A Family Secret – Part Three
March 13, 2011
In the days that followed Siri’s death, Mattie learned what she could by walking around town and making herself small and inconsequential, seeming to pass by but doubling back and stepping into shadows to listen while grownups talked. Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
A Family Secret – Part Two
March 10, 2011
As a small child, Mattie followed the moon, amazed that every night brought a change. She would follow it still as an old woman, standing out on her back steps in North Dakota—never mind sub-zero weather. She wanted to see it without the filter of window glass. Her devotion was absolute.
Like this:
A Family Secret – Part One
March 7, 2011
Mattie was ten years old the summer of 1921 when her cousin Siri moved to town and got a job at the post office. All day Siri stood behind a narrow window on one side of a high-ceilinged room with a wooden floor, and Mr. Peaks, the druggist, stood at his own counter on the pharmacy side. Farmers, merchants, and housewives drifted in and out for pills, powders, syrups, letters, packages, and stamps. Mattie, a child in love with books and the moon, soon fell in love with Siri too.
Siri stayed in a second-floor room at a boarding house at the end of Main Street. Her window overlooked the railroad tracks and was partly shaded by a spindly cottonwood. She was nineteen, and this move from the family farm into town was meant to be a new beginning. Instead it was the last summer of her life.
The circumstances around her death were secret and shameful. To counteract them, the editor of the local paper wrote a flowery obituary for his four hundred readers that made it sound as if she simply floated off one day into heaven. I found out what happened to her because Mattie, when she reached her eighties, told me what she knew. Read the rest of this entry »
Whatever Libby Wants-With One Exception
February 28, 2011
Last week a plump 94-year-old woman named Libby sat down in Irene’s empty chair in the dining room. The staff had picked Libby to be Alice’s new dining partner.
It’s not going well. Read the rest of this entry »
The Old Country
February 26, 2011
Many thanks to our friend Claudia for sharing this short, stunning time-lapse video by Randy Halverson: Dakota on a February night.
Sub Zero – winter night timelapse from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.
To see more of Randy’s work, go here: http://vimeo.com/20062206
P.S. Got some feedback that the video gets “stuck” occasionally. If that happens to you, just let it play through once without bothering to watch, then start it again. The second time should be smooth.
Like this:
Another Country
February 21, 2011
Recently, the Dapper Man stopped by Alice’s table in the dining room to chat, and he abruptly asked her how old she was. She answered that she’s 95.
“NO!” he said. Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
The Runaway Buggy
February 12, 2011
During our evening phone call the other night, Alice announced proudly (and out of the blue) that she is the survivor of a runaway buggy.
Not this:
Not this:
What’s in the Way
February 8, 2011
Bad weather prohibited a trip to Wisconsin for Pearl’s funeral. A friend suggested that Alice and I have our own service. Read the rest of this entry »
Pearl – April 19, 1920-January 30, 2011
January 30, 2011
Alice’s last remaining sister, Pearl (youngest of the six girls), died early this morning.
Some of you read about Pearl in a previous post.
She was nearly blind. She couldn’t read or even watch television any more, and she didn’t feel well most of the time. She talked to Alice every night. Lately, she’s been saying she wanted to die, and she hoped it would be while she slept. It was.
Alice’s last words to her were “I love you.” Those were mine, too. She turned her considerable warmth in my direction the moment I was born and never once, throughout all these years, pulled it away.
I stayed with Pearl and her truck driver husband, Huber, many times when I was a small child. My uncle, a big man, would lie flat on his back on the floor and let me climb onto his stomach and bounce up and down and tell him the craziest stories I could imagine about anybody and anything, real or not, that popped into my mind. He laughed loud and hard and that encouraged me. So did the fact that Pearl sat nearby writing down every word I said. No wonder I thought I could be a writer.
But I can’t write any more about Pearl today. One day I will.
After Irene
January 24, 2011
“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” -Gustave Flaubert
Alice wanted to know if the Dollar Store was anywhere near the hearing aid specialist we were going to see. Ever since our first trip to the big store filled with twinkling bargains, she always asks if it’s on our route. Friday was her first day outside of The Place for three weeks. The flu quarantine has been lifted.
But we were not going within range of the Dollar Store. Read the rest of this entry »
Goodnight, Irene
January 16, 2011
When Alice arrived in the dining room, finally released from her apartment after a 12-day flu quarantine, she noticed Irene’s place mat was upside down. Without a thought, she turned it over and started looking around to see who else had been liberated. Read the rest of this entry »
Busted!
January 12, 2011
Alice was calmly eating a piece of toast in her apartment this morning when suddenly ten people came bursting through the door.
Even though the toast was burned, she didn’t know it had set off the smoke alarm because she couldn’t hear the smoke alarm. She’d been deposited in the Rosary Room while staff people threw open her windows and waved newspapers and magazines around. Read the rest of this entry »
Watching for Trees
January 6, 2011
Alice wanted to eat lunch at the Red Lobster, the older Midwesterner’s idea of a great fish and seafood place. I mentioned the nearby ocean and rivers filled with fish that were not available to her in Iowa. “Fish places are everywhere out here.”
But no, she wanted the Red Lobster. The closest one was tucked away in a suburb, nearly an hour from The Place.
We sat in a booth and ate some fish who should not have died in order to be cooked in such a ho-hum manner. I told Alice that in the afterlife we’d have to face these fish and apologize. She reminded me that when she was eighty she had passed away while traveling to a family reunion and been CPR’d back to life (long story; later post), and she’s pretty sure we can expect no afterlife. She said she experienced “nothing, just absolutely nothing.”
“But,” she added wryly, “maybe something different will happen the next time I die.” Read the rest of this entry »
Dancing in a New Year
January 2, 2011
Alice has fallen in love with a big white Victorian house in southeast Portland that belongs to our friends, Thalia and Mike. The wood inside is richly dark, and the colors are deep reds and golds and blues. Best of all, it’s filled with treasures from their worldwide travels.
We were invited to come on New Year’s Day. Mike had been called to work, so the three of us (actually four, including Brio) were on our own. A Christmas tree stood in the corner of the dining room. The house smelled of pine. Read the rest of this entry »
The Two of Us
December 31, 2010
On Christmas day, I brought Alice a fanciful stocking stuffed with good things, thinking it would bring back memories of her childhood Christmases, but it turned out she’d never had such a thing in all her 95 years.
No wonder I’d grown up without one. The things we don’t know about our own mothers. Read the rest of this entry »
A Christmas Poem for Kittens
December 22, 2010
This poem is loosely based on “The Night Before Christmas.” It was written by a reclusive feline poet with a nurturing heart. She wishes to teach kittens the secret of Christmas—and year round—happiness.
Reclusive Poet
Dollar Store Revisited
December 16, 2010
We were gliding down the soap and lotion aisle of the Dollar Store, Alice with her walker and me with a cart, when she craned her neck, looked around, and asked, “I wonder where they keep the nightcaps.”
Maybe it’s the season, but I immediately pictured this:
Happy birthday, Emily Dickinson!
December 10, 2010
Today is the 180th birthday of the great American poet, Emily Dickinson.
Several years ago I wrote a poem in her honor titled “Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List.” Today, Garrison Keillor is reading the poem on The Writer’s Almanac. You can read it or listen to him reading it here if you like, and you’ll also find a short and fascinating essay Mr. Keillor wrote about the poet’s life.
Emily Dickinson
Needless to say, Alice is pleased about the reading. Garrison Keillor is, after all, a Midwesterner, and so she believes he can be trusted to do a good job.
In case any of you are in a book-buying mood for Christmas, don’t forget the two famous collections: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Johnson, and The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by R.W. Franklin.
I just started reading a delicious new book about her, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, by Jerome Charyn.
“Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List” is available in two anthologies: I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: His Poems and Her Poems Collected in Pairs, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul Janeczko, and Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson, edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammarro.
Special thanks today to my good friend, Mary Narkiewicz, whose passion for ED—her world and her work—is contagious.
Time Traveling
December 5, 2010
Sometimes when we’re together or talking on the phone, Alice and I zip around in time at our whim, untroubled by either sequiturs or non sequiturs. (How did they get to be so important anyway?) Last night our phone conversation started with her telling me that Mrs. Obama wore a pretty pale blue sweater with a beaded collar to lunch. She was not talking about Michele Obama at a White House luncheon, but about a woman named Susie who had often worn an Obama sweatshirt to the dining room throughout the last Presidential campaign, as had her husband.
In 2008 Alice was new to The Place. She didn’t know their names, so she called them the Obama People, as in: “The Obama People came down the elevator separately tonight. First Mr. Obama came down and then a few minutes later Mrs. Obama came down and she was mad at him because he hadn’t waited for her. Mrs. Obama stopped at my table and said, ‘I’ve never thought about divorcing him but plenty of times I’ve thought about killing him.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Alice, aka Johnny Boy
November 27, 2010
Alice and her family were often visited by Mr. and Mrs. Pletcher, well-off farmers who came into town regularly for supplies. The moment Mr. Pletcher headed off to make his purchases, Mrs. Pletcher removed her large pink corset, draped it over the back of my grandmother’s sofa, lay on her back with her knees raised up underneath her long skirt and, each time, asked the same question: “Can you see anything, Martha?”
What’s Up There?
November 20, 2010
One day Alice pointed up at the sky and asked, “What’s up there? Just air?”
I asked if she meant the sky that we see or beyond it, and she answered, “Beyond it.”
We talked about the universe for a few minutes, but it didn’t seem to make sense to her in the way I expected it to, so I decided to pick up some children’s books at the library—children’s books because the concepts she had lost or that had gone missing for one reason or another would be explained simply and in print large enough for her failing eyesight.
Yesterday, while the wind tore at the remaining leaves on the trees outside The Place and the rain came in bitter spits, Brio and I made ourselves comfortable in Alice’s small apartment. Brio curled up on the sofa; Alice and I sat in chairs pushed close together under her special bright lamp. Read the rest of this entry »
In the Beginning, Martha
November 14, 2010
One winter day when my grandmother, Martha, was twenty-six years old she needed to go outside and get some water from the well. The well wasn’t far from the house, but fetching water on a Dakota farm on such a cold day meant she either had to bundle up her two children–Marie, age four, and LaRue, a baby–and take them with her, or leave them inside. My grandfather was away.
The fireplace warmed only one room of the two-room sod house, so she spread a quilt on the floor, put the children on the quilt, gave them some bread, and placed two dolls she’d made of wooden spools on the edge of the quilt for them to find when they’d finished the bread. She grabbed a woolen shawl and a pail and set out. In a few minutes she’d be back. They’d hardly notice her absence.
She started down the frozen path to the well. Blades of sunlight gleaming off a mower struck her eyes. She raised her right arm to block the glare and hurried on, worried that the children might crawl in the opposite direction from the dolls, toward the fireplace. In her rush she didn’t see the thick wedge of ice around the well’s wooden skirt. When the toe of her boot hit the wedge, she slipped and tumbled headlong into the icy water.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mix-Ups
November 11, 2010
There have been a few. Some examples:
Mix-Up #1
During our phone call last night, Alice told me that Mr. Whipple had taken her hand and patted it when she passed his table in the dining room.
“You mean Mr. Fickle,” I said.
“What did I say?”
“You said Mr. Whipple.”
“Who is Mr. Whipple?”
I reminded her that he’s the guy who can’t stop himself from squeezing the Charmin.
“Oh, right,” she said. “No wonder I thought of him.”
Mix-Up #2
The other day as we drove home from an appointment, a dreary and relentless rain fell. Alice, lost in thought, stared straight ahead. “Poor Mary out in the rain,” she said finally. “Fall, winter, and spring.”
I nodded, thinking about our friend Mary who takes the bus to work every day and spends hours waiting at bus stops throughout soggy Portland winters. “It’s too bad she never learned to drive,” I said.
I glanced over at my mother, who was looking at me as if she’d never met me, let alone given birth to me. Read the rest of this entry »
Like this:
As the Cap Turns
November 6, 2010
“I went out one door and blew in another,” Alice told me after she tried going out for a walk on an especially gusty day last week. She’s been feeling upbeat about her sister Pearl’s return from the hospital to her apartment at the assisted living facility in Wisconsin. They’ve been talking on the phone again every evening, and each time they talk Pearl’s voice sounds stronger.
So, in a celebratory mood, out she went, the wind attacked her hair, and in she came. She decided to walk around inside the building, and it proved so satisfying that she did it again today because it was raining. She walked through the Rosary room door and spotted Mr. Fickle. He sat by himself, slumped in a chair, his back to her. His body seemed too still. “That,” she said, “took the wind out of my sails.” Alarmed, she took a few steps closer. Suddenly he raised an arm and waved at an aide who walked briskly through the room on her way to prep the dining room for dinner.
“He was waving, so I knew he wasn’t dying,” she told me cheerfully. Then she reprimanded herself. “Alice, that’s not funny!”
She stopped to ask him if he was greeting all the girls going by. He answered with a vigorous “You bet!”
“He had his cap on,” she said. “Not backwards.” She had not approved of the backward cap, which was the way he wore it on Irene’s birthday. It made no sense to her that a man in his eighties would indulge in such behavior.
He looked off to the hallway on the right and announced that he could see someone coming. “Well good for you,” Alice told him and went on her way.
In the dining room an hour later she saw Mr. Fickle in his cap, which was still correctly positioned, bill over his brow. He approached a woman in a wheelchair, hugged her, then headed toward his table. But the woman called him back. He returned, listened to a few words she spoke into his ear, nodded, and pushed her chair toward the elevator. “Next thing you know,” Alice said, “up he goes in the elevator with her. She lives on the second floor.”
Alice’s table is near the elevator. She kept an eye on it while dinner was served.
“Some time later,” she told me, “here comes Mr. Fickle with that woman. They got off the elevator and guess what?” She paused. “His cap was on backwards!”
He returned the woman to her table and made the rounds, greeting various friends. “He was just all over the place,” Alice said, “running around with his cap on backwards, as if no one knew it was on the right way when he took her upstairs.”
I asked if she thought anyone would have noticed. “Anyone but you, I mean.”
“Maybe not.” She started to laugh. “They’d have to be interested.”
When she walked through the Rosary room on the way back to her apartment, as she does every night after dinner, she noted that Mr. Fickle, who had just finished setting up chairs for the Rosary group, did not wear his cap at all. “Not backward. Not forward,” she said. “Cap off.”
“Cap on chair?” I asked.
“Cap on chair. That’s right.”
He sat down on another chair to wait for the group to join him.
“I told him that he’d better wave at me,” Alice said.
He bypassed the wave and went for a hug, then added a kiss on the cheek, to which she responded, “Thank you.”
“Now that I’m telling you this silly story,” she said, “I’m wondering why I bothered to say thank you after getting a kiss and hug. Why on earth would I do that?”
I thought that my mother, who had been anxious and upset about Pearl for the past couple of weeks, felt relieved at her sister’s improvement and was enjoying herself, and that she felt grateful to Mr. Fickle for not being ill, or worse, in his chair that afternoon and for continuing to be the source of her fun. But before I could say any of that, she moved on, lowering her voice for dramatic effect. “Now what do you suppose could have happened up in that woman’s room,” she asked, “so that he came downstairs with his cap on backwards?”
Any ideas?
If you need inspiration, click here for a 30-second video.
And/or just think about this:
Words of Wisdom
November 5, 2010
Today Words of Wisdom, a web site connecting people who read and write blogs, is highlighting Go Ask Alice…When She’s 94. I want to thank Sandy and Pam, who run the Words of Wisdom site, and I’d like to welcome fellow blog writers who are stopping by because of their recommendation.
Some background: My mother, Alice, moved from Iowa to Oregon, where I live, two years ago and now has an apartment in an assisted living center. She calls her new home The Place. I’m using the blog to keep track of some moments with Alice that I don’t ever want to forget. I also write about other family members from time to time. This week’s post, for example, is about Alice’s sister, Pearl (age 90).
Sandy and Pam suggest offering three previous posts to give an idea of the subject. To get to know Alice better, I recommend:
Mr. Fickle is my mother’s name for a man in his eighties who lives at The Place. He kissed Alice’s cheek on New Year’s Day and occasionally he holds her hand in a passing Hello a bit longer than, as she puts it, is necessary. Read more…
I decided to extend the celebration of Alice’s 95th birthday by smuggling a contraband item into her apartment: a toaster. Read more…
About six months ago Alice was sitting on the edge of the bed folding laundry, one of her favorite activities, and suddenly she found herself on the floor. Read more…
Thanks for visiting.
And, as always, many thanks to this blog’s regular readers.
Pearl
October 28, 2010
Every night Alice talks to her sister Pearl (90), who lives in Wisconsin. They do not agree on politics or religion. Pearl watches Fox News and swears by it. Alice watches CNN and is not so sure all that they tell her is the whole truth. Nevertheless, they are the only two remaining from a pack of seven (six girls; one boy), and they are loyal despite their differences. But this week there have been no nightly conversations. Read the rest of this entry »
She Walks
October 23, 2010
About six months ago Alice was sitting on the edge of the bed folding laundry, one of her favorite activities, and suddenly found herself on the floor. She couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. “I’ll be okay,” she said as paramedics surrounded her. But no. Her right hip was broken and had to be replaced. After the surgery she lay in a hospital bed under the spell of the painkiller Oxycodone. She hallucinated dancers on the walls, as well as elegantly dressed couples going out for dinner at candlelit restaurants. “Who’s that man?” she’d ask me as she looked across the room at the blank wall beside the whiteboard that listed her doctor for the day, and I would respond, “Tell me what he looks like.” She’d describe some tuxedoed stringbean, and I’d say, “It’s Fred Astaire. No? Cary Grant. No? Frank Sinatra. No?” We did this over and over, and she always shook her head and insisted I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Every day the same nurse came to her hospital bed and bathed her. One day a new nurse showed up. She wore a purple scarf wrapped decoratively around her small, perfect head. Alice found the scarf fascinating and wanted to know where the woman was from.
“Zimbabwe,” she answered.
She asked her name.
“Queen.”
Alice’s eyes, dimmed by pain, met mine. “Queen of Zimbabwe,” she said. “I wonder how much this bath is going to cost me.”
All three of us found this funny, but Alice was too deep in Oxy-fog to laugh.
Although the surgeon had confidence, everybody else at the hospital–floor doctors, nurses, and aides–continually reminded me that my mother was probably too old to survive a broken hip.
“Like you say, she’s 94,” they’d invariably start out, even though I hadn’t said a word about how old she was. But I guess they didn’t want to be responsible for the long, winding road of years that had led to this pretty pass. “Well, you know,” they’d say, “these things happen and then…” They’d trail off, and I would point out that she was still in there, still Alice, still making jokes. It was plain to me that she didn’t know how serious a broken hip was for someone in her age group, or she had forgotten. I instructed them not to tell her and to let her keep trying to be whole again. And so she continued to expect herself to improve and she did, little by little, inciting disbelief, astonishment and, eventually, celebration.
After she left the hospital, the doctor ordered her to go to a nursing home for a month. Her first room-mate talked incessantly. That inmate was followed by another who slept with her television set turned on full volume all night long. Finally, along came a woman who sat in her wheelchair and banged the door against the wall, trying to get someone’s attention so she could go to the bathroom. Alice stayed sane by doing books of word puzzles. Whenever I complained about anything to the kind and overworked staff, they reminded me there weren’t enough of them to get around to everyone in a timely manner. I moved Alice back to The Place with a stack of puzzle books all filled in. “Don’t lose those,” she said. They were artifacts of a time gone way wrong that she had survived.
All the physical therapists who visited her apartment for lengthy sessions of exercises fell in love with her. “She does everything we ask!” Each of them (a rotating staff of three) reported this with utter amazement. I wondered what other people did in order to walk again. Half of what they asked? None?
When physical therapy finally ended, the head of the team called me and said, “I’ve enjoyed every single second I’ve spent with your mother. We all feel the same way.”
Thanks to their dedication and her own, Alice now goes for walks almost every day, as long as there’s no wind to muss her hair. The other day I joined her for a short stroll in the sun.
“That sky,” she said looking up into a marbly blue, “reminds me of my new sweatshirt.” Before I could say anything she started to laugh, “Oh, what a thing to do to the beautiful sky, to compare it to a sweatshirt!”
You decide:
Sky
New sweatshirt
As always she was intoxicated by trees and greenery.
Alice on a walk
But her arms began to ache from pushing the walker. “My arms aren’t so good today,” she said. “And my shoulders are hurting. They don’t work right any more. Have you seen how shabby they’ve gotten?” She turned around to show me that she could not make her shoulders raise her arms very high.
“But you are walking very well,” I said.
“I can walk. Yes!”
That night she called to say she was soaking her feet in a white vinegar foot bath and had added a few drops of cocoa butter lotion from the Dollar Store. She swears by vinegar’s power to cure all aches and pains. (Here’s a list of the wonders of vinegar.)
And while she soaked her feet, she said, she was sipping her nightly drink, which she calls a Tartini.
Tartini Recipe:
1/4 glass cranberry juice (straight; no sugar)
1/4 glass red wine
1 tbsp Bragg’s vinegar
Yes, it’s awful, but she swears she has even seen a few strands of black hair among the white since she started this regimen. “Vinegar is good for everything.”
She told me she was looking forward to watching the President on television. “He’s here in Portland today, you know,” she said, sounding as pleased as if he’d come to town to see her personally which, if he knew her, he might find useful.
Irene’s Big Day
October 14, 2010
To celebrate turning 110, Irene wore a tiara with Happy Birthday spelled out in rhinestones. Someone tied balloons to her walker. People poured through the gates as if dispatched by the king to discover the secret of longevity. People she’d never met. They probed for the answer, even though few among them would probably care to live a day over eighty-five. She told one stranger that she used to drink bourbon but now it’s red wine. When another asked what she and her friends liked to talk about, she answered crisply, “None of your business.”
She mentioned to the gathering crowd that she’d gone to Reno when she’d turned 100. She joked that she could still do all the things she was able to do at 109. She remembered a husband she had loved. She ate cake.
All the usual suspects drifted in and out of the scene. Mr. Fickle lingered in the little post office after others had come to wait for the mail delivery and gone back to their apartments when it arrived. “I wasn’t sure it was him,” Alice said in her nightly report. “I was sitting at my table in the dining room and he had his cap on backwards.” At The Place a backward cap is a rarity. “But I knew it was him when I saw him kiss the mail girl. I want to call her the mail maid.” She stopped and thought about this. “Maybe the mail maid was sad about something. Or maybe he knows her from somewhere else.”
“Maybe he’s just being Mr. Fickle,” I suggested.
“That could be.”
Irene was too exhausted to eat her dinner. Also, she said she’d eaten a lot of cake at her party, which Alice did not attend. “Too much noise. Too many people.” As they sat together at dinner, the person Alice calls the Dancing Man approached–he who moves jauntily from side to side as he goes along in his walker to the tune of (in Alice’s mind anyway) Some Sunday Morning. He wanted to take Irene’s photograph. Irene, subject of picture-taking all day, agreed. “Then off he went ‘Some Sunday Morning’ back to his table,” Alice said.
Shortly after that, the Dapper Man dropped by with his camera. Irene smiled for the picture.
Alice wearied of reporting on Irene’s big day to me and changed the subject. She told me that when the aide came to her apartment with her medications, she took them and started to throw away the little white paper cup they came in. But the aide stopped her. “There’s a lady here who collects those,” she said.
For a moment Alice was speechless. The day had held such a huge event, and now this: someone who collects the little white paper cups that pills are delivered in. Then she said to the aide, “Whoever that is must be really hard up for something to collect.”
“I probably shouldn’t have said that,” she told me. “But why…?”
We were as unable to find a satisfactory answer to this question as were those who came to seek the secret of longevity. On the one hand, here was Irene, starting out in 1900, collecting years one by one, outliving everyone she knew from a life that contained love and marriage and friends, but still enjoying an occasional glass of Merlot and an annual birthday bash. On the other, a woman somewhere in the building collecting tiny white paper cups.
We hung up on the mystery of it all.
Oh, Irene. 110!
Some Sunday morning is going to be
Some Sunday morning for someone and me.
Bells will be chiming an old melody,
Spec’lly for someone and me.
There’ll be an organ playing,
Friends and relations will stare,
Say, can’t you hear them saying,
Gee, what a peach of a pair?
Some Sunday morning we’ll walk down the aisle,
She’ll be so nervous and I’ll try to smile,
Things sure look rosy for someone and me,
Some Sunday morning, you’ll see.
Music by M.K. Jerome and Ray Heindorf; lyrics by Ted Koehler
Actors: Clint Walker, Joan Weldon, and…???
An interesting British television documentary on scientist Aubrey De Grey’s exploration of living forever located here.
(The names of residents and others in this blog have been changed to protect privacy.)
Like this:
To See or Not to See
October 10, 2010
Every six weeks my mother and I sit for up to an hour in a chilly waiting room in northwest Portland until a nurse from Ukraine calls out Ah-Leece! She ushers us into a room with what Alice calls a “tilt-back chair,” and we wait for the doctor to appear. He will dismiss us anywhere from an hour to three hours later with a bag full of eye drops.
The young doctor grew up ten blocks from our house in Iowa. He attended the same school I attended, but thirty years later. Sometimes I want to tell him about the shortcut I used to take through the neighborhood cornfield–crows cruising overhead in an opaline blue sky and the rustle of mice in fallen shafts. But why would he care? Before he was out of diapers, that cornfield had been plowed under and turned into blocks of apartment houses. Place has always been important to Alice, and she feels connected to this man because of it, but he’s a taciturn Iowan, so it’s hard to say if he feels the same about her, or if she is just another elderly patient with a degenerative eye condition. He sees so many every day and he gives them all injections. In their eyes. Including Alice. Okay, not another word about injections, but maybe this is a good time to bring up that expression we’ve all heard and shrugged off but may want to reconsider: Old age is not for sissies.
The treatments help Alice keep what little remains of her sight. She loves to read, to watch people, to see what they’re wearing, hairstyles, clothes, make up. She spins stories about what she sees, even though her vision problems leave her with a world partially obscured by a black spot smack in the middle of both eyes: The silver-haired woman with a white cane in the waiting room doesn’t get along with her son, who sits beside her for short stints and then wanders off. Those two men are army buddies, the way they lean into each other and laugh (I think they’re probably lovers). The child who waits with her grandmother stomps twice around the room singing Who Let the Dogs Out at full volume, and Alice concludes the grandmother regrets bringing her along. Each new person walking in gets tagged with a new story.
My father always took me for a milkshake after trips to the dentist, and I always take Alice for hot chocolate after these appointments. But this last visit she wanted something else. At The Place she’d heard buzz about a store where everything costs only a dollar. She wanted to go, even though her left eye, her good eye, was blurry after the you-know-what. (Sorry.) I knew my mother, child of parents who’d skidded by on next to nothing long before the Depression even started, would love a giant store filled with glittery and cheap goods.
She guided her walker up and down the aisles, tossing things into the cart that I pushed: cocoa butter body lotion (“This stuff really works!”), toothpaste, chocolate covered peanuts, mouthwash the shocking blue of an as yet undiscovered Hawaiian lagoon, hand towels, soap, curlers, a hairbrush, and more. “I’m so happy,” she said. “I love it here.”
Mr. Fickle, whose name she mysteriously changed for the day to Mr. Feegle, has a birthday coming up so she headed for the cards. “I don’t think Mr. Feegle would like this one.” She held up a cartoon of a wizened face and read it.
Outside: You don’t look your age…
Inside: NOBODY looks that old.
She found that funny, but discarded other jokey cards with elders whose breasts drooped to the floor, whose wigs went flying off in rain storms, whose false teeth floated in water-filled glasses, or got stuck all by their lonesome in birthday cakes, or dropped into the flush of a toilet and, like the supposedly amused recipient, swirled around in the final drain of life. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered quietly. Because of her eye problems, now with the addition of blurriness, nearly every card ended up north, south, east or west of where it had started. I tried to slip them back into place without her noticing, even though I wanted to rip them to pieces.
She picked up a large card with a river scene and the silhouette of a tall strong male fishing. “To a WONDERFUL man,” the outside read. Inside, it claimed no one was kinder than he. “If only it didn’t have that word wonderful on it…” She placed it in a slot two rows south of where it belonged.
She finally settled on one with candles and a blessing. The message was about gentleness. “He is gentle,” she insisted.
We inched home in rush hour traffic. “It’s a good thing I’m not driving,” she said. “All I’d do is look at the trees.” I thought about her lack of skill at the wheel even back in the Midwest where trees were few and far between and her vision was excellent: the time she passed another car on a hill while I screamed beside her, the time she pulled out of a gas station and into a lane of oncoming traffic, and countless other close calls. She’s as bad as her father, famous for driving a borrowed Model T so fast over railroad tracks that all seven of his children, each holding a paper bag of popcorn, bounced so high that not a single kernel stayed in the bags.
After living in Portland awhile, she can now tell when we’re approaching home. I heard a little sigh.
I got her new goods put away, settled her in, and placed her eye drops on the desk next to her La-Z-Boy. I leaned down to kiss her goodbye. She thanked me for a good time. “We got some really good bargains today, didn’t we?”
She had pushed the appointment–that black spot smack in the middle of her day–out of sight.
Like this:
The Envelope, Please
October 2, 2010
Yesterday I went to visit Alice and found her wearing a soft turquoise jacket and some eye-catching blue glass beads (yes, Goodwill). She said she’d stayed inside her apartment all day because she hadn’t felt well, and I mentioned that it was a shame no one had seen her, especially You-Know-Who.
This morning she called to report what she’d done after I left. She said she’d thought about my comment, that it was too bad Mr. Fickle hadn’t seen her. She has been liking him again these days because she saw him comforting a woman who was crying. “He tries to help people.”
So when she heard the evening Rosary prayers winding down, she peeked out the door. Sure enough, Mr. Fickle, the unofficial Rosary host, was saying his good-byes to the group. “I wanted to walk through that room,” Alice said, “so I ducked back inside and got my walker and grabbed an empty envelope that was lying on the desk. I carried the envelope out the door, pretending that I was going up to the little post office by the dining room to mail a letter.”
He was busy when she passed through the first time, but when she returned from the post office, he was completely alone. As he pulled a chair from the prayer circle and slid it back against the wall, he glanced up and smiled.
“But that was it,” she said. “He’s definitely not as friendly as he used to be. He didn’t take my hand or do anything else to let me know he thought I looked nice.” She paused. I could almost hear her shrug. “Well,” she said, “I tried.”
She moved on to what she was watching on television, as she sometimes does when we talk on the phone. “Oh there’s Nancy Grace. She looks like she’s had a face lift. I think all these TV celebrities who get face lifts go to the same doctor. They all look alike. Just like all of us women here at The Place who go to the one and only beauty operator at our beauty shop. We all come out looking exactly the same.”
“You don’t look like anybody else,” I assured her, then steered her away from her worries lately about thinning hair and back to the fake letter. “Tell me, when you walked through the Rosary room the second time and saw Mr. Fickle, where was the envelope?”
“Oh, I wasn’t carrying that any more. I scrunched it up and put it in the wastebasket at the post office.” She thought destroying the evidence was funny, and that the whole ruse had been a clever turn in the ongoing Push-Pull game with Mr. Fickle. If they gave an Oscar to the one who holds without sway to the Ideal of Romance (never mind what life has dealt them), Alice would rise, step forward, and most happily accept.
Like this:
The Accordion Player
September 26, 2010
Alice always goes to the dentist fearing he will pull her remaining teeth, and he always assures her, his oldest patient, that he’s doing his best to help her keep them. Recently, he cleaned them and as a reward for not removing any, she told him about the time an accordion player was scheduled to appear in her little Dakota town.
Alice and her five sisters and her little brother ran the dirt streets barefoot all summer long, and in the winter they wore hand-me-down shoes and clothes, along with itchy woolen underwear, which their father forbade them to remove from September until June, regardless of the temperature.
They were many and poor and subject to a few ridiculous old-country rules, but they were generally happy and free-roaming. Some music headed their way was a big deal to them.
The accordion player was the son of immigrant farmers from Russia (originally from Germany). He had no interest in farming himself. He spoke broken, bouncy, and limited English. By the time he’d turned twenty, he had begun to leave the farm occasionally, carrying his accordion to small town music halls to try to make some money. No band. Just him. Except in this case, a summer night in 1923, he enjoyed the accompaniment of Mrs. Stith, the local music teacher in Alice’s town. She played along on the piano.
Everything happened at The Hall–voting, dances, speeches, plays. When something musical was going on, people from all the nearby towns and farms came to listen and to dance.
Alice was eight years old. She knew nothing about the lanky farm boy who wandered the countryside playing an accordion, but she loved dancing. Her partner that night, as at any dancing event, was her ten-year-old sister Lillian. (“Lillian was shorter than me but she always led.”) They hopped this way and that to the music, trying to polka and waltz like the adults. Their older sister LaRue was there, too–beautiful LaRue, named for the surname of a distant cousin (French? Belgian?) of their father’s. She was almost fifteen.
Music swirled around Alice as she and Lillian jigged in and out among the dancing farmers, shopkeepers, livery men, housewives, boarding house residents, store clerks, etc., plus scads of other kids, including LaRue’s friends, Mae and Alma, bright and pretty young women instantly besotted with the accordion player.
As the night wore on the older people sat down to rest, and at one point the young man put aside his accordion and leaned over to whisper something to Mrs. Stith. She nodded and began playing Let Me Call You Sweetheart as he stepped down from the stage and headed straight for LaRue. He took her hand and invited her to dance with him.
This turned out to be a Lawrence Welk trademark event. Some time during the evening he always left the stage and picked someone to dance with, but that night it was new to everyone, maybe even to him. LaRue rested her hand on his shoulder and Alice sucked in her breath and had to remind herself to let it out again. She felt enormous pride. They might have been poor and their clothes not the best, but the accordion player chose her sister out of all the girls and women there. They glided around the room, young and supple, smooth as skaters on ice.
Alice still feels pride when she tells this story. She adds that she didn’t think about Lawrence Welk ever getting famous until she and her sisters heard him some years later on WNAX radio out of Yankton. He’d put together a band, which was followed by other bands and finally the popular television show. She still watches him on cable television.
“When we heard him on the radio from as far away as Yankton,” she told the dentist, “we knew he’d amounted to something.”
The dentist liked this story and responded with one in kind, though much briefer: He’d grown up in New York City. When he was fifteen he broke his leg and wore a cast. One day he was waiting for his father to come out of a store when a man came up and asked him what happened to his leg. They chatted for a while and then the man asked him if he knew who he was. “No,” said the future dentist, “I don’t.” The man announced that he was Guy Lombardo.
Once again, Alice sucked her breath in, astonished. Here she was getting her teeth cleaned by someone who had once had a conversation with Guy Lombardo.
I wanted to join in with my story of walking down a street on the East Side in New York one wintry night and coming upon John and Yoko, but this somehow seemed out of tune.
My Aunt LaRue went on to fall in love at another dance. She once told me that she spotted Henry for the first time over on the other side of the dance floor and she never ever looked at anyone else again. Even if Lawrence Welk had come waltzing back to town, she wouldn’t have noticed him.
Here she is at seventeen modeling Henry’s jeans, shirt, and cap.
LaRue at seventeen
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
- I am dreaming Dear of you, day by day
- Dreaming when the skies are blue, When they’re gray;
- When the silv’ry moonlight gleams, Still I wander on in dreams,
- In a land of love, it seems, Just with you.
- Let me call you Sweetheart, I’m in love with you.
- Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.
- Keep the love-light glowing in your eyes so true.
- Let me call you Sweetheart, I’m in love with you.
- Longing for you all the while, More and more;
- Longing for the sunny smile, I adore;
- Birds are singing far and near, Roses blooming ev’rywhere
- You, alone, my heart can cheer; You, just you.
- Let me call you Sweetheart, I’m in love with you.
- Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.
- Keep the love-light glowing in your eyes so true.
- Let me call you Sweetheart, I’m in love with you.
- Music by Leo Friedman; lyrics by Beth Slater Whitson
- Bing Crosby sings it here.
- A suave and successful older Lawrence plays it for an audience singalong here.
- And for your viewing pleasure, Ladies and Gentlemen, a youngish Lawrence shown below. (Click on any image in the blog to make it larger):
Young Lawrence
To the Trees
September 23, 2010
Let’s say you have had insomnia all week, you’re feeling groggy and low, and you’re angling for your mother’s sympathy. (Amazingly, you’re still not too old for this.)
Morning call with Alice. Hearing aids not in yet.
Me: Last night I slept for only three hours.
Alice: Last night you went to the treehouse? What treehouse?
You think of different ways to state your case.
I did not sleep.
What?
I couldn’t sleep last night.
What are you saying? Spell it, please.
Last night, no sleep. NO S-L-E-E-P.
Eventually, she understands you, but instead of telling you how sorry she is that you didn’t sleep, she finds it very amusing that she thought you said, “Last night I went to the treehouse.” And then she asks you, “Wouldn’t it be more fun to have a treehouse than a sleepless night?”
You get no sympathy at all, and you wonder if you should go out into the Oregon forest tonight and build a treehouse and take along your dog and cat and lie awake together and listen to Neil Young on your iPod and watch that big old harvest moon, instead of worrying any more about sleeping.
Surprise!
September 21, 2010
Most of the costume jewelry that Alice wore through her working years was sold at the garage sale back in Iowa. She brought only a few pieces with her to Oregon. She didn’t want to keep more, or so she thought at the time. But lately she’s been craving a little flash.
About fifteen years ago she gave me all she had of value–her wedding ring and a pearl necklace she’d received from my father as an anniversary gift. Yesterday I took the gleaming pearls from my jewelry box, rolled them up, and dropped the coil into a small black leather pouch.
I filled a shopping bag with a new stash of large-print books from the library, a puzzle book, fresh strawberries, an avocado, some flowers, and a print-out of Little White Toaster, the song Justin wrote in honor of her new contraband appliance. I tucked the pouch with the strand of pearls into a corner at the bottom of the bag, then called and told her that Brio and I were headed over with some surprises.
She was happy to see each item, including the mystery books from the library. (But let me just ask this: Why are so many large-print books mysteries? It’s hard to find anything else when browsing the shelves at the library. Do large-print publishers believe that sight-impaired people are only interested in murder?)
She was especially delighted to see Little White Toaster printed out.
At last she pulled out the black pouch, but she was not ready to peer inside. She wanted to guess what it contained. She looked over at me and smiled while pressing her fingers lightly against the secret contents. After a second or two she said, “I know what it is. My teeth!” She was referring to her former set of dentures, the ones the dentist instructed her to hang on to in case of emergency.
Would I be likely to bring her old teeth to her as a surprise?
She started laughing along with me. “No,” she said. “Not my teeth. Huh-uh. I just saw them the other day. They’re still in the dresser next to my bed.”
She opened the pouch and pulled out the necklace. “Oh, my pearls! Well, I was close.”
She said she was glad to see them, but she handed them back to me. “They’re safer with you.”
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I immediately knew what she meant: the comings and goings of staff; the hirings, firings, and walkouts of people she barely gets to know before they’re gone. And the fact that everybody who works there, other than kitchen staff, possesses a key to all the apartments. They are free to walk in at any time to pick up laundry and trash, or bring her medications, or clean. They can enter whether she’s there or not. One sharp knock and the door opens before she even has a chance to say “Come in.”
I told her that they did background checks on people working at The Place, but yes, we’d go on a jewelry hunt for something pretty but less valuable.
“Goodwill,” she suggested. She’s become a fan of Goodwill since moving to Portland (like almost everyone else who lives in this city, including me).
I agreed. Lots of flash in the big glass cases there.
“Something to look forward to,” she said. Which is all she really wants.
Little White Toaster
September 15, 2010
My wonderful friend Justin Ting wrote this in honor of Alice’s new toaster.
(To the tune of “Kindhearted Woman Blues.” To hear Robert Johnson sing the original version, recorded in 1936, click here.)
I got a little white toaster,
Warming up toast just for me,
I got a little white toaster,
Warming up toast just for me.
The caretakers fuss too muchly
and they will not let me be.
I love my toaster,
And my toaster must love me,
I love my toaster,
Ooo, and my toaster must love me
I really love that toaster
Can’t stand to leave it be
There is only one thing
That makes me stop and think
I have to let it cool off
Before it goes under the sink
Oh, babe, my life wouldn’t feel the same
If my little white toaster left and went away
–Justin Ting
Toast to Alice
September 9, 2010
I decided to extend the celebration of Alice’s 95th birthday by smuggling a contraband item into her apartment: a toaster.
Toasters are not allowed at The Place, and I’ve tried to imagine why. Maybe, long ago, a resident burned a piece of toast. An Emergency Anti-Toaster Meeting was called by the Director, who observed that the smoke alarm could have gone off. So then, put it in the rules and stamp it with a stamp: No more toasters!
One’s final years with no toast available except the cold, soggy version served at breakfast in the dining room–unbearable thought. What does one do with that yen, that ache of desire that comes late at night, the ache that toast and butter and strawberry jam will soothe? A delicious and sensual mixture–hot, slippery, and sweet–a satisfaction on the same continuum as something else that too often goes missing with old age.
One has lost one’s home, one’s animal companions, one’s garden, one’s trees, one’s husband or wife or partner, one’s comforts of the flesh. So much sacrifice. And now this little pleasure, too. Gone.
And maybe one’s adult children, if one has any, are far away or don’t give a damn or are munching away on their own toast, assured that one of advanced age needs neither sex nor toast when in fact one needs both, but toast anyhow will suffice. One pines for a slice of toast.
But no. One’s pinings had just better settle down. Go to bed. Count sheep.
For two years, Alice and I abided by the no-toaster rule, along with all the other rules of The Place. I listened to her say–very, very often–that she’d really love a piece of toast. She doesn’t even get the cold soggy version because she doesn’t eat breakfast in the dining room where it’s served. She’d like to have her hot toast in her own apartment which, by the way, is tiny and yet exceedingly expensive.
Apartment. Not a nursing home. Not a hospital. The apartment residents are men and women who may need help getting dressed or taking a shower on their own. Dropping a piece of bread into a toaster and taking it out again is not beyond them.
Maybe I’ve gained courage because I’ve never been spotted clipping a few of the many unappreciated roses along the chapel wall, at least not spotted by anyone except the neighborhood dogs. Alice loves the roses I bring her. And so for a follow-up birthday gift, on an impulse, I purchased a toaster at a nearby Fred Meyer store, along with bread, butter and jam. One-stop shopping.
Alice’s big blue eyes widened when she unwrapped the gleaming white toaster. I may as well have given her a brick of gold. “Can I?” she asked. “Really? Did something change?”
Nothing changed, I told her, and would she please keep it hidden when not in use? She immediately tried out several hiding places: hall closet, upper kitchen cupboard, lower kitchen cupboard, under the sink. Finally she found the right cubby hole.
Later that night she called. “The caretaker came by on her rounds to see if I’m all right, and she’s not coming back again tonight. So I’m going to have some toast and jam. No wait, wait! First I’m going to get ready for bed, then I’m going to have my toast and jam. Then I’m going to let the toaster cool down. Then I’m going to hide it again. And then I’m going to bed.”
Goodnight, TV set. Goodnight, La-Z-Boy. Goodnight, lamp. Goodnight, book. Goodnight, toaster.
The Dapper Man and the Mystery of the Fancy Chocolate
September 4, 2010
Alice has a new admirer. Unlike Mr. Fickle, he wears clothes that fit. “Sometimes he turns his collar up,” she told me. He is not tall, but his posture is admirable, shoulders back, arms like drumsticks at his sides. His “good head of hair,” precisely combed, is a pleasing shade of gray. His shoes are polished. He’s new at The Place and she doesn’t know his name. She calls him The Dapper Man.
The Dapper Man, one of the very few men in residence, took immediately to gazing at Alice from across the dining room. Last week he stopped by her table and greeted her and Irene. He said something to Alice that she couldn’t quite hear, but instead of saying her hearing failed her, she smiled and appeared to agree with him. She almost regretted this when he nodded and walked away slowly and more confidently than she felt the occasion deserved. Since then she’s been watching him to see if he continues to watch her and to observe what he’s up to.
The other night when she got to her table in the dining room, she found a brightly wrapped cube of chocolate atop her napkin. Read the rest of this entry »
Dining with Irene
September 2, 2010
When all is going well (no medical appointments, no trips to ER, no groceries to buy, errands to run, etc.), Alice and I speak on the phone twice every day, once in the morning and once at night. In the morning she tells me how she slept. In the evening she tells me what happened that day with Irene and her food.
(See Hello, Irene for how these two ended up eating lunch and dinner together.)
Whatever happens with Irene (age 109) and her food depends on the workers, who are called aides. So fast is the merry-go-round of poorly paid help at The Place that Alice barely has time to learn their names. (“Oh, you know who I mean, the one with the big gob of hair on top of her head; the one who shouts YOU GOT IT whenever anybody asks her for anything; the one whose pants are so tight they’ve got to hurt her; the one with the pretty teeth; the one with a bead stuck in her nose, with tattoos on her legs, with arms as big as three-year old kids, poor heavy girl, what can be wrong there?”)
These women, often single mothers desperate for income, will leave if they can get fifty cents more an hour somewhere else. Alice sympathizes with their lot, but her measuring stick for whether or not she likes them is how they treat Irene. Irene is almost completely blind and deaf, and perpetually at the mercy of a sweet tooth. Alice wants to outwit that tooth, but because she cannot feed Irene herself, the frail little body rarely gets much protein and very few vegetables. Depending on awareness, compassion, and time, the aides may or may not be able to pay attention to what the oldest person in the facility eats, or even if she eats at all. Because of budget constraints, they are rushed and overworked. They wash linens, respond to calls for help, assist residents in going to the bathroom, getting dressed, getting into and out of chairs, and so forth. And they serve as the wait staff in the dining room.
Alice regards Irene as a treasure. She believes that Irene should receive her meal first, always. Irene is, after all, one of the oldest people on earth. But The Place runs perversely on democracy. Sometimes Irene is first, but usually not, meaning she may have to wait up to an hour before she can eat.
Alice is normally shy of drawing attention to herself, but when she arrives at their table, she shouts out within earshot of the entire dining room, “Irene, it’s me Alice. I’m here now.”
And Irene invariably smiles when she answers, “I know who you are.” Which, to someone aged 109, is a sentence that carries more meaning than it would for you and me.
When she has to wait to be served, Irene occasionally calls to no one in particular, “When are we going to eat?” She might tire of waiting and return to her apartment hungry. But when she stays, she eventually insists on coffee and bangs her empty cup on the table until a hassled aide comes and fills it. Alice is unhappy about this banging, but she recognizes the frustration.
Last night Alice gave me a typical nightly report on Irene. Here it is in full: “The one with the gob of hair on top came and plunked down Irene’s plate way over at the edge of the table. At least she put the fork into Irene’s hand, but she didn’t pay any attention to me when I said Irene couldn’t see the plate and didn’t know where it was. Off she went. I stood up and tottered over toward Irene’s side of the table and moved the plate. She opened her mouth like a baby bird. She wanted me to feed her. But I can’t stand up long enough to feed her and there’s no room for my walker in that corner. I got back to my chair and called out that Irene needs help. ‘Someone help Irene! Please help Irene!’ They didn’t come and didn’t come and then finally the one with the pretty teeth came over and fed her two forkfuls of beans and she left and the tattoo girl came by and shoved a piece of pie in front of her. Irene pushed the dinner plate away and started eating the pie with her fingers because she’d lost her fork by that time. And then when I got up to leave after I finished eating, she reached out her sticky little hand to take mine and squeeze it, and you know, I have to grab hold of that hand, no matter how sticky it is. She eats with her fingers so much of the time because she keeps losing her fork, but I have to squeeze it, you know. Because it’s Irene. I’m sure she ate the whole piece of pie after I left, but I bet she only got those two forkfuls of beans. Oh Irene.” A long pause. “My goodness. How are they going to treat me when I’m old?”
She caught herself and managed to chuckle at the distant possibility that she might one day get old, but her blood pressure was up again, she said, and I promised to talk to the administrative staff because Irene has no relatives to speak on her behalf. I know what will happen because I’ve done this before. They’ll instruct the aides to put the plate where Irene can reach it and to make sure she eats real food. They will ask them to withhold sweets until she has finished her meal. But then these aides will scatter, one by one. They’ll be replaced by other overworked women on the edge of poverty, and these new women may or may not be able to afford the mindfulness necessary to see and to care about this ancient one, this redwood in a forest of venerable oaks.
© 2010 Andrea Carlisle
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.
Dreamboat
July 21, 2010
Alice has a new friend at The Place, a Viet Nam vet named Lyle. Like Alice, Lyle came to Oregon from the Midwest. When they see each other in the dining room, he talks about the war and about the music from the time of that war, music that still holds meaning for him. She can’t hear him very well, but she tries to listen. One of their lunchtime conversations prompted her to wonder about the music coming from our involvement in current wars. Is it beautiful? Does it have meaning for people?
She was wondering this when I stopped by with her groceries yesterday. She’d pulled the blinds because light hurts her eyes sometimes, especially after she’s had a treatment for macular degeneration, and she just had one a few days ago.We sat quietly after she’d unpacked everything. She’s always delighted with each item, even when she knows what’s coming because she asked me to get it for her. “Cinnamon bread!” “Grapes!” “Raisin Bran!”
When she brought up the question about music and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, neither of us had an answer. She can’t hear well enough to make out the lyrics of songs she’s never heard before, and I don’t listen much to music on the radio.
I thought about the few songs I have heard that were written for the people who have given their lives in those faraway places. They’re mostly country and western songs enamored of patriotism. The lyrics are in service to making a point: right versus wrong, not heart to heart. At the other end of the spectrum, protest music also focuses on the wrongs. If anyone’s listening to songs about this topic at all, they’re probably choosing to hear only those that express their own position on the wars. But, as we know, World War II was different because the country was more united.
I asked my mother what her favorite song was from that era. She mentioned “I’ll Be Seeing You,” but then she told me the song that saw her through the years my father served in the Army in France and Germany was “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.”
She sang the whole song for me. It begins like this (lyrics by Dave Franklin & Cliff Friend):
When my dreamboat comes home
and my dream no more will roam
I will meet you and I’ll greet you
when my dreamboat comes home
Almost all the songs she could remember from that time, she said, spoke to love and longing. My father was drafted shortly after Alice lost her only brother at Guadalcanal. She couldn’t face the idea of losing her love. Her dreamboat was going to come home.
As we sat close together in the near dark, she told me a story I’d never heard before. Read the rest of this entry »
Alice’s Make-Up Recipe
July 16, 2010
Alice told me she needed some “tops”–blouses, shirts, sweaters. We decided to take the new walker out for an extended spin at Lloyd Center, the nearest mall.
She had never heard of Marshall’s and wanted to go inside the moment she saw it, despite my hesitation. Once inside the door she looked around and loudly announced, “These are the worst looking clothes I’ve ever seen in my life.” Nevertheless, she dispensed with her walker and ventured off stiffly on her own, holding onto clothing racks jammed with floral prints and plunging necklines. I followed anxiously behind, pushing the walker, just in case. After a trip down the third aisle with no results, she grabbed it from me and got into position. “Let’s blow this joint,” she said, doing her best Brando from The Wild One.
Sears was next door, but that didn’t please her either. She held up a slinky black top with beaded buttons in a zig-zag pattern down the front. “Am I supposed to wear this?”
But when I found the Land’s End racks she began tossing blouses and sweaters onto the seat and arms of her walker, using it like a grocery cart. I felt awed by my mother’s capacity to keep going. She read my mind. “Aren’t I amazing?”
I agreed that she was. She turned her face up to me and wanted to know if her make-up looked okay. It did. I asked why she wanted to know. “Because,” she said, “I made it myself.”
A woman about a decade older than I hovered nearby, listening. Read the rest of this entry »
Alice and Mattie
July 14, 2010
The leader of the pack of six sisters in Alice’s family was the third-born, Mattie (1911-2000). Today she would have been ninety-nine.
They grew up poor in a little Midwestern village called Carson (pop. 400), and the family was so large (nine altogether, counting the baby, a boy) that their mother needed them to do chores. Some, like Mattie (the reader, the saver, the keeper of memories in the making), took the chores seriously. Others, like Alice (actually Alice alone), did not.
When Mattie was twelve and Alice was eight, Alice’s job was to wash the lunch dishes. She didn’t care for it. One day she traded this task for Mattie’s job, which was to take the large tin milk jug to the dairy a few blocks away, get it filled, and haul it back home. Mattie washed and dried the dishes while Alice played stickball in a nearby vacant lot with friends. When the dishes were neatly stacked away, she brought the milk container out to the lot.
Alice saw her coming and cast aside her stick. She took off in the opposite direction. Mattie, carrying the jug, pursued her. Furious. They ran up and down Main Street, passing the dairy itself several times. Finally, Alice bolted down an alley and into a back yard that contained an outhouse. She locked herself inside. Mattie banged on the door, but no luck. Even sitting locked inside someone’s outhouse was more preferable to Alice than taking the milk jug to the dairy, or at least more preferable than giving up. So Mattie finally turned around, walked back to Main Street, got the jug filled, and carried it home.
Seventy-five years later, Mattie still told this story. Alice always laughed. But so did Mattie. They became good friends, the best of friends, the closest of sisters.
Alice (age 13) and Mattie (age 17)
Alice the Fixer
July 12, 2010
Alice has always had a mechanical streak. Roger, my father, did not. Yet, they persisted in pretending that he did, and she deferred to him until one night when the kitchen light switch stopped working while she was making dinner. Like a surgeon, my father asked for his tools, which she, like a nurse, brought to him. He requested a flashlight. She fetched one. And wasn’t there a box somewhere with electrical stuff in it? Indeed there was. She knew exactly where to find it and carried it to his side. Then he instructed her to turn off the power, which she did.
All this even though he spent his days in a store working with people, and she spent her days at home, managing a family and house, fixing every appliance that broke in order to save money, and doing things like drilling holes in her bedroom closet floor so she could thread wires from the stereo through to the basement, hook up a speaker on the laundry room wall, and listen to Tony Bennett or Perry Como while doing the wash. She also brought home broken television sets and radios from garage sales, repaired them in the living room in her spare time, and gave them away to people who needed them. We, her children, knew her abilities from close up and expected great things from her. When I was in high school, I once asked her to lift our car out of an enormous snowdrift so I could make it to class on time. When she declined, I felt quite disappointed. Lifting up a couple of tons of metal for my benefit had seemed entirely within her range. In any case, nothing, certainly not a light switch, seemed likely to be out of my mother’s mechanical reach.
They stood close together in the dark. My mother held the flashlight while my father removed the switch cover and examined the innards in the small, dark, rectangular recess in the wall. He raised the screwdriver, but here his nerves and knowledge failed him. Alice, far too deep by then into that no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude that comes steaming in with menopause, couldn’t wait another minute for light to return to her kitchen. Her hand shot up and she tugged at the switch until it came partially out.
There was a pause, and then my father, without looking at her, handed over the screwdriver, took the flashlight from her hand, and aimed the beam at the open wound in the wall. She continued on, removing screws, pulling things out, jimmying the new switch in, tightening everything back into place, and closing up the repair with the old switch cover. The lights came back on. Of course.
I didn’t see any signs of their relationship, a mixture of contentiousness and intense attraction, changing after that. He did buy her a toolbox for Christmas a few years later, and after he retired he would often brag about how she was always fixing this and that around the house.
So it is particularly disconcerting to hear Alice tell me that she’s afraid to try to get her new coffee pot to work, when it simply involves filling it with water and plugging it in. Or that she’s having trouble deleting things using the keyboard of her Web TV, on which she’s written e-mail for the past twelve years. Or that she’s not sure how to follow the directions I’ve written out for her on how and when to take her Fosamax pill. And I think, even Alice. This happens even to her, my powerful mother who could do all things.
These are the kinds of losses we stand by and watch, first with disbelief, and then a long, sad dawning of enlightenment, as age, so relentless in its creeping, steals not only the body, and often the mind, but also the defining qualities that make a person fit into the precise size and shape of the space they have always filled in life’s puzzle. They are leaving us behind and we’ll need to put the pieces together in some new way, some way we’ll have to fix for ourselves.
Hello, Irene
July 4, 2010
Shortly after she moved into The Place, Alice learned that a 107-year-old woman lived there. Irene once had a dinner partner, also named Irene (aged 104), but the younger Irene had recently died, leaving the older Irene to eat her meals by herself. The staff wanted Alice to join her.
Alice had come reluctantly to Oregon, hated her apartment (“electrical outlets in all the wrong places”), and had so far refused to eat in the facility dining room. Geoff, the director, told me they couldn’t continue to send a caretaker to her apartment three times a day with a tray: Nobody gets that, unless they’re sick. The Place was short-staffed. They’d made an exception because she’d moved all the way from Iowa, but now the jig was up.
I explained this to Alice. She said she didn’t care.
I reminded her that Irene was 107!
Neck stiff, hands in fists, banging her knees for emphasis, she told me No. She twisted her face at me, hoping to scare me away, I think.
The all-female staff of caretakers sent Geoff to talk to her, believing that women of a certain age will always allow men to make the rules. Geoff repeated what he’d told me: Not enough staff. Lonely Irene.
“Sounds like you’ve got a problem but it’s not my problem,” Alice said. Read the rest of this entry »
Are You Locked Up?
July 1, 2010
This is Alice’s question to me every night when we have our evening phone call. She’s not asking if I’m in an asylum. She wants to know if my doors are locked.
Whether they are or not, I answer, “Yes, are you?”
One night we forgot to ask one another this question, and she went to bed without removing the key from the lock of her apartment door. She’d forgotten to pull it out after returning from the dining room. Even though she’s ninety-four and pretty much defenseless, she wasn’t upset the next morning when she opened the door and saw what she’d done. Instead she said, “I’m lucky. Forgetting things like that doesn’t happen to me very often.”
A friend’s elderly great-aunt used to come for summer visits on Long Island. The moment she arrived, Aunt Janet ordered one of the three young boys in the house to carry her black leather valise to the fourth floor. She gave the order despite the sweltering August heat that rose up and up and up in the old house until it gathered in a humid, weeping mass on the fourth floor ceiling and stayed there. Aunt Janet told the boys that she chose the highest level of the house because she wanted to avoid what she called “marauders,” in case any came by. Apparently marauders would be too exhausted from pillaging the first three floors to bother with the fourth. She and everything in her valise would be safe.
Alice considered the possibility of marauders back in Iowa after my father died and she lived alone. Every night she stuck a butter knife into the molding next to the knob of her bedroom door. She’d slide the knife into the narrow slit, pat the urn on the dresser that contained my father’s ashes, and climb into bed with a book. Here in this Northwest city where the likelihood of marauders is much greater than an Iowa town, she doesn’t seem too concerned.
I wondered about this lack of concern, especially since she’d made a tireless effort to pass fear of The Dangerous and The Uncontrollable on to me since I was a small child. “Well, it doesn’t make sense to bother with a key at all, really,” she explained. “Those people on the staff, the caretakers and so on, they all have keys and can get in anyway, any time they want. But I’ll lock my door, honey. Don’t you worry.”
I realized that she didn’t understand that anybody could wander into The Place from various unlocked outside doors, but what’s the point in telling her that? She sleeps well, she feels safe, and all the butter knives stay in the drawer.
Stolen Roses
June 28, 2010
Every now and then I stop in the alley between the chapel at The Place and a row of garages and fenced-up, barking dogs in order to pick flowers for Alice. Along the chapel wall, unseen by anyone but the dogs, grow hundreds of roses in a mind-blasting variety of colors: saffron yellow, butter yellow, cat paw pink, apricot, Corvette red, harlot scarlet, bridal white, clotted cream, and so forth. You get the idea (Portland: City of Roses). These unappreciated beauties call to me and so I occasionally take one or two. Who’s to care? The dogs? The dogs do bark more excitedly than usual when I stop, I admit, but I attribute this to canine enthusiasm for mischief in general. They want to share in the fun.
Alice grew up in North Dakota and then lived in five other states as my father was transferred from department store to department store around the Midwest. Not one of her yards ever contained a rosebush. Her childhood was impoverished. No bushes of any kind grew in the grassless yard at all. Today, the very presence of a single rose can make her cry. She pays The Place $3000/month for a tiny apartment and food she doesn’t much like and so she figures an occasional stolen rose from the back wall of The Place’s chapel is her due.
This past week she made up a song about this thievery and sang it to me as we were on our way to a follow-up appointment with the surgeon who replaced her broken hip with a good, new one. This is how her song went (to the tune of Paper Roses):
Stolen roses, stolen roses
Oh how much those roses mean to me
They’re not paper, these lovely roses
They’re my own reality
She said she thought it up in the middle of the night and acknowledges it needs some work.
© 2010 Andrea Carlisle
Mr. Fickle
June 20, 2010
Mr. Fickle is my mother’s name for a man in his eighties who lives at The Place. He kissed Alice’s cheek on New Year’s Day and occasionally he holds her hand, in a passing hello, a bit longer than, as she puts it, is necessary. His real name is Howard. “He’s not as handsome as your father was,” she’s told me more than once. “Not by a long shot.” Read the rest of this entry »
The New Walker
June 19, 2010
Alice wanted a walker you could sit on. “Everybody at The Place has one,” she told me. Sit-on walkers can be pushed and are shaped like small chairs, so you can sit down when you get tired.
We went to the walker store but she didn’t like what she saw. “They’re all so big!” She poked at several of the metal walkers with her cane and they rolled slightly. “I don’t want a great big thing like that. The ones people have at The Place aren’t that big.” She has a way of sounding irritated even when she’s not.
When she spied a smallish one at the end of a row, she headed toward it, sat down on its tiny seat, placed her cane across her lap, and smiled. A woman came out from behind the counter. “That’s too small for you,” she said. My mother made a face at me, as if I’d said this. I asked her if the seat was comfortable. “Not really,” she admitted.
Reluctantly, she got up. Then she pointed at a king-sized walker nearby. “You’re not going to make me take that one!”
“Of course not, no,” the clerk said. “That’s for a really large person.” She rolled out a medium-sized walker.
Alice sat down in it. “Well, yes,” she admitted. “This is a better fit.” Her smile this time looked more genuine. She was having a little Goldilocks moment. Read the rest of this entry »
Hearing Aids
June 19, 2010
Alice was experiencing a worse-than-usual day of poor hearing yesterday when we were at the vision clinic. She could not hear anything the doctor was saying. I was seated behind him. He’d speak, she’d frown and look at me, and I would yell his words to her.
She explained to us that sometimes her hearing aids fail and then will suddenly improve. “It’s mysterious,” she said, “but that’s how it happens.” We all kept hoping they would improve during the exam, but they didn’t. Nor did they improve when we sat with the guy who fit her glasses. Nor at Starbuck’s, where we stopped to get cocoa on the way home.
At around ten p.m. she called me and said, “My hearing aids are working now. Want to go somewhere?”
© 2010 Andrea Carlisle
Go Ask Alice…when she’s 94
June 19, 2010
I’m a woman in my 60s who, like many others, finds that one of my main tasks in life these days is taking care of my mother. Alice is 94. She moved from Iowa to Oregon, where I live, two years ago and now has an apartment in an assisted living center. There’s a statue of a pregnant Virgin Mary in the front yard of the facility, which is owned by the Catholic church. She can’t quite get over this. “I’ve never, ever in all my life seen a pregnant Mary.” Although she is not religious, she disapproves. In any case, she can’t seem to remember, or doesn’t care to remember, the name of the facility and simply calls it”The Place,” as she did recently when tired from an outing: “Better get me back to The Place.”
She’s been through a lot since she came here, including hip replacement surgery. She’s the most undaunted woman I know, and yet she’s also incredibly shy at times. Her self-expression with others (outside of family) is hobbled by growing up in an era when the word “feminism” was not even spoken until I was in my late teens. But her self-expression with me is what I care about for the purposes of this blog. Her move to Portland has changed our lives. I’m hoping to keep track of some moments with her that I don’t ever want to forget.
(The names of residents and others on this blog have been changed to protect privacy.)
Alice on Mother's Day
