason, they didn’t work out. Maybe it was because somewhere buried deep there were still thoughts of each other. And there wasn’t room for anyone else the way we had room for us.

 

It is a damn fool thing for an old man such as me, eighty-eight years in, I think, to wish to go back in time. But I think of it often. When I am doing senior yoga, or taking medications they say that I need, or when my phone doesn’t ring, or her door doesn’t open. When I am holding my hand to the wall and wondering if she is sleeping well or if she ever thinks of me over there. I hope that maybe when I pass away, God might be so kind as to let me walk into that smoke‑filled barroom one more time and to take a seat and to hear her say, again, with that big smile, “Hello, my name is Hazel.” And from there, to live, to love, and to never let go of her for anything in the world. The devil once had me by the throat. What an asshole I was at times because of it. Never really appreciating what I had. Towards the end I got it together, but it was too late then. I was coming when she was going. I was up when she was down. It hardly matters now, does it? No one answers in a cold room.

 

I once told her, long, long ago, that she should stop smoking or she would get cancer and, of course, it made her mad as hell. And she said, “I am a grown woman, I’m 38, and I can do what I want to do and I don’t need you to tell me about cancer.” It was after the devil had his way with me, but while we were still together. Holding on. Before he did, she had stopped smoking because she said she knew I didn’t like the smell of it. I didn’t mind the smell. I was only afraid of losing her and cancer scared me. I said, of course, you can do what you want to do. I was never sorry for saying it, for trying because when you love someone you don’t want them to ever go or to give years away. I never wanted to be so wrong in my life. She totes an oxygen tank around and there is a tube in her nose that reminds me of that alligator’s bridle.

 

I see her outside of her room after dinner and I tell her if she gets lonely tonight to knock twice on the wall and I will come to her room, or she can come to mine. And she indifferently says, “To do what?” And I laugh and to my surprise she smiles back at me in a way I haven’t seen her smile since I knew her when and then she gently closes her door. “Goodnight my Floyd,” she says from behind it. The “my” she added warms my heart and gives me hope for tomorrow. Maybe I will propose, so like a fool I go to my room and practice in a mirror.

 

I wouldn’t have traded these past two months for anything in the world. Not 90 more years in a young man’s body. Not anything, but maybe for another chance encounter with Hazel Hampshire in a smoke‑filled barroom 53 years ago this past October 12. And I pray and thank God for this chance encounter and these adjoining rooms at Blue Pines and sixty some cups of coffee. God must love me still, despite my sins. But I lie down with the feeling that I might not wake up tomorrow for some reason. A part of me feels a sense of gloom that I cannot shake. I wonder if this is how it goes. That you know it is coming when it is to come. So, I leave a letter for her and use a picture of us from 53 years ago as a paperweight. The only thing the letter says is, “My Hazel, See you in my dreams, beautiful. I love you. Your Floyd.”

 

But to my surprise I wake up. It is early morning, still dark, and the letter and the picture of me and Hazel are still where they were. The laminate floor is cold below my feet and I hurry to get dressed so not to miss her door open. Hurry is not the proper word for it, but I hurry for an eighty-eight year‑old who is madly in love with the woman of his dreams next door. I am happy about what I have to give her today. It is an origami cardinal that I made in one of those crafty seniors’ classes. I wrote “Gigi” under its foot and I hold it in my hand tenderly as though it is a real bird.

 

I sit in my usual chair by the door and wait for the unmistakable sound of her door latch. But her door doesn’t open at 7:30. And so I wait. And wait. But the sound doesn’t come. And I cry. And I sit there. After a while, these old bones reluctantly carry me to the hallway and her door is closed and I open it. She is not there. Her oxygen tank is by her bed and the tubes are on the floor beside it like dead snakes. Her bed is empty of the linens and a nurse tells me she is sorry but sometime in the night – and I don’t hear the rest of what she says, but I know what she says. I know. And the nurse leaves and Hazel’s things are there because no one has packed them away yet and there is a framed picture of us by her bed amongst pictures of her grandkids and great grandkids. We are at a baseball game. Her first Indians game. So long ago.

And on the dresser, where there is nothing else but a small white placemat, is the mason jar I had made for her with the wilting orchid on top. Her engagement ring is beside it and the candle is turned on as though the light refuses to go out. And I don’t know what to do with that origami cardinal so I keep it for her funeral and I go back to my room and cry for what feels like days. And for some reason, I think of that postcard again with the little girl on back of the alligator holding those reins, and I think about what it said and how the little girl had no expression at all.