![]() He concluded by saying he’d been “a lucky son of a gun.” Just as I was coming to the end of Seevak’s “Heaven,” the radio program’s host came back on to say Pittman had died. ![]() He talked about how he was enjoying life, now that his days were numbered, how he loved the taste of salt and sugar, and a lemon’s sourness. On the radio, Jim Pittman, “the singing cook from Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia,” rambled on about finding out that a boil on his bald head was really sarcoma. “ Heaven,” by Alison Seevak, leaped out at me, and I turned to that page and savored the short piece as I peeled and ate my orange. Having breakfast alone in my shop this morning, waiting for my first customer and enjoying the quiet, I took The Sun from the magazine rack and scanned the contents. When they climb into the soft laps of his mother, his father, his grandmother, no one really minds. Now they roam the house in search of warm places to make their own. They’re like the prized Burmese cats he bred for a living between acting gigs he had to board them in a kennel when he came home for visits. He’s brought all his secrets along with him this trip. The purple mask of Kaposi’s sarcoma has lifted, and his mother can see traces of the little-boy face she once held between her palms. Rob, their son, is too young to be sinking into heaven’s overstuffed furniture, but he is here nonetheless. My uncle is plump and rosy again, a kind duckling of a man with a black mole on his cheek. His mind has come back to him, the Alzheimer’s gone like a thief who has slipped quietly out the back door into the night. The Red Sox always win in the sports pages he reads. The vacuum cleaner sits unused in the hall closet. And dust has stopped gathering under the beds in her house. At least Aunt Tillie’s hacking cough is gone. Honeybee, the sweet, smelly beagle, leaps at her, no longer dragging his arthritic hind legs behind him like sandbags. So she keeps busy loading and unloading the dishwasher. You can’t smoke, not even outside, and her fingers haven’t quite lost that twitch for cigarettes. Maybe heaven’s not such a great deal for Aunt Tillie herself. She’s got her nose buried in a copy of Exodus. In heaven, you can read as many Leon Uris paperbacks as you want. That medicine was what finally stopped my grandmother’s kidneys, making her the oldest dialysis patient in the world for a few long months in 1979. The bottle of thick brown medicine that sat on the bottom shelf of Tillie’s refrigerator has disappeared. She no longer has to eat bananas since she doesn’t need potassium anymore. The smoked sturgeon and onion rolls and rugelah laid out on the dining-room table never go stale. The decaf Sanka in the big silver pot brews on into eternity. My relatives sit in her worn velveteen chairs, no longer alive, but enjoying each other’s company all the same. I imagine that heaven is not unlike my Aunt Tillie’s living room.
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