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Note #7624 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

The last 8-ball
03135
March 11, 2003

The last 8-ball 

Goodnight, Mr. Calabash 

by Jerry Van Marter

LOUISVILLE - "Eight ball in that corner," I called, pointing with my cue. I
shot. The ball rolled in, making the final score about 250,000 to 249,999.
	
For 34 years, whenever I'm in Tacoma, my dad and I have talked religion,
politics, love and life while shooting pool in the rec room downstairs. Last
Monday night we played our last game. 
	
My folks are moving out of the house they bought in 1968, into a condo
nearby. The condo is smaller and has no stairs, and all the maintenance,
inside and out, is taken care of. Their lives will be a lot easier. 
	
I went over to the look at the condo Monday afternoon. It's nice - clean,
modern, with a terrific deck looking out on Mount Rainier  when it's not
obscured by fog. Mom doesn't want to be stuck in the house after Dad dies.
She says she felt like a big weight was lifted off her shoulders when she
signed the condo papers. Dad's not so thrilled; but after 62 years together
they have a thorough mutual understanding of what it takes to make their
lives work. 
	
The condo will never feel like home to me. And there's no room for the pool
table there.
	
My dad is dying. But I was delighted to win that game. 
	
Their house is on the market now, so the whole time I was there, a steady
stream of realtors led prospective buyers through while we all sat like flies
on the wall. It was very weird to hear sales pitches for a place that's been
OUR home for 34 years. 
	
My two sisters wanted to see the condo, so they came down from Seattle on
Monday. After the tour, I cooked dinner. It was the first time in more than
25 years that just the five of us sat around the dinner table - no spouses,
no kids. It was wonderful and poignant, heartwarming and heartbreaking. I
loved it and hated it. I thanked God and cursed the cancer. 
	
The strangest part of my two-day visit came after that Monday dinner. Dad and
I went down to the garage he built 33 years ago, shortly after they moved
into the house, and he had me pick out the tools I wanted to keep. After the
house sells there will be an estate sale, and everything my sisters and I
don't want will be sold. 
	
Dad grew up during the Depression, and he and Mom didn't have much money when
I was growing up, so everything they needed, he made or built, and everything
that broke, he fixed. I remember him overhauling car engines in that garage,
which now is a cornucopia of tools, gadgets, gizmos and junk accumulated over
70 years or so. 
	
Some moments were hilarious: Dad trying to talk me into taking something he
said was "a real good one," and me not knowing what the hell it was or what
it could possibly be used for. 
	
So, thanks to some incredulous but kind Delta Airlines people, I flew home
with a giant, beat-up hardshell suitcase containing a chain saw, two other
saws, an axe, several coils of rope, a rat's nest of bungee cords, a couple
of socket-wrench sets, an industrial-strength staple gun and an economy-size
roll of duct tape. 
	
There's other stuff that will have to wait until I can get out there with a
truck - a grandfather clock, a rolltop desk, an air compressor, odds and
ends. I've wracked my brain trying to figure out where in our house I could
put the pool table. No way. So some stranger is going to get a beautiful pool
table with a million Van Marter stories caroming off its rails and rolling
true across the green felt. 
	
I flew back to Louisville on Tuesday, very early. Mom and Dad were asleep
when I left. It was dark, with only a few night lights on. Remember the old
Jimmy Durante television program? I felt like Jimmy. At the end of the show,
the stage lights would go dark except for a few circles of light trailing
towards backstage, and he would stroll away, stopping momentarily in each
spotlight to turn and wave to the audience, strolling, stopping, waving,
turning, the lights going out one by one, until he was gone. 
	
Carrying my suitcase, dragging my "toolbox," I paused at the top of the
stairs and glanced through the living room, to the fireplace; stopped at the
bottom of the stairs for a last look at the tiny makeshift office where Dad
did his church work (serving as clerk of session, presbytery stated clerk,
synod stated clerk, General Assembly nominating committee member); stopped to
look out the living-room window at the Tacoma Narrows; stopped at the back
door to thank the pool table for 34 years of joy. And that was that.
	
(Jerry Van Marter's father, Bob, died of pancreatic cancer on March 10. Jerry
wrote this story after a February visit to his boyhood home in Tacoma, WA.)

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