Musings By Regena Handy
No doubt he would be surprised to know I still have it—a little ship replica that he gave me one time. Certainly I have no idea where he got it but do remember what he said when he handed it to me.
“I know you’ve been waiting for your ship to come in,” he said. “Here it is.”
Rudy was the brother next to me, three and a half years older, my tormentor, my hero, my friend. But he was always the big brother and never hesitated to tell me what he thought, even if it embarrassed me or even made me mad.
He loved a good story or good joke more than anyone I know. Loved to hear them from other people and to tell them himself; in fact, he told them as long as he drew breath. One of the most amazing and unexplainable things I’ve ever witnessed took place only days before his passing in 1993.
The last few weeks of his life he spent in the hospital in Roanoke. He’d been asleep, basically comatose for a while. His fiancée and I were sitting in his room when he suddenly began talking, a long narrative that lasted a good five minutes, a mixture of truth and fiction that even under the circumstances was hilarious.
My husband walked in to find the two of us laughing and crying, wiping tears. When he asked what was going on, we said to Rudy, who by all appearances was asleep, to tell my husband the story he’d just told. And, unbelievably, he did. Almost word for word what he had already said.
A storyteller to the end.
He was an educator, working both as a teacher and administrator, mostly in rural southwestern Virginia. Whenever you hear someone who has served in those capacities say “I should write a book”—he really could have. The young people he assisted gave him great joy and their rapport was two-sided. And wonderful fodder for more storytelling (no names were ever mentioned, of course; not that we would have known them anyway).
So, back to waiting on my ship … Rudy never waited. He lived his life fully, passing one day after his 43rd birthday. I think it bothered him that we didn’t all use the opportunities that come to us.
That was fairly well emphasized over a Scrabble board one night a couple of years prior to his illness. He and I were in the midst of a game and it was my turn to play. After an extraordinarily long wait, Rudy asked in obvious exasperation “don’t you have anything?”
I answered something like “yes, but if I play the word I have, it will mess up the rest of the board and I won’t have any good words for the next turn.”
Rudy shook his head at me and said something I’ve never forgotten.
“You know what, Gena, that’s always been your problem. You are always worrying about what’s ahead of you rather than right now.”
I’m fairly sure that sums up the moral of this story.