Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

Alice has always had a mechanical streak. Roger, my father, did not. Yet, they persisted in pretending that he did, and she deferred to him until one night when the kitchen light switch stopped working while she was making dinner. Like a surgeon, my father asked for his tools, which she, like a nurse, brought to him. He requested a flashlight. She fetched one. And wasn’t there a box somewhere with electrical stuff in it? Indeed there was. She knew exactly where to find it and carried it to his side. Then he instructed her to turn off the power, which she did.

All this even though he spent his days in a store working with people, and she spent her days at home, managing a family and house, fixing every appliance that broke in order to save money, and doing things like drilling holes in her bedroom closet floor so she could thread wires from the stereo through to the basement, hook up a speaker on the laundry room wall, and listen to Tony Bennett or Perry Como while doing the wash. She also brought home broken television sets and radios from garage sales, repaired them in the living room in her spare time, and gave them away to people who needed them. We, her children, knew her abilities from close up and expected great things from her. When I was in high school, I once asked her to lift our car out of an enormous snowdrift so I could make it to class on time. When she declined, I felt quite disappointed. Lifting up a couple of tons of metal for my benefit had seemed entirely within her range. In any case, nothing, certainly not a light switch, seemed likely to be out of my mother’s mechanical reach.

They stood close together in the dark. My mother held the flashlight while my father removed the switch cover and examined the innards in the small, dark, rectangular recess in the wall. He raised the screwdriver, but here his nerves and knowledge failed him. Alice, far too deep by then into that no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude that comes steaming in with menopause, couldn’t wait another minute for light to return to her kitchen. Her hand shot up and she tugged at the switch until it came partially out.

There was a pause, and then my father, without looking at her, handed over the screwdriver, took the flashlight from her hand, and aimed the beam at the open wound in the wall. She continued on, removing screws, pulling things out, jimmying the new switch in, tightening everything back into place, and closing up the repair with the old switch cover. The lights came back on. Of course.

I didn’t see any signs of their relationship, a mixture of contentiousness and intense attraction, changing after that. He did buy her a toolbox for Christmas a few years later, and after he retired he would often brag about how she was always fixing this and that around the house.

So it is particularly disconcerting to hear Alice tell me that she’s afraid to try to get her new coffee pot to work, when it simply involves filling it with water and plugging it in. Or that she’s having trouble deleting things using the keyboard of her Web TV, on which she’s written e-mail for the past twelve years. Or that she’s not sure how to follow the directions I’ve written out for her on how and when to take her Fosamax pill. And I think, even Alice. This happens even to her, my powerful mother who could do all things.

These are the kinds of losses we stand by and watch, first with disbelief, and then a long, sad dawning of enlightenment, as age, so relentless in its creeping, steals not only the body, and often the mind, but also the defining qualities that make a person fit into the precise size and shape of the space they have always filled in life’s puzzle. They are leaving us behind and we’ll need to put the pieces together in some new way, some way we’ll have to fix for ourselves.