Joe

WORK IN PROGRESS...PLEASE COMMENT, I RETURN ALL REVIEWS!!

There is an apologetic look in Joe’s eyes as he struggles to place his thoughts on paper and even the slight nodding of his head seems to cause him considerable agony. My eyes wander laboriously around the room, trying to focus everywhere else but on the ravaged man in the hospital bed.

There is a large green oxygen tent in one corner, adorned with masks and hoses. Against the far wall, an antique bureau looks oddly out of place amongst the medical white and heavy life-sustaining machinery laid all about the room. I notice the big picture of Joe on the right, he's at the helm of his boat wearing a flannel shirt and faded blue baseball cap. In it, Joe looks weathered but not terribly ill within his seaman’s clothes and the ocean is rising up in the background. I assume it was taken before the cancer had come back.

Cancer. My eyes slid momentarily back to him, bent over his pad concentrating on forming words with his shaking hands. His blue eyes are still incredibly bright but that seems to be all his sickness had not dimmed or damaged. It is as if one side of his face has caved in, no longer supporting the right side of his eyeglasses and they hang, uncomfortably crooked. I long to straighten them for him but know it would be an impolite invasion, serving only to remind this proud man of his incapacitation.

My thoughts and my attention snap back on the reason for my being here now, my father, sitting at Joe’s side, a look that is a strange mixture of affection and sadness playing with his features.

Joe is not a man I know well. He is however, a man who has been in and around my father’s life and the business since the beginning. My father worked for Joe as a mechanic when he first started in aviation, for Joe’s little start-up airline that featured ugly, twin-engine puddle jumpers that required nearly constant maintenance. The two had kept in contact through the years, Joe remaining influential as my father founded and grew his own aviation company, maturing into a young entrepreneur himself.

While Joe is some thirty years his senior, they enjoy a friendship that seems to become more endearing as they both age, they share business successes and woes, jokes and earlier, before Joe's cancer and after my father’s divorce, dating advice. It had amazed me that despite his age, Joe was quite a hit with the females and we’d frequently see him about town deep into the “Mystic shuffle” – pet name for their slow, social cruise through the local bars each Friday night. The affection between my father and this man was clearly visable when Joe would see him out, or during Joe’s drop-in visits to the office and later, his visits to my father’s new home. It seemed to me that they were part of some elite club of men that easily fit into several categories at once: fathers, ex-husbands, business owners and playboys.