One of the more unique aspects of being the son of a minister is
exposure to so many different facets of society which I would not
otherwise see. For example, following my father when he serves as guest
speaker at different churches, I have been given an opportunity and a
logical reason (it is generally considered a social faux pas to
break church loyalty by attending another congregation) to visit every
single one of the perhaps twenty or so major Chinese congregations in the
Chicago area. I have also been exposed to many problems of people whose
lives I would not have interacted with otherwise, problems ranging from
police troubles and language problems to sickness and deaths. From this I
have been exposed since childhood to the existence of cancer, to the
existence of car accidents, to the existence of suicidal teenagers
dissolving their guts with Dran-O, to the existence of old age, to the
existence of dire illness which snatch the quick to join the dead and
leave naught but a family broken not by lack of love but lack of life. I
have always been grateful to my father's profession for the opportunity
to observe so many things I would have missed had he not been what he
is, opportunities even so mundane as a simple
Sick Call
I am on a sick call with my father. It is an overcast, grey and gloomy day
in mid-autumn, somewhere around the time of Halloween and its associated
pagan silliness. This time the patient is a ninety-year-old man, slightly
sick and confined to his bed but still coherent and in fairly good shape
given his age. I am unfamiliar with both the family and the man in
question but through necessity in the form of lack of an extra car, I
follow my father to a two-story suburban house a few blocks away from the
community center from which our church rents a room for our Sunday
service. I drive the few blocks in our dark grey--obsequiously renamed
"opal grey," probably by the same kinds of people who use words like
"teal" and "fuchsia" and are not employed by the Crayola company--Ford
Taurus and park in front of their Skokie residence.
The house is old but appealing in its own sort of way; it is a house,
really, that I stereotypically associate with old age. The architecture is
vaguely Victorian, vaguely reminiscient of old Norman Rockwell covers and
grandmother cooking pie in the oven. I would really much rather stay in
the car and listen to my Simon and Garfunkel but my father urges me to
accompany him in, and of course I acquiesce. We knock on the door and it
is opened by a fairly elderly woman who turns out to be the daughter of
the patient we have come to visit. My father knows her well, but I have
absolutely no idea who she is. However--just like many of my father's
acquaintances--she of course knows me, has known me for some time, and
uses the opportunity to comment on how well I've grown.
We enter the house. It smells of herbal remedies--a distinctly Chinese
odor, in my experience. I leave my shoes at the door, as is customary in
any Asian household, and stand awkwardly on my navy socks in the center of
the living room.
The patient we have come to visit is lying on a medical bed with metal
railings and electric controls placed next to the inside wall of the
living room. Although the room is well lit through a solitary window, dust
and an unbearable sense of age make the room seem misty, small, and dingy,
although it is none of these things. The woman who opened the door for us
offers us tea, candy. We decline; my father has come for a different
purpose. The man we have come to visit rises slowly from his bed and,
balanced precariously on a four-legged walker, totters slowly over to an
easy chair across from my father.
My father begins to talk. He has an easy, hypnotic voice when he is
speaking in his native Cantonese, probably his greatest asset as a
preacher. He begins to tell the grandfather we are visiting about the
gospel, the gospel about which this over ninety-year-old man has perhaps
vaguely heard of but never believed in. He begins by talking about life
and how blessed the elderly are to have lived so long and to still be in
decent health. I tune out and listen as if in a trance to the words
flowing from my father. I have heard the gospel before. The only thing I
am aware of else than the misty sunlight and my father's voice suddenly
breaks into my consciousness like a machine gun: a loudly ticking clock. A
clock on the mantle has been ticking the entire time and I abruptly notice
its noise.
My first thought is how utterly rude it is to put something so morbid
next to the bed of a man who spends his days in bed, unable to walk or
bathe without assistance, practically waiting to die. I immediately
dismiss the thought, of course; obviously nothing bad was meant by
whichever fool decided to install a clock there.
I try to focus back to what my father is telling our host. My father is
telling him about Jesus and how through God's only son we can attain
everlasting life. I try to listen further but nothing gets through now
except the ticking of the clock, counting off the seconds with a noise
that seems incredibly, unbelievably loud.
total accesses since 2:00pm February 4, 1996.
Illustrations by Edvard Munch
Andrew Ho
(ag-ho@uiuc.edu) |
writings