Under the cold, crisp dawn unlike common summer mornings, I found myself piloting beds through a hospital. Today was my third week at work, where I usually find myself pushing two-hundred pound beds laden with patients.
This particular morning, my first transport was a brusque, heavy set man about fifty years of age. I hadn't slept the night before, but I nonetheless soldiered through my fatigue and steered the bed from the patient's room to the backdoor elevators.
It was a brief ride down to the floor below, but long enough to instill an awkward silence. Under normal circumstances, I would've struck up a conversation--anything to appear as though I am at all comfortable in such social transactions, but the man before me held steadfast to his silence.
By the time we arrived, I felt more than obliged to speak not just for the sake of conversation, but at the very least to conform to the jovial helmsman persona any transporter with a merit to his name embodied.
I cleared my throat, and my hoarse voice cracked the song I’ve relied upon whenever confronted with such a situation, “Well, maybe when the technicians get this test done, you’ll be out of here soon”
The man shrugged, and with the gesture, he shed his cold demeanor. “Just gettin’ old,” he told me. “Spent the last twenty years driving trucks. Should’ve taken better care of myself…”
By the time we arrived at the radiology department, he’d regaled me with the highlights of his youth, his marriage of forty years, the subsequent death of his wife about the time of my birth, as well as the loss of his youngest child. He told me that all his children were grown up, living their lives across the states, and he was left alone after retiring in Vegas. He spoke of no visits.
Though the man never spoke it, a guilty tinge of bitterness in his voice—the kind of dissonance, perhaps, a friend who envies a loved friend may experience. He spoke as though he surely should’ve been entitled to more than what he was now—bedridden, lonely, and funneling his retirement funds into his medical expenses.
As I set left him to the capable hands of the radiology technicians, I couldn’t help but wonder what this man kept in his heart. I believe he did not resent his children, after bequeathing upon them whatever legacy he had achieved in his years of trucking, for leaving him behind.
But I know he was not satisfied with where his children’s actions, or lack thereof, left him. To this lonely hour of midnight, cold moonlight and desert wind whispering about me, I keep asking: what is legacy but customary theft from forefathers to decendants?