The Kitchen Chair

One day my mom and dad went to the doctor and then to the hospital. My dad had a thing called a hernia that made an extra piece of skin poke out of his stomach. It looked a little like a baby gerbil, only bigger.

Then another day my mom and dad came home from the hospital. There is a photo of them coming through the kitchen door with winter coats. My dad was wearing his black fuzzy hat and gray gloves. They told me my dad had a thing called cancer. I wondered if he got it because of the hernia. I was eleven. He was 55. It was 1972.

As the Wisconsin weather got warmer that year, my mom said it was time for spring cleaning. She told me I needed to wash the kitchen walls. The yellow paint looked brown because my mother smoked a pack a day of Benson and Hedges filtered cigarettes. She handed me a can of Big Wally and told me to start as close to the ceiling as possible and wash my way down to the floor.

My mother shoved one of our metal kitchen chairs next to the wall so I could reach higher. My feet squished into the plastic padded seat. The Big Wally smelled bad and made my eyes water. It dripped from my hand over my head down to my blue t-shirt sleeve.

Another day my mom and dad came home from another trip to the hospital. I don’t remember ever visiting my dad there, only seeing my parents return home. They came through the same kitchen door, but this time with no coats. It was summer. I could see a bump under my dad’s white t-shirt. It was not the gerbil hernia.

This time the bump was called a colostomy. It was a clear plastic half-bubble taped around my dad’s stomach with a yellow strap. It had a clear plastic bag hanging from the bottom of the plastic bubble. My dad got embarrassed when it made loud gurgling noises and yellow goop shot against the side of the plastic bubble from a hole in his stomach. Then the yellow goop would drip down into the plastic bag.

Because my mom had to go to work at her factory job, I had to learn how to clean the colostomy bubble and bag. It would fill up often during the day and smell bad. Someone had to be there to help my dad because he was too weak to change it himself. I could not leave the house or invite my friends over the whole summer.

When it was time to clean the colostomy, I would hold my dad’s elbow and help him walk to the bathroom next to the kitchen. We had to take along his tall metal pole that had a bag of medicine hanging from it. Sometimes it would start swinging and almost tip over. The bathroom was really small, so there wasn’t much room to move.

I had to take off the plastic bubble and rinse it out, and then replace the full bag with an empty one. Sometimes the goop would spill. I would pretend like it didn’t matter, finish cleaning up my dad, walk him back to bed, and then go back into the bathroom and clean it up. It seemed grosser when my dad wasn’t there.

One Sunday morning, when my mom was cooking bacon on the stove, my dad walked into the kitchen without help, with his colostomy sticking out of his t-shirt and his metal pole swaying. He put his face really close to the sizzling bacon in the hot pan. My mom yelled at him. Then my dad started singing and climbed onto a kitchen chair. He seemed strong but tippy. It was scary.

I stared at my dad’s bare feet on the plastic chair seat. They covered a lot more of the orange and yellow flowers than my sneakers did when I stood on the chair to spray the Big Wally. My mom yelled at me to help her get my dad down from the kitchen chair. She said the medicine was making him act crazy. I liked that he was singing.