By Loren Hardin

This is part two of a series about Butch, who was 55 when he enrolled in outpatient hospice services with terminal cancer. Butch is a perennial prankster. When he was a teenager he stapled his little sister to the floor with his new staple gun. Butch reminisced, “Mom laughed so hard she fell on the floor, and since she was already on the floor I decided I may as well staple her to the floor too.” And there was the time Butch tied his mother’s legs to the bed while she was sleeping, dabbed bingo ink on her eyeglasses, and went outside and knocked on the door. When she heard the knock at the door she couldn’t get up or see. Butch is a man after my own heart.
In part one of this series, “Here’s your sign!” Butch reported, “It gets worse every day but I’m still out hustling…I know the day is coming when I’ll be stuck in this house. So I’m getting out of here as much as possible.” Butch’s wife Carmen shared, “But he gets depressed sometimes.” Butch admitted to me, “Yeah, I get pretty depressed dad…but there’s this group that I love to listen too! I especially like their gospel songs…I’d love to see them in concert! That sure would be a neat concert wouldn’t it dad?” Two weeks later we were heading to Louisville in a white Dodge Charger from Enterprise to see “Home Free” in concert.
On the way back the next day we decided to eat lunch at a restaurant where Butch and Carmen had never been. Carmen stated, “I’ve never been to IHOP. I’ve seen pictures of their food and it looks like they have really good food.” So IHOP it was. Butch and I ordered coffee and he stated, “I don’t know why but for the past two or three weeks I’ve been slamming down coffee.” As we were drinking coffee from our IHOP cups I thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if Butch had an IHOP cup as a memento of our trip.” I suggested to Butch and Carmen, “I don’t think they would miss one cup do you?” Butch stated, “I don’t know if I would do it dad. They probably have cameras and you’ll get caught.” I agreed and replied, “You’re right. Can you imagine us walking out and cruisers pulling up and surrounding us with their blue lights flashing; the police pushing me up against the cruiser, frisking me and finding an IHOP cup? And me telling them, ‘I’m really sorry officer. I’m a hospice social worker and I just wanted our patient to have a souvenir.’”
When our young waitress came back around I told her, “That fellow there across the table tried to talk me into stealing a cup but I told him we shouldn’t do it.” She stated, “We sell them, but we see people slipping them into their jacket pockets all the time; but we don’t say anything.” I replied, “So what you are telling me is that if I slip a cup into my jacket pocket that you won’t say anything?” She replied, “I wouldn’t say anything; but you do know that you’ll have to answer to God for that, don’t you?” Butch grinned like a possum eating and sweet potato and exclaimed, “Man dad, she pulled the Jesus card on you! Yeah dad, ‘what would Jesus do’? God, that’s funny stuff Dad! You can’t make this stuff up!” For the second time on the trip we laughed so hard we cried.
So I bought an IHOP cup for Butch and the waitress brought it to the table in a gift bag. Butch left a few minutes before Carmen and me, carrying his cup outside to “take a smoke”. When we got in the car Butch confessed, “Yeah dad, when I was leaving I told the guy at the counter, ‘I bought my cup but I think that old guy back there is thinking about stealing one. So you better keep your eye on him.’ And he looked back at you when I pointed you out.”
I’m reminded of Kate, a long departed ninety-one year old hospice patient, who resisted a similar temptation. Here’s Kate: “When I was in the hospital they brought me two wash rags to wash off with. I really like those wash cloths. They aren’t like the ones we buy. The ones we buy at the store are too thick. You can’t even wash your ears out with them. But the ones at the hospital are just right so I thought I’d take one. I thought, ‘They wouldn’t miss just one.’ I had it all folded and God said, ‘Now Kate, that would be stealing, wouldn’t it?’ He told me real plain, so I put it back. I told God, ‘I’d rather have dirty ears.’” I think I’d rather drink coffee from a Styrofoam cup than from a stolen cup from IHOP, after all, as that young waitress warned and admonished, “You do know that you’ll have to answer to God for that, don’t you?”
Loren Hardin is a social worker with SOMC-Hospice and can be reached at 740-356-2525 or at hardinl@somc.org. You can order a signed personalized copy of Loren’s book, “Straight Paths” at https://squareup.com/store/straightpaths or at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.