The Twenty-Six Year Old Hug or Why One Should Never Laugh in a Deserted Funeral Home

At around 4:30 AM on Monday, May 30, 2011 my grandmother died.

If it hadn't been for the keyboard, I would have missed what occurred at 9:45 AM on Friday, June 3, 2011.

That's when, five days after she died, my grandmother spoke to me for the last time.

On Thursday morning we were sitting in the auditorium at The Peanut's school, waiting for her kindergarten farewell concert to begin. My mother was going over the funeral plans with The Wife, my mother-in-law, and me. 'Nana', as we have always called her, is a deeply devoted Christian woman. She had been ill for a long time so death's approach was not exactly a surprise. When she discussed her impending funeral with my mother, she told her that she wanted several hymns sung at her service. The only problem with that turned out to be that there was no piano or organ available for Mom to play at the funeral home. My mother-in-law, who has been taking piano lessons for a year now, offered us the use of her electric keyboard so Mom didn't have to lead everyone in singing the songs A Capella.

Friday morning, the day of the funeral, I drove over to my in-law's house to pick up the keyboard and its three piece stand. I loaded it up in the back of my car and drove over to the funeral home. I pulled up the winding driveway and parked the car right at the front entrance. A kindly old lady in a day-glow yellow shirt and interestingly checkered pants met me at the door. She was expecting me and I was ushered into the viewing room.

I was surprised to see that Nana was already in the room. No flowers or anything yet, just her body, resting in a chestnut colored casket. I registered her presence then got to the task at hand. It took me about fifteen minutes to get all the pieces out of the car and assembled correctly at the front of the room, to the left of the casket. For the first ten minutes, the woman in the gods offending bright yellow shirt sat and watched me, as if afraid to leave me alone with the body, sure that should she turn her back or leave the room I would leap up from my spot on the floor, sharpie marker in hand, and draw an evil handlebar mustache and matching pointy beard on nana's restful face. She just sat there and watched me. No conversation, just the optical scream of her shirt and the regularity of her short, quick breaths.

I finished putting the stand together and just needed to attach and screw in the keyboard itself when the phone in the office next door began to ring.

"Will you be alright if I go answer that?" she asked me.

I assured her that I would. I even put the screwdriver down and made sure she saw my empty hands to put her at ease. She nodded and shuffled out to take the call. I had the keyboard attached and screwed safely in place three minutes later.

My task complete, I walked over to Nana's casket. She lay there peacefully, arms to her sides, dressed in a beautiful purple beaded dress that I recalled her wearing to my wedding. I stood in silence for a moment, just looking; the only sounds in the room the quiet hum of the air system and the faint murmuring of the telephone conversation in the other room. A lump began to form in my throat, a feeling of sorrow at her passing mixed with the relief that she was no longer in pain. Her face so calm and tranquil, she could have been in the middle of the world's most soothing dream.

As I turned to go I placed my hand on her arm. It happened the second I touched her cool skin.

I was suddenly and overwhelmingly flooded with memories. The onslaught was as sudden as the burst of water from the copper end of a kinked garden hose that has just been loosened. Childhood memories I had not thought of for years, decades even, came rushing back. I stood there with my hand resting on nana's arm, floating in a sea of forgotten memories. Then one specific memory dropped into place and I was taken back in time.

I grew up in Marcus Hook, a small borough in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes drive south from Philadelphia. About five blocks from my house stood one of the last remaining vestiges of a staple in the lives of children in twentieth century America. A penny candy store. Our penny candy store was called Bonsal's. The dim, one roomed shop, its interior lit by a single, sickly light bulb hanging from the ceiling was my childhood Mecca. It was presided over by the indomitable Mrs. Margaret. Every child who grew up in Marcus Hook from the 1950s to the 1980s knew Mrs. Margaret. The 1980s was the decade when I was an active patron at Bonsal's, near the end of the run for both the candy store and for Mrs. Margaret herself. She looked to be in her late seventies. Frizzy white hair sprung out on all sides, surrounding her aged face. Eyebrows, freshly applied every day in two stark, black lines above her watery blue eyes. Her lipstick, a deep red, almost a blood red in my memory's eye, often staining her teeth. Every day but Sunday, there she stood behind the massive glass counter, dressed in her trademark white blouse and plaid skirt awaiting the orders of scores of children, their faces pressed against the glass, eyes drinking in the sight of a smorgasbord of sugary confection. Ordering etiquette, much like in the shop of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi, was to be closely followed, lest one be fixed with an icy, irritated stare. Her nicotine laden voice would call you to attention and you would place your money on the glass counter top, then step back and call out your order, pointing out your choices with tiny, dirt stained fingers. Mrs. Margaret would slide the wooden panels at the back of the case back and forth as she filled your order, placing your carefully considered choices into a tiny, brown paper sack.


One day in the summer of 1985, two friends and I were desperate for a trip to Bonsal's. There was only one problem. Our pockets were as void of cash as space is void of oxygen. I ran across the street to see if I could bum any money off of Nana, who was always very reliable when it came to the giving of small amounts of cash. I walked into the house, enjoying the comfortably familiar squeal of the floorboards as I entered. I went to her room to find her sound asleep. I began to turn away in disappointment when I noticed her purse on the floor next to the bed. Open. A veritable open invitation to my sugar starved, preadolescent brain. Desperately trying to channel the feather soft steps of a ninja I walked across the small room and knelt before her purse. Sitting right on top was her wallet, a lime green pouch with tarnished clasps, a time traveler from the 1960s. At this point we no longer had simply an open invitation. I was now facing an outright demand that I  just help myself. I opened it as quietly as I could and pulled the two sides of the wallet apart. Lying at the bottom, resting atop a few pennies and a pack of gum, Andrew Jackson stared up at me with a noble expression, his wavy hair arranged magnificently atop his green head. The firm hand of conscience held me back for all of a second or two before I snatched the twenty dollar bill up, closed the wallet, and made my way back outside to my friends, a conquering Hannibal, moving money instead of elephants. In our joy no one bothered to wonder aloud if twenty dollars might have been a sum TOO rich to take. All we saw was mountains of candy, a summer's supply, all in one fell swoop and within our grasp.


Our euphoria carried us over to Bonsall's in no time at all, the fifteen minute walk seeming almost instantaneous. I pushed the aging green door open, the tiny bell at the top announcing our arrival. Mrs. Margaret was sitting behind the candy case on her stool, leafing through the pages of a magazine. I do not recall any surprise on her face when I placed the twenty dollar bill confidently on the glass top, no inkling of the plan which I am sure began to form in her mind as soon as I laid such an exorbitant sum of money before her. For twenty minutes she filled our order, my two friends and I discussing what we wanted and what quantity we wanted it in with the intense care and concentration of battle field generals preparing a daring assault. When we finished ordering we walked out of the candy shop, eight brown bags bursting to the brim with a king's ransom in candy. We were the lords of all creation.


For a time.


We went to an abandoned lot close to home, which we called The Process for reasons I never knew, and sat under a tree and tore into our haul. We did not linger. We all wanted to get home before our parents so we could hide the evidence. No realistic explanation for possessing such a large amount of candy could be figured out so we decided as a group to go with deception. We split the candy three ways. Naturally since it was "MY" money that we used, I was entitled to a slightly bigger share. I walked home on top of the world, a smooth operator with days of sugar laced goodness before him. I walked right past my driveway. It never even occurred to me that it would have been a good idea to look to see if my mother's muted red Pinto was there or not. She was supposed to be at work and I had no reason to believe otherwise so I didn't even bother trying to hide the bulging paper sacks I was carrying. I opened the silver painted gate to my front yard, raced up the walk and onto the front porch. I opened the front door and my idyll was smashed to pieces before me.


My mother was sitting at the bottom of the steps, still wearing her brown Wawa uniform. I froze in place, exhibits A, B, and C of my crime clutched in hands that were suddenly drenched in sweat. I was caught. Mom didn't even ask where I had gotten so much candy. Apparently, as soon as we left her shop, Mrs. Margaret called Nana and asked her if she knew where I would have gotten twenty dollars to spend on candy. Nana had no idea but one quick search of her wallet, still coated with my invisible fingerprints, revealed the answer. She then got on the phone to my mother who left work to lie in wait for me, a lioness anticipating the arrival of the weakest and the slow. She made me arrange the candy in a huge mountain of guilt on our dining room table, then she sent me up to my bedroom at the back of the house to await my father's arrival from work.


I lay in bed, tears leaking from my eyes, stomach tying itself into knots, waiting for my father to come home, when I knew the bill for my stupidity would come due. And come due it did. He made me throw every last piece of candy away. He didn't let me just dump the bags in the garbage. He made me select each piece and throw it away individually. It took quite a bit of time. I spent the next week confined under house arrest, waking each morning to a day of house chores and a bed time strictly enforced as soon as the sun began its decline into the west. I also had to personally apologize, torture for an eleven year old boy, to both Nana and Mrs. Margaret. For the rest of that summer Bonsal's Candy lost its allure for me. Swedish fish, candy buttons, and bubble gum cigarettes had become the taste of guilt in my mouth, one I avoided at all costs.

As I stood at Nana's casket this memory played out in my mind's eye. If you had asked me to recount it for you a week ago, I would not have been able to. Sure, I would have remembered getting in trouble for stealing some money. But the clarity of the memory I have just shared with you simply was not there, not until I stood with Nana in that nearly deserted funeral home. And then, one final detail clicked into place, as if it was being whispered in my ear by the woman on whose arm my hand still rested.

About a week after I got off my punishment I was with Nana in her room. We were watching some cartoon on the TV and she asked me to turn it off for a second. Nana was an epileptic and she was often not feeling well so I assumed she was going to ask me to head out so she could get some sleep. But she didn't. After I turned the knob on the TV to off she called me over. She put her arms around me and looked right into my eyes. "Brian, sweety," she said. "I am sorry I got you in so much trouble with your dad. If you wanted twenty dollars to buy candy for you and your friends, all you had to do was ask me. I would have given it to you. I want you to know that I forgive you for stealing money out of my wallet." Then she hugged me tight and I hugged her back, tears of shame and gratitude mixing on my cheeks.

I looked at Nana's peaceful face, life's pain and hardship vanished from it forever. I looked at the woman who twenty-six years earlier had forgiven me for stealing from her and assured me all I had to do was ask and she would do what she could to make me happy.

'That was Nana,' I thought to myself. 'Caring more for my happiness then the obvious health issues raised by an eleven year boy eating twenty dollars worth of penny candy.'

That was when I laughed. The laugh was as unexpected as the flood of memory had been. I looked up. The old woman behind the desk still had the phone attached to her ear but she was halfway out of her seat, a wary look on her lined face. I figured it was time to go.

I leaned over quickly and planted a kiss on Nana's cheek.

"Thank you for forgiving me," I whispered through my tears. "And thank you for reminding me about it today."

I gave her arm a final squeeze then walked out into the bright June sunshine, the memory of a twenty-six year old hug filling my heart.