Shoebox, unadorned.

I tested the width to see if the book would fit inside with crepe paper.

Trying on the shoebox for size.

It did, and so I added a box of chocolates and a pendant and more crepe paper and wrapped it all up in flowers.

Shoebox, adorned.

On the afternoon of Mother’s Day, Alice and I settled in with another box, a small amplifier called the PockeTalker®, which we learned about from Alice’s doctor and promptly ordered.

PockeTalker with ear buds.

I hold the box with the microphone attached and Alice puts one of the ear buds in what she calls her “good ear.” Then, in the quiet of her apartment, we can chat back and forth. With the PockeTalker®, I can now speak to her in a normal tone of voice for the first time in years. (The mic picks up too much background noise in public places, so it’s most useful one-on-one in quiet rooms.)

She reminded me that we had to go to the Mother’s Day Tea in the dining room soon. She was looking forward to the “delectables” the invitation claimed would be served. “We had pork and beans for lunch,” she said, casting a sour look in the direction of the kitchen. “On Mother’s Day.”

She picked up one of the cards I’d gotten for her.

A close reading of the card.

She always reads every word on cards. This one held a wish that time could be turned back so that I could appreciate her in a way that I hadn’t done earlier in our lives together. But when she read the first Hallmark phrase about wishing the clock could go backward for us, she said, “No, I don’t think we’d want to do that because we didn’t get along. Remember?”

I remembered. “Read on,” I said, as I firmly gripped a special mental steering wheel developed for moments such as this and wrested my mind away from images of various therapists’ offices.

She continued reading and began to nod, agreeing with the sentiment that she should have been more appreciated. All the work and worry, etc. So true! She liked what I’d written at the bottom of the card too, about treasuring our relationship and our friendship. “Oh honey, that’s so nice.” She read the next card, a humorous one about how much fun she is, and then she put them both aside, ready to receive her gifts.

I’d placed the book on the bottom of the shoebox so she’d open it last. She pulled off the paper, put the flowers in a vase, and began to explore the contents.

Chocolates, of course – only to be expected on Mother’s Day.

She lingered over the pendant and examined the candy carefully before selecting one. “We should watch our weight,” she said, patting her stomach. “I don’t know why we have both blossomed out at our ages.”

“I have no idea,” I said, biting into a chocolate.

During the unwrapping of the book, I felt a little anxious. She, of course, was not. “Everything is so pretty. I hate to tear it.” As she tugged at the bow and paper she talked about how the morning aide who had helped her shower thought she must have been a swimmer once because her back is so strong. “I told her no, I was certainly no swimmer and that my daughter had once taken me to a lake to teach me how to swim and kept saying to me, Mom, you have to lift your feet up, and I told my daughter that I couldn’t because of my varicose veins. Do you remember that?”

Fifteen years old, standing in four feet of water with my panicked mother, who tried to convince me that varicose veins could keep a person’s legs from lifting in water, and therefore even floating was hopeless.

Finally she looked at the gift. She had removed enough of the wrapping to see her own feet in the cover photograph.

“Oh my goodness!”  She was beginning to understand the object she held. “Oh! Aren’t those cute shoes?” She read the title. “Roses Are Red, Shoes Are Black. This has the poems in it?  Ohhhh, my goodness sakes.”

She opened it to the first page and this Marilyn Monroe quote: Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world.

Then she read the little story based on the blog post, turned to the first poem, and, before reading it, looked up to ask if the poets could get a copy of this book. I assured her that those who wanted a copy had one. Satisfied, she read over each poem and looked at each photograph until we got to Gordon’s hooch and the photo of Alice’s Gumption (a brew made especially for her).

Alice’s Gumption

“That Gordon!” she said, tapping the reference to the time Alice buried some beer for a bootlegger. “He got hooch into his poem.”

She seemed a bit overcome by all of it. “And oh my goodness! For goodness sake.”

I relaxed. She was so happy. She continued on, reading the verses out loud and laughing at each one, even though she’s read them all several times before. “It must have taken awhile for you to do this.”

“Not too long,” I said, Princess Blithe of the Land of Blithery.

She lingered over Justin’s poem, meant to be sung to the tune of Baby Mine. “I don’t know this tune,” she said, so she made one up and began singing the verses to that.

She agreed with the poem that described her shoes as having a “seam down the middle, and a bow just so” by Elizabeth. “That’s true!”

She remembered meeting Leigh, who wrote this in honor of Alice’s new Goodwill shoes:

My shoes are sharp,
My feet feel flirty;
They could dance all night
And still look purty.

“Leigh,” she said. “I’ve met her. She’s had a partner for a long, long time.”

“Yes, thirty-some years.”

“Did you hear,” she said, “how the Republicans are talking about Obama doing this (coming out in favor of gay marriage) so he’ll get re-elected?” This strange interpretation of his high risk move struck her as so funny she doubled over laughing.

Finally, she closed the book and looked again at the cover. “That is just unbelievable. I can’t believe those are really my feet. I wish those shoes could know about this. Where did you get the shiny paper?”

I explained about vanity presses like blurb.com, the press I’d used, and how the book was made.

“It didn’t come flying out of your computer, then.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh my!” And again: “Those are my feet! And you wrapped it in a shoebox! I thought you might be giving me slippers.”

I gave her one more present.

This reminded her of the Mother’s Day Tea and its so-called delectables. “But remember what they served us for our Mother’s Day lunch. So don’t get your hopes up. Pork and beans! That’s a dirty trick.”

I thought about how many Mother’s Days she’s had: 75. Surely no pork and beans on any of them except possibly during the Depression.

She unplugged herself from the PockeTalker® and off we went to the Mother’s Day Tea in the dining room, which is another story, involving a wandering accordion player whose stomach was so large and belt so low that Alice feared his pants were going to fall off at any moment; a female staff member wearing a white wig and dressed in a vintage dress, hat and heels for reasons we did not fully grasp, who wanted her picture taken with Alice (“Who was that?” Alice asked after I took the photograph and the woman had moved on); Mr. Fickle drifting along the edges, uncertain of how to be part of all the mothering that was being celebrated; real China teacups and real flowers; plates of sweet things that were more or less delectable, and a girl with a new puppy who stopped by to show him off and who, one can only hope, will be royally appreciated by that dog she dotes on and will fully appreciate the mother who brought her to The Place to celebrate the grandmother who was probably never fully appreciated until now… But perhaps I don’t need to tell it all. You get the picture.

Oh man, the things you find on youtube! I couldn’t stop watching this little Arabic confection:

Antoine Wilson is the author of The Interloper and Panorama City. You can read more about him and his work here. I haven’t yet read his novels, but I appreciated this funny and true little piece of work.

I’m looking forward to sharing the shoe book with Alice tomorrow for Mother’s Day. For all the mothers of children (of any age), and those who nurture any creature of any stripe, literally or otherwise, I hope the people close to you acknowledge fully who you are and what you bring to this crazy earth party.

“It was Mrs. Beck,” Alice said. “She died of TB. She was Mama’s friend and Mama got the word she was gone and she took me with her over to the Beck house. A neighbor lady sat at the bedside. She pulled down the sheet and there was Mrs. Beck with her eyes closed. She just looked normal, like she was sleeping.”

I asked how old Mrs. Beck was and it turned out she was “Mama’s age,” which meant, sadly, only about thirty-two or thirty-three.

“How did you feel about this?” I asked.

“I was maybe four years old. I felt sad because Mama was sad, I suppose, but still, I was glad she took me along. Nobody else went. Just me.”

By nobody else she meant none of her four older sisters: Marie, LaRue, Mattie or Lillian.

I thought of all the four-year old children I’ve known (many, many four-year olds from eleven years of teaching preschool). This seemed to me how a person that age might look at things. Well, Mrs. Beck is dead but Mama took me along to see her and nobody else got to go.

It turned out that another person in the Beck family died later of tuberculosis, a son who had for a short while been Alice’s sister Marie’s boyfriend. I wondered why my grandparents didn’t worry about their children brushing up so close to this disease, but Alice didn’t want to talk about that. She was busy remembering other times with her mother. “We went to church once, just the two of us.”

One of the churches in the prairie town where Alice lived as a child.

“I was about the same age that time too,” she said. “Four years old. But what was I doing with Mama all by myself at church? We hardly ever went to church. I don’t know why we were there that time. But anyway, she got sick just as the choir started singing Beulah Land, and we had to leave.”

She sang a verse for me:

Far away the noise of strife upon my ear is falling.
Then I know the sins of earth beset on every hand.
Doubt and fear and things of earth in vain to me are calling.
None of these shall move me from Beulah Land.

“It sounds like that might have been Mrs. Beck’s funeral,” I suggested.

“Maybe. But anyway, around that same time when I was running around with Mama,” Alice continued, “she took me down to the tracks one night to pick up chunks of coal that fell off the trains.”

They’d ventured out late, she told me, so as not to be seen by anyone in town. “People knew we were poor, so I don’t know why it had to be so secret that we needed coal.”

Broad daylight coal picking.

“It was hard to see that coal in the dark,” Alice said. “You can imagine.”

Her mother urged her to be absolutely quiet. They walked along the tracks scanning the ground along the rails, the prairie night wrapped close around them as they snatched up the scattered lumps and dropped them, thunk, thunk into a gunny sack.

From only a few feet away, a deep, angry voice blasted into the black silence. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Alice twice repeated the scary voice, throaty and threatening. “WHAT ARE  YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” She pulled her coat close around her as if remembering the chill of that terrifying moment. “Mama and I jumped,” she said, “and I very nearly screamed. I thought it was the station master or the sheriff and we’d go to jail. But then we heard Mattie laughing. Oh she thought she was being so hilarious. She’d followed us just so she could scare us.”

She shook her head, trying to fathom the ways of her big sister, who’d been eight years old at the time. “I wonder why she did that,” she said.

“Because it was fun,” I said.

She laughed, considering this possibility perhaps for the first time. “But where was Pearl all this time? I always had Pearl with me.”

Pearl

We considered her age and Pearl’s age – four years apart. I thought about my grandmother feeling suddenly ill in church and put the pieces together. “I bet your mother was pregnant with Pearl,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she started taking you everywhere with her. She knew you weren’t going to be the baby any more.”

“Oh, I wonder about that.” Alice sounded doubtful that her mother could have been so psychologically astute and sensitive, but I remember Martha too. Aside from the occasional murder of a perfectly good snake, she was all about love. She knew the real Beulah Land for any four-year old would be running around with Mama, wherever Mama needed to go.

By the time we got to her apartment, Alice felt too tired to eat her sandwich. All that pre-appointment anxiety and then all the riding in a car and remembering ancient history had tuckered her out.

We sipped our cocoa. I picked up one of her library books, a large-print Amish romance, one in a series she had liked at first, but which was now, she said, starting to be tiresome. “Those people are so dull.”

I read about the dull Amish people. She read her mail. We spent time together quietly content in our own little Beulah Land.

******

Dwelling in Beulah Land
(by C. Austin Miles)

Verse 1

Far away the noise of strife upon my ear is falling.
Then I know the sins of earth beset on every hand.
Doubt and fear and things of earth in vain to me are calling.
None of these shall move me from Beulah Land.

Refrain

I’m living on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky.
I’m drinking at the fountain that never shall run dry.
O yes! I’m feasting on the manna from a bountiful supply,
For I am dwelling in Beulah Land.

Verse 2

Far below the storm of doubt upon the world is beating.
Sons of men in battle long the enemy withstand.
Safe am I within the castle of God’s Word retreating.
Nothing then can reach me—’tis Beulah Land.

Verse 3

Let the stormy breezes blow, their cry cannot alarm me;
I am safely sheltered here, protected by God’s hand.
Here the sun is always shining, here there’s naught can harm me.
I am safe forever in Beulah Land.

Verse 4

Viewing here the works of God, I sink in contemplation.
Hearing now His blessèd voice, I see the way He planned.
Dwelling in the Spirit here I learn of full salvation.
Gladly I will tarry in Beulah Land.

This is quite a lively rendition with all the hopeful words included:

But here’s a prettier version (at least I think so), just a man and his guitar. No lyrics. It could be about heaven or Mama or anything you like:

By the way, one of our readers, Marcia Riefer Johnston, was inspired by the poetry in the book published last week about Alice’s shoes, Roses are Red, Shoes are Black – The Book, and she decided to write her own poem about the pleasures of writing and how to make it richer. The poem is lots of fun. You’ll find it here.

I plan to give the book to Alice for Mother’s Day (May 13). She doesn’t know about it yet. I thought you might be interested in giving it as a gift to an elder in your life too, or, considering the whimsy of these poems, children might like to read it or have it read to them. Come to think of it, just about anybody who likes shoes would enjoy it. Maybe you’d like a copy for yourself. I have to say, it’s a mighty sweet little book.

Click to enlarge image.

The preface is a radically abbreviated version of the blog post. From then on, it’s entirely a book of the wonderful, funny, and quirky poems written by readers of this blog, combined with photographs. You can preview a few pages of the book and/or buy it here, or just click the Book Preview in the upper right-hand corner of this page. (Text and pictures look a little fuzzy in the preview, but they are sharp and clear in the actual book.)

It comes in soft cover, hard cover with a dust jacket, hard cover with “image wrap,” and an iPhone or iPad version.

Although it may seem likely that great riches will flow from a book about a pair of shoes purchased by an elderly woman at Goodwill, we understand that this might not happen. The goal is to make a few people happy.

I want to thank the readers who responded so spontaneously and with such good humor to the original post. You took time out of your day to make something special for Alice, whom most of you have never even met. As you know, she is thrilled with the poems.

I don’t know what other bloggers get from writing their posts, but your presence, all of you, makes this World of Bloggery a true pleasure for me. Thank you, as always, for stopping by, and please feel free to share the news about Roses Are Red, Shoes Are Black with your friends. Easy and fun to do:

Bob and Jo, two satisfied readers of "Roses Are Red, Shoes Are Black."

I was incredulous. Even though I grew up among Alice and her five sisters, storytellers every one, my grandparents’ lives are a book that never completely closes. Just when I think I know everything there is to know about them, the circus rolls into view.

Ludvig, aka Louie

Several times over the years I’ve read the seven page handwritten account of Louie’s life.The day that he and his brother, small children, and their father, a young Civil War veteran, witnessed Jessie James and the Younger Brothers rob the bank in Northfield, Minnesota, is on the first page. “I was standing on the corner of Main and Division St. with my Brother John taking in the show. The Robbers riding up and down the street and chasing…”

Louie's view from Division Street, Northfield, Minnesota (1876).

The pages following that infamous event are filled with horrific stories of blizzards, storms, floods, and drownings on various farms and ranches; the deaths of his parents, his harsh life as an exploited orphan, a dirty and hungry little boy with nothing but his pride; his love of books, his attempts to hook up with relatives who didn’t really want him, and later his failed ranch, his failed farm, his meat market, his trials as a rural mailman (horse and buckboard wagon), sheriff’s deputy, and much more, but not one peep about working in a circus.

Louie's Life Story

“Are you sure?” I asked Alice.

She ignored my question. “You can’t read that book I just finished,” she said, “because you’ll be upset. They don’t treat animals right in a circus.”

“Yes, I know. But what about your father working in one? What did he do?”

“All I remember,” she said, “is that he was young, just a kid, and he had a circus job where he went around with snakes in his pockets.”

We both settled back for a moment to try to imagine what possible circus job would offer this harrowing opportunity. Assistant to the Snake Charmer? Big Tent Mouse Patrol Officer? Scary Kid?

Alice does not like snakes. In Iowa, she would not enter the backyard for fear of them, while my father spent every summer of the last two decades of his life in his backyard where he was always planting his garden, watering flowers, or trimming trees. Visiting cats and dogs and a stream of fearless bunnies, squirrels, chipmunks and, I’m sure, plenty of snakes kept him company, the wild things edging so close sometimes that I would marvel whenever I stopped to watch this little Eden from the kitchen window.

Meanwhile, Alice discovered snakes on the enclosed porch and in the garage. Every summer, all summer long, snakes threatened from every corner. She once displayed a mark on her arm she said was the result of a snakebite that occurred while she was sleeping.

This was all quite a switch from the woman who calmly hung clothes on the line in the backyard of our Dakota house when I was a small child sitting in the dirt of the vegetable garden nearby and munching on freshly pulled carrots while painting captured baby garter snakes with my watercolor set.

You’d think that she, daughter of pioneers, would have come to her fear of snakes honestly because North Dakota was loaded with rattlers not that long ago. Homesteaders could have filled volumes with snake anecdotes, if only they’d had the time or inclination.

I remember one day (when I was three or four years old) working hard with my red tin shovel to dig a hole next to the house where we all lived, a big extended family in a tiny set of rooms.

The house in about 1952.

The next morning I came back to my hole and discovered a large green snake had coiled up in the cool and moist cubby I’d created all by myself. Delighted, I ran into the house to share the fabulous news with my grandmother, failing to notice that she grabbed a hoe as she hurriedly followed me back to the scene of this miracle.

The hoe came down so fast I didn’t have time to blink. Whop! The snake was separated from his head. My grandmother turned around, leaned the murder weapon against the wall of the house, and went inside. Martha wasn’t only the daughter of pioneers. She was a pioneer, and snakes had just better steer clear of a woman who once clawed her way out of an icy well, that’s about all there is to that.

I reminded Alice of this event in my life and how sad I’d been about the snake dying like a criminal without so much as a trial. “She didn’t know if the snake was poisonous or not,” I said. “He seemed friendly.”

“That’s just what I mean,” she said. “You shouldn’t read that book about the elephants and all those other animals.”

It was time for me to go home. I packed up her library books. “If you remember anything else about your father and the circus, let me know.”

She brightened. “He loved the circus. It came to town once and he was so excited. He took us there.”

I pictured Louie leading his six little dark-haired girls and his single, tow-headed son, the youngest, through their small prairie town to the Big Top. I could almost feel Alice’s mind reeling back as she tried to catch a glimpse of that day, and sure enough, something splashed on the surface of her incredible memory.  “I can still see the tent and smell the horses and remember where we sat in the bleachers and we ate some popcorn. Lillian hated the clowns. She never got over being afraid of clowns.”

“I miss Mattie,” she said. “She’d know all the details about Papa and the circus.” Soon it will be twelve years that Mattie, our family historian, has been gone. We both tried to grasp that loss once again.

Finally, I kissed Alice’s cheek. “Well, we can remember that your father was in the circus,” I said. “We’ll have that much at least. Snake Boy.”

She seemed relieved. Yes, from now on we’ve got Snake Boy.

“Toodle-doo,” she said,  waving. “Ta-ta.”

   A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides —
You may have met Him —
did you not
His notice sudden is —

The Grass divides as with a Comb —
A spotted shaft is seen —
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on —

He likes a Boggy Acre
A floor too cool for Corn —
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot —
I more than once at Noon

Have passed, I thought, a Whiplash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone —

Several of Nature’s People
I know and they know me —
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality—

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone

         –Emily Dickinson

You do nothing but gaze in wonder as your guest, who happens to be a folklorist, goes online in search of natural Easter egg dyes as made by the Folk of Olde. Dubiously, you stand by ready to fetch whatever supplies you own that might coincide with whatever the folk had on hande.

Within moments, the Huffington Post, of all places, promises naturally dyed Easter eggs of the brightest colors, easy to achieve, the author claims, with things like spices, kale, blueberries, etc. You can get results like this:

I didn’t want to give up my kale or organic blueberries for the experiment, but spices…why not? I’m no cook, so out came some organic paprika that this very guest had urged me to purchase several years ago at Whole Paycheck. (Cost: $8 for an ingredient I only associated with a square white tin in Alice’s kitchen, which she shook gingerly in order to add a tasteless red powder to a tasteless goopy dish she called goulash back in the 1950s – I come by my lack of cooking skill honestly). Also, Meg (aka as “the guest”) found a jar of curry powder. In the freezer lay a neglected bag of ancient cranberries that I’d bought one day because they looked pretty.

We boiled eggs, tied rubber bands around them to make stripey designs, and immersed them in colors we thought looked rich and vibrant.

Cranberries

Curry

Paprika

Meg’s sister Susan, an artist, and her family had created beautiful eggs earlier that weekend so, while the eggs soaked, Meg and I looked at their photographs and dreamed big dreams.

Eggs by Susan's son, James.

But our eggs didn’t take to spices and old cranberries. They resisted as if they’d been covered in wax before dipping.

Nevertheless, Meg dandied them up with markers and then requested a basket.

I found a basket in the shape of a goose. It was filled with pennies wrapped in paper rolls by my frugal Aunt Mattie, but I emptied the money out and we stuffed the basket with yellow crepe paper, bits of ribbon and string, and plant material. “Like a nest,” Meg said.

And off we went with the goose full of eggs, a chocolate bunny, a card, and some blackberry jam to see Alice.

The visit went as follows.

First, Alice opened her Easter card, her lottery scratch tickets (she loves these), and her chocolate Easter bunny.

Alice with Easter card.

Then we gave her the basket.

Alice receives her Easter basket.

We told her about our dying project. When asked to guess which spice was used to color the one below, she guessed turmeric. Close enough. This was the curry powder egg:

Meg showed her photographs on her laptop of the eggs made by her family.

Alice marveled at what she saw:

Happy spring!

P.S. Alice won no money whatsoever with those scratch tickets. Last night she told me that she and Celia plan to hitchhike to a casino and try their luck there.

Is this the result of sound medical advice, big doses of Tylenol, your tender, kind, and spirited good wishes, the news that two beloved nieces (Pearl’s daughters) will be coming from the Midwest to visit her this summer, the delightful discovery that Celia’s son is a writer just like her very own daughter except that he has three (self-published) books to prove it, the repair of the swivel on her La-Z-Boy chair by a nice guy named Juan (she couldn’t hear him and called him Ron, but he didn’t seem to mind), who came with me to her apartment early Tuesday morning, tipped the chair upside down, unbolted the broken swiveler (several of its ball bearings had dropped out of service and wandered off into a corner), and installed a new one with shiny new ball bearings in a matter of minutes, which means she will no longer have to stand up and push her La-Z-Boy around to the direction she wants it to face (something I discovered she’d been doing after the doctor’s visit), or all of the above?

Who can say?

As my neighbor Stanley (of Finnish descent) pointed out when he heard about Alice’s troubles and the healing that is progressing, “Norwegians don’t have the reputation for being stubborn for no good reason. That’s what it takes to survive that cold up there.”

I suppose he’s right. We might as well tie up this ever-faster-rolling-ball-of-recovery with that long and tough genetic string.

No doubt Alice will be doing deep knee bends again in the future. And thanks to our friend (and blog reader) Janina, we have an 86 year-old German woman whose strength and flexibility you will marvel at. I’ve watched this very short video a few times and my mouth falls open each time. Talk about stubborn and strong, not to mention inspiring:

More videos and information about the German gymnast, Johanna Quaas, here.

Thank you, Janina!

And thanks so much to all of you for your concern about Alice and for taking time to check in and think good and beautiful thoughts for her. With you on board in Alice’s life, I am one lucky writer, even though I don’t have three books to prove it.

Although we talked a couple of times during the day, she didn’t tell me about this until late Tuesday night. She called then to say she had just fallen, scraped her face on the edge of the dresser, and broken her glasses. She’d been trying to turn down her bed and suddenly her leg buckled under her following a jolt of pain. The comforter slipped away, and she crashed.

The severity of the pain she’d felt that morning, she now revealed, was on a par with the broken hip she experienced two years ago. (See She Walks.) While sitting or lying down at any point during the day, she’d felt no pain, and so she’d hoped it would go away. Instead, the pain was now undermining her ability to walk.

After asking several questions, the on-call doctor concluded it might not be a broken hip, and the stress of ER and an MRI, X-rays, or other tests at that late hour would likely cause more overall damage. She urged us to stay put until Alice’s regular physician, Elizabeth, could see her.

Brio and I spent the night on Alice’s couch, only able to give her our company and concern whenever she tried to adjust her position in bed and moaned in agony. Once, briefly, she wept. A long, hard, pitiful night.

Elizabeth squeezed Alice into a busy schedule the next afternoon and asked her a few questions. For example, could she point the foot on the injured side outward, away from her body? Alice tried it and yes, she could. Could she raise her leg? Yes. Bend her knee? Yes. Had she been doing anything unusual the day before this happened?

To my amazement, the answer to this, too, was yes. Despite my own rigorous interrogation about everything she’d done on Monday, and despite her vehement insistence that she’d done nothing out of the ordinary, she now appeared to consider the doctor’s office equivalent to a court of law where she was sworn to tell the truth. Avoiding my eyes, she confessed to Elizabeth that she’d been neglecting her exercise program lately and so, in an effort to catch up with her 95-year-old self (she’s now 96), on Monday afternoon she’d done twenty-five deep knee bends.

After a few more questions and movement tests, followed by some poking, Elizabeth concluded that a muscular structure known as the Iliotibial band, was in spasm.

A vision of rest, taking it slow and easy, ice and heat, and Tylenol replaced the specter of a broken hip that would require surgery, mega-drugs, weeks of nursing home care, many months of rehab, etc.  As we walked out of the medical building (a big “Ouch!” at least every three steps), Alice suggested a hot cup of cocoa would be very welcome, and then she sang the praises of Elizabeth as we drove down the big hill that holds the sprawling OHSU medical center.

Oregon Health & Science University

“She’s so easy to talk to!” she said, among other things. “I feel I can tell her anything.”

After the cocoa she was anxious to get home and rest. The past several days have not been easy for her. She’s still in pain, and it’s a long, slow road back and forth to the dining room, so sometimes she asks for meals to be brought to her apartment. She’s a bit depressed, and she misses Celia.

Luckily, I could get her eyeglasses fixed fairly quickly so she can read and do puzzles.

“What happened here?” asked the man at the optometry clinic, when he took the wounded glasses from my hands.

“A 96 year-old woman did a few too many deep knee bends,” I explained.

Now the glasses are fixed and back on Alice’s pretty face as we wait for her body to mend. Although her bifocals had nothing to do with her fall, I took Elizabeth’s advice and ordered a new pair of glasses for her that are not bifocals. She can use the bifocals for reading but not for walking around. Apparently, bifocals and progressives are the cause of many falls among the elderly.

So watch your step. And take it easy on the squats. And if, like Alice, you’re having a hard time, remember “Everybody Hurts” from R.E.M.:

(Lyrics for this song are on youtube.)

Neutrogena with Retinol

“I’m going natural,” I said.

“That’s not a good idea.” She tossed the tube in our cart and off we went in search of toothpaste, bread, milk, cereal, etc.

Sometimes shopping with Alice is an exercise in redirection. She has energy for the grocery store so rarely that, once inside, she tends to want whatever she sees. For example, when we came to the candy aisle, she spotted her favorite:

I reminded her that the dentist doesn’t want her to suck on anything with sugar in it. “Fastest way to a cavity,” he’d said.

I pointed to some crackers nearby that looked healthy.

She countered by dropping a package of Twizzlers into the cart. “I deserve something good once in a while.”

I could not argue with this, though I did consider arguing whether or not Twizzlers are “good.”

When we got back to her apartment, we unloaded her groceries and put them away, and she sank into her La-Z-Boy for a nap. Back home, I promptly forgot all about the purchases.

When I arrived the next day for a visit, she told me there had been a “little problem.”

“I washed my face as usual last night,” she said, rocking briskly, “and then I reached for the tube of Neutrogena and gave it a good squeeze and rubbed it in hard to make sure it got down into all the folds and wrinkles. Right away I felt this burning. Oh my, how it burned!” She placed three fingers lightly on her cheek and tapped. “It never did that before when I used it, so I wondered if I’d put on too much.”

I became concerned. Maybe the tube had been tampered with. Some misogynistic maniac had injected antifreeze or hydrochloric acid into tubes of Neutrogena wrinkle cream.

“Then I realized what I’d done.” She pulled the new tube of toothpaste from beside her on the chair and grinned.

The Crest was supposed to contain extra-strength “whitener,” but her face looked no whiter than usual and none the worse for the hard rubbing. I felt greatly relieved and suggested that toothpaste might turn out to be as effective on wrinkles as Neutrogena. Also, a lot less expensive.

“That’s ridiculous!” she said. “I’m not going to tell you things any more.”

“Oh, I hope you will.”

And sure enough, she soon told me that she’d had a long phone call with her niece back in Iowa, she’s still crazy about her new shoes, lunch was disappointing except for laughing over various things with Celia, Mr. Fickle has been taking lengthy naps lately in the Rosary Room (yes, still wearing his coat all the time), and the Dapper Man seems always to be digging up earth outside her window, preparing the community garden for planting.

Then she pulled out the list she made of all the people she greets or waves to every day. She has added to the list since the last time I saw it. We went through the names, and I remembered how unhappy she’d been when she first moved to The Place, but then she met Irene who, at the time, was 107 years old and had the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.

But Irene is gone now, and we didn’t talk about those early days. Alice held the reins of the conversation lightly, and we kept moving forward.

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent – that is to triumph over old age.
– Thomas Bailey Aldrich

You’ll find other mix-ups here, and again here, and also here.