Ben and Gill and I wandered the streets of Liverpool, marking time, waiting to return to Liverpool’s Broad Green Hospital to learn whether I’d be arranging my Dad’s funeral, or that he would be convalescing looking out over the Irish Sea.
Ben was our nosey toddler, determinedly pushing the stroller. He’d walked since he was nine months; at a year he made his own way down the church aisle to the baptismal font. His prowess extended to pushing his stroller. He would keep at it until his legs wobbled and he quietly succumbed, fast asleep.
We’d gone in a circle. On our second pass, Ben dragged me to a bicycle window. In pride of place at the bottom, a child’s wheelbarrow. Bright red bucket and hand grips, yellow frame and handles, black tire. Ben loved it, his love infectious. The clerk was part way through his muted sales pitch (does a child’s wheelbarrow really need a sales pitch?). I was preparing to pay when Ben, now, having figured out the barrow and, let out by a new customer, escaped into the street, scattering the passersby all over the pavement, Gill in pursuit.
The barrow wouldn’t fit, any which way, into the stroller. So, Ben rode, holding on to the wheelbarrow in a death grip. It slowly slipped from his hands as his eyes closed again. I took over. It’s amazing how a wheelbarrow, not the easiest thing to carry, even a small one, gets heavier and heavier.
Truth be told, I bought the barrow for me as well as Ben. Simple and enchanting. A boys to love. Vicarious pleasure for a dad. Son Ben and then grandsons Gavin and Oliver delightedly moving piles of earth from one place to another and back again. Then trying to fill it with Fall’s leaves; bicycles forgotten. Whenever the big barrow was out, the red barrow would be alongside, waiting to help Dad. A working barrow.
Mustn’t forget, too, its cameo appearances at Harvest Thanksgiving. Replete with stuffed pumpkin and fall vegetables, fronting the corner display’
This barrow wasn’t meant for me, it was for Ben but I’m the one who’s kept and cherished it for 40 years in England and Ottawa. Sitting atop the chaos in the shed. Showing its age but still dragged out by Gavin then Oliver, still decorating the Church at Thanksgiving. But, now, indisputably my red and yellow wheelbarrow.
And my Dad? He convalesced looking out over the Irish Sea.
