Alice, Now 95
August 30, 2010
I asked my friends for ideas to celebrate Alice’s 95th birthday and they came back with wonderful suggestions: a train trip with scenic stops through the Columbia River Gorge, or a walk through Oregon vineyards, or the Arboretum, or the Audubon Society, or the Grotto (botanical gardens, giant fir trees). On the phone, Alice considered each possible outing with interest. When I came to pick her up she was sitting upright in her La-Z-Boy, smiling and eager, holding what appeared to be an empty, plastic Folger’s coffee jar. “Our urinal,” she explained.
Astonished, I took it from her hands. “And why do we need this?”
“Well, in case we’re out in a leafy wood somewhere and we have to go to the bathroom.”
I peered inside. The jar contained several travel-sized spools of thread, some needles, and a tiny scissors. What were we going to sew in a leafy wood, I wondered. She seemed confused. When I showed the contents to her she laughed so hard she had to go visit her very own bathroom, luckily close by.
Like any daughter with an elderly mother, I have my moments of concern. This was one of them. But when she returned, she was still laughing. “I bet you’re worried about me,” she said. “But that’s my eyesight. That’s how bad it’s gotten. I didn’t see those things in there.”
Okay, that was a relief. Sort of. In any case, I felt grateful that I have a mother who can laugh (at times anyway) about her failing eyesight. But I was still curious about the wisdom of walking down a trail, say, in the Arboretum, carrying an empty Folger’s coffee container in case one of us had to duck behind a blue spruce and pee. I asked if it wouldn’t be okay if we just peed on the ground, like the animals we are, and this struck her as an agreeable idea, and one with history. “Like we did when we were kids,” she said, thinking of her five sisters and her brother and their outdoor Dakota adventures. She asked me to return the jar to the top shelf of the cupboard where it lives with other jars containing small items: batteries and screws and teensy knobs to things that are either doing fine without their teensy knobs or are gone altogether.
Off we went to immerse ourselves in green I hoped, but as soon as we got in the car she decided she’d rather go shopping. Of course I said okay, but as I feared, it turned out to be pretty much a repetition of our last shopping experience, with the same complaints about the miserable selection of clothes and, since it was her birthday, she got even more testy. “How come nobody makes clothes for 95-year-old women?” When I pointed out that there aren’t that many 95-year-old women around to make clothes for, she brought her walker to a halt and looked up at me. A moment of enlightenment.
Later in the week I took her to the Audubon Society. She scooted her walker into the rescued birds sanctuary. Here, wild birds with deformities or who have met with accidents and cannot be released into the forest again live out well-fed and tended lives as an educational resource for the public. She met Aristophanes, a raven the size of a small dog, and whispered, “Well, aren’t you pretty?” But she didn’t seem at all charmed by the raven’s noisy squawks and moved on immediately when he hopped out of sight. She approached a peregrine falcon, two kestrels, and a Red Tail hawk with about the same level of interest, but she stayed for a long time at the cage of Hazel, the Northern Spotted Owl.
While she watched Hazel sleeping, my mother told me about a time when she was eight years old, dressed in a red cloth coat and on her way to school, when she spied a small owl on a neighbor’s fencepost. She remembered the day as cloudy; the town of only a few hundred people was quiet. The bird must have swooped in to rest from a prairie hunt. The back yards of all the houses on Second Avenue–one of three avenues, Railroad, First and Second–ran to Junegrass and bluestem that rolled on forever.
She walked slowly toward the owl. The owl didn’t move. She continued to step forward, creeping on tiptoe, eyes fastened on the owl’s eyes, expecting that at any moment the bird would startle, flap its wings, and fly away, as every bird in the short story of her life so far had done. But the owl dropped its guard for the red-coated, black-haired girl with brilliant blue eyes and a sense of excitement so keen it must have sprayed a vibrating halo of light around her. When they met, they stared into one another’s eyes up close. She couldn’t remember who moved first, but she didn’t think it was the owl.
“I’ve never forgotten that owl,” she said quietly.
Until that moment, the fact of my mother reaching the age of ninety-five hadn’t yet seemed real to me. But now it settled in and became unarguably true because I could so clearly imagine her, over eighty years ago, when she found herself under that immense Dakota sky, nose to beak with an owl, breathing the same pure air, caught in the same curious and profound business of living.
Dog of God
August 25, 2010
One of the members of what Alice calls “the Rosary bunch” lives across the hall from her. Edie is in her eighties, frail and slow-moving. She has a heart-shaped face and short gray hair. A gentle soul. She tilts her head far to one side when she speaks in a whispery voice that I’m not sure is the result of age or is her natural, life-long low volume.
Recently, Edie stopped on her way into her apartment to greet my dog, Brio, as we arrived to visit Alice. She misses her dog, who lives with her son now. We talked about how many people there at The Place left animals behind–with family, with friends, or with no one at all but the person who took them to the Humane Society. We talked about how the dogs, and cats, too, had to work out the displacement. Would they attach to a new person, stay faithful and wait for a return that would never happen, or give up?
Brio had been plucked from the streets of Los Angeles by animal control and saved by a rescue agency on the day she was scheduled to be executed. I found her photograph online and knew she belonged with me and I with her. But she was in LA. My dear friend Thalia donated frequent flyer miles so that I and another dear friend, Kathy, could go get her.
Kathy and I got a deal on a rental car at the Burbank airport, scooped up Brio (whose rescue agency name was Clarity) and headed back to Oregon with our navigator, Thalia, on her cell phone from home, checking online for pet friendly motels along the way and calling ahead to reserve rooms for us, as well as offering sound itinerary advice.
At no point on this journey would the dog answer to Clarity. Maybe she thought it was a little silly. We spent much of the road trip trying out other names, but none fit. Finding my dog’s new and true name of Brio took only about a week of living with her. She brims over with life.
With Alice at the helm, no dog who lived with our family got to sit on furniture, but Brio is invited to climb up on Alice’s green sofa, stretch out, and shed to her heart’s content. She is also allowed on the bed. Alice saves up bits of cheese and crackers for her visits and leaves a water bowl permanently on the floor in the kitchen. She keeps a tennis ball on her desk for games of fetch. When I once complained that my new dog had chewed up a pair of my favorite slippers, Alice leaned forward to better focus her weakened eyes on Brio’s face, smoothed back the floppy ears, and said to her, “You can’t be perfect all the time, can you?”
In short, Brio is her grand-dog.
About an hour after I’d run into Edie, Alice and Brio and I started out for a walk. To get outside we had to pass through the Rosary room, which is presided over by a statue of a shepherd with a lamb slung over his shoulder.
Alice–non-Catholic, non-Protestant, non-church-goer and never a Bible reader–pushed her walker up to the shepherd. “Every time Edie passes this statue,” she said, “she stops and kisses the dog.”
She kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the lamb’s forehead. “Like that.”
I suggested the animal might be a lamb and the statue might represent what Christians call the One Lamb of God.
Alice squinted hard at the statue. Her face clouded with confusion and then, from within, a church bell from childhood must have chimed. The confusion cleared away. She sat down on her walker, crossed her arms across her belly, and held on to her elbows with her hands as she rocked from side to side laughing. “I’m going to hell!”
We stayed in the Rosary room for a while contemplating dogs and lambs and the merits of each. Then we pulled ourselves together and Brio led us out into the light.
The One Lamb of God
Dog of God (one of millions)
Kathy and Brio
Thalia and Brio
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
August 22, 2010
“Well, it’s Saturday night,” Alice told me on the phone last night, “so to celebrate I drank a bottle of Gatorade I found in the back of the refrigerator. It didn’t do much for me.”
She remembered that on one wintry Saturday evening she had jokingly asked Mr. Fickle, The Place’s resident Lothario, what he was going to do to for excitement. He thought for a minute and then said, “Wait for Sunday.”
This dull response deeply disappointed Alice. She’d considered Mr. Fickle to be her main chance at a romance ever since his kiss on her cheek on New Year’s Day. Despite his waiting-for-Sunday comment, she’d continued to keep the door open.
But now she was having doubts, she said, because she’d gotten a good look at his teeth.
“They’re old and large and yellow.” She paused. “Of course they’re old. That goes without saying. But the rest…I think I could abide them large, but not yellow. Now ask me how I found this out.”
Without waiting for me to ask, she continued, “I came back from a walk and had to go through the Rosary room to get to my apartment. Mr. Fickle was putting chairs in a circle getting ready for that bunch to come in and say the rosary after dinner. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder, and like a damn fool I said, ‘Did you miss me?’”
She was laughing, but I understood her to mean she was asking if he missed her while she had been in the hospital and then ill in her apartment for a while, therefore absent from the dining room where they often saw one another. But Mr. Fickle didn’t get it.
“No,” he said. “Have you been gone?” Read the rest of this entry »
In the Gloaming
August 9, 2010
Last week was rough on Alice–a trip to ER with heart problems, a two-day stay in the hospital, and a bout with flu when she got back home. All this has made her anxious, sad, and thoughtful. She called me a little while ago. She’d been thinking about this song (written in 1877; “gloaming” is an old Scottish word for “twilight”). She used to sing it, she said, while she was ironing our family’s clothes (six wardrobes, so she sang quite a few songs, but this is one she sang over and over).
Here’s a bit of it (complete lyrics at end of this post; click here to listen):
In the gloaming, oh my darling
When the lights are soft and low
And the quiet shadows falling
Softly come and softly go
When the trees are sobbing faintly
With a gentle unknown woe
Will you think of me and love me
As you did once long ago?
In the gloaming, oh my darling
think not bitterly of me
Though I passed away in silence
Left you lonely, set you free
She said she remembered today that my oldest brother, Bruce, once came to her as she ironed and asked why she sang this particular song. She had no idea.
Bruce–a brilliant, funny, and talented boy–died by suicide a few years later, at nineteen (no note, but a relationship had recently ended, though not with the friend shown below). After that our family lived in the mystery and misery of his passing. “Where’s Boo?” my little sister asked for a long while, and then finally stopped asking when we had no good answer for her. Now only Alice and I are left, and from time to time we still wonder how this death came to be.
I asked if she would sing In the Gloaming for me today, and she did, her voice a little trembly but still pretty. After she finished, she said that now she sees the song could be about suicide, and that Bruce may have understood it to be so.
We talked about why she had sung it so often back then. Was it a premonition? Or an unconscious cue to Bruce that she was sympathetic to how this sort of thing could happen to someone? Or was it simply a song that fit well with the rhythm of ironing?
These are the sorts of questions she and I are left with fifty-two years after Bruce’s death. I know she still cries about losing him and losing my father, as well as my other brother, Michael, and my sister, Marla, who both also died too young. But she’s a Scandinavian and a Midwesterner, and so she doesn’t let people see her cry in sorrow, not even me. Nobody at The Place even knows that she once had four children.
We talked about the song for a few minutes, and then she said, “I wonder what we’re having for lunch in the dining room.” Subject changed.
Once, I would have tried to make her linger in this kind of conversation. I would have wanted her to reveal hidden emotions, or hoped we’d keep pushing until we arrived at some insight. But now I wondered along with her, What would they have for lunch? We abandoned the deep conversation and let it slide into the mundane because it is her wish to do this, and she’s very old and tires easily and is in a gloaming of her own.
Bruce
In the gloaming, oh my darling
When the lights are soft and low
And the quiet shadows falling
Softly come and softly go
When the trees are sobbing faintly
With a gentle unknown woe
Will you think of me and love me
As you did once long ago?
In the gloaming, oh my darling
Think not bitterly of me
Though I passed away in silence
Left you lonely, set you free
For my heart was tossed with longing
What had been could never be
It was best to leave you thus, dear
Best for you and best for me
In the gloaming, oh my darling
When the lights are soft and low
Will you think of me and love me
As you did once long ago?
Music composed by Annie Fortescue Harrison for the poem In the Gloaming, written by Meta Orred.
Alice Bin-Laden
August 6, 2010
When the security guy at the Des Moines airport drew a yellow line through Alice’s boarding pass, I knew we were in trouble. I’d promised new airplanes, maybe a long line, but not this. Before I could explain what was happening, she was taken to a penned-in area. An offended murmuring coursed along the line of fellow passengers.
Navigating the airport with a cane was impossible, so she was in a wheelchair with her purse on her lap. She looked baffled when her shoes were removed. I stepped over the barricade so I could talk to her; they ordered me back. The passengers’ murmuring turned into muttering. This is ridiculous. What are they doing to that poor lady?
A woman on the security team grabbed the purse and put it on the magic untouchable table. Now my mother’s bafflement turned to alarm as she watched her purse emptied and a wand stuck inside.
One of the guys mumbled something in her direction about how she’d tried to use an expired driver’s license for ID. Alice couldn’t hear him.
“Talk louder, please,” I called over to him. I wanted to say: Tell her that you think she’s covering up her true identity and is really some other ninety-three year old woman, maybe Bin-Laden’s grandmother. See how absurd you sound talking about an expired driver’s license.
But saying that didn’t seem wise. We were in a new America, after all, and in this new America you had to shut up and be humiliated if that’s what it took to keep you safe.
Besides, I felt guilty. With all the time we’d spent together in Ames packing her belongings, why hadn’t I thought to mention shoes and wands and magic tables?
The woman asked Alice if she could walk. When she said yes, she was ordered to stand up and move out of their way so they could pass the wand over the wheelchair. She was wearing her customary nylon knee-highs and the floor was slippery. I stepped over the barricade to hold on to her. I wasn’t going to watch her fall.
“Hey! Lady!”
The Reluctant Traveler
August 3, 2010
For years, every time Alice and I talked about moving her from Iowa to Oregon, she claimed there was no way to get her here. Planes were out, she said; she’d traveled by airplane only twice, back in the 1980s, and both times she’d been removed via ambulance. Panic attacks.
She really didn’t want to move at all, but she knew the time was coming. Now and then she’d try on the idea of a train, but I’d picture her with her cane on a train lurching west, trying to get to the bathroom without falling. “Not the train,” I’d say. “Why not by car?”
“Car!” She coughed out the word as if I’d floated out some crazy, untested invention. “I have to go potty too often. We’d be out in the middle of nowhere. I’d have to go…”
“Okay, not a car.” Sometimes I considered reminding her that her great-grandmother had crossed an ocean in steerage at the age of eighty-one, and then worked as a cook in a lumber camp in Wisconsin.
Months would pass. Then I’d try again. Once, my friend Thalia suggested that she and I go pick Alice up in an RV. We got excited thinking about the big picture window on the West, the king-sized cup holders and giant comfy seats. We tried to ignore the part about the tank chugging piles of dead dinosaurs. In any case, Alice nixed the idea. Too much like a bus. Buses made her carsick.
Whenever my mother and I edged up to a plan–stopping once an hour if we traveled by car, for example–she vetoed it. “That’s silly. No. Huh-uh.”
This went on, as I said, for years, and meanwhile her life shrank down to leaving the house only when my cousin drove her to medical appointments. One day during a telephone conversation she mentioned that every morning at around eleven she sat in her recliner with her eyes focused on the driveway so she wouldn’t miss the Meals on Wheels delivery. She had to watch, she said, because she couldn’t hear the doorbell any more. When I learned the delivery people weren’t due until noon, that was it. This was not the life Alice deserved. “You haven’t been on a plane since 1987,” I said. “They’ve changed. You’ll be fine.”
For some reason, this argument–the new kind of airplane that didn’t exist in 1987–worked. “What will I wear?” she wanted to know. “People on planes are always so dressed up.”
Only in 1960s TWA commercials, I thought, but I told her we’d pick out something special.
I’ll skip the part where we packed her things so she could leave the house she’d lived in for forty-three years. All you have to do is think about leaving your own house forever and you can imagine what that was like. Add to that leaving your long-time friends (though you rarely see them), your grandson, your niece, your last remaining sister (in Wisconsin, yes, but still in the same region). Good-bye to my father’s vegetable garden, overgrown now but still planted with a firm memory of him–tanned and happy playing in that rich Iowa dirt and carrying armfuls of bounty into Alice’s kitchen at harvest time, proud as a warrior bringing home the pillage of battle. Good-bye to the cemetery where several family members lie, the grocery store around the corner, the sports bar that makes the best deep-fried shrimp in the land, according to Alice, a bucket of which my father would occasionally order while at work and pick up on his way home. Good-bye shrimp and Ames, Iowa and 246 South Franklin, ranch-style home, full basement, two bedrooms, needs a little work.
Alice was finally on her way to Oregon. Or so we thought.
