Can't Wait to Get to Heaven (12 page)

A Heavenly Walk

A
s Ida and Elner walked along, it was very quiet, not a soul around, just the sound of birds.

When Elner asked her where they were going, Ida said, “You’ll see soon enough.”

Elner looked up and saw two zebras, with red stripes that looked like candy canes and with silver tinsel manes and tails, and a herd of tiny little bright yellow hippopotamuses no bigger than twelve inches high, pass right in front of them.

“That’s different,” Elner said. “You don’t see that every day.”

“You do here,” said Ida.

After they had walked a little while longer, Elner asked, “Are we there yet?”

Ida ignored her.

“How much farther do we have to go?”

“Just hold your horses, Elner, we’ll get there when we get there.”

“All right. I just wondered…that’s all.”

They continued on for a few more minutes, and as they turned a corner and Elner looked around, she suddenly realized they were walking down a street that looked exactly like First Avenue North; as she went farther and recognized the Goodnight house, she knew for sure it was First Avenue North. She was back on her own street all right, but something was odd. There were streetcar tracks running down the middle of the avenue and there had not been streetcars in Elmwood Springs for years; not only that, the large row of elm trees that used to line both sides of the street, that had been chopped down in the fifties, were suddenly right back where they used to be. When they walked past Ruby’s house, it had not changed much, but when they walked past her own house, she noticed that the fig tree in the side yard was only three feet tall. Elner said, “Ida, I don’t know what we’re doing here, but we’re not in the right time period, I can tell you that. We must have flipped back fifty years.”

“At least,” said Ida, looking up at the trees and continuing on down the street. Although she couldn’t figure out why she was back home again, Elner did not mind being back in time. It was really very, very pleasant, and so so quiet. All the new housing developments were gone, and the cornfields that used to be behind all the houses were back again. Then Elner saw several big fat squirrels running up and down the trees, only these squirrels were bright orange with white polka dots. “Look, Ida, wouldn’t Sonny just love to catch one of them.” Then something dawned on her. “Wait a minute, Ida, if we’re back fifty years ago, poor old Sonny isn’t even born yet, is he? And why are we flipped back? Am I going to get younger too?”

“Just wait, you’ll see,” she said.

Ida walked her all the way down to the end of the avenue, but instead of the little Shop & Go market the Vietnamese couple ran now, the old Smith house was there where it used to be, looking exactly as it had so many years ago, with the green and white awnings, and the big radio tower with the red light at the top still stood in the backyard. Ida stopped right in front of the house and announced, “Here we are!”

Elner was surprised. “Is this where we’re going? Neighbor Dorothy’s old house?”

“It is indeed. Come on,” she said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Elner said, and happily followed her up the sidewalk. Elner was very pleased about this development. She would love to see the old house again. For years Dorothy Smith had broadcast Elner’s favorite radio show from that very house. In fact, the
Neighbor Dorothy Show
had been broadcast from Dorothy’s living room. Elner had listened to that show every day for all of the thirty-eight years it had been on the air. Dorothy had given out recipes and household hints and had even given away unwanted pets on the show. When Elner heard Dorothy describing a little orange kitten that needed a home, she had made her husband, Will, drive her into town and get it. She had even named it Sonny, in honor of the show’s theme song, “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Standing there, Elner could still remember the song and the announcer’s voice that had introduced Neighbor Dorothy every morning.
“And now, from that little white house just around the corner from wherever you are, here she is, the lady with the smile in her voice, your neighbor and mine…Neighbor Dorothy.”

Ida led Elner up the stairs to the front porch, and everything looked just the same, with the swing on one end of the porch and another swing on the other, and on the window to the right of the door, painted in small black and gold letters, was
WDOT RADIO NO. 66 ON YOUR DIAL.
Ida opened the front screen door and stepped back and indicated for Elner to step in, then said, “See you later, have fun” and turned to leave. “Wait,” said Elner. “Where are you going? Am I going to see you again?”

Ida waved over her shoulder at her as she headed back down the stairs.

“Just go on in, Elner,” she said as she disappeared around the corner.

Elner was a little nervous at being left alone. She wasn’t sure what to expect next, this had been such a crazy trip, but the minute she opened the door and poked her head inside the house, it still had the same old familiar smell she remembered; Neighbor Dorothy’s house always smelled as if there were something sweet baking in the oven, and usually there was. When she stepped inside the front hall, she got the surprise of her life. Princess Mary Margaret, Dorothy’s old cocker spaniel, came running to greet her, and over in the corner, there sat her old friend, Neighbor Dorothy! She had died almost forty-eight years before, but here she was, looking exactly like herself, sitting in her favorite floral chair with that same sweet open round face smiling at Elner, as big as you please, with the same old twinkle in her eye.

“Hello there, Elner,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you!”

If Elner hadn’t believed it was her, she would have recognized that voice anywhere.

“Well, it is you!”

“Yes, it’s me!” said Dorothy, clapping her hands in delight. “Surprised?”

“Just as surprised as I can be.”

After they had hugged, Elner said, “Oh my heavens. Ida never told me a thing, I had no idea I’d be seeing you again. Let me just sit down and look at you.” She went over to the chair across from Dorothy’s and just stared at her, shaking her head in amazement.

“Well…if you are not a sight for sore eyes, I don’t know who is. For land’s sake, how are you?”

“Oh, just wonderful, Elner, and how are you?”

Elner shook her head and laughed. “Honey, to tell you the truth, at this point I have no idea. Evidently I’m dead, but I haven’t the slightest idea what is going on. All Ida told me was that I was going to meet my Maker. Am I in the right place?”

Dorothy smiled. “You are indeed, and you don’t know how happy I am to see you, Elner.”

“Me too, it’s been too long, and you look great.”

“Thank you, Elner. So do you.”

“Oh well,” she laughed. “I’ve gained a few pounds since I last saw you, but I feel fine…except I just fell out of my fig tree, that’s why I’m in this old robe, I hadn’t even gotten dressed for the day yet.”

“I know,” said Dorothy sympathetically. “You took a bad fall.”

“I did, didn’t I? But I don’t think I broke anything. Nothing hurts so far.”

“Good, we don’t want any broken bones.”

Elner sat back in her chair, crossed her feet, and looked around the room and noticed Dorothy’s two yellow canary birds, Dumpling and Moe, were as fat as ever and still chirping away in their cage, and the milk-glass chandelier still hung over the dining room table, with the floral swag curtains. “The place looks just the same. I always loved your house, Dorothy.”

“I know you did.”

“And I loved your show too, everybody missed you so much when you went off the air. There’s never been a better show than yours. Now they have Bud and Jay on in the morning, and they’re pretty good, but they don’t give out recipes like you used to.”

“No, those were the good old days….”

Elner looked around and said, “I smell something good, you don’t just happen to have a cake in the oven, do you?”

“I do,” said Dorothy. “A caramel cake, and as soon as it is done, you and I are going to have some.”

“Oh boy, caramel cake, my favorite.”

“I know, I remembered.”

“So,” said Elner, very happy at the thought of the upcoming cake, “am I in some sort of a holding pattern, resting up, having a little snack, before I go on to my final destination?”

Dorothy smiled and said, “No, honey, this is it.”

“It is?” said a surprised Elner. “Now I’m all confused…. Are you the one I’m supposed to see? You’re not the Maker, are you?”

Dorothy laughed. “Yes, one of them, at least, there are actually two of us, but I wanted a chance to say hello to you first, before we went in for our meeting. You were always one of my favorite people. I always got the biggest kick out of you, always asking those crazy questions.”

“Well, thank you,” she said. “You were always one of mine, but…I always thought you were just a regular person, it never occurred to me that you were anything other than just my friend, now I’m just mortified…I never dreamed you were…well, who you are. Will that count against me?”

Dorothy shook her head. “No, and you have no need to be mortified over anything.”

“I don’t?”

“No, the Dorothy Smith that you knew was the real Dorothy Smith, I’m just speaking to you in her likeness, sort of a look-alike. We always like to use a familiar form, one you would feel comfortable with: we certainly don’t want to scare anybody. You’re not scared, are you?”

“No, just a little confused. You say you
look
like her, but you’re not really Neighbor Dorothy?”

“That’s right, but in a way I am. There’s a little part of us in everybody.”

Elner tried her best to figure it out. “Oh dear, I think I’m still confused, who’s ‘us’? Ida told me I was going to meet my Maker, and if you’re not you, then who’s that dog over there? Is that Princess Mary Margaret, or just an imposter pretending to be her?”

Dorothy laughed. “I promise you, it’s not all that complicated. Just wait, you’ll see, the whole thing is really very simple. Come on with me, honey, I have someone I want you to meet.”

Calling Dena, Palo Alto, California

12:16
PM (10:16 AM
Pacific time)

A
fter having spent some time seeing Aunt Elner, Macky came back into the waiting room and sat with Norma. The nurse who had stayed with her had asked if there was anything else she could do, anyone she could call for them, when Norma said, “Oh, Macky, you need to go call Dena. Tell her we’ll let her know as soon as we can about when the funeral…” Then Norma burst into tears again when she heard the word
funeral
. The nurse put her arm around Norma’s shoulders and tried to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” said Norma. “It’s just so hard to believe…. Go on, Macky, call Dena. I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll have to call collect.”

“Just tell the operator it’s an emergency.”

Macky reluctantly got up and went down the hall again. He hated making this call, the one to Linda had been hard enough. If it had been up to him, he would have waited until they got back home, but he supposed that Norma knew best in these matters. Women seemed to know the rules and regulations about weddings and funerals, but he was not going to make it an emergency phone call. The poor woman was dead; there was no emergency about that as far as he could see. He would just make it a regular collect call. Dena Nordstrom O’Malley was Norma’s second cousin, Aunt Elner’s great-niece. Although she knew Aunt Elner had been old, she like everybody else was totally surprised when Macky told her. News like that was always the last thing in the world she expected to hear. When she put the phone down, she stood for a moment and considered calling her husband, but decided to wait and tell him in person when he came home for lunch. There was no rush; it had just happened and they didn’t even know yet when the funeral would be. She walked over and sat down in the chair by the big bay window and gazed out at the yard, and felt the tears welling up in her eyes and running down her face. The last time she had seen Aunt Elner had been at Linda’s wedding.

Ever since her husband, Gerry, had become head of the psychiatric department at Stanford University Medical Center, and she had started teaching journalism, their lives had been so busy they had not had a chance to get back and visit with Aunt Elner in person. The last time she had talked to her on the phone was just last week. Aunt Elner, who never understood the two-hour time difference between Missouri and California, had called at five
AM,
all excited. And when Dena picked up, she had said, “Dena, did you know that a watermelon seed can produce a watermelon two hundred thousand times its own weight? Isn’t that something?”

“Oh yes,” said Dena, half asleep.

“And here’s what I want to know. How does that little black seed know to make the outside of the watermelon green and the inside of the rind white and the rest of it red? Can you figure it? How does it know how to do that?”

“I don’t know, Aunt Elner.”

“I guess it’s just one of those mysteries of life, isn’t it?”

Dena had hung up and gone back to bed.

Now, remembering their last conversation, it suddenly hit her just how much she would miss talking to Elner. They had talked at least once a week for the past fifteen years. As Dena sat there and thought more about it, she also realized just how much of her present life and happiness she owed to having known Elner. Dena and her mother had left Elmwood Springs when she was still a baby, and she hadn’t gone back until she was a grown woman, and even then she had not intended to ever go back there. At the time she had been one of the new up-and-coming female network television news reporters. She had only gone back because she had been sick, and needed a place to recuperate. To her, Elner was just a country woman, certainly not very smart, not in the ways that Dena judged people as being smart.

Before Dena had become ill, her first priority had always been her career, getting ahead, chasing after success and money. It had never even occurred to her that anything else was important, and so a woman who lived in the most humble of circumstances and seemed content to do so was an enigma to her. Having lived ten years in New York City, Dena couldn’t believe the woman never locked her doors, didn’t even own a key to her own house, and Elner was the first person she had ever met who actually seemed content, and she didn’t understand it. Dena thought that she must be a little simpleminded and her almost childlike fascination with nature was just a lack of sophistication. “God, who could get so excited at finding a four-leaf clover?”

Before she had left New York, Dena had certainly never paid the slightest attention to nature, had never seen a sunset or sunrise unless it had been an accident. She had rarely even noticed the moon or the stars or even the seasons changing, other than switching to heavier clothes. And most of all she was at a loss to understand why anybody would go out of their way to see the same sunrise every morning, and the same old sunset every night. As far as she was concerned, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But Aunt Elner had explained, “Oh, honey, it’s never the same, every morning it’s an entirely different sunrise, and every night an entirely different sunset, and it will never ever happen in quite the same way again.” And Elner had turned to her and said, “My question to you is, how in the world could you stand to miss even one? It’s better than any picture show and it’s free too.”

It had taken Dena a while, but after joining Elner every evening, sitting with her and watching the sun go down over the fields in the back of her house, she had come to see what Elner had been talking about. Aunt Elner had taught her to look for the tiny green flash that happened just as the sun dipped down into the horizon. The first night she came over and sat out back with her, Aunt Elner had said, “You know, Dena, there’s a secret to watching a sunset, most people think that once the sun goes down, that’s the end of it. They stop watching too soon, because the really pretty part is just beginning.” Aunt Elner had been right, of course, and every night after that they sat in the yard and watched until the last rays faded and until after the sky had turned dark blue and the first star had appeared.

Aunt Elner said, “I just couldn’t go to bed if I hadn’t made a wish on the first star, could you?” Dena had always wondered what Aunt Elner wished for, but when she asked, Aunt Elner had just smiled. “If I tell, it won’t come true, but it’s a good one, I can tell you that much.” Since those days, Dena had come a long way. Aunt Elner had been the one who had first opened her eyes, made her see the things that had always been right in front of her, all the things she had never stopped long enough to look at. Later, she came to realize just how smart Aunt Elner really was, and now she hardly ever missed a sunset. All of a sudden another wave of sadness hit her as she realized what a lonely old world this was going to be without Aunt Elner.