Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Over The River

“What day is it?” she asks a nurse who brings her medication.

“It’s Sunday sweetie,” says the nurse, who hands her a paper medication cup. “Here, take this.”

Lucille smiles and takes a tablet, places it on her tongue, and with an exaggerated grimace, sips water from a bent straw in a plastic tumbler.

         “It’s stuck,” she says, wrinkling her nose and sipping again.

         “You always say that,” laughs the nurse. “Take another drink.”

Lucille hands the glass back to Rachel, the nice nurse.

         “You need anything else?” asks Rachel.

Lucille thinks for a moment and then says, “I’m cold,” more to prolong the interaction than to address the temperature in the eighty-degree room.

Rachel dutifully adjusts Lucille’s shawl and the blanket on her legs.

“Is that all sweetie?”

Lucille nods and thanks her, then asks,

         “What day is it?”

         “It’s Sunday. Don’t you have a visitor on Sundays?” she says.

         “Yes!” Lucille smiles and says, “Thank you honey.”


From the comfort of her favorite chair she stares at snowflakes gently falling through the light that spills from her window into the adjacent courtyard. The giant flakes swirl in the fading daylight, mingling with a few windblown brown leaves into small, unseen drifts against the north wall of the Hope building. The way they appear and disappear in the shaft of fluorescent light is vaguely reminiscent. She frowns as the tantalizing recollection slips from her mental grasp and like the snow, is lost from view. 

 

She spends her days alone in a place of unfamiliar faces and the stench of excrement and antiseptic cleanser. Her fading memories fall to the gleaming tile floor, swept away each night like her small collection of paper napkins, straws and sugar packets. Her minor hoarding provides her with a limited sense of control over her surroundings now that many of her life’s pleasures are forgotten. Fortunately, so are many of her pains.

 

As the holiday season approaches, the silence and darkness of the night close in like a quilted blanket at the end of another cycle in what seems an endless day of days. She has outlived most of her family and friends. The time and place she occupies have become strangers. The curse of advancing dementia offers a blessing that shields her from thoughts best left unremembered. Even her window affords her a blank slate with an unstimulating view.

 

We walk slowly past countless closed and open doors and nameless wrinkled faces. Across a darkened courtyard window Grandma waits, standing now and shuffling between her bed and the window, backlit like an image on a television screen and slumping forward with rounded shoulders to study her uncertain footing. It is at this very spot in an hour or so that she will watch us leave, tugging at a sleeve or pocket to produce a mandatory white silk square. She will wave that handkerchief in a personal semaphore to bid us on our way as we grow smaller and eventually disappear around a bend in the hallway. Such has always been her way.

 

Her eyes sparkle as we begin the hour in a hundred we find to spend together. Those moments we manage to wrench from our seasonal chores are not relinquished easily. At the end of an hour of nagging sorrow and a dozen repetitions of the same conversation we are forced to leave despite her protests. Still, we harvest a beam of sunlight she sowed and nurtured long ago. She shares stories in a season that draws those memories closer, providing kindling for a long-term memory that blazes in her mind beyond the short-term vacuum of today and the expanding gulf that lies between the present and the past.

 

             “Do you remember,” she begins, “the year it snowed like tonight?” 

 

I turn my head toward the window to forge the connection.

 

            “That turkey was a big one,” she says, “…almost didn’t fit in the oven.” She glows with pride and glistens with tears of joy.

 

I look into my wife’s eyes, signaling, “Help me remember this. Be my witness, because this is going to tear at the very heart of me.” She nods her understanding and takes my hand.

 

Grandma proceeds to relate, with surprising clarity and detail, a tale of the most magical of my Thanksgivings. It begins, sandwiched one frigid automobile journey between two slices of warmth called home and Grandma's house.


To read the rest of this story and more than seventy others, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


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Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Screened

I would like to attribute the following misadventure to my catlike reflexes, but the reality is that inertia and poor balance get the credit for what my body accomplished in Arizona during March of 2004.

My son lived in and loved Tucson during grad school. And long ago I searched for and decided to “Take it Easy” by actually standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona. In 1976 it was a fundamentally boring location but it remains my favorite song. My music-loving daughter wood-burned the title on a plaque for me. But if you’ve never been to a city built in the middle of the desert allow me to enlighten you.

The phrase “death’s door” brings a number of images to mind and resulted in towns named Tombstone, Nothing and El Mirage in Arizona. You can also pass through death’s door in nearby Needles, California or by way of Death Valley, location of the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. There are any number of ways to unwittingly slip into the afterlife, several of them being in a place where plants grow for hundreds of years without much more than an occasional sip of water. The competition for Earth’s most abundant resource in this locale is so fierce that the plants grow dagger-like spines to protect their water-retaining innards. It is a beautiful, tranquil and most inhospitable place. Scorpions, tarantulas and rattlesnakes call it home. Do you really hate winter enough to move there?

A couple of brief examples from our 2004 vacation demonstrate what living within five percent relative humidity demands of the human body. We went for a walk one morning. I have never been a lean person, and as a result tend to perspire like a spring shower at the mention of exercise. But a half-hour into our gradual uphill stroll I noticed that I felt cool and dry despite the warm temperature and glaring sun. I was being evaporatively cooled! By the end of the walk I was quite thirsty and developed a headache.

It was an eventful day. The beautiful weather enticed us to take advantage of the home’s patio for lunch al fresco. We assembled lovely sandwiches in the kitchen and brought them out to the shaded table behind the house. We ate overlooking a picturesque hillside of sand, scrub brush, stones of many sizes, cacti and I assume, scorpions, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. By the time we took the first bite of our lunch the bread had the crunch and crispness of toast. Oh well, I sometimes like toast. We immediately brought four bottles of water outside and decided to keep them nearby at all times. I was thirsty and close to rekindling my headache.

There were no takers for a trip to the local Biosphere exhibit that afternoon so I went by myself. I found fascinating the idea of an experimental self-sustaining environment in which scientists sequestered themselves for extended research. It was a project intended to test the limits of human endurance in a Mars-like colony sealed off from the world except for communication. The experiment was supposed to last nine months, but for “certain reasons” was halted after six. If that conjures up images of crazed PhDs cannibalizing each other, I’m suggesting nothing of the kind. I think I stumbled onto a cause far more insidious.

I joined a group of perhaps thirty elderly tourists for a trip through the gleaming white geodesic domes and greenhouses of Biosphere 2, now managed by the University of Arizona. They were a slow moving bunch, and it pained me to see my future self illustrated so vividly. But I appreciated their curiosity and active lifestyle until we had to climb several long flights of stairs. I politely took a respectful position at the back of the crowd, the “no, after you” spot where I could be available to call for paramedics or perhaps prevent someone from falling backward down the concrete steps.

In arrears was also the unfortunate vantage point from which I looked up at their rears, a quivering walk of shame from which ripping and tooting uncontrolled flatulence began echoing on the acoustically conducive surfaces all around us. It wasn’t one person or four, but seemed that the entire entourage had dined at the same Mexican restaurant as part of a group package that I had missed. As the herd ascended like waddling penguins, the occurrences grew more frequent and varied in pitch and duration. It was simply musical, percussive and, due to exemplary air handling, inoffensive. But the flapping dance of buttocks, as an adjunct to the droning umpteenth discourse by a clearly bored grad student was more than I could handle. Rather than burst into teary-eyed, doubled over laughter I left the tour early and no doubt missed some of their best refrains.

I returned home just before dinner. It had been decided that I would grill hamburgers out in our mid-day desiccation chamber. Now, I haven’t described the house we rented for this trip. A friend rented it as a favor to trustworthy folks like us at an extremely discounted rate. It was considered their winter retreat. It was a 3000 square foot “cottage” with twelve foot ceilings, spectacular views, an open floor plan with four bedrooms and a “casita” up front which I suspect was used for counting money and dabbling in watercolors. The same couple later built a home in the hills that wound up being featured in Architectural Digest. So we were shocked, pleased and inordinately careful about taking off our shoes and other such good behavior while in the house.

If you’ve read a few of my other blogs, you know of my propensity for setting fires. Please rest assured that I did not burn down our vacation home. That’s not where this is headed. I know how to use a gas grill. The bungee cords that secured its black canvas protection were carelessly splayed out on the ground but the cover was in place and it didn’t seem a likely place for scorpions, tarantulas or rattlesnakes. Or was it perfect for them?

It was dark by the time I was ready to cook, burgers at the ready, plates on the granite countertop just inside the nine-foot tall screened patio door. The dining room table to the left was one of those plate glass numbers that top a massive lacquered tree trunk with branching supports. You know the type. If not, pick up a copy of Architectural Digest. Six chrome and leather bar stools stood like attentive soldiers to the right, a great place for a casual breakfast or for having drinks while the hostess directs caterers around the kitchen.

Anyway, dinner was delicious and a great success. The kids were relaxing, each with their own TV and remote in adjacent rooms. My wife was tidying up the kitchen while I made sure the patio was as we had found it. And that’s when the snake took me by surprise.

A SNAKE! A slithering coiled monster. It was an Anaconda by the feel of it against the tender bottom of my bare and vulnerable foot. But not an Anaconda. No, that didn’t make sense. This was a Diamondback rattler, denizen of the dark, cold-blooded visitor in the night, emerging to seek warmth near the recently heated grill. It need not rattle a warning, my foot planted on its lengthy spine. I could almost feel the piercing fangs as they prepared to inject a load of venom into my leg and sense its paralytic grip coursing through my arteries as it sought out my heart, my lungs, my nerves. All that happened in the first tenth of a second.

Of course it wasn’t a snake, but I had been thinking about them for several days, especially since we drove around a sunbathing giant while out on an otherwise super fun ATV ride. But you wouldn’t believe how much a carelessly placed bungee cord feels like a snake on the bottom of a bare foot.

I performed what can be characterized as a full body clench, a futile attempt to prevent gravity from grasping my mass and pulling it Earthward. There’s no stopping a front leg in motion when said leg is the body’s sole support, back leg having left the ground in what is essentially a controlled forward fall. The first sensation of a round, rubbery object underfoot caused a reflexive desire to avoid landing with my full weight, for fear of hurting either the object or my foot.

What resulted was an unstoppable forward fall, into and through the very tall and expensive screen door. The slow motion liquid that we call time lifted me like an undertow, lofting my entire weight in a crashing wave against comparatively fragile metal fabric, taut within its slender aluminum frame. To say that I broke the screen or pushed it inward is an injustice to the physics of my fall. The screen never ripped. It folded, collapsed, engulfed me like a cocoon, a wire-framed toga, cradling and turning me as I continued my journey through the door’s opening. The next casualty was the drapery that was seldom if ever closed, a decorative tapestry hung some ten feet overhead, ripping asunder like the temple cloth during the crucifixion. It is important to note that my wife and kids were watching this happen.

I now faced left, viewing the perilously close plate glass plateau, inches away. But the row of bar stools behind me were impacted next, like so many dominoes toppling one after the other in a crash, crash, crash that was not only a marvelous noise generator but quite a dramatic continuation of the wave metaphor, spilling onto the sandy beach that was the plush tan living room carpet.

Eventually I came to rest, as all great objects must. I was gratefully unhurt but trapped in a brown metal sarcophagus that no longer resembled a barrier against an evening breeze. It was ruined. The drapes were torn. The table was spared and the bar stools were only knocked over. As I began to laugh, harder and longer than possibly at any time in my life, I drew the ire of my nearby wife, mortified at what I had just accomplished in a few seconds of our cautious existence within this marvelous house. The kids also exploded in giggling, amazed amusement despite fiery looks from Mom, and are laughing to this day, also I assume in relief because Dad was apparently ok, but also because the show he had just completed was a memorable and spectacular performance, unexpected and unrivaled during subsequent vacations.

When emotions settled down and with no small effort I was unpackaged. We dragged the remnants of the screen door into the garage and attempted to unbend, straighten and hammer out the creases and folds that aluminum produces when treated like cardboard. It was hopeless. We called the owners to explain the new door they’d eventually notice. They were gracious. We just assumed we’d never be invited back. Other destinations awaited.


😎


If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


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Saturday, November 14, 2020

Never Forget

We are entering an era in which the oldest among us are the youngest who endured life in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. The last camp liberated was Stutthof on May 9th, 1945. As of this writing, that is seventy-five years ago. I was born nine years later, so this may seem like comparatively ancient history to a teenager in 2020, and in fact it felt that way to me until I gained the perspective of age. That is when I realized that there is but a sliver of time between my childhood, one spent blissfully playing with friends in the vacant lot next door, collecting lightning bugs and being called in for dinner on endless summer evenings, and a horror that descended upon the Earth like a deliberate and dark cloud of poison and pain. They say we should never forget, but many of us already have.

I had a little camera when I was young. It took pictures on film that I used sparingly, precious at twelve to a roll. The man behind the counter at the local Walgreens to whom I handed the exposed film carefully labeled and placed it in an envelope to be sent out for processing. A week later if all went well, a dozen black and white images were ready to be picked up by a ten-year old boy whose patience was far from his greatest strength. I rode my bicycle to the store rather than wait for a ride from my busy mother. That envelope held wonders from the distant past a week before, moments frozen in time with the month and year imprinted in tiny black characters on the white border of the glossy, square photo paper. Moments that I saw with my own eyes. Moments that I could revisit.

I later became interested in the mechanics of photography, the seemingly magical appearance of a hoped for image emerging in gently swirling baths of developer and fixer under a dangling red safelight in my basement. I dried the pictures on a clothesline, pinned side-by-side overhead near my enlarger, chemical bottles and other supplies. There was no distracting Internet then, no video games and really not that much television. Many years later I was fortunate to manage a small photography department with two wonderful photographers. Together we navigated the rapid transition from film to digital photography, but the resulting prints were as magical as ever. A picture worth a thousand words indeed; we produced billions.

During my twenties my best friend and I spent so much time together his mother called me her “other son.” We were both fatherless by this time. She was a charming British woman, deserving of the nickname “Queen Mum” among those who loved her. Frequent holiday visitors to her lovely colonial style home included Aunt Lil, a sweetheart of a lady who smiled generously, spoke with an accent reminiscent of the Bronx and seemed to drift from room to room like an apparition. Her brother, Uncle Angelo effectively represented the Italian lineage in the small family. A New York cabbie with thick dark-rimmed glasses, short in stature but large in demeanor, he dreamed of someday being a famous singer, and would have been a big hit in bars had he not predated karaoke by several decades. His was the voice of Bing Crosby, a crooner to the core. But the world didn’t need another Bing, so Angelo sang for family or on tape, but nothing more.

Lil and Angelo were the fond familial remnants of my friend’s late father. Both single, they lived together in a rent-controlled apartment in New York. They went through tough times, a Depression and a World War in which their youngest brother, a soldier took a British war bride to America and settled in the lower east side of Manhattan. In their brother’s absence, the strength of his devotion lived on in the tenuous bond, that obligatory honoring of extended family that endures beyond loss, and among the best of us. There was a very subtle sense of tolerance on the part of the Queen, much like the frequent eye rolling my mother demonstrated upon visits from “Cousin Kurt” of my father’s clan, only more gracious. I now imagine these things in hindsight from the stored intuition that emerges with adult perspective of distant memories.

It was shortly after college and after one such family gathering that my friend and I slipped away to his nearby apartment to relax and have a few beers. In an age before recreational marijuana, we excelled secretly at the forbidden intoxicant, surrounding ourselves with pre-purchased food, and generally schemed to surprise each other with astounding revelations. You know, blow my mind, I dare you. It was fairly easy to do in that condition. We opened up vulnerable neural pathways to all things amusing or amazing.

The family time earlier that day set the stage for what was to follow. About half a pizza into the evening, I found myself silently confronted by my friend’s outstretched arm, a yellowed envelope in his hand.

            “Take a look at these,” was all he said.

I carefully opened the clearly ancient paper vessel and saw the edges of photographs much like the ones I’d excitedly received at Walgreens so many years earlier. Just like them. But not.

            “Oh, cool, what…” was as far as I got.


😎


To continue reading this story, please consider buying a copy of Park Ridge Memories. See the link to Amazon below.


If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Falling For You

I looked down a flight of stairs longer and steeper than any I’d seen since climbing the pyramid at Chichen Itza. They led to the basement in the home of my mother’s 90-year-old cousin who lived alone in Iowa. They also led to her death. My own slight anxiety, tightly grasping the handrail, was justified. Several years later we could only imagine the misstep that sent cousin Ruth tumbling head over heels down her treacherous carpeted staircase. We wondered how long she lay on the basement floor, neck and back broken, with internal injuries, before she was found.

That brief story is background information for a similar episode that I witnessed and that had a better outcome. You see, falls are the leading cause of fatal injury among older adults, one every nineteen minutes. After about age sixty-five you really don’t want to have stairs in your house if it can be avoided.

During the 1970s commuting to college meant getting up early to catch a train or making an hour-long drive to the university I attended in Chicago. My grandmother lived with me at the time. I was twenty and she was seventy-two. We got along famously, but occasionally behaved like a bickering old married couple. We had daily delivery of the Chicago Tribune, tossed unceremoniously onto the apron of our long driveway in the darkness of the very early morning. Before I left for school I made a point of retrieving the paper and leaving it on the kitchen table for Grandma to enjoy later in the day. That and the soap opera General Hospital were two highlights of her mostly sedentary existence.

My goal each day was to quietly go out the back door, pick up the Trib, lay it on the table and then head off to school without waking Grandma. There was no point in waking her. I poured a bowl of cereal as quietly as possible, ate my breakfast of champions and tried to sneak out in as much silence as a small brick ranch would allow.

I’m not sure when a new pattern emerged, but upon entering the house with the newspaper, there would be Grandma waiting to take the paper and see me off. You need to understand something about this woman. Many years earlier, holiday visits to her apartment in the city always culminated in somewhat misty-eyed goodbyes as we drove away. We looked back to see her standing in the front window of her second floor Brownstone waving a white hanky as if we were headed off to war. It was her thing, and in hindsight was adorable and a fond memory. I have often joked that I come just short of this tradition (no hanky) when our adult children drive away from a visit to our home in Florida. I just hate to see them leave and wish they wouldn’t find me so annoying.

So there is Grandma standing just inside the back door each morning no matter how fast I try to retrieve the paper and bring it back to the house. I realize in hindsight that this became a game. It was the Olympic newspaper event, and seldom resulted in a medal-worthy performance by yours truly. She was just that fast, rising from a sound sleep at the sound of my spoon in a bowl of Captain Crunch, shuffling to the back door with sleep in her eyes. Now that I think about it, perhaps a quieter cereal like oatmeal would have improved my odds, but that would have required use of a noisy microwave and the danger of a cycle-ending beep.

Each day I tried harder, moved faster, eventually breaking into a run only to find my smiling Grandmother waiting with her hand out and a ready kiss goodbye, no hanky necessary. I know that I told her repeatedly that it wasn’t necessary to meet me at the door. I would leave the paper on the table for her.

Things proceeded, growing increasingly competitive. An imaginary starting gun and streamers lined the driveway. My time for the fifty-foot dash improved dramatically but was never quite good enough.

And then came that morning. That fateful morning when the competition ended. 


😎 

To continue reading this story, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories at the Amazon link below.


If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.