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."