Six Weeks of Ginger

My grandfather has had the same cough since the middle of October. It's the middle of December now.

Every morning he makes his tea in our kitchen on Gates Avenue: hot water, honey, too much ginger, and a piece of dry bark that he keeps in an old coffee tin. His mother made him the same cup sixty years ago in a village outside Ziguinchor, where he was Amadou, a boy with a cough in the dry season. He drinks it standing at the window. Then he tells me he feels better.

“Grandpa, the clinic can see you on Thursday.”

“Thursday I'm busy,” he says. He isn't busy.

I've tried three ways, and none of them worked.

First I tried science. I told him that a cough that lasts six weeks isn't an ordinary cough, that a doctor can look inside your chest, that some diseases stay quiet for years and then stop being quiet. He listened politely, the way he listens to the weather report. Then he said that the bark works on the quiet ones too.

Then I tried my mother, who shouted. Then I tried the money. The clinic on Fulton Street is free for him, and he told me he knew that.

Last Sunday I took his coat to the cleaner's and found a card in the pocket. An appointment card. The clinic on Fulton Street, November 14th, two in the afternoon. He had made it himself, and he had not gone.

So it isn't that he dislikes doctors. It's that a doctor tells you a thing, and once a human being knows a thing, he can't stop knowing it. My grandfather would rather live inside a question than inside an answer.

I put the card back in the pocket and said nothing.

This morning I made the tea myself, hot water, honey, too much ginger, the bark from the tin, and I poured it into a thermos and put on my coat.

“It's Thursday,” I said. “Bring your medicine. We can drink it in the waiting room.”

He looked at the thermos for a long moment. Then he got his hat.

I don't know what the doctor is going to say at two o'clock. I hope the bark helped a little. I hope it isn't the thing I've been reading about at night. But Amadou is sitting in the chair by the door with his coat on, forty minutes early, and that is the only part of this I could change.