“I used to stitch up wounded farmhands with a flashlight and whiskey—now my grandson gets a sticker for logging onto Zoom.”
That’s what I said to my wife last week, half joking, half aching.
The house is quiet now. Too quiet. Mary passed in ’08, and the kids are grown and scattered like leaves in October wind. The only reason there’s noise at all is because little Eli’s here for the summer. Five years old, full of questions and peanut butter, always barefoot no matter how many times I tell him the porch nails don’t care about his young skin.
I sit in my rocker, the old one with the carved arms and cigarette burns from back when doctors smoked in their offices. Eli’s next to me, legs swinging, watching a bug crawl across the step.
“Grandpa,” he says, “did you have school on the computer when you were my age?”
I bark out a laugh before I can catch myself. Not out of mockery—just the pure absurdity of it.
“No, son. We had one teacher, forty kids, and if you talked back you got a ruler across the knuckles. And that was on a good day.”
He stares like I told him the sky used to be green.
I start to tell him about the chalk dust, the clanking radiators, how we wrote our letters by candlelight in winter and listened to the news on the radio if the reception held. I leave out the hunger. The silence at dinner when Dad lost his job. The way Mom pretended watered-down milk was a recipe.
Eli reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tiny plastic figure. A superhero. Blue cape, neon helmet, arms wide like he’s ready to catch the world.
“Is that your hero?” I ask.
He nods. “He heals people. In my game.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
When I was five, my hero was my uncle Jack. He worked in the coal mines six days a week, came home coughing soot, and still found time to carve me a wooden train set by hand. He lost a thumb once—machine caught it and didn’t give it back. Wrapped it in a rag and finished his shift.
“That’s what men did,” I mutter.
“What?” Eli asks.
“Nothing, buddy.” I smile at him and pat his head. “Just remembering.”
We spend the next hour in the yard. I show him how to hold a pocketknife—not one of those spring-loaded gadgets, but a real whittling blade, dull with use. I hold his hand and guide the motion. Peel the bark, shave it down slow. He’s clumsy, but eager. His eyes wide, tongue poking out in concentration.
“Why do we do this?” he asks.
“To make something with your hands. So your mind can rest a little.”
He doesn’t quite understand, but nods anyway.
After lunch, I take him to the shed. Dusty, full of spiderwebs and old memories. I pull out a birdhouse I made in ’72 and show him the nail marks where I bled into the wood. He thinks that’s gross. I think it’s beautiful.
“You built this without instructions?”
“Yup.”
“No YouTube?”
“Just heart and guesswork.”
We sit on the back porch later, watching clouds shift like slow battleships. I tell him about my first day as a doctor. I was twenty-seven. A tractor flipped on a man’s leg. We had no ambulance. Just me, a nurse named Charlene, and a pickup truck with a torn seat. I held that man’s thigh together with gauze and prayer. He lived. Walked with a limp, but lived.
Eli’s eyes are big. “Was it scary?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But that’s when you know you’re doing something that matters.”
He’s quiet for a while. Then, like kids do, he veers off.
“My game has a doctor like that. He fixes people by pressing buttons really fast. You get points when you save them.”
I stare at him.
I want to tell him that’s not how it works. That real healing is messy. It bleeds and screams and sometimes doesn’t work no matter how hard you try. I want to tell him about holding hands that went cold, about the night I had to call a mother and say the words I still taste in my sleep.
But he’s five.
He doesn’t need to know yet.
We eat dinner at the small kitchen table, just the two of us. I let him have dessert first—something Mary would’ve scolded me for. His mouth is chocolate-smeared, and he’s humming a tune I don’t recognize. Probably from one of those cartoons where animals talk like TikTok influencers.
I want to freeze this moment. Bottle it. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real. His fingers tapping the table, my spoon scraping the bowl, the way the sun hits his hair just so.
After the dishes, he asks for a story.
Not a made-up one.
“One of yours, Grandpa. A real one.”
I nod slowly. “Okay. I’ll tell you about the man who died in my arms in 1985.”
He scoots closer, eyes serious.
I start telling it. The late call. The rain. The bridge out. How I drove my own truck through the woods to reach him. How I pressed on his chest for forty minutes while the nearest help was still too far. How he whispered his daughter’s name before going quiet.
But before I can finish, Eli looks up and says, “Why didn’t you just call a helicopter? Or use a drone?”
The innocence slices me sharper than any scalpel.
I close my mouth.
Stand up slowly.
And walk toward the hall closet.
My fingers tremble a little as I reach the top shelf.
Wrapped in a yellowed cloth is what I’m looking for.
I carry it back to the porch where Eli waits, feet dangling in the twilight.
I sit beside him and place the bundle in his lap.
“Eli,” I say, my voice rough, “it’s time you held this.”
Coming up: What’s inside the bundle? What does Sam hope to pass on before time runs out?
