Honey, I’m Home!

          When my mother suddenly became ill with a heart problem, I was drafted as a short-term replacement for her as the receptionist in my father’s medical office near the Smoky Mountains. I didn’t relish the idea of taking any leave from my glamorous job as a U.S. Senate lawyer, but it was a genuine emergency and would only be for a couple of days anyway. How could I say no?
          So I rushed home from Washington. But the “couple of days” stretched into weeks, and then into months. This was a deeply unwelcome career detour and I have to admit I wasn’t handling it very gracefully. I was moping and sulking behind the reception desk one afternoon when a complete stranger walked up to register for his wife.
          In our small rural community, we all know each other, so it was quite unusual for a total stranger to appear. This man was tall and dark-haired with a black patch over his right eye and a beautiful smile. He looked like a pirate.
          When his wife went back to see the doctor, he was the only person left in the waiting room. I was curious about the eye patch, but I didn’t want to embarrass him with prying questions. I’ve always had to struggle mightily to be discreet, but as the minutes ticked by with just him and me sitting there, my natural curiosity won out.
          “What happened to your eye?” I asked him. He mumbled that it was an old war injury and looked out the front window toward the parking lot, his face turned away from me. I studied his profile. It must’ve been Vietnam. “Vietnam?” I said.
          He nodded.
          “Shrapnel?” I was really being a pest.
          “No,” he said in a sharp tone, turning to look and me, to try to figure out why I was interrogating him.
          “I don’t mean to bother you,” I said, “but I’ve had two eye operations myself and I’ve had to wear an eye patch off and on all my life. My eyes’re still crooked and I can only see out of one at a time.”
          He nodded at me and then turned his head away again. After a few seconds he said, “I was gonna shoot a fellow . . . but he got his shot off first. His bullet hit the scope of my rifle and exploded it in my face. It put my eye out.”
          I couldn’t think what to say. Then I realized he’d said his rifle had a scope on it. Everybody around here knew what that meant; he hadn’t been a regular soldier, he’d been a sniper. For many generations and many different wars, this area had provided most of the snipers to the military. Locals were renowned for an amazing proficiency with guns that came from handling them extensively from an early age.
          I felt sorry he had lost an eye but I couldn’t really blame the other guy for shooting, too. And I had to admire such a beautiful shot. So I just sat there imagining the incredible drama of two snipers holding each other in their sites simultaneously until one of them squeezed the trigger.
          After a few moments of thoughtful silence he turned and asked, “Do you wanna hear about it?”
          “Yeah,” I said, standing up and leaning over the counter so I could see and hear better.
“Being shot in the face put me in a coma. The Army doctors tried everything they could think of, but they couldn’t get me to wake up. They flew me all over the place to different VA hospitals, but I stayed unconscious. They finally got tired of fiddling with me and told my family I never would wake up. Then they just discharged me and sent me home.”
          I got an image of a piece of lost luggage that suddenly showed up on the doorstep. Except in this case the package was a body bag that they couldn’t quite zip up.
          “My wife and I hadn’t been married but less than a year when I got shot,” he said, “but she stayed and took care of me anyway. Even though they told her there was no hope. And then one morning while she was standing beside the bed where I’d been laying for months like a stick of wood, all of a sudden I asked her, What time is it?
          “It must’ve scared the fool out of her when I started talking all of a sudden like that, but she told me it was 7:30. Then I said, Oh no! I’m gonna be late for work!
          “And she said, No, you’re not. I said, Why not? She said, Cause you don’t have a job no more. I asked her, How come? She told me, Cause you’ve been in a coma for more’n two years!”
          The man and I laughed and then sat looking at each other, considering this amazing thing. Then he said, “Do you wanna hear something weird that happened to me?”
          I thought to myself, more weird than getting shot by someone you’re trying to shoot, or more weird than waking up suddenly after two years in a coma raring to go to work? I said,           “Sure.”
          He said, “Jesus come to me while I was sleeping.”
          “He did?”
          “Yeah. I used to dream just like everybody else before I got hurt. But when I was in the coma, I never had one dream the whole two years. And I’ve never have had one in all the years since. But I did see something while I was sleeping.”
          “What?”
          “Jesus. He come down and sat on a three rail fence and talked to me. I can’t remember what He said, but I remember Him very clearly and I knew who He was and He just sat there on that fence and kept me company til I woke up.
          “Do you believe me?” he asked. “Most people don’t believe me.”
          “I believe you,” I said. “What’d He look like?”
          “He just looked like a man, but I knew who He was anyway.”
          The man and I sat in a companionable silence. He was smiling to himself at the memory. Then he took a deep breath and said, “If it wasn’t the good Lord sitting on that fence, I know I wouldn’t be here today talking to you. That’s for sure.”
          I was inclined to agree.
          After the man and his wife had left I sat behind the reception desk on the plain wooden stool my mother had occupied for thirty-six years before me and marveled at the miracle of suddenly waking up after such a long sleep. Then I thought about the miracle of unconditional love and loyalty within a family. And I realized that coming home hadn’t really been the end of my career, but a fresh start.