Too young to be Pilgrims

Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton (1833-1905)

   You know how sometimes the battery isn't dead but it's really weak, and so the car won't start the first four times you crank it, but after you've sat there trying out various combinations of dirty words for, oh, five minutes, you try one last time and it turns over? Something like that happened with Mom today.

   She was napping when I arrived but not deeply, so I woke her by showing her the unrealistically blue orchids they had for her at Kroger.
   We spent about 30 minutes cycling through today's statements: "That's the most beautiful blue." "It would never happen, ever." "I'm 90 ... something." And "What's Michael doing?" "Oh God, here come some more Pilgrims."
   The Pilgrims are in a print on her wall. A group of them are walking to church in the snow, and they stare out at the viewer with expressions that make me wonder if possibly I am a bear.
   I gathered that what would never happen ever was the blue of the orchid. And Michael is always mowing the lawn or "thinking of things for us to do."


   I put on the Sound of Music  CD and danced around to "16 Going on 17," always good for yuks. That girl shouldn't listen to the boy, he wants to be a Nazi. But this time, when I "conducted" the band using hand shadows, Mom merrily joined in with the only hand she had available. When the song ended she looked disturbed.
   "We got stuck here somehow," she said.

   Maybe she meant her head was stuck in her neck pillow or we had listened to Sound of Music one too many times or that she was stuck in a bed in a nursing home. But on a hunch I looked under the blanket, found her left hand and pulled it out so she could see it.
    She held her two hands up and studied them a while. "This is all that's left of me."
    I said, "Yep. You're nothing but hands now."
    And she got the giggles.

   Eventually Michael called on the phone and was his usual funny self, and she listened with a lot of interest. Sunny wheeled in and soon was having a crisis in the bathroom, so aides came in. And in the middle of all this stimulation, Michael started making jokes about the Pilgrims, asking Mom if she'd known any Pilgrims, and I said, "Mom was born during Prohibition."
   Michael asked her, "What did you drink?" and Mom answered him.
   She said, "Water. Nothing but water."
   This was different.
   Remembering that she used to talk about watching her uncle make soap in the basement — which somehow I've gathered was code for making wine or something harder — I said, "And soap?" She studied me, as though to decode whatever it was I had said. I repeated, "Uncle Eddie was making soap in the basement, wink, wink."
   "No," she said. "No, it was soap."
   Hootch was not made in the basement at Uncle Eddie's house?
   "Auntie Minnie would never have done that," she said.
   "But what about Uncle Eddie? Would he? Wasn't he tricksey?"
    She said, "It was soap and they used it to scrub everything in the house."
    This was turning into a genuine conversation.
   "But Auntie Minnie made cookies, right?" I asked. "Because she didn't like that the men were drinking on empty stomaches, and she knew they would eat cookies. They wouldn't eat dinner, but they would eat cookies."
   And she said, "That's right."
   "Huh. Well, I have misunderstood something all this time. So it was soap in the basement. Were they good cookies?"
   "They were delicious," she said.


   I don't mean to suggest it was a fluent conversation, but it still seemed special even after we'd repeated the discussion about basement soap several times. But finally I needed a change, so I responded to the house scrubbing bit by asking if Aunt Mary and Uncle Eddie had made her and the other kids clean the house with them.
    She said, "No, they never made us do that."

Aunt Mary and Uncle Eddie's house

    "You made us do chores,"  I pointed out. "Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, doing the laundry.  You made us do it but also you taught us how to clean things, so I suppose that was good. Thank you for that. But they didn't make you do chores?"
    "No," Mom said. "But they cleaned everything with the soap, they scrubbed the whole house from top to bottom. And all we drank was water. Just water."
    "And tea," I said. "I know for a fact you drank tea, too, because your mother sometimes would look at the tea leaves."
    Mom was momentarily confused. Then she smiled to herself. It looked for all the world as though she was remembering.

   I asked her if she'd known any of the Pilgrims personally and she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. "That was too long ago." On the phone, Michael was calculating centuries for us.
   Meanwhile, we looked at the Pilgrims on the wall. "What do they want? Why don't they get out of the cold snow?"
   Michael joked that their pants didn't go all the way to the ground, and Mom laughed so hard I think she wet herself, because she looked very distressed.
   "They came here and stomped around in the snow and made us have to cook a turkey every year," I said.
   Stupid Pilgrims.
   She laughed some more.

   "That must have been a dirty little house," I joked, and she laughed. But then she said, wistfully, "It was a nice little house."
    She suddenly looked sad, so I agreed, "It was a happy little house."
    And she said, so very sad now, "That's all over. ... I don't know how I got to be so old."
   "I'm old too," I said.
   "How old are you?"
   "I don't know," I said, "Not as old as you are, though."
   "I'm 92," she said. "But I guess I will live to be 100 years old."

Happy day

Sweet grandbaby visits Mom two weeks ago.

   If the person you've come to the nursing home to see is asleep when you get there, he will wake up for you or he will not. The outcome's easy to predict: There's asleep, and then there's asleep with the mouth open.
   The mouth-open sleeper is a deep diver, unreachable.
   After missing more than a week of visiting Mom because of traveling to Indiana and then coming home with the grandbaby's chest cold, finally today I felt well enough that if I didn't go see her, guilt would wreck my night.
   It's about a 30-minute drive on a Sunday morning, or maybe 25 minutes. And so the car's air conditioner was doing an excellent job by the time I parked, shut down the engine and popped open the door to the reality of hot air. Gathering an armload of good-bet children's books and a laptop loaded with new baby pictures, I made myself smile and walked into the building, past the nurses and down the long hallway to her room.
   Where Mom's mouth was open.
   Some days, that is my best case scenario, but after such a vacation, it was deflating. Was I really going to drive all that way only to turn right around and head back? I cast around the room for chores to make the trip worthwhile.
   I stroked her hair. Nothing.
   Maybe I should sit and sing at her. But no, I was still wheezy.
   The potted plants needed water, and so I switched them from one side of the TV to the other. I plucked a bit of paper off the floor. Wrote a note to Mom's roommate Sunny and left it by her bed.
   I stroked Mom's hair again.
   Noticing that her teeth were stained with a brown line, possibly leftover from chocolate pudding, and that they looked uncomfortably dry, I decided to risk moistening her lips. There were three plastic-wrapped sponges on sticks atop the TV cabinet. I opened one, got a glass of water to dunk it, and wiped her teeth.
   Without opening her eyes, she peeled back her lips. Uppers first, then lowers. She went on snoring gently, and yet she moved her lips out of the way so I could clean them.
   I squeezed a sip of water into her mouth.
   She spoke! She said, "Happy day."
   Nothing more, and her eyes stayed closed. Just "Happy day." She was under deep again, mouth gaping.
   The exchange took maybe a minute and a half, but I felt as justified and acceptable as though I'd sat with her for an hour and a half. I stole from the room and drove home to spend the rest of the day making pottery.
   And I'm pretty sure I won't be waking up to worry about my selfishness and failures tonight, either.

Don't worry about that

   Our daughter and grandbaby are visiting, and they have head colds. Caroline was concerned that, given Mom's frailty, a cold might kill her. Would it be safe to take the baby to the home for a visit?
   Maybe. I mean, anything is possible.
   But more likely the baby would pick up something from Mom.
   No head cold is likely to kill or even disturb my 92-year-old mother.
   In the past two years, she has survived the flu that killed other residents, several UTIs and (by my count) three bouts of pneumonia, the most recent brought on by sinus drainage from her seasonal allergies.
   Ordinarily, people with seasonal allergies are miserable, but they change postures, walk around, blow their noses, cough and keep their lungs clear. Mom lies in bed too weak to hold up her head longer than a few seconds. Her lungs were wet all spring, and eventually she developed some pneumonia.
   I thought, "Pneumonia is an old man's friend."
   I thought, "She'll simply go to sleep and not wake up."
   I thought, "What a relief it will be."
   I thought, "But will it?"
   I thought, "No, Mommy, don't die!"
   Now she's fine.
   I think that her immune system has already become well acquainted with each and every one of the rhinoviruses of central Arkansas and so would simply blink at this head cold the baby has picked up from her Little Rock cousins.
   Blink.
   Poof.
   Bye-bye.