Walmart Wellness Event Promoter (3:57)
Every now and then one of her visitors carries an item of clothing out to their car and hangs it with their own. Sometimes they're clutching a paper bag and I can't see what she has given away. Shirts and books and even his toiletries, though I'm just guessing here. I'm probably mistaken about the toiletries, but things have been trickling out of the house ever since she began to get a grip on herself. About a year ago she told me over the fence that she might not be able to keep her house, legal matters including Mr. Woodruff's royalties given over to pay off a publisher for books he'd never write. It's been a hard time for each of us in our own way. Mr. Woodruff only managed to live 10 months, and the house next door is my neighbor. I'm a good neighbor and would have enjoyed living next to him into old age, maybe even seeing myself depicted as a minor character walking a dog or passing by, just as his main character needed to clarify something by speaking with a stranger. Even though our time as neighbors was short, I had some good influence on things next door. Mr. Woodruff used to ask me about my roses. I guess you could tell I'm a fanatic about them. He told me his literary agent in New York City had sent him and his wife three rose plants. Love, hope, and cherish. The next thing I knew, he and his wife were making a small rose garden over there with about 10 bushes. She would dig a hole with a mattock, then she would haul a gallon bucket of water over next to the planting bed. He would tip the water into the hole, then wait for it to seep into the soil. Finally, he would get down on his knees and set each plant into place on Sundays I see her gathering these same roses now that they've bloomed to to take to the cemetery. It makes me wonder if they both knew while they were planning them that this was out there in the future. Or maybe they were so involved with earth and root balls and whether the holes were deep enough that they didn't trouble to think ahead, except that eventually there would be roses. Maybe their minds were mercifully clear of the future. That's what I hope, anyway. I own signed copies of all of Mr. Woodruff's books except this last one he was writing next door to me and which didn't get published until after his death. I called out to him one day when he was sitting at the teak bench in his yard, musing. Even before I saw it, I could smell he was smoking one of those small stinky cigars. I stood at the fence and asked if I could please get his signature on a few books. I was afraid he might be working, puzzling over a character in his head. I hated to disturb him. I've tried my hand at writing and I know how it goes. Courting the imagination, putting words down until a new world builds up, mixing a little of the real with some of the made up until it starts things you couldn't expect. I also know I'm never so happy as when I'm reading. In fact, well, I'd never imagined that a real and famous writer, in fact a pair of them, since the missus is also a writer, will move in next door to me. When I asked Mr. Woodruff to sign the books, he appeared almost boyish. He seemed eager to do it for me, so I climbed to the rail fence and went over to him, and I think he was not supposed to be smoking because he acted like I had caught him at something. He puffed a rancid swirl of smoke onto some red peonies at one end of the bench and ground the cigar into the grass with the heel of his bedroom slipper. I noticed his heel stayed on the cigar. Sit down, sit down, he said to me, because he could see it was going to be a while, as I had brought about six books over the first time. I sat down at the far end of the bench and put that stack of books between us, then handed him my pen. My wife was still living at the time, and Mr. Woodruff very kindly inquired after her. I said she was now in remission and we were hoping, God willing, she would stay that way. I felt a little emboldened by actually being in his yard. I told him I lit a candle for him at Mass every time I lit one for my wife. He didn't seem embarrassed at all about this. In fact, he just very quietly said, thank you. Maybe I should have let it go at that. But I added that I hoped his treatments were going okay. There was no use pretending I didn't know he was traveling back and forth every week for radiation. I'm doing just fine, he said. Nothing to it. It's over in 60 seconds and I don't feel a thing. Before they left for Seattle one day, I'd asked if I could do anything to help out, and his wife allowed me to water her sweet peas, which are on a trellis up against my fence. That's when she told me about the brain radiation. The brain. Well, it gave me a pause, I can tell you, to think what might be going through Mr. Woodruff's mind and his wife's too, knowing there was a tumor where he worked and imagined. Still, I learned later he was going to his desk over there every day, writing those last things, and she was helping him. After my wife's death, when I finally came to myself again, I noticed my neighbor's yard needed mowing, and I asked her would she mind if I ran my mower over it. She said her brother had been mowing it while he'd been out of work, but he'd recently found a real job. She would have to hire somebody, all right, she said. I told the widow it was no trouble, and it would give me pleasure to mow her lawn, as by now I had read her stories and poems, too, along with Mr. Woodruff's. I'd also read about their life together, the final portions of which I'd witnessed without quite knowing what I was seeing. There was a day, a stocking Mexican man with a pretty blonde woman and a dark haired beauty of a girl. His wife and daughter, I assume, pulled up with an unwieldy flat object strapped to the top of their avocado green station wagon. At the time, I thought it was a piece of construction material and that maybe this fellow was doing some sheetrock over there. Later, when I'd been invited into the house, I saw that what I thought was sheetrock was actually an oil painting this man had painted. The canvas had been wrapped for transport in a bedsheet. If it hadn't been for this, I would have seen salmon leaping up a waterfall and the faint images of a spirit fish headed the opposite direction in the painted sky, all of this bobbing down the driveway between the Mexican man and the blonde and onto the porch next door I discovered about the painting the day Mr. Woodruff motioned to me and asked would I come into the house to help him with something. Sure, you bet, I said and followed him into the entryway under a chandelier tall as one of those 30 gallon galvanized garbage cans. I thought he was going to ask me to help him move something that I was already deciding not to say anything about my sciatic nerve just to take a chance I'd be okay, but instead he opened the hall closet door and took out a necktie. He left the door open and I couldn't help noticing there were a lot of neckties looped over wire clothes hangers at one end of the closet. These neckties were already tied as if around an invisible neck, and the neck holes had been left wide to let the guy breathe or at least relax. Mr. Woodruff ushered me into the TV room, which was very comfortable. I saw he must be spending a lot of time reading. At one end of a leather couch, which faced into the room, was a stack of books on the floor. I appreciated that the natural light over the back of the couch was good for reading. When I turned back to Mr. Woodruff, he was holding this slightly metallic looking pale salmon colored necktie. There was an expression of utter helplessness on his face and the tie was limp across his outspread palms like a priest bearing the Eucharist. If we had been in church, my chin would have been up, my eyes closed, and my tongue slightly extended. Do you know how to tie one of these? Mr. Woodruff asks me. At first I'm taken aback. A grown man who doesn't know how to tie a necktie. Then I recall reading somewhere that his father carried a lunch bucket. So did mine, and he didn't own a tie for some years himself. Still, I had to wonder how Mr. Woodruff made it in the halls of academe back east when he occasionally held a lectureship or a chair at this or that Ivy League university Times. He must have had to meet a dean or two to look snappy in his tweed jacket at a banquet. Who was tying his necktie then? Somebody or several somebodies had certainly stocked his closet with a good supply of ready to slip on neckties. I am a man who was always learning things, so I assumed that finally Mr. Woodruff had decided to transcend his working class preference for an open collar. He was ready to tie his own necktie and I was to be his teacher. I felt very flattered by This I almost wish his wife were there to witness the patience I was about to expend in showing her husband how to do something which, for unknown reasons, he'd been avoiding all his life. But I'd seen her leave half an hour earlier in the car with some book sized packages I'd assumed were for the post office. It's a tie one of my friends gave me, Mr. Woodruff said, and I want to wear it at the book fair in Anaheim. Fine, I said. We'll fix you up. He stood looking at me with a kind of friendly curiosity while I draped the tie around my neck. It did not coordinate with the mostly red plaid flannel shirt I was wearing. I asked Mr. Woodruff to move parallel to me while I went through the steps. I flipped the tie this way and that as slowly as possible. Finally, when I'd asked several times, you got that? And repeated the procedure, I handed him the tie and told him to give it a shot. He looked baffled, like I just asked him to nail his eyeball to the wall while holding the hammer between his teeth. He laughed nervously. His fingers seemed ribbed together like wings. Then he made his move. He fanned one end of the tie over the other with a nice emphatic gesture that allowed me to think briefly this would come out okay after all. But then he just stood there, elbows out, and looked down at the tie, which was shooting off a cruel iridescent sheen in the mid morning sunlight. I wanted to give him a hint, but I also didn't want to insult his intelligence, which was considerable despite what I'm portraying here. When Mr. Woodruff made the first wrong move, I reached up gently and got him headed right again. Finally, though, he'd made enough wrong moves that I realized something. I'd done it. I'd tied the tie for him. He seemed very pleased, extraordinarily pleased. He shook my hand enthusiastically, I remember, just like I'd done something for him nobody else had ever done. But it was dawning on me that this must have happened many times before, and that Mr. Woodruff had no earthly intention before death and God of ever learning to tie a necktie. I mean, it was right over there on the side of his ledger with bungee jumping and ice fishing, camel rides across the Australian desert, and maybe even the Pogo Stick Olympics. This is great. This will just keep me going just fine, he said, and walked a few steps away into the bathroom so he could check my work in the mirror. The collar on his sports shirt wasn't right for a tie But I guess he was picturing himself in his dress shirt and suit jacket. He liked what he saw. Then he did something I realized I'd seen in my mind's eye a moment before it happened. He reached up and, like a sheriff who has interrupted a small town lynching, he loosened the tie from his throat and lifted over his head. My neighbor seemed suddenly more free, like any man who's nearly lost his life. How could I help but be glad for him? I knew what he was up against in more ways than one. I forgot all about being his failed teacher of the necktie. Instead, I looked around the room at the warm spruce paneling, the braided rug, the way the sun shining through the skylight illuminated the very place he was standing. I just appreciated the comfortable circumstances Mr. Woodruff had managed to find for himself. I knew from things his wife had said over the fence that it was a difficult time for him. Look at this painting our friend Alfredo gave us, Mr. Woodruff said as he pushed me eagerly along by my elbow toward the living room. But I stopped in the dining room doorway, staring into the living room at this huge painting. Salmon were leaping across it. I took in the way they were balancing there on the edges of their deaths. Some were in the river and others were leaping above a waterfall. I had to fight the impulse to touch the painting, to feel the ridges in the river current and the waterfall. Mr. Woodruff must have noticed my hands rising, hovering before the painting, because he said, go ahead, it's okay. I looked to see if my hands were clean, and they were. Then I moved them very lightly with the current across the canvas. It felt like minnows flicking across my fingertips. Still, I knew nothing was really moving except the blood in my veins. I let my fingers follow the lines of color and shape. The Mexican painter had spent a month or more pressing into his canvas with oil paint on a brush. It occurred to me that all the time he must have been painting he had to know his friend was dying. He would have had to guess that. Yet he'd also probably been glad Mr. And Mrs. Woodruff had each other. That had to strike him, and the fish, too. He must have been glad as he painted each one, that nothing was going to get in the way of their leaping along like that. It was all there in that painting, joy and sadness and destiny and friendship and farewell. I admit I was weak in the knees. When I turned back into the room, I saw Mr. Woodruff, my neighbor, still holding the necktie. He was going to slip back over his head in a few days in California, cinching it up to his Adam's apple like he'd tied it himself. I was his accomplice, and we smiled at each other that day in his living room like we just cleaned out a bank, and each of us had a pretty woman waiting for us to spend the money on her, and we did too, both of our wives still with us then, and that miracle of life itself, too. Ours for however long it lasted, we had it all. That was the most memorable encounter I had with Mr. Woodruff, when his son comes to stay a few days each summer with his stepmother, my widowed neighbor. I feel strangely like I'm back in Mr. Woodruff's young, vigorous days, shaking hands with him at full strength, his hand pressing so hard on mine that the wedding ring I've moved to my right hand smarts to the bone. So you knew my dad, the son says to me in a kind of simple wonderment, smiling. He's the spitting image of his father, only young and alive. I did, I say. I sure did, and I'm sorry I don't have more to add. Since my meetings with his father were really so incidental. I suppose I could tell him about the neckties, but somehow I think that's just between Mr. Woodruff and me. Sometimes I look over and see the son sitting alone where his father sat on the teak bench. I've noticed him helping my neighbor pick the apples when he occasionally visits her in September, and once in February they pruned and mulched the roses together. Each time he leaves, he is usually carrying a few things of his father's. He had a briefcase and a raincoat. This last time he was beaming, and he came over the fence to show me and to thank me for helping my mom asked what he calls his stepmother. I think to myself this is decent kind of him, really, to refer to her as his mom, since she has told me he is the closest to a son she will probably ever have. I tell him it's no trouble. I just do her lawn when I do my own. But mowing my neighbor's lawn has gotten to be something I actually look forward to. I admit I like to make a swirling green current the way I cut the grass so the lawn has a river, an invisible river of pattern with ridges of energy cut right where I've moved my body along behind the mower I can work up a good rhythm. There's a kind of hum running inside me so pleasurably I forget what time it is or if the darkness is falling as it often does, I'm moving with the current under the boughs of the cedar trees. When I'm finished and have shut off the mower, my neighbor comes out of the house to stand next to me. I've never told her about the dream I have repeatedly, in which she crosses to me on the freshly cut lawn and holds out one of Mr. Woodruff's already tied neckties, loosened to slip over my head. I bend my head down, but even so she still has to reach up. It's like I'm receiving a medal after performing in some amazing exhibition of human will and daring. Only I can't think what I've done to deserve this tie coming over my head. I feel ordinary and humbled as the tie slips down to my shoulders, but my neighbor seems so sure about what she's doing that I just give over. I go ahead and cinch the necktie, sliding the knot under my Adam's apple. It's then I feel an unexpected moment of satisfaction. Like the already tied necktie. This peacefulness also seems somehow to have been ready for me. In the dream. I have the sense that Mr. Woodruff is advising me, telling me it's okay to leave some things to others the way he managed his closet full of neckties. I wake up feeling greatly calmed and included, remembering how he let me help him that day. Then I realize this is the same feeling I have after I've cut my neighbor's lawn. We admire the lawn together a while, taking silent note of its rushing, a low murmur in the leaves of the big maple near the garage. After a minute or two, she thanks me, but neither of us goes anywhere. We survey the sweep and eddies of the lawn together, and for a moment a stupendous calm falls over that small corner of the world. It's then I take leave of her and go back to my own house to fix the evening meal, the same way she must be doing over there.
