An Old Man’s Christmas in Pittsfield
homage to Dylan Thomas
On a winter’s day, the old man rubbed his hands together over the hot-air baseboards in his house as he waited impatiently, peering out his front windows, waiting for the purple bus to arrive. He lived alone in his home of twenty years on the outskirts of Pittsfield, too far from downtown to walk there in the cold and the snow, whether impeded, or assisted, by his cane. Nor could he drive to his appointment at the dentist as he had sold his car two years previously. Couldn’t feel the pedals with my feet anymore, he thought grimly.
Every time he looked through the front windows, he was reminded by the empty driveway of how landlocked, even isolated, he was, living by himself in his house. He dare not attempt walking down the hill with his cane to get to the bus stop because the buildup of ice every winter on the pot-holed pavement was so treacherous. Granted that the incline of his side-street was not very steep, still, all the runoff from every rainfall seemed to always swamp his house in particular. He felt that if he ever took a fall out there, he wouldn’t be able to get up. There would be no lazy-boy recliner out there for him to cling to and pull himself up.
Yes, he was feeling mighty sorry for himself this day. He had survived two heart attacks seven and six years earlier, then a bout of bladder cancer during the pandemic, which ensnared him in a series of 23 chemo treatments in a 12-month period. That was brutal. Survived that, too. Now he was feeling poorly again, and is cardiologist had told him, “We’ll have to send you to Springfield, we don’t do open-heart surgery here.”
It seemed to the old man that he was beset by difficulties. And he couldn’t call his sister for a lift — she and her husband, in December this year, were already in their condo in Florida. He was alone. And he was embarrassed, even ashamed, to show his face outdoors anymore. Due to a complicated sequence of boondoggles and mousetraps, and the insufficiencies and red-tape built into the senior health care system, not to mention the insurance companies, he had lost all his upper teeth. In his own mind, no matter what the experts, or google, said, he owed this to the side-effects of the cancer treatments. And now two years had gone by since the fatal day when his last seven uppers were extracted in the dentist chair. To his dismay, he thought that maybe it would in the end turn out to be three years of eating applesauce before he would finally get those dentures.
And now here was the bus, finally. Fortunately for him and all the other seniors, the BRTA, the Berkshire Regional Transit Authority, had a door-to-door bus service, called the Para-Transit program, for people like him. Gingerly, the old man, hanging onto his house-key to make sure he didn’t lock himself out, gripped the handrail with one hand and his cane with the other as he let himself down the three tiny steps on his front porch. He clomped his way through the snow impacted in the driveway and boarded the bus. He said, “Hello,” and a gruff, “thankyou,” to the driver as he climbed aboard. He didn’t know this young man, hadn’t met him before, but he noted with distaste that the driver’s waistline bulged out to practically swallow the steering wheel.
So he managed to slump back into the first seat available with a sigh like a groan. And strapped himself in for the duration. He knew the driver wouldn’t move till he fastened that seatbelt. Once underway, he was grateful that this one didn’t seem interested in idle chatting. The old man could keep his thoughts to himself and not be bothered. Luckily, he was the only passenger. In a short while, this trip would be over, he would be disembarking at the dentist’s office, the Community Health Program, or CHP, Suite 2 at 510 North Street, and this little segment of his old age would already drift into the unremembered past.
But to the old man’s dismay, the route the driver took did not seem to be heading to the dentist’s. The cantankerous old man sat there, bound and determined to ask no questions, make no protests. Then the driver spoke up. “There’s another passenger I gotta pick up.” Short and sweet. What next, thought the old man. And miserably, he now noticed that he had forgotten to change his bifocals for his driver’s specs and looking out the window as they cranked around narrow corners, everything was a blur.
Down the hill on Columbus Ave. they went. With a noise like skidding, the bus ground to a halt outside a compact, nicely-appointed little office building with a sign outside denoting that this was the headquarters of the Western Mass Labor Action Office. Hmph. Never knew this office was here. Lived in this town 20 years, and never knew. The old man’s interest was piqued. His dad, now passed on since 2012, at the ripe old age of 95, had spent his early life as a coal miner in Fayette County, PA, and was a lifelong staunch union man, in his later life, a master carpenter in the Massachusetts Carpenter’s Union, one of the strongest in the country.
Then to the old man’s curiosity, the driver emerged from the building pushing a woman in a wheelchair. She had a thick blanket bulging with threads like porcupine quills spread out over her lap, and when the driver tilted the chair, to let her down over the curb, the old man, peering near-sightedly through his window, could discern that the woman in the wheelchair was a double amputee.
It took a considerable time for the driver to let down the wheelchair lift behind him, where the old man couldn’t see them, get the woman on board, and then engage the grapples and hooks on the grooves built into the floor of the bus which secured a wheelchair-bound passenger. And the old man was left there in his seat to gaze up at the ceiling. Poor woman, he thought. And let that be a lesson to you. There’s people in this world worse off than you are.
Get gene christy’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Now the old man was put into a mood not to mind at all that his trip to the dentist’s had been diverted and delayed, as there was a good reason, and even the driver, he had to admit, was one who had done, despite his girth, the right thing, to get down from his chummy chair and assist this poor old lady through the cold and the snow.
At the dentist’s office, still reflecting, the old man settled back in his recliner-chair still in his mood, thinking a thousand thoughts about unions and old people and the bus service and the drivers he knew and sometimes shared his story with on the way to his numerous appointments. So he somehow forgot that he had been late for his appointed time in the alcove at the CHP inner offices. But eventually he remembered and it occurred to him that, in compliance with the rules and regs of the Para-Transit Program, he had specified a pick-up time for his return trip home. He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and now became disgruntled all over again as he noticed that he wasn’t going to get out of here in time.
To the hygienist he said, “Where’s the doc? I’m gonna miss my ride home.”
The doctor came in shortly and she was her usual sweet, considerate self, so when they were finally finished, the old man felt free to unload on her.
“You know,” he said loudly, “the medical professionals in this town don’t seem to realize that a lot of us seniors don’t have our own independent means of transportation. Like me, doctor. I don’t have a car. And the para-transit program is good enough to provide door-to-door service so I can get here on a winter’s day. And they have their rules. They have to. I mean, I’m not the only one in town who needs them! They got a lotta stops to make. So you gotta tell them what time to pick you up to go home. So now I might have to walk home with my cane, and it’s a mile to my house, maybe a mile-and-a-half.”
“But the girls at the front desk will call a taxi for you.”
“Do you know how much Pittsfield Taxi will charge me to go one mile? Ten bucks, that’s how much! — and more, I know, I’ve done it before. I’ve sat there watching the meter go up while we’re stopped at the lights at Wahconah Street. And they’re the only taxi in town — they’ve got the monopoly!”
The old man glanced over at the alcove across the hall where the patient in her chair and the hygienist were listening avidly to what the old man now realized had turned into a tirade that probably could be heard all over the inner offices. So he shut up, embarrassed to think he was making a spectacle of himself.
Upset, disappointed, mad at himself, the old man bypassed the girls at the front desk, pushed his way through the button-buzzer dividing door with his cane in his hand, and slumped into the first chair outside the door in the waiting room, to sit there and stew. He pulled out his cellphone again and started scrolling through looking for the number to call for the taxi.
Suddenly, the buzzer door flew open and the hygienist dumped ten dollars and change into his lap, bills and coins. ‘Listen — oh, gosh — this is just for your taxi.”
The old man jumped up, chagrined to think they had taken up a collection for him! “But I can’t take this,” he cried. “Look — take it back!”
“No, no, no,” the girl insisted. To him, old as he was, they were all girls, even the doctor, even the front-office women. Before he could protest one syllable more, she was gone behind the locked door again.
And he was left standing there, with his Christmas gift in his hand.
