Labeled Clothing

Down the nursing-home hallway was an old friend of Mammam’s – but they knew nothing of each other anymore. Anna Johns was a bit more alert than Mammam at this point and, just as Mammam did earlier, she could converse in a chit-chat manner that didn’t always immediately make clear her mental limitations. I visited The Manor with my father and we paused in front of Anna. My father said in that tone reserved for children and geriatrics, “Hia Anna! How are you?” “I’m good. Who are you?” she said immediately. “I’m Rose Topolski’s son, Walter.” No response. My father asked, “Do you know what your name is?” She promptly reached down, took the light blue slipper from her left foot and read the label inside, “Anna Johns.” she said confidently.

A Violet and a Rose

At first we would bring Mammam home from the nursing home for Sunday afternoon visits but as she began to resist return, those visits became less frequent and eventually stopped. Visiting Mammam, surrounded as she was, with people in similar mental states, was always funny, exhausting and heartbreaking. I remember wanting to go and then, upon arriving, I would immediately want to leave. The halls smelled of living decay, excrement, cafeteria food and disinfectant.

Mammam’s first roommate was Violet. I forget her last name. Violet probably weighed no more than 85 pounds and spent most of her time sitting in silence propped up in a wheelchair/highchair hybrid. On a somewhat regular basis, Violet would brace herself, take a few deep breaths and scream a brief obscenity in a volume that was highly disproportional to her frame. The otherwise quiet hallway would suddenly be filled with an ear-piercing “BASTARD!” or a blaring “FUCK!” You could see that this was not a small task for Violet and after a while we became familiar with the build-up of energy she needed to let loose these bits of her limited vocabulary. She would sit up a bit, take one or two deep breaths and one of us would intervene, “Violet!” we’d warn sternly. Her exhale would deflate her posture and her body would slouch in a bit of resolve - she’d quietly murmur, “fuck.”

As the Crow Flies

My father later said that it was the most difficult thing he had done in his life. Before he took Mammam to the nursing home – The Manor, they called it - there was a long discussion about the idea of having her live with us in our house. I don’t remember who thought what, but I remember that it was a discussion had time over time for a number of years leading up to her admission. I don’t recall a debate on the decision.

The Northumberland County Mountain View Manor is on Trevorton Road. Looking at it from a distance one can realize just how close our house (A) was to The Manor (B). Because of the terrain, the roads had been built to climb the mountains in a serpentine fashion. From our house to The Manor was nearly a three mile drive - but as the crow flies, it very close. I didn’t know that then.

They told my parents that it would be best if we didn’t visit her for a while at first; they wanted her to acclimate to her environment. Her environment wasn’t entirely new to her however. Many years earlier but only several years after Dzjajie died, Mammam found it necessary to seek employment. After some training she took a position as a ‘Nurse’s Aid’ at The Manor. Years later, as a patient there, she thought she was at work again and she turned out to be a great help around the nursing home. As her Alzheimer’s progressed that changed and, for a period, her risk of flight was high. She wanted to leave. Eventually she didn’t understand the possibility of leaving. Then her brain stopped running her body and she was bed-ridden. She was in a fetal position when she died.

Wedding Portrait

Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pandowdy

Memory and communication are similar in that we long to have both in some pure sense. With both, our best gauges are far too susceptible to contamination to make them reliable.

I recently had the chance to spend time with my mother, whose hearing has declined significantly, and my father, who has progressed beyond the first stages Alzheimer’s. Among other variables, communications between them hinge and sway on the general comprehension of the moment at hand and the irregularities of ambient sound. Similar symptoms manifest themselves in their conversation regardless of the cause.

“What’s in them?” My father pointed to two white unmarked pie boxes on the counter.

“Pie – I told ya three times!” She was putting away the dishes.

“Ooh – what kind?”

“I said before - there is what is left of the raisin one and there is a new Shoo-fly Pie.”

My father immediately broke into singing what was clearly the closing line of a song, “Shoo-fly pie and apple pandowdy, I never get enough of that wonderful stuff!” My mother joined him to sing the same line again and when I said that I never heard that song before, neither of them heard me over their own voices. Apart from that line, neither of them knew any other lyrics.

My mother took a plate from in front of my father, "That dish isn't clean." he said.

My mother turned her head quickly toward me, "Did he say that fish ain't meat?"

I laughed and said loudly, “No Mom – he said that that dish isn’t clean.”

“Oh – I know that!” she said, slightly irritated.

I wasn't certain that she heard me and I didn’t know who she was talking to. I didn’t know if what she knew was that the dish wasn’t clean or she did in fact hear what he said.

I looked at my father as he began singing again and realized that he was unaware that he had not been heard. I thought about what that meant and wondered how often it happened in their every day. “Oftener and oftener.” I said softly aloud.

HabliMat

(re)naming and (re)collecting

My Dad went by Walt, Wally, Vwadje, and earlier in his life, Tippy. It seems that everyone that is my father’s childhood friend had an alternate name - Jimmy Pickles is my favorite. We called my mother’s brother Uncle Buck although his name was Paul. (I was told he was in a gang in his youth – they called him Buck Rogers and part of it stuck.) We called our godparents and family friends ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ although they were technically neither: Aunt Peggy, Aunt Pattie, Aunt Louise, Uncle Charlie and Uncle Richie. We called my Mom’s mother Mammam Dando; she was rarely in our company so we referred to her in a manner that mostly served to differentiate her from my Dad’s mother - we just called her Mammam. We called Dad's father Dzjajie. ('jȯ-jē )

I have only one recollection of Dzjajie. He shifted on the burgundy naugahyde of what I understood to be ‘his’ chair to give me space, not on his lap but next to it. I squeezed between him and the chair’s arm and my feet dangled far from the floor. He smelled of work – burned flux and freshly welded metal. It was a smell that became very familiar years later – the smell of my father just coming home from work. He would kiss my head as he went to the basement – ‘the cellar,’ we called it – to take a “quick shower” before dinner. (My father always says he is taking a “quick shower” and my mother always says she is going to “hop in the tub.” I’m not certain why their bathing always seems to have time constraints.)

I made a linoleum-block print with an image of Dzjajie’s chair on it; below it was text describing the single memory I maintain of my grandfather. My mother saw the print in a local exhibition that she and Dad came to Rochester to see. “You can’t remember Dzjajie! You’re remembering a picture,” she said – “its at home in the box with all the old photographs.” A heavy cardboard “Clark’s Poultry” box stamped with a red silhouette of a rooster holds the collection of old photographs. On my next several visits home I methodically mined through decades of images but I could not find it.

\ˈsen(t)s\

Howard Hughes died around that time and the earlier made-for-TV movies that chronicled his life and forecasted his death were playing in reruns on Saturday afternoons. Hughes, according to the stories, would separate and consume his peas by size and in order. He would also collect and stock the fingernail clippings and hair he would acquire from his annual personal hygiene sessions. The notion of such eccentric behavior was entertaining at the time. But I was stunned when I realized that the small plastic-wrapped bundles on the door and bottom shelves of Mammam’s side-by-side freezer contained her garbage.

My mother sorted the frozen trash from the edible goods and I brought the galvanized garbage can in from outside under the fire escape to make the disposal easier. The garbage-man had apparently made his weekly rounds and the can was empty. Mammam said little if anything about the my mother's activity - she never really stopped talking, but she said little that addressed that day’s goings-on specifically.

Several days later my father sat at the round kitchen table in Mammam’s kitchen. It was located under a small awning window situated near the metal fire escape that lead to the apartment upstairs. Three days of August heat had cooked the garbage and a dreadfully unpleasant odor wafted inside. No one had to tolerate that smell earlier that summer and afterwards, realizing this, we let Mammam dispose of her garbage the way she wanted – an odorless way.

Tharptown

My parents moved out of the apartment above Mammam and Dzjajie’s when my mother felt that Mammam was getting too possessive of my sister Donamarie. They moved to an apartment in Tharptown a couple blocks away from the house I lived in until I went to college. The owners of the house at the time, Dot and Merle Beaver, lived downstairs and the arrangement was not dissimilar to the one my parents escaped. Eventually, Dot who had never had children of her own, became very possessive of my sister as well.

Pictured above are Donamarie, Paulie my cousin, and my brother. It was Jan’s first birthday and they were posing on and near the yellow, gray and black patterned dinette set that moved with them to their next house; it resided in our kitchen until I was a teenager. The original image was taken about six years before I was born in the apartment above the Beaver’s – I think that is Dot’s arm on the right reaching in to make sure Jan didn’t tip backwards. That is probably Dot’s purse on the left. Next to it on the counter is something that only exists in this image and earlier versions of it – I put it there about eight years ago. It is an appliance of sorts with a function that addressed a very specific need common in kitchens of that earlier era and now.

Kapusta-Head

On top of Mammam’s refrigerator – on the edge, just within her reach – was a thing that defies categorization. It was plastic and its base resembled a terracotta plant pot. From the textured plastic that tried to imitate soil in the pot sprung a plastic plant/figure. All its parts were shaped like vegetables but configured to look like a person – celery arms, cabbage head, but yet black eyes with long lashes that looked like no part of any vegetable. It was meant to be funny and it was.

Mammam would see it on the fridge, grab it and set it on the kitchen counter so I could see it better. She did this often. A single visit might involve several exchanges regarding the figure – sometimes it would never be mentioned; its frequencey had mostly to do with whether or not she happened to see it.

“And did you see my Kapusta-head!” she would say. She would laugh. She laughed often. We would stray away from the topic and she would return when she spotted it again. She’d laugh, grab it and say, “And did you see my Kapusta-head!”

Changing Spaces

My father remodeled Mammam’s house several years before she went to the nursing home. He replaced two double-hung windows in the upstairs bedroom at the front of the house with two smaller awning windows. He chose to place them fairly high on the wall so furniture could fit below and so as to increase privacy; the windows were in the front bedroom of the apartment above my grandmother’s bedroom. There had not been tenants for many years but my father had a plan that would eventually change that.

My grandmother was short – very short. Next to my Grandfather– a muscular and slender 6’3” - she seemed even shorter. She used to call him a “big lug” – “Get outta here ya big lug ya!” she’d say, chasing him out of the kitchen.

That was earlier.

That day she heard my father upstairs installing the windows and went up to investigate. “Hi Mom!” my father said, “What do you think of the new windows?”

“Yeah – yeah” she said under her breadth as she walked up to one of them. “I can hardly but see outta them bein’ up so high!” She reached up and grabbed the window sill plate with both her hands, her knuckles whitened slightly. She wanted to pull the space down to her level – as if the pine two-by-fours defining the structure would compress and stretch, “Can’t ya just slide them down a little bit?”

The solids where she resided were compliant – glass was permeable and space was tied to no specific time.