'Prepare yourself'

Bernard and Marie Deinlein's children: David, Helen, Bernie and Joan in 2014.

It had been almost two years since I had seen my cousin, Sue.

As I walked onto the deck of my aunt and uncle's cabin in the mountains outside Berkeley Springs, W.Va., I gave her a hug.

"Prepare yourself," she whispered in my ear. "Prepare yourself."

I knew going to see Aunt Joan would be hard.

Two weeks earlier, I'd learned that my father's oldest sister was in the intensive care unit with pneumonia. After being on a ventilator and a cocktail of drugs, one bodily system after another was failing her.

"When they'd correct one problem, it would cause another," said my cousin, Kathy, Sue's sister. "The doctor said that every day, there was a new life-threatening problem they'd have to correct."

Aunt Joan was independent. She didn't like the fact that my Uncle Carle had to help her move about their home after she suffered a stroke a few years ago. There also were several falls and broken bones, limiting her mobility further.

But that independence is what made Joan one of my favorite relatives. I always looked forward to seeing her. She was full of stories and jokes and laughter. And she loved to hear good stories and jokes and laughter, too.

Much of her time was spent in the garden, finding different ways to grow vegetables and to keep the critters out. At Christmas each year, once you turned 21, you no longer received a card with money. You earned one of her black walnut cakes, made with nuts grown at the cabin.

Even she referred to them as "door stops," but we discovered their slices made good French toast.

She'd share deep conversations on philosophical topics, including but not limited to spirituality and what happens to the soul when it leaves the body.

She found peace in nature and joy in the garden.

It wasn't a surprise to me when Kathy said Aunt Joan didn't want to be kept alive by machinery. It would be OK for a little while, but if it became obvious that things weren't improving, she wanted to be taken off.

Meanwhile, Aunt Joan continued to tell anyone who would listen: "I want to go home. I want to go home."

Kathy told me how she explained to her mother that she couldn't go home because she was sick. Finally, at one point, Joan appeared to understand.

"I told her, 'You can't go home because Dad can't take care of you there,'" Kathy said.

She went from feisty to being calm and resigned.

"The fight just went out of her," my cousin said.

When it became clear there was nothing more medical science could do for her — not without a tracheotomy, feeding tube and dialysis — Kathy, Sue and Uncle Carle made arrangements to bring Aunt Joan home. Her bed faced the sliding glass doors, looking out onto 17 acres of West Virginia wilderness.

As I walked through the screen door into what had been her home office, there was my aunt, her eyes half open, her mouth agape as she struggled to breathe, an oxygen tube in her nose.

Kathy, Sue and Uncle Carle said that, sometimes, Aunt Joan's eyes would flicker when you'd speak to her. There'd be a brief moment of what seemed like recognition.

But then it was gone.

I leaned in close to her.

"Hi, Aunt Joan," I said. "How are you doing?"

As soon as I said that, I realized how dumb it was to say.

I sat in the rocker next to her bed, patted her hand and talked with the family. They said how it seemed to them to have taken a long time for things to come to this, but really, it had only been two weeks.

Too many long days.

Shortly before I had to leave for work, my mom, dad and youngest brother, Stephen, arrived.

I knew this was a hard time for Dad, who was the baby of the family. He was more than a decade younger than Aunt Joan. Her son, my cousin, Carle, who died of cancer more than 20 years ago, was not much younger than Dad.

Joan was closest to Dad emotionally out of all the siblings. Put the two of them together, it was a party.

So when he walked in and sat down next to his dying sister, he looked ashen.

Despite Sue's advice, that was the part for which I was not prepared.

I had only ever seen my father cry twice in my life: When his dog died and when the Colts left Baltimore. Both happened when I was 5.

On that Saturday before Mother's Day 2016, I saw the third time.

And so I had to leave for work. I shook hands and gave hugs to the family.

Then I leaned in to Aunt Joan.

"Hey Aunt Joan," I said, touching her shoulder. "I have to leave.

"I will see you later."

Her eyes flickered.

"I love you," I said, then kissed her forehead.

It was in that moment that I realized it was the first — and last — time I had ever told her that I loved her.

We German English Bohunks aren't known for our warmth, Dad once told me.

I've discovered we're also not always the brightest, particularly when it comes to family relationships.

I said goodbye to everyone again and left.

Aunt Joan died the next morning. Dad called to tell me.

"She didn't exactly have a strong faith in God," he said, his voice low and gravelly, "but she was a good lady. And that's really what matters most in this world."

Rest easy, Aunt Joan. I think you prepared yourself well for whatever comes when the soul leaves the body.

Singing sister

Jen and I have taken to calling our impending child Doodlebug.

Jen and her mother and sister will sometimes call Sophie "Sophiebug," and so Jen suggested "Doodlebug" shortly after we learned she was pregnant. It's stuck.

What makes my heart melt, though, is when Sophie goes up to Jen's tummy and talks to the baby. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's beautiful.

The other day, Soph even was singing — in Sophie-eese — to Doodle while resting her head on the baby bump.

Even the cynic in me went, "D'awwwww."

Our Doodlebug will be here in a little over a month, and I'm looking forward to the relationship built between my children.

Now, I know from experience with my brothers, as well as plenty of TGIF comedies on ABC, it's not always going to be smooth sailing.

But maybe Soph will still sing to Doodle.

Lieutenant

My grandfather, Bernard J. Deinlein Sr., died 45 years ago today, Dec. 19.

I was born almost nine years later, but my father and relatives have told me stories about him.

He was only 65 when he died, when my father was 19.

He had retired as a Baltimore City police lieutenant not long before that. He had been assigned to the Central District.

When my dad has told me stories of my grandfather, he always has himself and other family calling him "Pop" or "Pop Pop" or "Bernie." But when other voices in those stories speak of my grandfather, he is called "Lieutenant."

Silently, it conveyed to me the respect he commanded. And rightfully, so, as I'm told.

Dad once told me that when my grandfather was a teenager in the era of the first World War, he beat up a bunch of kids who were picking on his sisters because of their last name.

He was a husky 250-pound German who stood more than 6 feet tall when walking the beat on Baltimore's Pennsylvania Avenue. And he'd sometimes be treated to a warm meal or a drink from a tavern owner glad to have a cop nearby.

I've heard how he was involved in temporarily shutting down the city's first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise under orders from the city health department. The event, apparently, was tied to a political battle that involved the father of a current U.S. congresswoman from California.

In more hushed tones, I also was told of my grandfather's 24-hour shifts during the Baltimore riots of 1968, and how he was almost killed by a rioter with a hatchet. His crisp white shirt and white cap, signifying his rank, were stained crimson, but the blood wasn't his.

Yet there's another, more interesting side to my grandfather. He was studying to become a Marianist brother at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

Yes, my alma mater.

I've heard the tale told several ways, but essentially, my grandfather was in his second or third year at UD studying and teaching mathematics when his father died. He returned to Baltimore to take care of his mother and two sisters.

He never returned to Dayton, instead working as a shoe salesman and a Western Union teletype operator before becoming a cop.

When we went to Ohio to scout out the school, my family and I spent several hours in Roesch Library, looking through old yearbooks. We found a few shots that could have been my grandfather, but yearbooks back then apparently didn't believe in attaching names to every photo.

If you look through some UD yearbooks from 1997 to 2001, you might find my mug without my name attached, too.

Perhaps it's a trait I inherited from him.

More likely, though, I inherited his poor genes.

Pop Pop had too many chronic illnesses to name. The biggest — diabetes — is what took his toe, then his foot, then his leg up to the knee.

It also took his life.

My father has inherited similar problems, though he's not lost any body parts due to diabetes. My brother, Nick, and I are not yet afflicted with it, but our youngest brother, Stephen, is.

Instead, Nick and I are dealing with other health issues that Pop Pop shared, such as high cholesterol, among others.

Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, maybe the four of us will be able to forestall the effects of genetics.

No matter my health, on this last day of fall, as the earth tilts its farthest away from the sun, I'm thinking of the man I never met, but without whom I would not be here.

Pop Pop, here's hoping you were treated to a warm meal and a drink by some folks glad to have a cop nearby.

Valuable lesson

My Nintendo was similar to the one seen here.

My first lesson in economics, in the end, was worth $75.50.

Or $125.35 if I wanted store credit from 2nd & Charles in Hagerstown, Md.

Let me bring you up to speed. Jen and I have been consolidating boxes we've moved from the garage of our old house in Clarks Summit to a storage locker in the Chambersburg area.

In the process, I came across my old Nintendo. You know, the 8-bit. Up, down, up, down, B, A, Select, Start.

My Dominator was similar to the one seen here.

Along with it and the original controllers and gun, I also found about 50 games, plus "The Dominator" — a large joystick-equipped controller that worked using infrared.

The hours Nick, Stephen and I would spend playing these games. A lot of brotherly bonding… and fighting. Still, that Nintendo entertained us through much of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Despite pangs of guilt, I knew it was time the old NES and I parted ways.

To be fair, I had tried to do that once before. I offered to give the unit to a coworker in Scranton when Jen and I moved up there. I even brought it into the office. But for one reason or another, Big Jim never took full ownership. The system languished in a file-cabinet drawer for months after the sports department got its fill of playing Bases Loaded and Tecmo Bowl.

When I departed The Times-Tribune, I pulled the equipment and games from the file cabinet and put them in a milk crate in our garage.

There they sat.

Through two floods.

Now, they were off the ground. And the NES itself was not near any of the water. But some of the games were sprinkled. All of mine, however, retained their black plastic sleeve and thus were protected. Because I took care of my Nintendo games and system.

Because it was mine.

It was, indeed, the very first thing I ever bought with my own money.

As a boy, I begged my parents for a Nintendo, one just like all my apparently spoiled friends had received from their apparently rich parents who were apparently growing money on trees.

Seeing the opportunity to teach me the value of a dollar, Mom and Dad said I could get a Nintendo, but that I had to buy it. They drove me over to Chesapeake Federal Savings and Loan on Joppa Road and set me up with a passbook savings account. 

I don't recall the interest rate, but I know it was better than the passbook savings account Jen and I set up for Sophie last year.

I stashed away nearly every nickel and dime I came across, either through the exchange of services (I mowed a lot of lawns) or found on the sidewalk. 

Every few weeks, I'd pedal my bike through the neighborhood, up and down hills, dodging the dangers of Old Harford Road to deposit my spoils.

I'd wait anxiously as the bank teller would slide my passbook into her printer, the piercing DOT Matrix whine updating my growing financial empire.

TMNT II arcade version.

Meanwhile, I searched every circular put out by Toys R Us, Montgomery Ward and Circuit City for a unit that was less than $99.99 in hopes I might reach my conquest sooner. (A few years later, I received a coupon from Nintendo of America Inc. to make up for the price-fixing scheme.) 

But once that unit came into our lives, my brothers and I felt like normal kids. We could talk with the other kids at school about the secret mushroom extra lives on Super Mario, or how you could throw a bullet pass from Jim McMahon to Ron Morris in Tecmo Bowl if you ran McMahon back to his own end zone, switched the receiver to Morris, then passed. 

Original TMNT game.

I was too cool for school when I eventually received the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II Arcade game. I also had the original, less fancy TMNT game.

Through it all, though, the experience taught me the valuable lesson: If I work hard and save my money, I can get what I want.

In today's dollars, that lesson's value had depreciated to $75.50.

But in my heart, it's one of the most valuable ones my parents ever taught me.