My mom’s two younger brothers live in Iowa, and at the time, so did her mother, Edna Pearl.
So our trek through Iowa was supposed to include a family reunion for Lou and me. I was excited to see my family; I’m kind of the “bad relative” in our family because I’m not very good at keeping in touch.
When my mom was still alive, she used to keep me connected to her family better than I could on my own. And while my uncles and their wives had met Lou before, Lou and I hadn’t really spent much time with my extended family over the years. So this was supposed to be a happy time for us to get together and connect.
But if that was going to happen, Lou and I were going to have to rally.
Once the newly signed wrinkle cream distributors were safely in their cars, and pulling out of the Panera Bread parking lot, Lou and I needed to take a beat to assess the situation before I contacted my Uncle John to sort out our dinner plans.
I remember feeling incredibly numb once I fully acknowledged that Lou was bleeding. Badly. It’s a strange thing to be dealing with a major health crisis in someone else’s body — because everyone has a different capacity for coping with a health scare. But having blood coming out of that part of your body? Well, I think it’s safe to say that no man has a natural capacity for such a predicament. And, I think I can also honestly represent that no wife will ever have the right words of comfort or understanding.
So I did what I typically do in a crisis: I came up with a tidying strategy.
I refilled Lou’s cup with some lemonade, and then I went out to the SUV to dig out a pair of dark blue jeans, and a pair of fresh underwear. When I came back into the restaurant, Lou seemed to be fighting off the urge to go catatonic on me. When I joined him at the crumb-covered table that was positioned closest to the bathroom, Lou looked at me and started blurting out possible reasons for the bleeding:
“I think it’s from sitting so long in the car.”
Followed by…
“I’ve been having some trouble urinating, so maybe I pushed too hard, and a blood vessel burst.”
And then this one…
“I think I was riding my bike too much before we left. Then, when you add all of the sitting in the car for the past two weeks — it probably caused me to start bleeding.”
As Lou offered up all of these possible explanations, I could see him rally slightly. In that moment, an explanation was the only comfort either of us was looking for. And, some of Lou’s suggestions seemed like they could be plausible. It was true that we’d been in the car — driving non-stop for more than three weeks — so there was no doubt that Lou was doing a lot of sitting.
But what do I know?
All I had was a pair of clean jeans, fresh underwear, and a simple strategy: “Just pad your underwear with tissue to get us through dinner with my family.”
While Lou changed into the jeans in the bathroom, I called my uncle to find out where we could meet up. When Lou came out of the bathroom, I remember seeing the stress in his eyes.
At that moment, I wanted to say something to make him feel better. I wanted to comfort him the way I knew he’d comfort me if I were the one having the health crisis. He’d always been stronger than me about everything that was happening to us, and I wanted to somehow reciprocate. But instead… I said probably the stupidest thing I could possibly say to Lou in that moment:
“Don’t worry, Buddy. I’m sure I can get your shorts clean.”
