At Chuck and Janie's in New Plymouth

Late in the morning Alix and I drove an hour west to New Plymouth, down the short main street and out past town a mile to the Park View Cemetery. A funeral had just finished and a long line of cars and pick-ups was coming out.

I first came to New Plymouth when I was thirteen or fourteen and stayed with my great-grandmother, Grandma Liz, in her small green house with her small, gray husband, Shorty. I ran around town with cousins, a suburban youth surprised by and smitten with a small town filled with people to whom I was related. I took Alix to Grandma Liz's headstone first. We visited my grandmother Barbara, too, and her son, my uncle Kelly. Alix said, "it's so sad," and it was, but somehow comforting too, to have them marked down there in the grass.

We drove past Grandma Liz's old house, then Chuck and Janie's (a great uncle and aunt) two blocks away. I could see Janie through one of the front windows standing at the kitchen sink and decided we'd go ahead and drop in unannounced. When she came to the door she didn't recognize me for a moment, but then she did and opened the screen door and told us to come on in.

"Sit down, sit down," she said. "Can I get you kids something to drink? I'd offer you lunch but we just finished and there's nothing left." She laughed apologetically. Later she gave us ice cream cones from the freezer. Alix and I did sit down on a small couch in the small living room, after shaking hands with Chuck, who sat limply in the corner of another couch opposite. A clear plastic tube snaked from a humming oxygen machine in the corner to Chuck's nostrils. He was pale, his eyes red and red-rimmed, but his voice was strong. He's had heart trouble and just recently was diagnosed with leukemia. Blood transfusions every couple months apparently keep him going. He's 86, Janie 81.

We spent most of the afternoon at the house, visiting. After awhile Janie called Jeanette and Nig, another octogenarian aunt and uncle pair, and fifteen minutes later they were over, despite Jeanette's recent broken hip. "The doctor wants me to use a walker," she confided, "but a cane works good enough." She seemed not the least discouraged by her injury, though a little surprised. She's a sharp, active woman, white-haired but seemingly little affected by age.

Janie too. She's slight, weighing less than a hundred pounds, irreverent and skeptical, something of a smart-ass. When the subject of camping came up, in connection with our journey out from Minnesota, she said she did not like to camp. "That's over for us, thank God. There was all that getting ready and the packing up, which takes forever, and then when we'd get there he"--she jerked a thumb at Chuck, saying "he" with affectionate disdain--"he and the other guys would just go off fishing, while I had to do all the setting up. Then he comes back hungry and I gotta cook. And while I clean up he and his buddies sit and drink beer and play cards and tell lies." She laughed. Chuck said, "I always liked camping."

Just the day before one of Chuck and Janie's grandkids had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. "They both have wierd names," Janie said, shaking her head ruefully, "and I can't keep them in my head." She paused. "The girl's is Nev something--it's heaven spelled backwards." I said I'd read that Nevaeh was becoming quite popular. "But how do you pronounce that?" she said. We tried several variations but were unable to settle on a consensus.

The boy's name she couldn't remember at all. She pulled on her ear and thought for a moment. "It's in that wooden Indian song," she said. It took me a minute, but the clue was sufficient. "Elijah?" I asked. "Yeah," she said,laughing, "that's it. Where do they come up with these names?" Janie's kids are Rick and Sue and Chuckie.

Janie warmed up two big muffins and sliced them into strips and we sat at the dining room table drinking soda. Nig told us that he had both new eyes and new knees. He's a tall man, well-groomed. Alix liked his subtle pompadour, a gray wave rising gently from his temple. He said he'd now been retired for twenty years--he'd been a high school prinicpal, a school supertintendent--and that retirement had been a whole other busy career.

Somehow the subject turned to smoking, and it came out they had all been smokers for most of their lives. Janie still is. She didn't start until she was thirty-five, though. "I tried before," she said, "but I just didn't like it. When I was in nursing school there was a smoking room and all the girls smoked--it was like they wanted us to--but I just couldn't stand it. Later, though, after I had kids, I took it up." Alix said that she smoked and Janie immediately brightened. "Let's go back on the patio," she said. Outside Janie smoked four cigarettes to Alix's one. I took a picture of them together, each smiling and holding a cigarette up to the side.

Soon after Alix and I said our good-byes and headed back down to Boise. At my grandfather's house, his girlfriend Rosie opened the door and invited us in. Their new dog, a bichon frise named Lacey barked at us, until her bark collar zapped her, and then she yelped as if someone had stepped on her. After the greetings we all sat down at the dining room table and began a new round of visiting.