It's All Good

I talked with my nephew the entire forty miles from the train station to my sister’s home, but I don’t remember a word. Not that the conversation wasn’t interesting but ultimately my mind was preoccupied. And my stomach was twisting in knots. In less than an hour, I’d be facing my mom. Would she remember me when she saw me again after all this time? A rather selfish thought on my part, really. She has other children whose names come and go. But mine has been remembered long past expiration as the dementia takes a sledgehammer to her brain.

I think about the times when I’ve been on the phone with my mom, and we’d be having a nice reminiscence about my dad. Then all kinds of stories and references would start to pop up that just don’t fit. Come to find out, she’d actually been talking about her first husband, not my dad.

It’s like a supple-wristed Pinball Wizard launching that cognitive silver ball through the chute, sending out the ball to bounce off each rubberized pin, picking up a different piece of memory with each “bing-bing” as it travels over the 86-year-old synaptic landscape. Bing-bing! We’re in the 1940s. Bing! Back to the 1990s. Bing! Bounce back to the 60s. From hundreds of miles away, I’d do my best to knock that bastard Wizard out of the way, and I’d step up to punch those flippers, trying to jog a memory … going for a bonus game—for extra time with the mom I used to know.

We got out of the car and strolled to the house, my palms were sweating, The Who playing on the mental soundtrack. Probably should have been the fiery “Ride of the Valkyries” or the sappy “Bridge over Troubled Water.”  But I guess “that deaf, dumb, and blind kid” will do. I fell behind to let my charmers go ahead. I was scared as shit. The door opened, my sister and mom were standing there.

Mom hugged my daughter first, and then my wife. Did she call them by name? Like at the beginning of a play, the room hushed. An oval spotlight panned until it just covered the two of us. 

“Do you remember me, Mom?” 

“Of course I do, David,” she replied, her arms reaching for me. “How could I forget you?”

“Always has a replay,” the singer shouted in my ear. I hugged her tight. My universe felt righted … for now. I know tomorrow everything could—and will—change. But for the moment, it’s all good.

Tangible

My gypsy clan and I made a stop at the old family homestead in New York. Our last exit before we board the train to visit my mother. Our merry trio arrived late Monday night and didn’t have a chance to see the surroundings in the dark. When I woke up at 6:10 a.m., the clear at first light sunk in extra hard. My parents’ property is in desperate need of repair. Outside, the driveway needs gravel, fallen trees need to be cut and hauled off. Inside, soft spots in the floor boards need to be reinforced, ceiling needs to be patched, etc. I should be clear … this is not a grand estate from long ago that was meant to stand until the second coming. It’s a 1970 mobile home that sits on a basement my father built in the early 80’s. However, the crumbling abode is on a scenic twenty-two acres of land—land that would have inspired Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Robinson Jeffers to a blissful nirvana. While my dad was in good health, he—a handyman that I am not— was able to repair the place and keep it glowing.

So I was lying in bed staring out the window, my brow furrowed with thoughts spiraling like a gyroscope. After a while, I turned and looked at my charmer. I hadn’t realized she had been watching me, waiting for me to notice her as to not break my train of thought. She’s like that, which is one of the 782,432 reasons I love her. She quietly asked, “What’s wrong.”

“I know it’s silly, but I wanted this place to stand forever. I wanted to always return and see my mom and dad.” I pulled the curtain farther back to view the entire snow swept lawn. “My dad is always here … in the land, the trees and grass, and the creek that passes by. All him.  But mom … she lived for this home, and I can’t keep it up. The center can’t hold. And all that bullshit.”

She wisely let me stride down the ‘woe is me’ lane and listened intently. I waxed, on and on, about how we live in a disposable society and other mental crap, like, even memories don’t last … just look at my mom and the broken down merry-go-round that passes for a brain of hers. Nothing lasts forever.

I paused and contemplated what I just spat out. When I float back from my wounded spot, I found my charmer’s reassuring, green eyes. She said very simply, “Even the pyramids are crumbling, what do you expect?”

“Yeah. Nothing is tangible,” I replied. A few seconds passed, and we spontaneously laughed at the  direction our gravity-filled conversation lead us.

Our daughter woke up and looked at us. I saw my dad’s eyes and mom’s inquisitive nature. The past collided with the present in a whirlpool of emotions, and a thousand clichés could be inserted here, but I’ll spare you because there’s nothing new that you and an incalculable number of human beings from the dawn of time haven’t felt.  

My little girl asked me to read her a morning story, and so I do. I reach for one of her tiny books from the collection we piled on the nightstand. This dilapidated old trailer lasted long enough for me to read Biscuit Visits the Farm to my little coconut in the same room that my mother and father read Curious George to me. And, hell, that’s all I need to double down on life and keep pressing forward.

Grasping A Slippery Ledge

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” --James Joyce, Ulysses

I last saw my mom on December 2, 2011. At that stage she was already confusing name and faces. Forgetting children and close friends. A flickering light of memories, grasping a slippery ledge. It was maddening to get her out of her home, but we managed it. For her safety, it was a must. She and my sister hopped on a train bound for an endless cycle of frustration, turmoil, and the occasional splinter of joy. Now more than a year has withered away.

I talk to Mom a couple of times a week and she seems to remember me. “Doolittle,”—her old and affectionate nickname for me—she starts every conversation with. My sister says, “You will be the last one she forgets.” But what if she has already forgotten? She calls me Doolittle on the phone, but maybe she’s saying it to a ten-year-old boy. When I see her again, maybe my appearance won’t live up to what she’s seeing in her mind. Maybe I should shave this goatee. Lose some weight. Dye the gray in my hair. No, there’s nothing to be done except walk onto her stage like an improv performance artist and waltz to her tune. “Blue Danube,” anyone? Dementia is a kind of natural acid trip for the people suffering from this gives-no-quarter disease. A recent back and forth:

“Doolittle?” a barely audible voice says over the crackling line.

“Mom, why are you whispering?”

“They’re out there, hiding underneath the window so I can’t see them. They’re plotting to break in and rob me,” she says, her voice trembling. “I’m waiting for Blood.”

“Blood? What do you mean? Who’s out there?”

“Those cutthroats. But he’ll come.”

“Who, Mom? Who will come?”

“Blood.”

“Blood?” I say again, then dwell on it for a beat before venturing forward. “You mean Captain Blood?”

“Yes,” she says with determination, “and he’ll put these money-grubbing snatchers in the ground.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her we’re a long way from Port Royal.

Maybe I should prepare for our upcoming visit by watching FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS to be in the right frame of mind. Anthropomorphic desert animals! Bats bulleting the sky! Grab a flyswatter. Infuse Gonzo with surrealist Dali’s draping clocks, blank playing cards, and a man with no face. Stir in Dylan’s “Series of Dreams” playing on an infinitesimal Lewis Carroll phonograph. “And there’s no exit in any direction, ‘cept the one that you can’t see with your eyes,” the troubadour warbles. And if I start to get down, I will ask the court jester to do that Zorba dance that so mesmerized Basil.  

Reminds me of another quote, one from Henry Miller, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Yeah, I’m as ready as I’m going to be. Time to make that journey. Eyes wide open, old son.