Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

When I arrived to take Alice to the party, she greeted me wearing a dark violet sweater and pale lavender slacks. She waved her hands up and down to show me she was daringly bedecked in purple, head to toe.

We were going to celebrate Helen, my father’s cousin, who was turning 100. Alice wore this color because, a long while back she’d sent Helen a copy of the declaration: When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple.

Alice liked Helen well enough and wanted to go to the party but, other than a Christmas card, the poem about going purple was probably the only thing she’d ever sent her way. Until recently, they’d always lived far apart, Alice in Iowa and Helen in Oregon. When Alice moved to Oregon at age 93, she was in no hurry to go see Helen.

On the other hand, Helen was someone I wanted to know. Like me, she had moved West as a young woman. Back when she felt well enough for visitors, I’d spent long hours at her house in east Portland looking through her photo albums and listening to her sing old songs. Each time before I left, we’d stand together in her hallway and gaze dreamily at a huge collage she’d made that contained photographs of all the dogs she’d ever known.

And so it was that, as we got into the car to head across town, Alice and I had completely different ideas in our mother/daughter brains about what we were up to.

I drove through hectic traffic from one end of the city to the other, with Alice delivering her urban travel commentary:

“I hate trucks.”

Pause.

“I hate freeways.”

Pause.

I hate bridges.”

Pause.

“Why is everything in this town so far from everything else?”

I couldn’t come up with an answer to this question, and anyway I was thinking about my father and his cousin Helen. Here she is with her family but, sadly, her face is not turned to the camera.

Helen (second from left) - Dakota ranch circa 1917

Helen had grown into a teenager by the time my father was a child. She lived on an adjoining ranch in North Dakota and was friends with his big sister, who was her age (and is now long dead). Every time they spotted little Roger coming their way, the girls ran away and hid until he gave up looking for them.

Years ago I’d learned that Helen couldn’t tell any stories about my father’s childhood because she hadn’t known him. “We shouldn’t have always run away from him,” she confessed to me on one of my visits. “There was absolutely no one around he could play with. He was lonely.”

Unlike Alice, my father wasn’t given to telling stories about his early life. I did know that he loved his outspoken, politically progressive, second-generation Irish mother, Nettie:

Nettie

And he loved and feared his stern father, Harry, whose ancestors had come over with William Penn and married up with the Anthony family, Quakers all, the most illustrious of whom was Susan B. Anthony—a fact that must have flung open the doors to the free-thinking Nettie’s heart (in addition to his not-so-bad looks, of course):

Harry (center)

As I was driving along, I wasn’t hoping to tease out memories from elders at the party, because I assumed none from that part of the country would show up. But I knew Helen stayed in touch with a wide range of people. I looked forward to seeing who would be there.

At last, after about forty-five minutes of traffic thick and thin, we arrived.

The party wasn’t in the house but in the balloon-and-streamer-decorated garage (the inside door open to the kitchen, where women were up to their elbows in creating presentations for cakes, pies, cookies, punch, and other refreshments). This whole scene seemed like such a North Dakota thing that I could almost smell the blood of distant relatives. My excitement level rose.

Helen sat in a wheelchair at the center of activity, but not at all her once vivacious self. Surrounded by a blur of people and piles of food, she looked small, frail, and not very happy.

Helen

We greeted her, kissed her, gave her hugs. For a few minutes, Alice and I each held one of her hands and spoke to her. She seemed pleased to see us but, worn out by so many visitors, she quickly lapsed into silence. Someone offered Alice a chair next to her and she sat down.

I scanned the room. A man about my age appeared at my side and told me who was there. Helen is much loved, he reminded me. Friends and family members —several in their eighties and nineties—had flown in from the part of North Dakota where she had grown up. In fact, two sisters (aged 100 and 102) from that same ranch country sat right behind us.

I turned around and two elderly women smiled at me. Surely, I thought, these two must have known my grandparents and my father.

Sisters - 100 and 102

As soon as I’d snapped the photo above and introduced myself, Alice signaled to me. I approached her chair. “Let’s go now,” she whispered.

Go?

Before I could blink, she’d stood up, kissed Helen’s forehead, thanked her for the party, and was walking swiftly with her cane, headed back to the car.

Total party time: maybe ten minutes.

I said my good-byes to the startled people seated close by, including the two ancient sisters. I made apologies. “My mother can’t hear well. She can’t make out what people are saying…” My words drifted away. These things were true, but we had barely arrived. I said good-bye to Helen and hoped, probably foolishly, that it wasn’t our last good-bye.

When I caught up with Alice and got behind the wheel again, she grinned and said, “Let’s go shopping.”

In my rear view mirror I looked back at the garage spilling over with people. I took it all in, including what I could now plainly see was the party theme: elders reached out to accept glasses of purple punch and wedges of purple cake on purple paper plates, and all of this beneath purple streamers and make-shift wall draperies that I now realized were lavender. They were talking, telling stories, leaning forward so as not to miss a word.

Purple Purple everywhere and not a bit of it for me. I was driving away from a stash of pure purple gold, but Alice stared straight ahead and would not listen to any talk of going back. “We stayed long enough,” she said firmly. “I told you I didn’t want to stay long.”

True. She’d mentioned not staying long in a conversation we’d had a month ago about attending the party. But ten minutes?

A week might not have been long enough for me. But, of course, all the purple North Dakotans would probably be leaving the next day.

“Poor Helen,” Alice said, changing the subject. “She didn’t even notice my outfit.”

We went shopping for well over an hour. Then she wanted me to drive to her bank and make a deposit. While waiting for me to come back, she fell in love with a tree in the parking lot. She wanted a picture.

Alice's latest favorite tree.

Then she wanted food, so on to the grocery store. The next stop was Starbuck’s for hot chocolate. I went inside, stood in line, and returned with her favorite drink.

When we finally arrived back at The Place some three and a half hours after we left, I hauled in two large shopping bags, the cocoa, and the food.

I was about to leave when she told me to wait while she took her blood pressure and wrote it down on a slip of paper. I was to go find a medical aide named Jay and give it to him. “I bet Jay came to get it at five like he usually does, but I wasn’t here,” she said. “So you take it to him.”

A sharp No rose up from some bedrock of resistance and surprised us both.

“No, I’m not going to do that,” I said more gently.

It was the dinner hour, I explained. Aides would be going into apartments, rousing residents from beds and rockers and assisting them into wheelchairs and walkers. Trying to find someone named Jay in the warren of rooms at The Place was impossible. And couldn’t he get her blood pressure later? Why were we trying to adhere to Jay’s schedule anyway?

She still looked surprised. Where had her completely Alice-focused daughter gone? But she agreed. Jay could come by later.

I gave her a hug and left, annoyed with myself for the tone of my first No and also for not telling her about—for not even being fully conscious of —my agenda for the party. Why assume she’d be thinking about my father, as I was? Or about my curiosity regarding his childhood? Given the abundance of her own rich family stories, it probably never occurred to her that I would long for his as well.

Nor did it ever occur to him, for that matter.

For Alice, attending the party fulfilled an obligation to someone she barely knew but had liked well enough in days long past. She hadn’t known anyone else there. She’s hard of hearing. She’s an introvert. She got uncomfortable. She wanted to leave. I understood all of this.

I walked out of The Place into the thin light of the late October afternoon. The wind blew eddies of orange and yellow leaves around my feet. Maybe because it’s autumn, that strange and beautiful archway between the worlds of the living and the dead, all facts and my human understanding of them seemed useless, diminished by mystery. I felt a little lost, and I missed my father—rascal (and sometimes worse) as an adult; lonely little boy. Gone forever.

Roger and his dog Bonny

Autumn Movement

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one lasts.

-Carl Sandburg (originally published in Poetry magazine, October 1918, the year of my father’s  birth)