June 2007 Archives
The last time I saw my mother, at least in the earthly sense, was in a nursing home in the town of Shelton, Washington. My brother and I were joking with her, or joking with each other, and in the way of brothers, we weren't joking entirely.
"Whom do you love more?" my brother asked. As I recall, we each held one of my mother's hands, outside on what passed for a terrace. I may have cued my mother to say "the same" or "both," and she managed to squeeze out one of those words. Probably "same." I mention this because it speaks rather highly of my mother's mental functioning. For someone with advanced Alzheimer's, she was still somewhat there.
Which brings me to a juncture of mothers, trains and personal history. The details are scrambled, the dates have gone awry, but the salient features are anchored in the mid-1990s. Post-divorce, pre-Marlou, and my mother was visiting me. Why the trains? I must not have been driving very much then. But I was working, and the strain of driving and working probably added up to too much. In any case, my mother was down for a visit, down meaning south from Seattle. She was staying with her friend Nancy in Benicia. Ah, Nancy, driver to the Oakland Airport, picker-up of the mother, returner of the mother to the airport. I recall thinking of Nancy this way. Which makes me feel that the stress of driving and the Bay Area traffic bothered me then about as much as they do now. Meaning that I haven't deteriorated all that much. Good.
To get my mother to Menlo Park, I hit on a superb plan. Nancy would drive across the Benicia Bridge to the Amtrak station, put my mother on a San Jose-bound train. And I would pick up my mother in San Jose. Was I in a wheelchair then? Yes, almost certainly. I recall taking the commuter train to San Jose, meeting the train on the platform. And discovering that my mother wasn't on it. I can't recall if I called Amtrak, or if they called me, or how it all happened. But my mother had missed the train, and I spent a couple of hours in San Jose, until she finally rolled in aboard an Amtrak bus.
End of story? Hardly. My mother's account of the train mishap feels more important than ever. She was at the station, saw the train pull in, then somehow found herself a bit too far away. It was a long walk, she said. Very far, and how they expected a woman of her age to get from wherever she was sitting to wherever the train was, well, that was beyond her. Actually, I have a very clear image of what happened. There was construction at that station, an old one about to be torn down, a brand-new one going up. The benches and the train were probably some distance apart. With a bit of Alzheimer's already clouding her mind, my mother probably could not anticipate where to be.
In any case, she wasn't there when the train was. The train was far away, too far away, and she missed it. What I didn't miss in my mother's account was her stern, jaw-set resignation. I doubt that my mother yelled "wait for me" or made the slightest fuss. I'm sure it was a head-down, try-as-hard-as-I-can geriatric sprint, with walker and luggage, for Amtrak California southbound. This is a cautionary tale for me. I don't like to yell and make a fuss. But occasionally a conductor will forget that he has a wheelchair on board and attempt to sail out of the Menlo Park commuter station with me still on the train. I usually ask a passenger to yell for me. Either way, I don't like it. Survival requires it.
My mother was flustered upon her arrival in San Jose. I suppose the last vestiges of her independence were slipping away. From her 20s my provincial, even rural, mother had been making trains and getting herself to cities on time. Reporting for duty at one port after the next during the war. Getting on and off hospital trains. She knew how to get herself around.
But for me, there was no getting around my mother's upset. From an early age, I absorbed it. She was an emotionally erratic and unreliable parent, and forces within me rose to the challenge. It seemed that I could fix her, or to the child's sensibility, smooth her out or make her present. Who knows what I really was after? In any case, I became remarkably attuned to her moods. Worse, I absorbed them. As a general characteristic, absorbency may have something to be said for it. Perhaps I became a more keen observer of people. Whatever. In this time of my mother's visit, I had reverted to absorbing too much.
My mother had a way of wandering around at night. No, that is putting it mildly. She sleepwalked. During her stay in my apartment she wandered into my bedroom, sat down at the foot of the bed and began conversing. Well, I said, cutting her off in midsentence, it's time for you to go back to sleep. Yes, she sighed with a familiar air of resignation, I suppose it is. She wandered out. The next night she walked into my office. I listened as she sighed and talked to herself, then shuffled back to her bed on the sofa.
I wish I could say that these invasions of my personal space had struck me then, as they do now, as amusing. My mother's wanderings were harmless and even had an intrepid quality about them. She didn't give up, my mother, even when she didn't know where she was going or why. But, no, my mother rattled me on that visit. She was also, in retrospect, losing a good portion of her mind. She was having trouble with words and had taken to clamming up. My mother barely associated with others in her nursing home, heightening her isolation and making her oddities even odder. She was losing the ability to speak coherently and was far too proud to tell anyone. But, of course, she could speak to me, sort of. She had always been an issuer of great sighs and lamentations. Now these were coming at me all the time. Over dinner. After dinner. In the morning. Everything okay, mom, I would ask her now and then? The truth was that I didn't really want to know. I already knew. Things were not OK, never had been. And it was just as well that my mother was not going to discuss them now.
It was great to have someone wash the dishes, all dishes, any dish, at any hour. In the morning, my mother folded up her sheets and blankets, storing them out of the way. For what? My mother had acquired certain habits, and their origin was unknown. She had been, after all, a nurse for much of her life. Keeping things clean and surfaces clear may have been part of the job. Morning inspection aboard ship? Who knows? In any case, when my mother was around, things were clean, tidy and stowed. Still, I took in every sigh. I felt the depth and length of her silences. I could sense her agitation. When the time came, I was quite ready to head for the commuter train station for the reverse trip to Nancy's.
I checked both schedules, the commuter train and the Amtrak northbound. There would be plenty of time in San Jose, then my mother would be off. I would have a word with the conductor. I would alert Nancy. With people keeping a watchful eye on her, my mother would stay on the train until it was time to get off. Of this I was fairly certain. Certain enough to give it a try.
We boarded Caltrain, pulled into San Jose half an hour later. And I could already sense trouble. The Amtrak train was not a waiting on the adjacent platform. Why? Because it had left. I had taken the wrong commuter train to San Jose. I could see this right away, the simple miscalculation in my mind. What miscalculation? I honestly can't remember. It's just not the sort of mistake I make.
A quick phone call to Nancy. Another day with my mother. Another trip, the following morning, to San Jose. It all worked out. Nancy retrieved her from the station, drove her home to Benicia. And that was that.
"I wondered what you were thinking," my mother had said, as I stared dumbfounded at the empty platform that evening in San Jose. I wondered why she hadn't said anything about wondering. But not really. My mother was not only resigned but tactful in the handling of her adult children. What was I thinking? None of her business, it seemed. But what I was thinking seems a serious matter to me now. I wasn't thinking, of course. I was blotting. I was blotting out disturbance, and like a good blotter, I was absorbing. Which meant I was disturbed, her disturbance now becoming mine.
Marlou tells me I am strong, a source of strength to her. To me, it all feels a little different. I've absorbed many shocks in life. The shock absorber. I've absorbed too much, though. Now I need to absorb less. And when the absorbing can't be helped, I need to drain. I also need to fear dissolution less. Things dissolve, become dissolute, and that's that. You might as well enjoy it. The center cannot hold, so stop trying to hold it together yourself. Does love dissolve? This, in the end, seems the only question worth worrying about. And there's only one way to find out. Stick around.
These days Marlou is deep in reminiscence. Sparked by a call for memorabilia from the student exchange organization that sponsored her summer in Germany four decades ago, she has been reassembling details. A road trip through Austria and Bavaria, days at a guesthouse near Innsbruck, it's all coming back to her. Strange things keep coming back to me too, although my memories are rent and spotty. I get too drawn into their significance to bother with the gaps. This is bad, for the gaps matter. Fill in the facts, and you may fill in the truth behind them. In any case, this is a classic symptom of getting older, looking backward, living backward, some would say.
Marlou was looking forward to the end of high school when she set sail aboard a crowded student ship. At almost the same time I was drifting around California. My first quarter at Berkeley had just ended in June, 1967. I'd spent the first years of university at UC Riverside. And for some reason, I was having trouble coming to ground in the Bay Area.
I recall missing a lot of classes. I recall being surprised that anyone had missed me. The teaching assistant from my Restoration Drama class stopped me somewhere, perhaps in the corridor outside the lecture hall. He told me that he loved the essay I had written on "Way of the World." He had noticed that I wasn't present at many lectures. Forty years later, this encounter remains vivid in my mind. I recall being surprised, both at his praise and his attention. Berkeley seemed such an enormous, anonymous place, so big, so uncaring. Having had quite a caring deficit in my life, but having no insight into this at age 20, the words of the teaching assistant only stirred emotions. Perhaps I would come back to class.
Where had I been? There are vague recollections of a trip back to Riverside. After all, I knew many students there. My father, brother and sister all lived there. It must have felt like home. As much as anything did. I had had quite a home deficit in my emotional life, too. I seemed to belong to no place and to no one. I'm not quite certain which of my Riverside friends put me up for a few days. But the practice of putting people up was standard. I slept on some couch somewhere.
What I recall was the atmosphere. Riverside, at the edge of the Southern California deserts, seemed surprisingly hot after Berkeley. In the warm air, the creaking of screen doors, yells of children, flushing of toilets, all seemed to filter out of the old wooden houses where students lived. They were plentiful, in those days, homes from the 1920s and 1930s, Riverside's boom time, now in the 60s rented in their entirety to students. In Berkeley, even the renting of rooms had a desperate, Darwinian clamoring about it. So many students, so few places for them to live between the Bay and the campus. But in 1967, Riverside seemed to have barely discovered university students. It was a buyers' market, and in the warm spring air a languor, slow as a Tennessee Williams script, hung over the seedy student neighborhoods west of the campus.
When the Berkeley term was over, I must have decided it was time for a respite, so I headed to Santa Cruz. I can't recall how I got there. A bus, perhaps? A ride from a friend? I also can't recall what I did in Santa Cruz. Did I venture out to the fledgling campus in the redwoods, still consisting of many trailers and temporary buildings? Possibly. I must've gone to the beach or the boardwalk. Who knows? All I recall is Sam and PJ. Frankly I don't even recall them very well. They were friends from Riverside who, like me, had transferred to another campus. UC Santa Cruz, in their case. So I knew them, assumed I could stay with them, and so I did. The scene looked very much like my visit to Riverside, a month or two before. The couple had a rented old house, something PJ had probably found. She was the more practical of the two, Sam being the dreamy one. It would be oversimplifying to call them boring. But, let's put it this way, neither of them ever got very excited about anything.
All I could see was that they were a couple. This was happening now, at this stage of life, young people pairing off. As individuals, they already seemed settled down. Now they had settled down into settling down together. I could barely sit still. I barely knew what intimacy was, let alone sex. Girls had an ominous power to hurt you, I could sense that much. Perhaps I'll always be alone. I envied Sam and PJ for the easy drift of their lives toward each other. We must've eaten together. We probably smoked dope together. Their white, clapboard house had screens on the porches and dust on the old couches, much like the houses students rented at Riverside. After a few days, it was time to go home.
I do recall the trip home. I hitchhiked. A period van, scrawled with squirelly, crudely psychedelic painting, picked me up at the Highway One on-ramp. Inside, the stereo was blaring. I sat on a rug in the back, leaning against boxes and passing around a joint. The Doors were lighting everybody's fire that summer, and they did so for us, swerving and banking over the Santa Cruz Mountains toward San Jose. The ride, I vaguely recall, ended there. Perhaps I took the bus back to Oakland. It doesn't matter. I was lost. Lost in the pain of a childhood that hadn't ended, not believing very much on my own future. However countercultural I thought I was, doors were opening and closing in life's maze. Fate had something in store for me, and whatever it was, I had better be prepared.
Back in Berkeley. Or was I? For one thing, I was actually living in North Oakland. For another, I was sharing the downstairs of a house with, yes, a recently transferred student from UC Riverside. I went in search of a summer job. The campus placement office sent me to an apartment manager, only a few blocks from the school. She was a Russian, named incredibly, Olga. She and her husband kept bloodhounds in a small, three-bedroom place. Her apartments needed cleaning. She managed two buildings, Olga did, and had hired Berkeley student after Berkeley student. None of them cleaned adequately. They say bathroom is clean, but bathroom is not clean. They say is clean oven, but no. I took this all in. I knew how to clean things. I'd grown up in a bachelor household with a father who was largely AWOL at parenting during my adolescence. I had plenty of German genes. I liked things clean. Olga was delighted with my work. By the end of the summer I'd paid my tuition, even paid off the Dean's loan I'd used to go to Mexico in August. I moved into my own room near downtown Oakland. I was about to begin my last school year with a whole body. Without knowing it, I was off to a good start.
Get real. This seems to the current imperative. When this saying gets on my face, I don't like it. But I find I don't like it anyway, under any circumstances. Yet circumstances are what they are. Get real before real gets you. Fact is, I am angry these days. Angry at Marlou's illness, angry at Marlou for her illness, angry of life for threatening to cut things short, important things, like everything. And what is there to do but exist within this reality, fester and, if one is lucky, grow old? And if two are even luckier, grow old together and laugh about this some day.
No one is laughing now. Marlou's theory is that this is the beginning of facing the end. The end comes for everyone, and the usual approach is to retire, go on an Alaskan cruise or two, deal with empty days or full ones, adjust to having your spouse around for lunch, or not, get increasingly frequent checkups, and not think about anything that will throw you off your increasingly shaky stride.
This is happening to us in our late 50s/early 60s, and it couldn't come at a worse time. What would be a better time? Is there a better time? How long has human life expectancy been comfortably stretched into the 80s for masses of people, as it has here in America? When did human life expectations stretch too, as though keeping pace?
Our summer holiday has been postponed. Not canceled, mind you, just postponed. There is every indication we will go somewhere in the autumn. Unless something turns up on one of Marlou's PET scans. Or...I keep trying to avoid this fact...something turns up on one of mine. Get real. Get a grip. Get a life. Which, as the novelists and the poets keep telling us, often requires that you get a death. Which, neatly summarized, adds up to getting a real grip on life and death. Get real.
Summertime, and the living is uneasy. One thing about 95-degree heat, the libido-sapping weather drains me of all critical faculties and all -- well, most -- spilkes, leaving little that can interfere with a good night's sleep. I do wake at the cool of the morning, about 4:30 a.m., casting about for reasons why I'm not sleeping. Which become apparent soon, say about 8 a.m. when I'm in the shower and Marlou and cancer and tomorrow come at me in unfortunate combination, a long moment of panic, conveniently experienced under a warm stream of water. Life is merciless and merciful at the same time. Go figure.
Even better, go out to our garden. Only a mensch could grow broccoli that is twice the size of a human head. Okay, maybe it's a little kid's head, but it's twice as big as two of those, and do I look like an agricultural scientist? I don't know what possessed me to plant broccoli, but it seemed like a good idea until the plants revealed themselves to be on the scale of small trees. At least shrubs. They are not only big but bluish, as well as greenish, noticeably different from their cousins at Safeway.
Was it some kind of cancer-curing wish involving the purported properties of cruciform vegetables that made me plant this stuff? I can't say there was a plan in any normal sense of the word. These days there is something in me a little desperate, background panicky, and I do what I do. Healing vegetables. In California, one has to be on guard for this sort of thing. Fortunately, we've had enough broccoli to share, slightly too much to consume ourselves, and an end that is in sight. There's only one broccoli left, destination as yet unknown.
Thank God for friends. Andrea told us last Sunday about a guilty television pleasure, something along the lines of "Dog, Bounty Hunter." Doubtless I've got the name slightly wrong, but not to worry. You'll find it on A&E, which is odd, for despite the cable channel's name, the show fits squarely outside the "arts" category and "entertainment" does not do it justice.
Andrea has a subtle way about her, so I didn't quite grasp that this is a reality show. First, understand that I have never seen a reality show. I stumbled across something called "Cops" once and got the idea, though. In any case, Dog is a reality star. In professional terms, he is a bounty hunter. Bountiful in everything, he lives in Hawaii, which you have to admit it is way cool. Even cooler, is his general appearance. Andrea tried to explain that he has something-or-others dangling from his head. And after studying the screen for several minutes, I'm not myself certain what they are. Ringlets of hair? Beads on hair? I just don't know. That's because the show's territory is slightly less familiar than the Sea of Tranquility. In fact, I've got more chance of making it to the moon then getting inside Dog's Honolulu home.
Dog looks to be in early middle age, slightly running to fat, and running his mouth throughout the action, as a sort of voiceover. He's trying to prepare you for the main event of the evening, the chase, cornering and apprehension of one of the country's most-wanted bail jumpers. The tension builds. Tonight's target, he tells his sons (more about them soon) has robbed banks. As though this fact alone is insufficient to quicken our adrenaline, he points out the heist essentials. Think of it, he says, the chutzpah (okay, my word, not his) of this guy walking up to a counter, pulling out a gun and demanding cash. Actually, he runs through this account twice.
Yeah, someone adds. That someone, temporarily offscreen, now moves on camera, absorbing all pixels, occupying the entire frame with her spandex-busting bosom, at least 60 inches of it, while she says something. Hard to say what the something is, except that it's more of the same. Imagine this guy, this bank-robbing lout, out there, roaming free, on my dime. The dime part is a little hard to figure. Never mind. You can't get your mind off this woman, Dog's wife. Is she Mrs. Dog?
There's no time to tell, because the action is accelerating. But not before a bit of reality-TV subplot. Dog has a new office. Dog has an old son, old enough to know better, apparently old enough to pack a rod and go hunting with daddy. But he's torn. Dog has a new office. It's cool. Computer, TV, stuff. Stay behind and play with the new office equipment or go on the manhunt? Quite a poser, but the lure of the hunt is too much. Soon were are all piling into SUVs, because the quarry has been spotted. Identified and cornered, although asleep might be a better word. The guy, whose photo we've seen earlier, a lean faced Hispanic bank-robbing mastermind, wreaking havoc upon the islands, is having a bit of a doze. In a downtown parking structure. This should alert us to something.
Sure enough, Dog, Sons of Dog and wife of Dog converge on the napping criminal. They pounce on him, weapons waving, insults flying, the wife adding another reference to him being free and her dime being spent. The criminal, still dispelling sleep from his head, looking bleary, and just plain looking at the bosom projecting from Dog's wife, offers no resistance. He seems, in fact, a hapless schlemiel. Sleeping one moment, handcuffed the next, but not terribly surprised. The show is over.
But the effects linger. Just when you think you're part of the educated, mid-Peninsula haute bourgeoisie, have a look at "Dog, Bounty Hunter." You and Dog have more in common than you'd like to admit. You'd like to have dangling things hanging off your balding head. You'd like a little crime chase in your life. You'd like a new office. "We are all Americans," Le Monde observed in a distant post-9/11 epoque. We are all Dog, it seems. Braying for a little blood, hoping for something new, praying for something not too horrible. Summertime. The living is uneasy.
I was standing in the bathroom this morning having a go at my face with an electric shaver when something collapsed in my foot. I couldn't tell if I stepped on something, cracked a bone or pulled a muscle. If this account sounds orthopedically vague, it is. My left foot, the functioning one, largely communicates with my brain through rumor. Skin sensations are not only muffled but twisted by what's left of my neurology. When the foot encounters something that hurts, the leg bends, buckles. There's virtually no pain sensation in my left foot, but the approximate shape and surface of what's underfoot comes through. I can feel that I have stepped on something like, say, a pebble. What's less clear is if the pebble is actually a sharp piece of glass and if the feeling of pain represents arterial slicing or just surface probing. Generally speaking, what I do know is that my knee is collapsing. That's the spastic reflex, the essence of spinal-cord-injured life. Something happens and something else happens. The thing that happens, like the pebble, can't be felt and the next thing that happens, like the bending knee, can't be controlled.
The other thing that happens is the conviction, immediate and profound, that more is collapsing than my knee. It's my life that's giving way. Things are falling apart. I am falling apart. Whether or not I recover from this instant and avoid falling on the bathroom floor doesn't matter. The signs are clear. It's getting worse. My slim hold on independence, doing something so routine as shaving, all that's going to go.
The truth is that it is. It's all going to go. For all of us, at some point. And one would think that I've been getting myself ready for this. I've had losses, kept going. I can have a few more losses and keep going a bit longer, can't I?
Marlou's cancer presents the same problem. She is symptom free at the moment, perhaps cancer free. Who knows? Why worry? Isn't this a gift?
It's fascinating to watch a typical kid's love of sameness. This food. That outing. These shoes. Kids keep their world secure and safe through reassuring encounters with the familiar. Same is good. I acquired a degree of emotional security late in life. And I understand this sameness thing. If your family seemed shaky from the start, then started shaking to bits, you learn to hang on. You hang on to constancy. You hang on to stability. You hang onto the past. And that is the problem.
The problem is that crippled people age too. The frightening slide into paralysis has never really stopped. It's had some pleasant interruptions. I walked everywhere for 20 years until crutching gave way to rolling. I used to have a strong right arm. I used to stand in the bathroom without worrying.
And Marlou and I used to think we had all the time in the world. Now we don't know what we have in terms of time. Fortunately, there are other terms. What we have is what we wake up with. At least we wake up. I am learning to that is enough. That is everything.
