A Rose for Rose

I sat at the small kitchen table with Mammam Topolski, my father’s mother, standing next to me. She cut a thick pat of butter from one of the quarter-pound sticks I just brought her from Weis’s market. She ate it off the knife. She ate it like it was cheese. And she enjoyed it – she said so.

I was 16 and the fact that Mammam’s Alzheimer’s disease had progressed to the point that she needed daily visits worked out well for me. I jumped on every excuse I could to get in the car with my new driver’s license. The extensive time I eventually spent with her impacted the direction of my art making like no other singular experience.

Mammam talked incessantly; because of this there was little difference between the notions that passed through her mind and the ones that passed through her lips. I’ll devote the next bunch of entries to Mammam’s stories. It is significant to note that these are recollections of recollections – gathered time and time over, they are both incredibly precise and entirely unreliable.

I recall one very specific instance where, in the midst of a narrated recollection of hers, I realized that she was there – inside her story - and I was with her. She was in that prior time and place and I was next to her in a revised reality. She didn’t know who I was specifically but she knew I was some form of the actual blood-relationship we had – I was her husband, or her son or her grandson – that didn’t matter really. I was familiar and comfortable in a significant way.

She wrapped the butter as she continued to speak, put it in the box and turned away to place it on the door shelf of her avocado-green Amana side-by-side refrigerator.