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Len and Smithy
by Carl Palmer
Leonard Miller is homebound in the home of Roy Schmidt. Len, as Leonard likes to be called, is seventy-one, actively dying from leukemia, and in the last two months, drifting deeper daily into dementia.
Len has family in the area, a daughter and son, both married with grown children of their own. They enter his conversations often, but they never visit or even telephone Len at Roy's home.
Mildred, Len's wife known as Millie, passed away six years earlier in her sleep and is still very much alive somewhere just at the edge of Len's focus.
Smithy, as Len calls Roy, lifelong friend, likewise in his early seventies, is a widower with grown children in town as well, who also never call or come around. Lately he shows signs of forgetfulness, too, but confides they're his senior memory moments, well earned, and sometimes best forgotten anyway.
“Len won a football scholarship out of high school. He was our quarterback and I was his center. Instead of taking the full ride, he enlisted in the Army,” Smithy muses as we three sit eating cereal back when Len was able to feed himself. “After serving his tour in Vietnam, he came home to marry Millie, head cheerleader and high school honey, before starting back to work beside me in our Dads' boat shop.”
“I certainly didn't need college to do what I'd always loved to do as a kid, more of a hobby than a job,” Len points out. “My son wanted to do the same when he finished high school, but Millie and I insisted he get a college diploma. His education is in design and Smithy's son got his degree in business. Soon after graduation our boys began to build that original small boat shop into what our company is today, Schmidt Miller Watercraft, named as one of the best 500 small businesses on the west coast,” Len boasts, then chuckles, “Of course, Smithy and I are retired figureheads now, with our pictures on the showroom wall.”
“Our families were always close, did most everything together,” Smithy maintains. “We have so much in common, Len and me. We even buried our wives the same year.”
“That's also when everything changed.” Len reveals and looks at Smithy who nods for him to continue. “After the wives were gone we'd spend more and more time together, sometimes not even bothering to go home to a lonely, empty house. I'd just crash in Smithy's guest room or he'd sleep in mine. It just made sense.”
“It made sense, too,” Smithy agrees, “that we should sign over both houses to the kids and move into an apartment together. We invited them over to share our good news. Without letting us finish, all four children and all four spouses start wailing at once. Are you telling us that you're gay?...at your age... I am so ashamed.... How could you?... How long has this been going on?... Who else knows?... What will the children say?... Do you realize what this will do to our business?...Have you given any thought about us?... They allowed us no time to answer and themselves no time to listen.”
“Individually each tried over the next few months to talk us out of our decision, each time ending in another argument,” Len discloses. “They stopped communicating with us entirely when I sold my place and moved in here with Smithy. That was four years ago today. Happy Anniversary, Smithy, I love you.”
“I love you too, Len”, Smithy whispers at the graveside, one year today since Len passed away.
“We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has lost a friend, what shall we call him?”
~ Joseph Roux
Carl "Papa" Palmer, retired Army, retired FAA, now just plain retired, lives in University Place, WA. He has seven chapbooks and the contest winning poem riding a bus somewhere in Seattle. MOTTO: Long Weekends Forever. Contact Carl.
