I never thought of my father as a family man. He was rarely affectionate, and he liked to be at work or with his friends at a bar or playing softball or almost any place other than home. So I was surprised to find this:

Some of these photographs were more than sixty years old when he died, and as far as I could tell he’d never taken them out of this little plastic folder except maybe to show some stranger the people who were inside.

Turned out it was us.

Top: Bruce, Roger at 15; Bottom: Bruce, Alice

Roger (home from army on furlough), Alice (with Andrea on the way), Michael(L), Bruce (R)

Alice must have sent this next one to him when he was back in Germany being a soldier once again.

Baby “Tinka” (Norwegiany name), aka Andrea

This is my brother Michael:

Michael

There was no picture of my sister, Marla, and I puzzled over this for a while, but then I realized she was born much later, and he’d put this together when he was going to war and when he was in the war. These were the people he’d hoped he would come home to in good shape, or at least as whole and well as a person can be after such an event in his life. He must have been so frightened of losing everything.

He didn’t ever quite make it to good shape when that war ended. He was always troubled, never healed, but nevertheless he was an honest person and proved himself to be a good friend to many, many people, and he became passionately anti-war.

Here we are together in the safety of peacetime:

Daddy and I.

If I could call him up right now I’d say, Unpack that wallet, Daddy, and come on all the way home.

But since I can’t, then love to him and to all the fathers who wanted to be better at fathering than they managed, as well as to those who succeeded and are succeeding in this whole new era of fatherhood.

I backed the car out of the space next to her building. “How far do you like to go?”

“Ten blocks,” she said.

“That’s how far away everything was back where I came from,” she added. “I should have stayed there.” She was referring to the Dakotas and Iowa and Minnesota and Wisconsin, where we mostly lived in towns small enough to cross in a few minutes.

She’s always anxious about these visits to the eye doctor. He takes photos of her retinas, submits her to various tests, and may or may not proceed with an eye injection.

The news on this visit, thankfully, was that her sight hadn’t deteriorated enough since the last appointment to make the dreaded injection necessary.

This meant we had extra time, so we headed to Starbucks and then over to the vet’s office to pick up Brio’s special kidney prescription diet. When I returned to the car with the cans of bland food that Brio would prefer I toss straight into the river, Alice was almost weeping at the sight of a small, shapely Japanese maple, like this one:

“We had a tree once,” she said. Because I’d been born in North Dakota too, I knew what she meant. If you wanted a tree in your yard, you had to go get one and plant it, as Alice and Roger had once done. If you wanted a free tree, you could dig up a young cottonwood from the bank of the Missouri River.

But who wanted a cottonwood? “They don’t give much shade,” Alice reminded me. “Not like that grove of oaks on Aunt Christina’s farm. We used to have picnics there. I loved those picnics. All that food!” Spoken like the always hungry child of poor parents.

Alice’s Aunt Christina

I reminded her of her current abundance. “Out here we have millions of trees of all kinds.” I realized we were not far from Columbia Park, where a mix of deciduous trees and old growth Douglas Fir stood watch over 35 acres.

And so on this sunny spring day, driving along a main street of strip malls, taverns, car washes, and tattoo parlors, we came upon this magnificent urban forest, alive and breathing and perched like a giant green bird on the edge of a residential neighborhood.

“It’s mostly shadows in there,” Alice said, gazing into the lush plumage, which was lit here and there by a stray feather of pure sunlight.

I slowed and pointed to a bench. “Do you want to sit under the trees?”

“I can’t stir my old bones to do that,” Alice said. “But I like to look from here.”

We crept down a side street at Sunday driver speed and then along Chautauqua, which was such an old and beautiful name I didn’t want the street to ever end. We glanced at the park on one side and at the yards blooming with every imaginable kind of flower on the other.

I understood now why old people sometimes drive so slowly. What’s the hurry when there’s so much to see, so much to take in, especially on such a day as Monday happened to be in Portland, Oregon? Dreamily, we continued on until I looked up and saw a street sign I didn’t recognize: North Willis Boulevard. Well, why not turn here? And so I turned in the direction I thought would eventually lead back to strip malls and taverns.

But no.

I tried Bayard Avenue.

No.

Endicott.

Nope.

We’d been drawn away from our big friendly green bird and off into the lanes and cul de sacs in the Land of Nobody Home.

I don’t have a smart phone, so a picture like this one wasn’t possible:

Columbia Park

Pale-trunked trees, whose names I didn’t know, lined these side streets and formed a green archway. Their lacy shade was like receiving a blessing to stay.

Alice continued to take in the roses growing right along curbs. Even after almost five years in Portland, she still can’t get over this (but then neither can I after more than forty). She couldn’t see well enough to make out the kinds of flowers in the yards, but she fell in love with each unique frenzy of color. She chattered about all this while I tried to meet up with the fact that we were, in fact, quite lost. Taverns on a busy street were now a thing of our past, like North Dakota. Someone who lived in this neighborhood would come home from work, pull into their driveway, and find they had adopted a 60-something woman and her 90-something mother, and that would be that. I started to look for a place with a cat in the window.

“We’re lost,” I said.

Alice laughed. “Oh well.”

She hadn’t stopped smiling for the past fifteen minutes.

In due time, somewhere along North Argyle, we spotted our first human being. He was a middle-aged fellow with long, freshly-shampooed hair, and he was crossing the street with two black dogs at his heels, one with a body as large and square as a Costco box of MilkBones, the other dog only slightly bigger than a large toad.

I rolled down the window. “I guess we’re lost,” I said. My voice had no desperation in it whatsoever and so the man smiled broadly. All five of us were suspended in a bubble of sun, warmth, and freedom.

He asked where we wanted to go. Alice ignored him and busied herself with looking at more flowers, while the man kindly directed us out of the maze of streets and back toward the corner of towering firs where, due to road work, we were to turn right and then left and then yes, we’d be back among taverns and tatoo parlors.

Making those turns was not a good feeling, I tell you, and soon I could sense that Alice felt the same, that all thoughts of “too far” had dissolved, and she regretted our finding the man with the dogs and the directions.

When she finally spoke, she again mentioned the grove of trees at Aunt Christina’s farm, back when Aunt Christina was young. then she leaped ahead many decades to the times poor aged Aunt Christina sat in a hot car at the fairgrounds every June because she was too sick with diabetes and other health problems to get out of the car, and her family just left her there to wait for them. “I suppose she told them to go on ahead,” she said. “But the car only had one little curtain over one window. That was all the shade she had.”

I saw her heading back to other grim streets, the ones in her memory that she still travels with a feeling of helplessness in darker moments. When she goes there, I sometimes try to help her get back out. Unfortunately, this almost always involves being reasonable; it never works. I tried anyway. “But why did she go in the first place if she had to stay in a hot car?”

“Well she had to get off that farm once in a while!” she said. What did I want the woman to do, stay out in the country every livelong minute?

The youngsters could have taken her down to the picnic grove while they ran off to the fair, I thought. It would be pleasant there. Shade and good memories. Maybe she could have had her very own picnic. But I knew nobody in that family at that time would have considered such a reckless thing.

The mood had changed and now Alice moved on to Christina’s husband, cruel Uncle Billy, and how he had pulled his boys and one or two of her sisters around by their hair. And worse.

“Tell me more about the picnics,” I said, anxious to leave the now long-dead boys and the even longer-dead Uncle Billy buried. She could resurrect them on a rainy afternoon maybe, but not today, not this pleasant, sun-smacked day.

“Those picnics!” Alice said, and back she went to the big meals spread out on quilts stitched by the women who had cooked all the food, back to the stuffing of small mouths until stomachs hurt, and then the joyful company of her sisters and cousins as they chased each other through the cool shade of the oaks.

A group picture, had one been taken at the time, might have looked something like this, without the luxurious presence of a car. A few horses would have been standing around instead.

Alice usually knows what I’m doing when I redirect her, but sometimes she allows me to do it anyway, as if I am the mother and she is a very young child with no investment in any destination or in anything at all except being safe with me.

She talked more about the picnics and one happy memory led to another until at last we arrived back in her own neighborhood. She was surprised to see the The Place’s chapel spire pop up out of the spring foliage and poke the bluest of skies.  “Oh my,” she said, “are we already here?”

***

Speaking of picnics, here’s one of my favorite children’s books. Two friends set off for a picnic and some completely wonderful and unexpected things happen.

RELATED ALICE POSTS:

To See or Not to See

Watching for Trees

Runaway Buggy

Time Traveling

Aren’t they wonderful? There’s a big exhibit of many of these photographs titled “Eyes as Big as Plates.” The photographers are two women, a Finn and a Norwegian, Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Horth.

From Riita’s site:

Eyes as Big as Plates started out as a play on characters and protagonists from Norwegian folklore with the Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth. The series has since moved on to exploring the mental landscape of the neighborly and pragmatic Finns. In June 2012 Finnish senior citizens modelled in the wilderness of south and eastern Finland.

A selection of the series was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki in 2012, and it’s now on tour.

Go to the Eyes as Big as Plates web site for more information. You’ll be amazed at how this collaboration has grown and involves so many people now, elders and artists and storytellers all working together. If you get hooked, as I did, be sure to visit the photographers’ sites (linked above) for more pictures and some videos.

*****

Also Dear Readers:

Thank you so much for your messages of condolence this past week. I wrote a response that I published today in the comments section of the post about Hadley. I  appreciate every comment, every e-mail, every poem, and every sincere thought about the importance of animal companionship.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Justin sent me a Judy Collins CD, which has provided the background music for this whole experience of loss. The other day as Meg and I were driving to the vet’s office to pick up Hadley’s remains so we could bury her, the car stereo turned on by itself. Needless to say, it’s never done that before. Each song seemed to carry a message about what we were doing and why and how love works. Here’s one of the songs the mysteriously attuned CD player played for us.

It was cold and rainy, so he took her inside and down to his office in the basement. After a few days of research, he concluded that no one was looking for a skinny cat with two cracked teeth, a soft, multi-colored coat, and a long, be-ringed tail with a velvety black tip.

The cat and janitor took to each other. While he did his paperwork, she sat on his lap. When he went off to polish floors, she kept his chair warm. He couldn’t bring her home, so he tried to make her the official school cat with a permanent residence in his office in the basement.

The principal nixed this idea.

Fortunately, a woman who worked in the same place I did took the kitty home. Unfortunately, she had a dog who had just killed her cat. She advertised the stray in an employee newsletter and I bit.

I brought her to my houseboat for a trial evening with my dog, Boon, who had no truck with cats. He didn’t chase them, but he didn’t care for them either. He was a greyhound/lab mix, a handsome fellow known by some (okay, by me) as the “Brad Pitt of Dogs.”

Boon sat next to me on the couch watching the river flow past. Cat? I don’t see any cat.

The cat sat down across the room, wrapped her snaky tail around her feet and met my eyes. Was I as good a person as the janitor? Was this odd house, which moved up and down and side to side when the water around it shifted, as warm as the cozy office next to the furnace room of a large high school? Clearly not. And yet the place might have its merits.

Boon placed his long nose across my lap and continued to stare at the river. When, I wondered, had it ever intrigued him this much before?

The cat crossed the room and hopped up onto the back of the couch. I thought I’d won over her green-eyed appraising stare with my relaxed and friendly stare back. I expected her to step down into my lap where she could curl up and rest from a stressful day. Instead, she squeezed down into the few inches of space between Boon’s back and the arm of the couch. She had to wiggle to get even her narrow, underfed body into this tiny slot, but she finally snuggled all the way down and pressed her nose up against Boon’s fur, inhaling him. Ahhhh. Dog.

Another dog must have kept her company during her former life of cracked teeth and unwanted litters and people who didn’t search for her when she got lost. She needed a dog. I needed a cat. The Brad Pitt of Dogs needed nothing whatsoever.

And so, her first love being Boon, with me along for the ride, she settled in. The vet pulled the cracked teeth and spayed her. He said she was maybe a year old, maybe two.

I named her Hadley for Hadley’s Landing, a favorite hangout of Boon’s. I figured if he associated our new roommate with a place he liked there might be a transference.

No dice. Cat? I don’t see any cat. Hadley’s is a place we drive to in a car and there’s no cat there.

This remained Boon’s attitude for the next nine years. Nevertheless, Hadley carried her torch for him, attempting without success to clean his ears, trying to share his blanket, padding around after him.

You couldn’t take a cat anywhere, this was Boon’s point of view. Unlike cats, he loved water. He liked to lie down in rivers and ponds and even mud puddles and take a few laps with his big pink tongue and daydream. My friend Thalia once said, “Boon likes to have his lake and drink it, too.”

He had a lot of friends around the neighborhood, even into his old age:

Amanda and Boon.

Boon with Salli.

Morgan and Boon.

Somehow, a “Mae” got attached to the name Hadley. She liked it, although over time she was called by many names, as most animal companions are:  Haddo, Hadz, Hadzip, Zip, Le-Le, Tweedle, etc.

I had a well-paying job and extra money. I bought Boon and Hadley food made of free-ranging virgin hens and organic vegetables, composed like a symphony by a team of veterinary scientists who each had six cats and four dogs and loved all things furry and their mothers, probably in that order.

Hadley plumped up.

She loved the sun.

Dog shadow contemplation.

She and Boon never got close but accepted one another:

Boon got sick, grew thin and tired, stayed on until he was nearly fifteen, and died. Hadley and I grieved, each in our own way. Without a dog in the house, she turned into a ferocious watch kitty, keeping the likes of the following moorage criminals at bay by slamming her whole body up against the window whenever any of them tried so much as to peer in.

Good Tracy, brother of Evil Tracy (not pictured).

Mingo

Sushi

Leo the Tiger

Pumpkin en garde.

Pumpkin off garde.

Hadley behaved like all cats do about whether to remain outside or come in.

You can learn an entire foreign language while waiting for a cat to decide whether to stay outside or come in.

Of course she liked boxes.

Hadley thinks about toast.

She loved being tapped lightly along the spine with a plastic stick and then rolling over and trying to kill it.

The game of Stick.

She took care of me when I was sick with the flu:

Nurse Hadley.

And I delivered her saucer of milk to the location of her choice:

She greeted every single visitor to the house, human or canine, with the calm air of an experienced hostess, even this one who ignored her good manners and wanted only to get at her food. Or any food, for that matter.

Starry investigates Ketzel’s veganesque refrigerator.

Every time a dog came for a visit, it became more and more clear to me that Hadley and I both needed one of our own, and so I found Brio.

Brio

Hadley immediately tried to clean Brio’s ears. Brio didn’t like that any more than Boon had liked it. But they played games like Chase and Hide-and-Seek and Hide-Behind-Door-And-Pounce-When-Clueless-Dog-Passes-And-Scare-the-Spit-Out-Of-Her.

Unlike Boon, Brio often sought her out for company.

Brio and Hadley in the sun.

Hadley grew old and lost weight. She didn’t feel well and in 2012 she was diagnosed with kidney failure. She ate a special diet, but toward the end was hardly interested in eating at all. When Alice came for a visit and saw Hadley a few weeks ago, she was taken aback.  “So thin.”

I’d told her about the disease but not the eating problem. “She doesn’t want to eat her special kidney diet,” I said. “She wants something more tasty.” More and more, I let her have foods richer than were allowed on her diet.

Alice told me about a long-ago cat named Pounce. Her family adopted the finicky Pounce back in those impoverished Dakota days, which was not a good environment in which to be a fussy eater.

“One day I came into the kitchen,” Alice said, “and Mama was standing with her hands on her hips, sounding very frustrated as she talked to Pounce, who sat on the floor in front of a saucer, looking up at her. ‘Well Cat,’ Mama said, ‘I gave you some tea and you wouldn’t drink that.’”

“Tea!” I was amazed that my grandmother would even attempt to give tea to a cat, but all Alice and I could think was that Martha had tried absolutely everything else in her pantry and Pounce vetoed all of it.

Hadley lived a good life here on the river. She generously made room for Brio, for Meg, for any and every visitor, whether they arrived with a suitcase or on a leash.

For fifteen years she asked for nothing more than shelter and food, and in return she gave great beauty, protection, loyalty, wit, her nose to my nose, her softly breathing presence on my lap as I wrote every single one of these blog posts over the years. She filled the house with her quiet sense of humor, her dignity, and her calm reassurance that all was well, and if it wasn’t she’d take care of it.

Her last two days were rough. Friends Christine and Kim came from the North Portland Veterinary Hospital and with all tenderness and kindness to all three of us, they helped Hadley let go of this life.

Now, as I told a friend, Brio and I are all wobbly, like a tricycle that has lost a wheel.

Cat? I don’t see any cat.

From the Koran (with thanks to my friend, Leigh):

There is not a beast on earth,
nor fowl that flieth on two wings,
but they are a people like unto you,
and to God they shall return.

On November 20 (1942) our regiment took up defensive positions at Point Cruz west of the Matanikau (river)…A slow advance toward objective further west is begun. The enemy is laying down heavy mortar and machine gun fire. They are well dug in and concealed. Due to the terrain of jungle and ridges and the terrific heat, it is very difficult to get supplies, ammunition and water to our troops. They are taxed to exhaustion. Coordinated artillery, air and mortar fire does not dislodge the enemy. They have dug-in in the coral and in draws and are quite secure. Any exposure of our troops draws accurate enemy fire. Casualties are fairly heavy.
-From the diary of Lt. Col. Samuel Baglien, Executive Officer, North Dakota’s 164th National Guard Unit

Alice’s only brother died in this battle the next day. He was twenty-one years old.

The 164th Infantry North Dakota National Guard had gone ashore at Guadalcanal the previous month, reinforcing U.S. Marines at Henderson Airfield.

Lew’s unit was the first U.S. Army unit to take offensive action in the Pacific. They were all North Dakota farmers’ sons and small town boys. One of them later explained their much-lauded courage under more or less constant bombardment, combat, and sniper fire: “Because if you let down a friend and neighbor, well this is someone you have known all your life.”

Last night Alice talked about Lew to help me conjure an uncle I never knew.

She and her five sisters called him “Brother” for most of his childhood, she said. “We were so glad to finally have a brother.”

“He loved to dance when he got older, like all of us. And oh, he fell in love with a Catholic girl, to Mama’s dismay, but she didn’t say anything to him about it.” (Martha, never much of a churchgoer, nevertheless stayed faithful to Luther.)

“Our big black telephone was in the dining room,” Alice said, “and I remember Lew walking into the kitchen holding it and then walking back to the dining room, over and over, when he was talking to a girl. Back and forth. Back and forth. So cute. He dressed in pullover sweaters, nice slacks. He liked clothes.”

He was playful. He was fun. He was that odd man out, the happy Norwegian.

The hardest thing for Alice, she said, was to explain Lew’s death to her firstborn, Bruce, who was four years old at the time. Bruce and his uncle had been close. “Lew played with him all the time. Anything Bruce wanted he could have, as far as Lew was concerned.”

“I remember,” Alice said, “that Bruce asked me, Was it a bad man who killed him? And I said No, not a bad man. It was a man who was fighting for his country.”

After a moment she added, “There was no way to explain it, really. Never a way.”

Later, Bruce would die at around the same age, just shy of twenty. (See In the Gloaming.)

What was Lew expecting from life? What did he want more than anything else? Would he have loved to travel, to cook, to read science fiction and poetry or listen to chamber music or Frank Sinatra or rock and roll? Would he have married the Catholic girl as his namesake, my cousin, married a Catholic girl twenty years after Lew’s death, forcing the family to expand its understanding of religion and Rome?

I have a fantasy that Lew’s safe return from Guadalcanal would have meant that Bruce would have chosen life over an early death, that our uncle’s good looks and happy spirit would always have cheered us whenever we came within range, that he could have brought the other warriors in the family, my father and my uncles, back from battle in a way that extended their feelings of brotherhood and disallowed the sour solace of bars and alcohol and cigarettes. Despite the rise of feminism, his sisters would have made a fuss over him right up until the day their only brother died a natural death in his Bismarck back yard or on horseback out in a far corner of his Wyoming ranch or on the deck of his rambling house in Big Sur.

“I’ll never forget, it was early evening when we buried Lew,” Alice said. “They played Taps, of course.”

After the burial, a woman walked up to Martha as she stood next to the grave and reminded her of what a mess it was over there after those battles, how the men did their best, but how could they be careful about details like names in the midst of everything else?

“So many boys got dug graves over there,” the woman said to this grieving mother, “and nobody really knows whose body got the right name or whose got sent back home and whose got left over there. It might not even be your son you buried today.”

“Well,” Martha said, turning away, “it doesn’t matter. It was somebody’s son I buried today.”

Lew was awarded a posthumous Purple Heart.

Later, as everyone knows, Guadalcanal was won. The enemy was vanquished.

Hurray. Hurrah.

Downstreet, Bellows Falls, Vermont (Photo by Mary Narkiewicz.)

Yes, I know this feeling. In fact, when I retyped this for the post just now, my computer automatically changed the Vermont colloquialism “downstreet” to “downstream,” and I pictured Alice stepping into my kayak and paddling down the river for a little adventure, leaving me standing on the deck, arms folded tightly across my chest while I waited to see how this journey would turn out.

Mary and I, along with countless other women in our 50s, 60s, 70s and even beyond, find ourselves in the position of being Mother’s mother.

The karmic gods are probably choking with laughter as we puzzle over how to parent well, especially those of us who never got any practice with children of our own. At times our elders, fragile in some ways, try to exercise too much independence. But some situations arise and, even though perfectly capable, they exercise too little.

Those contrary forces play happily together within Alice. Sometimes, for example, if she’s been sitting for a while and it’s time to get up and move, she fiercely waves me aside when I try to position her walker in front of her so she doesn’t stumble. This is more likely to happen when we’re in a public place, such as a waiting room. “I can do it!” she claims, and she grabs the contraption by one of its handles, pulls it closer, grips the other handle and yanks the walker roughly in the direction of her legs. “Good grief,” she mutters. “Do you think I’m helpless?”

Other times all her pluck seems to have drained right out of her. I’m much better at being shooed aside than I am when this happens. I see it for what it is: another kind of trip downstream. Do I let her go or try to call her back?

Last week, for example, she told me that her housekeeper had not shown up for the second Tuesday in a row, which meant she was now cleaning her own apartment. I asked when the housekeeper would be coming around again.

No idea. How was she supposed to know the mysterious inner workings of The Place?

I offered to find out was going on.

“No,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll tell us.”

“They haven’t told you for two weeks. Why would that change?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t you dare call. They’ll get mad at me.”

I reminded her that she’s paying more than three times what she’d pay for an apartment. “They’re supposed to do certain things in exchange for that money. Like clean.”

I knew that the housekeeper was probably getting paid next to nothing, that I’d walk out too if some other Place had offered me higher wages. All this made sense to me, but so did taking care of Alice.

“Now don’t you go calling anybody,” she said.

I thought about it and finally decided to see what happened the following Tuesday. But the very next day, while I was eating lunch, Alice phoned me in a panic. “You have to call them,” she said. A new floor manager was on staff and she’d sent out a notice announcing that she’d changed the cleaning schedule. Alice’s housekeeping day had been moved from Tuesdays to Sundays.

“It can’t be Sundays,” Alice said. “Sunday is a shower day.” She had once fallen in the shower. Now, under doctor’s orders, she wasn’t allowed to shower on her own. An aide had to help her.

“But what time is the housekeeper coming on Sundays?” I asked. “Your shower is scheduled for the morning. Maybe the cleaner is supposed to come in the afternoon.”

“I don’t know what time she’ll be here. I never know exactly when the shower person will be here either.”

“Can’t someone be cleaning the other rooms in your apartment while you’re getting a shower?”

I reminded her that many times she hasn’t even been at home while her apartment was being cleaned, so why did this matter so much?

She couldn’t explain all that, she said. “Just listen to me. You have to make them change the day.”

I put my sandwich aside. I wondered how the mother of the teenaged daughter I never had might have handled a similar problem. The mother (me), who hates to iron clothes as much as the more mature daughter (also me) hates making phone calls, would be holding up a freshly ironed blouse of a certain color, say green, and the teenaged daughter would be breathing hard and rolling her eyes and scolding her mother (again, me) for not understanding that she could not possibly wear a green blouse to school on a blue blouse day, and the mother who had pressed the wrong blouse (still unfortunately me) would then take a deep breath and in a calm voice say…

The parental me spoke wisely but faintly, too low and far away to hear. The daughter me felt a headache coming on.

“Call them,” Alice said, “and then call me right back and tell me what they said.”

We hung up. I made the mistake of finishing my lunch. The phone rang ten minutes later. “Haven’t you talked to them yet? I want to know what they say.”

“It’s only Wednesday,” I said. “This change doesn’t happen until Sunday. What’s the hurry?” Maybe the lunch and washing up hadn’t been a mistake after all. I’d had some time to think. Where was the woman who could break her hip at 94 and still be walking around the grounds of The Place at almost 98?

Alice on a walk.

The woman who could get eye injections and then go to Starbucks for cocoa? Where was my mother? Was it right to do this sort of thing for her, or should I urge her to exercise the strength I’d witnessed so often in the past?

“Why don’t you talk to them?” I suggested. “When you go to get your mail, stop at the office and ask them to change the housekeeping day.”

“Ask who?” The softest hint of a whine.

“Who signed that notice about the change?”

Papers shuffling, finally a name: Michelle.

“Okay,” I said, “ask for Michelle and tell her you’d like the day changed. Or tell her that the housekeeper has to come on Sunday afternoons because your shower is in the morning.”

Long pause followed by pretty much a repetition of the entire conversation above.

“Oh, you do it! I don’t want to,” she said.

“Look,” I said, “it’s your shower, your apartment, your idea that the two things can’t happen at the same time. And you know how to fix it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You just told me how to fix it a few minutes ago in our first phone call. And then I told you. Just now.”

We said good-bye, but she called back five minutes later. “I went out into the hall and ran into Laundry Edie,” she said. “She told me that Amelia is in her office right now. She said you should call Amelia and tell her to change this.”

“Amelia? What about Michelle?”

“Edie says no no no. It’s Amelia. Amelia’s the nurse and aide supervisor. She’s the one to tell. Do it now before she leaves her office for the day.”

“Nurses and aides aren’t housekeepers,” I said. “Michelle…”

“Call now.” She hung up.

The kayak slipped around the bend, out of sight. No adventure here. Simply retreat.

I gave up and phoned The Place to talk to Michelle. She was a new employee. We hadn’t yet met.

She was in a meeting so I left her a long, meandering voice-mail message. Highlights: Hello. Daughter of… About the housecleaning notice…Uh-oh. Sunday. Shower Day. Conflict! Must not clean then. Impossible!! Another day? Or change Shower Day? Aides do showering. Amelia manages aides. Talk to Amelia? Me talk? You talk?

By the time I hung up from this rambling it seemed the only thing to do was move Alice out of there and start over some place else.

Then, not more than half an hour later, my phone rang. I couldn’t imagine that Michelle had come out of a meeting and put that message at the top of her to-do list.

It was Alice. “It’s all straightened out,” she said, voice bright as a lark’s. “Thanks to me.”

There was my girl. In the fading light she’d turned the kayak around, paddled upriver fighting the current all the way, and made it to port. By herself.

“And just how did that happen?”

“Well!” Alice said as if about to impart the story of the year. “I just decided I can do this. I went to the front desk and stopped to see the little short man, you know who I mean, he sits there all day. I told him about my problem. He took me into Michelle’s office and then she came in and I told her about my problem and she said she’d take care of it. Then I came back and sat right down to call you.”

I felt as proud as the mother I never was would have felt if her teenaged daughter dared to wear a green blouse on a blue blouse day. And then some, because it’s even harder to call forth pluck when you’re old. Sometimes you have to fight for it. Every day, as I see and feel old age approaching in myself, I know this to be true.

Nancy came back to Mary from downstreet Bellows Falls. She didn’t have any exciting news, like the time she’d stopped at the Penguin Mart and happened to run into the Governor of Vermont. But she had gone out to see the world again on her own and made it safely home.

Nancy Narkiewicz and Governor Shumlin (Photo by Mary Narkiewicz.)

The Institute wants a written request for permission to use any of their images or videos, so I can only point you there. You can see images from the various exhibits here.

This page is from the Smithsonian magazine and includes a video interview of one of the two sisters who started this work. She tells how and why the project came into being. The video also shows many of the contributors at work.

In addition to the main IFF project, people from communities in the United States and around the world have developed their own crochet coral reef projects. You can see these by clicking Satellite Reefs at the top of any page on the IFF site.

The exhibits are powerful, intended to inform and bedazzle. Some parts of the reef, for example, are made entirely of plastics, an acknowledgement of the islands of plastic that are now part of our oceans. Each piece of this massive artistic undertaking, no matter what kind of yarn or shiny object it’s made of, is a wonder. I do hope you go look.

Many thanks to Go Ask Alice blog reader Ursula Le Guin for bringing us news of the Crochet Coral Reef Project.

Reader Sondra Brown wants us to take a look at the crochet work of one of the Coral Reef Project’s participants, Helle Jorgensen, found here.

And, in case you haven’t done so yet, be sure to check out Jung Jung’s intricate crochet work that another reader, Sue Rosoff, directed us to in the last post, Crochet.

What is it, I wonder, that makes the idea of sitting in a corner with a hook and some colorful yarn suddenly so attractive? Alice isn’t interested, but I am (off and on).

Take a look at these antique crochet hooks (from the collection of Nancy Nehring).

Crochet hooks.

(Top to bottom – abalone shell, glass, piqué posé work in horn, porcupine quill handle, brass filigree with aquamarines, forged brass, and bone with needle case.)

Weaving anyone?

Spindles

These images came from the Typologist, a site maintained by Diana Zlatanovski, museologist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and photographer at The Typology.

Another image on Diana’s site reminded me that Alice has not yet worn the wig we bought for her a while back.

Paper wigs

Paper wigs by Amy Flurry and Nikki Salk.

Alice says she’s saving her wig until she needs it.

I think I’m saving knitting and crocheting until I need them, but that could be soon.

Here’s 12 seconds of the amazing Hazel Tindall.

One of the readers of this blog, Sue Rosoff, left a comment pointing me to the work of a Japanese artist who dyes her own yarn and crochets things like the pieces below. Thank you, Sue. I like Jung Jung’s work so much I decided to add a few photos to this post.

That’s a whole new slant on things now, isn’t it?

This lacy style (also by Jung Jung) is more like what I remember of Martha’s work.

More of Jung Jung’s work here and here.

(Thanks to Alice blog reader and artist Judy Teufel for guiding me to Diana Zlatanovski’s work.)

Hadley (age 15 or thereabouts)

Brio (age 5 or somesuch)

As I stepped out the front door of my houseboat on my way to Alice’s, I met up with another family:

I brought flowers to Alice, of course:

Including the first stolen rose of the year:

And a bag full of stuff I knew she’d like. But first we had lunch, which was meatloaf (no photo of the lunch, and you wouldn’t want to see one anyway; looking at that ground up meat reminded me of last week’s post, Mother Love). Nadine was there as well as a lot of women wearing red hats. They were going to the Mother’s Day Tea at 2 p.m. Alice forbade me to even think about attending.

So we went back to her apartment to investigate the bag.It held chocolates, other foodstuffs, puzzle books and more.

For example, a new blouse (not from Goodwill). Here she is checking out the new blouse in her bedroom mirror:

Alice liked it so much she actually felt like posing:

She wondered if it was too “low-cut.”

“No!”

“But I have that skin,” she said.

I suggested she not worry about that skin. She returned to the bag.

What else is in here?

She found a new gold chain to hold the pendant made by a devoted follower of this blog, Kerry Ellen. Alice lost the original chain a while ago and has missed wearing Kerry’s glass work.

Two cinnamon rolls, her favorite kind.

A high-gloss magazine depicting all sorts of clothes and haircuts and actors and actresses from the 1920s:And of course a gigantic card. Even though it’s hard to read with her eye condition these days, she read every word.We each ate one of her chocolates and then she told me she was going to “hide” the box in her filing cabinet so she wouldn’t eat another piece any time soon. Following that, we visited a while and then she dispatched me to the garden to take a photograph of the new scarecrow made by residents. “Then go home and send me the picture,” she said.

Of course I obeyed.

What do you think of that scarecrow? She looks to me like she’s going shopping, perhaps for Mother’s Day gifts.

As Teresa puts it, this is “an illustrated moment about loss and the sweetness of memory.”

If your mother isn’t with you today, or even if she is, give this to yourself. It’s a small treasure, custom-made for today.

Music by Teresa’s husband, Hal Cannon.

Thank you, Teresa and Hal!