The Big Squeeze
March 24, 2012
“You should start using this stuff too,” Alice advised when she picked up a tube of Neutrogena with Retinol on our latest trip to the grocery store. She took a long look at my face, examining creases and planes for potential meltdowns. Read the rest of this entry »
Our Lady of the Rings
August 28, 2011
On Alice’s 96th birthday she received a ring from a stranger. Read the rest of this entry »
Let Go and Let Alice
July 21, 2011
At her request, I took Alice shopping at Goodwill on “Senior Citizens’ Day.” She was once in the clothing business herself and knows about retail mark-up, so a five-dollar blouse slashed to four dollars makes her feel like she’s getting away with something just by being old. Read the rest of this entry »
Three Years In
July 17, 2011
Alice flew in to Portland three years ago today. She was almost ninety-three years old. (See Alice bin Laden.) Read the rest of this entry »
Sex and the North Wind
March 30, 2011
Lately, Alice has been forcing herself to read books that feature devout Christian women trapped on remote homesteads during Dakota blizzards in the 1800s. Frost thick as cake icing covers every window. A handsome but forbidden male stumbles in from somewhere, shakes the snow off his boots and settles in. The North wind blasts through chinks in the walls in search of a meager fire to startle into wild, flaring activity and then abandon, leaving behind a heap of flickering embers.
Any reasonable character in such circumstances would go mad with cold and dread of more cold, but these women are easily distracted by envy, greed, lust (usually) and other sins that require an explanatory prayer every ten or so pages (as if the Lord may have lost track of the plot). The prayers go something like this: Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
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.)
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
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.
This is a beautiful version by The Story:
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 (she’d last traveled in the 1980s and was subject to airborne panic attacks), 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. Read the rest of this entry »
The Reluctant Traveler
August 3, 2010
For years after my father died, 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. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
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
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
