by

Jerry Durgan

Bamberg, SC 29003

803-245-4445

Fiction

Topic: Change of Life

Descending the stairs for the thousandth time in a third as many days, Jerry's knee buckled, sending him down, thankfully, only a few steps and onto the carpeted landing below.

Lying face up, both legs aimed toward the ceiling, his spectacles at right angles to his nose, he looked to his left to see if anyone was watching, only to see Goop, the 15 year old Black Labrador, looking at him, ears pricked up into a question above her sleek forehead.

"Damn!" he said to Goop. "That hurt."

The Lab, nonchalantly trotting across the room, licked a drooling spittle-smear across Jerry's spectacles, over his nose, wetting his gray beard and over his brow. "Goop! Ain't got no time an' no patience for that," he groaned. "I bust my tail and you sit there like you think it's funny!"

Pulling himself upright, holding onto the banisters, his knee still buckling from the weight of a hundred pounds more that it was intended. "Damn! A helluva seventy-seventh birthday present," he mumbled, hobbling into the bright sunroom at the back of the house.

Grimacing and nauseous from the pain, he poured his cup of steaming black coffee from the two-cup percolator hoping that the warming tartness would settle his stomach, but doubted it. Searching in his corduroy shirt pocket for his always-filled pipe and matches, feeling guilty in the process, his wife Carol scolded him whenever she suspected he was smoking, he inhaled a deep lung full of steel-blue smoke, exhaling through a heavy sigh of relief as the tobacco calmed nerve endings. "Damn, over three-quarters of a century," he thought, looking out through the large double windows toward the Cypress pond only a few feet from the house. "Can't expect nothin' to last that long, I guess," he muttered, gingerly rubbing a rapidly swelling knee. He thought about calling his doctor's office, but changed his mind. Doctors, he'd reasoned years ago, were for people who were sick. Not for stupid or clumsy people. "I'm both, this morning," he mumbled.

An early morning September sun was still low in the east, creating an array of shimmering points of light across the slightly rippling waters of the pond, as yet undisturbed by the large hardshell turtles that daily basked in the sun on cypress stumps, cypress trees rose-colored aglow in the foreground of an early fall sun. Canadian geese had already come, bathed, played, and taken flight again toward the deeper south. "Winter's a'comin'," they honked.

"See that, Goop?" Jerry asked, pointing to the now needleless trees, "That's the end of summer. The early beginnings of fall. Like you'n me. Maybe, mind you, we just might have 'nother summer comin'. Only God knows. But there ain't too many more, you know?"

Goop looked up at him, her brow furrowing, her ears pricked up, her head cocked to one side. Standing, she put her head in Jerry's lap, easy, her eyes looking up to his. "I love you," she seemed to say. "Happy birthday."


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