Wendy-Jean
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After a weekend of salty sea air and sumptuous seafood, we are refreshed and ready for anything that may come our way.

Wednesday, Flo will be discharged from Rivercrest and Diane will move her ( I’m in charge of the TV) back to Concord Park. We expect a rousing welcome from staff and residents.

Our friends’ house on the Cape had cable TV and we watched two new releases, both of which I recommend: The Fugitive and The Bourne Identity.

Diane’s best meal? Raw Oysters on the half shell with crab cakes and a glass of Rosemount Estate. Mine? Scallops sautÈed with capers.

You’ll be happy to know that I talked to only one person, Richard, the owner of one of Chatham’s oldest and most respected galleries. With a kelly green cable-knit sweater over a blue pin stripped shirt, weejans, and black rimmed reading glasses far down his nose, I thought, here is someone with whom I have nothing in common. Until he misunderstood one of my comments.

“That’s a good price for the Falconer painting!” At fourteen g’s, I meant, don’t be ridiculous. But he heard it as it reads. On our way out, I said, “I hate the traffic now and it isn’t even the summer.” He replied,

“This is a town of five thousand which grows to thirty thousand in July. When the crowds descend, I take my two most expensive paintings and put them in the window. That keeps the “I Am With Stupid” T-shirt crowd from coming in and dripping their ice cream all over my art.”

Adam sent me this photograph about a month ago. This river to be is now all river.
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Matt is on Spring Break in Florida and we are going to be in Chatham on the Cape until Monday. No computer access and no updates unless the Benedict Arnold Twins, Adam and Dan, chime in.

When you read this remember when my grandmother was born – a long time ago – and where she grew up – the southwestern part of Missouri.

Helen and I are waiting to see her liver doctor.

“What do you see?” I held up my fingernails.

“You’re not anemic.”

“That’s right. And do you remember when you looked at my fingernails and said I was?”

“Vaguely.”

“Back in 1970, when Diane and I were Macrobiotics. You said I was anemic. I said ‘Bullshit.’ But you were right, just like now when you said I should have checked in with the receptionist. We wasted twenty minutes because I thought they’d see us sitting here.”

Sitting here, waiting for Dr. Schneider. Our appointment had been for 2:10 and now it was 3:10. I owned twenty of those minutes, but he owned the rest. Helen was exhausted, but as in all things, there was good. Helen told more stories.

I continued.

“You reminded me of Dr. Phillips. He talked to me, and with no lab tests, diagnosed my hypoglycemia.”

“You said I sent you to a psychiatrist. That he didn’t even listen to your chest.”

“ A smart aleck, even at thirteen? I should cut myself some slack. Maybe I was being funny. I still can’t believe he figured that out.”

“Dr. Phillips knew my mother had atherosclerosis of the arteries in the brain. He said she had a classic ‘frozen mask.’ ”

“And he was right. Well, she had dementia, but who really knows why.”

“I told my mother and she said he was just a fat Jew.”

“Yeah, and… .”

“That’s what she said.”

“And… .” My mother, and my father for that matter, had they lived in Selma, might have marched with MLK. I needed some kind of acknowledgment that what her mother was saying was off the wall.

“She was half right. He was a Jew and he was overweight.”

“And…come on here.” I needed tenderizer for this tough piece of meat, but I wasn’t getting any.

“You know what Francis Gallagher used to say?”

“Do I want to know?”

“He said he would be sure his doctor was a hebe.”

“Classic Archie Bunker.”

“He said a Jew would have to work extra hard to get into medical school. I didn’t know what a hebe was. My mother had a bridge club. She told me one of her neighbors, a Jew, wanted to join. She asked me what I thought, because she didn’t know any Jews. I told her that would be a good reason to invite that woman to join. She looked at me and said, ‘You always were peculiar.’

“Did your mother have a sense of humor?” I asked this only because my older brother, Brian, thought she was a bit on the stern side.”

“She did, and she told this one joke, but she couldn’t tell it right. It goes like this. There was an evangelist. Her name was Aimee Semple McPherson. ( I heard, Amy Simple McPherson but when I looked it up Google asked me if I really meant Aimee Semple). My mother would say, ‘What do you call an Aimee Semple McPherson salad?’ The answer was, lettuce cutup without dressing. But she would say, ‘Lettuce cutup without Mayonnaise.’ Everyone would laugh.”

“Wait a minute. Lettuce cutup without dressing? This was a joke?”

“It was slightly vulgar”

“Vulgar? Aimee Semple …Lettuce cutup without dressing?”

Helen laughed so hard, she turned red. “You are as bad as my mother.”

“Lettuce cutup…”

She slowed it down for me, enunciating each syllable, “Let–us–cut–up–with–out –dressing.”

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An update from rakkity:
I just got an email from KT today. She slept under the stars in the Moroccan Sahara desert the day before yesterday, then hopped on a camel and rode back to town while the sun rose. She loved it. Today, she’s got her nose back to the scholastic grindstone in Sevilla.

Chris is tall and his grey hair, parted on one side, complements his blue eyes as if it were dyed to match. He looks like he could be Ted Kennedy’s son, and when he told me his mother knew Ted, I thought, okay.

“I don’t need much, a couple 1×8’s of quarter-sawn white oak.”

As Chris punched the keypad of his calculator, multiplying board feet by price, I asked, “Do you remember old time radio?” He paused and looked at me quizzically, as if the fifty years had to be traveled in real time.

“The Shadow, Ellery Queen, Dragnet, Sam Spade.Ö. I bought a three CD set from Willow Books, and now I can’t get out of my truck. “

“No, we were TV watchers.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-one; my brother, Mark, is fifty-three.” He and Mark run this business, a hardwood outlet. Suppliers ship rough cut lumber which is then dressed to order in the brothers’ mill.

“That was the beginning of TV. You would have listened to the radio.”

“The only thing I remember was the Dickens tale on WBZ. They played it two years in a row on Christmas Eve. It helped me get through the nightmarish night before Christmas Day.”

“I’ve never heard anyone call it nightmarish. Exciting, over-stimulating.Ö.”

“Maybe I exaggerate, but we could never fall asleep, thinking about presents waiting under the tree. Once my mother gave us sleeping pills.”

“Sleeping pills. I’d be afraid to imagine what they might have been.”

“You know, I don’t even know if they were sleeping pills. Could have been anything.Ö.”

“Placebos.Ö?”

“Like aspirin. That was the only time she gave us something to sleep. I wish I had asked her what they were, but I don’t think she would remember.”

“My mother would. She remembers everything.”

“Not mine. She had late-in-life depression which affected her memory, and she had electroshock therapy.”

“This was before Prozac?”

“No, it’s only seven years ago. There is a small percentage of people those medications don’t work on, and my mother was one. They contain speed, or something like speed, and it made her agitated. Instead of depressed and lethargic, she was depressed and hyper. But don’t think of mad scientist electroshock.Ö.”

“I know. My wife works at McLean.”

“It made my mother feel much better, but the side effect is it erases your memory. Not long term, but your short term memory.”

What is it about me that gets people to reveal this stuff? I don’t know that I’d even tell a friend my mother had electroshock. I could have gone on, but I changed the subject. “Are those your girls?” Portraits of two high-school age girls, both redheads, hung on the wall behind Chris.

“No. They are Mark’s, which means they are my nieces. The one on the left is sixteen and a half, just got her driver’s license.”

“Uh oh.” My father worried when we got our driver’s licenses, and even with safer cars, that worry was passed down.

“And she had a fender bender.”

“As did my son, Matthew, not long after he got his license. It seems to be a rite of passage.”

“She was driving in the snow. She slid right through an intersection.”

“Matthew has done that, too, without running into anything.”

“But she uses the snow as an excuse.”

“Let me guess. She said she was driving soooo slowly.”

“But not slow enough.”

“I know. It’s as though teenagers have established a minimum speed, below which they won’t go, and if they have an accident, it is not their fault. Was she alone?”

“She was, but she doesn’t pay much attention to the law about not driving with other kids for six months.”

“Doesn’t pay attention? Don’t you tell her not to?”

“We compromised. That is one law very few kids obey. I told her if she drives with kids it can’t be at night and she has to be extra careful.”

“That is your compromise? Think about the cops that stop her. They don’t compromise anymore. There is no longer any we’ll-make-sure-they-get-home-safely stuff. It’s all leg irons and handcuffs. I hate the rigid world Matthew inhabits.”

“Don’t get me started on that. We’ve lost control of our police departments.”

“That’s a great way of putting it. It’s all punitive.”

I could see my morning disappearing inside this two-room building.

“We could go on and on, but I’ve got to get back to work.”

***********************

My day’s project was to add connecting side rails to an antique head and footboard. I had the matching lumber, now all I needed was the hardware to connect the pieces. Next stop, my local lumber yard.

“Mr. Miller!”

“Jim.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I need bed rail hardware.’

“We don’t have any.”

Jim is sixty-two, has a lived-in body and acts at work as he might at home. He is so pleasant and so casual, I expect him to pop a slice of pizza in a nearby microwave and offer me half. I’ve known Jim for years and have learned that he is divorced, has two sons, and a daughter and two grandchildren. He claims his job killed his marriage. Or should I say, his jobs. For the last twenty-four years he worked two: one behind a desk, selling building materials, and the other, evenings and nights, patrolling the streets as a town cop.

“Okay, forget the hardware, tell me more about your two jobs. I can’t wrap my brain around the lack of sleep thing, and even worse is the space issue.”

“Like outer space?”

“Inner space. When I get home after work, I kick my dog, my wife and my kid in that order. You don’t go home, you go to another job. What do you kick?”

“Remember, I was doing two entirely different things.” Jim ended the sentence with a lilt, as if the change in tone added emphasis.

“Oh, yeah, that would do it. Go from your day job to your night job, the one where you carry a gun. And this is on how many hours of sleep?”

“Four, but never all at once. And you know, it never bothered me. My doctor couldn’t understand it either, but he said I was so healthy, to keep on doing what I was doing.”

“Here’s a question for the old time cop in you. I was talking to Chris down the street, just before I got here, and we both agreed we’ve lost control of our police departments. Nothing is settled in a friendly fashion. Like the old days. You remember the old days.”

“You mean domestic disputes?”

“No, we were talking about driving…but, yeah. That too.”

“You can’t anymore.”

“Can’t what anymore?”

“Walk away from a fight. It’s the liability. If I walk into a situation, I own it. From the moment I arrive, it’s on my shoulders. If I leave and someone gets killed, I’m in trouble.

“You can’t stop the fight, dust your hands off, and say goodbye?”

“No. If I get a call and it’s a couple, one of them is going in. No matter what, and I have to decide who. I got a call once and it was a woman beating her son. She had pulled the glass and wooden shade off a ceiling fixture, smashed it on the floor and was hitting her kid with the wooden slats. She said she was trying to teach him who was boss. I had to take her in.”

“So you go from child abuse to, ëI don’t have bed rail hardware?’ No stops at Jim Beam’s house, let alone your house?”

“I don’t drink, and that lady hitting her kid is far from the worst. I had a seventeen year old point a gun on me. He kept me at bay for forty minutes.”

“And then what?”

“He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

The Big Picture

Begin here for new photos and integrated pics with rakkity’s travelogue across the pond. At the bottom of the page is a link to Chapter II – new pics, a new story.

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It’s 4:30 AM and I am on my way home. Given the hour I lose, I hope to be in Acton by 11 PM.

Helen, after her first office visit, admiring her flowers.
Yesterday reminded me of one of the camping group’s fall bushwhacks through the Maine woods. We have a plan, a view, we have a destination, a mountain top, but we never quite get there. A rocky outcrop, an opening through the trees, a glimpse of the lakes below, a settling for less than what we desired.

In the shortest form possible, her primary care physician said, ‘Move.’

Her gastroenterologist said she might have autoimmune liver disease or Primary Biliary Cirrhosis, but we won’t know until we do more tests.

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Dr. Bieker. ‘Do you have a living will?’

Helen. ‘No.’

Me. ‘I am her health care proxy.’ I’m pretty proud of this now that Chris tells me it means I’m her favorite.

‘Dr. Bieker to Helen. ‘Does he know what you want?’

Me. ‘I do. At the first excuse, she wants to see what’s next.’

Dr. Bieker. ‘Many people are afraid to die.’

Me. ‘Not this one. she is not afraid enough and that’s a problem.’

Dr. Bieker. ‘And some people reach a point where they have had enough.’

Helen smiled. I knew she wanted to raise her hand.

Jennifer

When my grandmother died in a two car accident at around age 75, my family was pretty convinced that she had desired her death, and I decided that the uninjured teenage driver of the other car deserved to know that. My family agreed, and (partly since it was my idea, and partly since I was a teenager myself) I was the one who called him on the phone, and told him Ö gosh, what DID I say? I think I explained who I was and then said that we thought that she might have been trying to kill herself and that we were glad he hadn’t been hurt. I think he mumbled “Oh” and then there was a kind of uncomfortable silence and I said goodbye and hung up. Every now and then, I muse on the situation, and reconsider whether she really had desired her death, and whether the call was of any use to him then or ever. Did he muse on it every now and then and wonder if that was really why I called? Or had he already (a few days later) essentially forgotten an unpleasant incident? Did my family really think it was true or were some in my family deceiving themselves and/or others in order to feel better?

As I sit here my mother tells me stories. Because “here‚” is at her fabulous new computer, I try to write them down as fast as she speaks, but I get behind. She’s a terrific story teller with a scary memory, and if I could keep up, I’d have no editing to do. Today, I’m not in a spiffing up mood. Here’s today’s, ragged edges and all.

But first, a short update. Tomorrow we have Helen’s first doctor’s appointment at 9:30. It’s with her primary care physician, the one who will tell me Helen has to move to be closer to her children. Joan wants me to say, “My sister, Joan, would be happy to have her parents move in with her, and she will do everything humanly possible to facilitate it. Michael, however, thinks it’s okay if his mother dies a miserable and neglected death in bed in her computer room.”

At 2:30, we drive back to the same building to see the gastro-enterologist who will tell us if the Prednisone is keeping Helen’s auto immune liver disease under control. Joan, wants me to ask him about interferon lozenges.

On to today’s story:

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“When Ron Coleman killed himself, the police wanted to interview me. I told them, no, I didn’t want the police driving up and down the street in front of his house. “

“That was the guy across the street?‚”

“Oh, you remember. Ron came over asking for money and we gave him a check for forty dollars. I made it out for twenty and he looked at it and said, “Couldn’t you make it out for forty?’ I said, “No,’ but Mack gave me that don’t-be-so-stingy look. Later that day the bank called to ask me if I had written a check for four hundred dollars. Anyway, the investigating detective wanted to come to our house to interview us. I told him, “I do not want you parked in front of my house because I live across the street from these people. They don’t need the embarrassment.’ He said, “I’m not sure it’s any of your business.’ I said, “I’m not so sure it’s not,’ and then I said, “Why don’t I meet you at the bank?’ His answer, “I don’t have time to do this.’ I’m getting impatient now, so I asked him how about if we meet at the bank in two hours, and the detective agrees, but he doesn’t show up. After I got home from the bank, I called him in his office to ask why he didn’t wasn’t there. He said he didn’t feel like it. He wanted to meet me here.”

“Anyway, I turned the news on the next night and there is a story about a man found dead in an abandoned house of a drug overdose. It was Ron. I had to call his brother to tell him what happened. As much as I knew. He was greatly relieved by my call because he was afraid he had caused his brother’s death after he stopped giving him money.‚”

We enjoyed another active day. Jeff helped me pull the cap off the back of my truck so I could wax underneath it and wash those impossible-to-get-to windows where the front of the cap faces the back of the truck (yes, I am running out of things to fix and polish). After breakfast, and after the morning’s crossword puzzle, HO and I worked on her new email address book and continued to explain her absence to her cyberbuddies. Then I drove to the mall to buy food and computer-related parts, and for dinner we all went to Jeff and Karenís.

The amount of food consumed by the Millers was most impressive. Helen had, in her subtle way, complained of the lack of flavor in the fixings I’d been providing. Little did I know that the chicken soup I created was so similar to what she’d been eating for the last two months. We feasted on salmon, tuna, baked potatoes and spinach salad, as much for taste as hunger.

After dinner we drove the thoroughly exhausted Helen back and put her to bed. I switched on her TV and did what I always do – sit at the computer and respond to her minor requests. She watched another British comedy, and I typed; she fell asleep, I played computer chess. We experienced one brief scary choking period before I left, and I think that helped set the stage for what happened next. Let’s say it knocked over another chess piece on an already messy board.

With my camera slung over my shoulder and my new black Irish sweater tossed almost preppy-like on my back, I headed towards Jeff and Karen’s. The streets were dark. This time as I shuffled along I thought about the girl who had been shot in the park across from the Ruthenburgs. I even imagined her slumped on one of the benches. I don’t know the real details.

From behind me, I heard a voice, a question. I turned and saw a guy on a bicycle. He appeared too old and too big for the bike; I said “Hi.” He looked at me and mumbled, “I thought you were someone else.” I thought, I’m much older than you, I’m white, and other than my blue jeans I’m sure I’m not dressed like anyone you know.

“It’s an easy mistake,” I offered under my breath. I might as well have said, “Yep, I”m prey. Take a bite.”

He turned on his bike, looked harder at me, and said something else I didn’t understand. I walked on and he cut his front tire sharply and coasted up to me. For some reason, maybe it’s that male thing, but when I feel like someone is pushing, I push back. I knew where he was headed, my face, but he had no idea where I was going, his face. Now he’s straddling his bike and I’m staring through the dark lenses of his glasses, our noses maybe five inches apart.

Had I a moment to reflect, I might have laughed. An old white guy, far from home; a young black guy, in his hood. And moments before I was sitting with my mother clearing the phlegm from her throat.

We stood for a few moments, then he said something conciliatory, and I responded in kind. We disengaged.

“I’m in a lousy mood. I’m visiting my sick mother.”

We walked together the last two blocks to Jeff’s house, me telling him about my mother, he telling me about his parents, where he went to high school, his military service, the work he does, the work he has done, his belief in God, how he prays when he is depressed, and on and on. We talked so long that Jeffrey, who was inside listening to music and thought he was hallucinating me outside talking to this guy, moseyed out to see what was up. As Jeff approached, my new friend said,

“Hey, man, I didn’t mean anything earlier. No disrespect or anything.”

We’d just finished breakfast and my mother, the only person I know who enjoys the past more than I, asked me, “Do you remember the Brady’s, next door in Cincinnati?”

“Of course I do. There was Cassie, Roger and John and their parents, Rommie and Gordon. I remember the camper Gordon made from plans – it took him months – and I remember the night when he got drunk.”

“That’s what I was going to tell you about.”

“I was twelve; it was 1959. I was upstairs. The noise woke me. He kept screaming about his glasses.”

“That’s because Rommie broke them. This was the night before they moved to Milwaukee. They were going out; they were very social people. The next thing I know, Rommie is at the door in her slip, her hair is messed up, and she’s yelling, ‘He’s trying to kill me.’ “

“But Mr Brady was a Mr. Peeper’s type guy. As were his sons. Peter might call them brainiacs”

“He was a Mr. Peepers, but not when he drank. Rommie said he hit her and the only way to stop him had been to break his glasses so he couldn’t see. I told her to go up into our bedroom and stay there.”

“She was small, right? About five three, 150 lbs ?”

“Yes, and her husband would make three of her. He made two of Mack. He and Mack were the same height, but Gordon was much huskier. Rommie ran upstairs and then I hear this banging on our back door. It’s Gordon and he says, ‘I need to see my wife! ‘ I told him to sit down and I’d make him some coffee. He said, ‘You have no right to keep me from my wife.’ I said, ‘Gordon, if you don’t calm down, I’ll call the police.’ Meanwhile Mack is looking in from the next room. I wave him off, thinking the worst thing would be to have two bulls going at each other.”

“All this time Rommie is upstairs?”

“On our bed with a pillow over her head. Trying to block it all out.”

“She spent the night at our house, and the next morning they both came for breakfast as had been planned. Gordon said, ‘Helen, I am really sorry about last night. I do apologize.’ I said, ‘I accept your apology, just don’t ever let that happen again.’ ”

---

Dinner last night at Jeff and Karen’s.

“Helen, do you remember WildRoot Cream-oil?”

“It sounds familiar. Do you mean Brylcreem?”

“No, WildRoot Cream-oil. Brylcreem came after it.”

“That was oily wasn’t it?”

“Those old time radio shows, that I’ve been listening to on CD, play the original commercials. I remember that stuff. Can you imagine smearing something on your hair that they call cream oil, and that they boast has lanolin in it? They talk about using it on your kids to train their hair. Probably train it do situps.”

“I remember when you and Stevie Brown would slick your hair down with Brylcreme. Then you’d put your leather jackets on to look like Elvis Presley.”

“We looked pretty sharp, didn’t we?”

“Not too.”

---

“In my twenty years I have never seen anything wired in series like that?”

“What do we have to lose? Let’s run that copper wire between the two terminals as you suggest and eliminate it.”

My father and I had been, for most of the morning, banging our heads on the puzzle that was my nonfunctioning, driver’s side power window. We’d pulled the whole door apart, and I had in my hand, the small motor that lifted the window. Next to me on the ground were exposed wires, flapping plastic, screws, and multiple trim door parts. We had tested and retested and tested again resistance and voltage, but mostly we had tested our will to succeed.

We were sure we’d isolated the problem to the motor, which is as simple a device as the abacus. But we couldn’t determine the root problem. We’d get to a point, after checking every lead, where we were sure it should work, but when we reconnected the motor to the electrical harness – nothing. In frustration I called the local parts store – $210.00 for a new motor. Fat chance. I’ll continue to roll slightly pass those toll booths, and open my door before I pay that kind of money.

In the old days my father would have never given up. I knew he had the answer- he always had the answer, no matter how esoteric the problem- and all I had to do was keep him at it.

“Let’s take the motor into the breakfast room and work on it at the table.” Remember, this is not a greasy car part, but an isolated, compact, metal and plastic device. We’ve done much of our most important work at this table. Our last resistance check revealed an inline chip of some sort, that when wiggled, would either register as a closed circuit – good – or an open one – bad. That was the problem, and that was the in-series gizmo that made no sense to my father. We wired past it, reinstalled the motor and sure enough, the window went up and down.

I smiled to myself knowing that the only other person in the family who would truly appreciate the inventiveness of this solution would be Matthew. He had discovered countless part workarounds on the old BMW, oddities even his teacher at Minuteman Tech was clueless about. I just wished Matthew had been here for this one. Need I say, I miss Matthew?

Which reminds me of my phone call to Diane on Saturday. I stood on the porch in Evansville, warmed by the sun, as she watched the rain patter against the windows from inside her kitchen in Acton. With the lovey dovey stuff out of the way and a quick synopsis of Patti’s health, Flo’s progress, Kate’s broken foot, Matt’s tire purchase in NH, the overworked sump pump, her upcoming trip to Montreal, Susan, Jimmy, what movie I should watch with my mother, when I might be coming home and how things are here, I popped the most serious question. “How has the blog been without my editor?” Meaning, my posts from afar without Diane’s eagle eye.

“It’s been great. I love it.”

“But wha about punctuation and typos and … ?

ëI didn’t see any.”

Then it dawned. I can, write; anything: I want, in pretty, much my usual stlye. an as long sa it ends, with: I miss Diane – it’s perfect.

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Louisville Slugger