Hats

 Dabbing napkins at our lips after finishing tuna salad, spinach soup, and the ubiquitous melon slices, Mom and I sat in the dining hall a little while. I grumbled to myself about why food service providers cannot seem to come up with any fruits besides melons (Hello? Perhaps you’ve heard of apples, pears, bananas, grapes?) when I was distracted by a dapper elderly gentleman nearby droning on to a trapped tablemate about generations of his German ancestors. “Gee, his voice is loud,” I commented. Mom hadn’t heard him. I found it a bit hard to hear her soft voice because of his, but we both felt too relaxed to get up and go. Other than this man, his victim, and four gray-haired folks playing cards, aided by light from a small goose-neck lamp they’d brought, Mom and I were the only diners left.

 

From my vantage point, I could see two of the long hallways leading to apartments, the little gift shop and mail room. As I watched residents come and go, I noted to Mom that it must be “argyle day” since I’d seen several argyle sweaters. I happened to be wearing one myself; maybe that’s why I noticed. She replied that argyle is popular this year, and she has an argyle sweater, too. I didn’t mention my socks were also argyle.

 

“I’ve been looking at old family photos, and there’s one of Dad and his dad on the beach in Connecticut,” I began. “Grandpa’s got his usual beret on, and Dad’s wearing a hat with some kind of decoration on it. I don’t remember it and can’t figure out what kind of hat it is.”

 

Mom said she knew the photo and wondered if it was a hat she’d bought him. “You know, when Dad and I met in the forties, all the men wore fedoras. But once hats became passé, Dad no longer liked to wear any hats—until he retired and took up tennis—then he wore tennis hats.” I nodded. I have Dad’s tennis hat in my car so that it will be readily available to shade his eyes when I wheel him outdoors in summer. I asked her if the hat in the old picture was one she had bought him.

 

“In the fall of the year we lived in Connecticut, Dad was invited to be on a panel at a meeting in Ann Arbor or Detroit, I forget, so Grandma came to babysit you kids, and Dad and I drove all night. When we got to Toledo, we went to the hospital to visit my father, who was there for a gallbladder problem. When we walked into his hospital room, he cried … My father cried because we had come.” Mom was quiet for a moment. Her clear, cornflower-blue eyes seemed to be seeing the scene afresh. “Then we went on to Ann Arbor or Detroit, and after the panel discussion, we got back in the car and drove all night to get back to Connecticut.”

 

“So it was on that trip that you bought that hat for Dad?” Mom returned from her reverie and strained to remember where that particular hat had come from. I wondered where that particular reverie had come from. She finally mentioned she always liked him in hats.

 

From there conversation wandered back into passé fashion trends, especially women wearing hats, and always dresses or skirts. She said that one frigid winter day in 1966 she sensibly sent my sister to sixth grade wearing smart, wool flannel slacks to protect her from the cold on her long walk to school. The school immediately called her to say my sister would not be allowed into class until my mother brought a dress for her.

 

Vacuum cleaners whizzing around our table signaled an end to our lingering after lunch. We left to drive the few blocks to her house, where she explained to me how to take care of Dad’s bills “in case anything should happen to” her. It was pretty simple, but I’m grateful she told me how she does it. I sat on the floor and organized papers into piles: nursing home bills, prescription bills, laundry service bills, long-term-insurance payments. Paper-clipping the piles, we put them away. Earlier we had decided that it would be unwise to make our usual visit to Dad because of the nursing home’s dire warnings about rampant flu strains there and all the quarantined hallways, and we would instead play a game. But when I asked what game she wanted to play, she blurted, “I’m worried about Dad. When I was there the other day, his eyes were all red.” When I volunteered to dash over and check on him, she urged me to.

 

I walked back past the dining hall to the nursing home. Bracing against the wind (in my hood and warm slacks, haha), I questioned how smart it was for me to be defying the nursing home’s warnings but hoped with a wing and a prayer and a mask grabbed at the front desk that I’d escape unscathed. Further, I decided I would relish this visit. I would wear not only my eyewitness-report-to-mom hat, but also my light-up-dad’s-day hat.

 

Once I wheeled Dad into his room in the Alzheimer’s wing to listen to his favorite music cassettes, I could see his eyes looked painfully bloodshot. My mother had requested I feel his forehead for a fever, and his temp seemed normal. I went and got a nurse, who told me his eyes weren’t bloodshot because there was no hematoma. I asked her why they were so red then, and she said she’d have the doctor look at his eyes. Perfect. His brown eyes smiled though as he gyrated his hands to Boots Randolph and Billy Joel. Was it a Talking Heads song he danced in his chair to? First one shoulder jutted out, then the other. Then he shrugged them to the beat. Then he pulsed them out again. So cute. Was it when Crystal Gayle sang, “When I dream, I dream of you” that he swayed dreamily? What a delight to see him responding to music with pleasure. He has so few pleasures left—indeed so few responses.

 

I told him about the picture of him and his father on the Connecticut beach. No sign of understanding in his eyes. I yammered on anyway, reacquainting him with the fact that his father was an artist who liked to wear berets, trying to describe the unusual hat he himself was wearing, finally promising I’d bring the photo to show him someday. Then I launched into ages, figuring he was almost 40 in that picture and his father would have been in his early sixties, about my age. Since Dad had been a mathematician, sometimes he shows signs of understanding when I talk about numbers. He didn’t today.

 

Now it was his suppertime, so I wheeled him to the Alzheimer’s hall dining area where the nurse greeted him with a tiny paper cup containing the pills my mother had just taught me how to pay for. The brisk wind carried me back to my mother’s, where I assured her Dad seemed not to have the flu but the doctor would check his eyes. And more good news: Although many wings still struggle with four strains of viruses, the Alzheimer’s wings that have been on lockdown for more than a month have now been cleared because they have no more flu. I had made an appointment for Dad to get a haircut Monday, which pleased Mom. Since he doesn’t wear hats, she likes his hair to look nice.

Thank You

 

My stomach knotted in the grocery checkout line Thursday. The reason for such annoyance mystified me. To everything the cashier said to her, the woman in front of me distinctly replied, “Thank you.” Here is just a portion of their “conversation”:

“Customers aren’t supposed to take the coupons off packages; only the cashier.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Your total is $56.37.”

“Thank you.”

“Paper or plastic?”

“Paper. Thank you.”

“Here’s your receipt.”

“Thank you.”

Yipes, lady, how much sugar did you eat for breakfast? You’re about 30 years too young to remember the Pollyanna movie. What is with you? I might well have asked myself what was with me that someone’s simple courtesy would so jangle my nerves. Long before that lady’s conversation ended, I wanted to put my hands over my ears and childishly chant, “I can’t heeeaaar you.”

I forgot about this irritating über-politeness until Friday while visiting my father. When I spotted his wheelchair halfway down the Alzheimer’s wing hall, my steps sprang forward. I bent down to hold his warm outstretched hand, lean toward his smile, and introduce myself.

“Hi Dad! It’s Jane.”

“Thank you.” (Just a month or so ago he would have said, “How nice to see you, dear.”)

“How would you like to go down the hall and work a puzzle?”

“Thank you.” (Earlier this summer, he would have said, “I think I’d like that.”)

“Look at how bright green the frog in the puzzle is!”

“Yes. Thank you.” (Before, he would have simply agreed.)

“Oh look, they’re going to have a party—and you’re invited. There’ll be singing, and you like music.”

“Thank you.” (Not too long ago Dad would have said, “All right” and added, “Yes, I do love music.”

Mystery solved. This explains my irritation in the grocery store. I wasn’t nettled by that customer’s politeness. I was angry at Alzheimer’s disease, the thief that just this summer blindfolded us all, stole in, ransacked my crossword-puzzle-champion, punster-extraordinaire father’s vocabulary, and left only “thank you.” In the past few weeks’ visits to my dad, I had heard repeated “thank you” responses and just figured, well, he’s just recovering from the same respiratory tract infection others in his hall contracted, and he’ll regain some words. I didn’t understand my twisted gut in the grocery store until Friday’s nursing home visit, when I felt wrung out to realize Dad’s other words are gone for good.

Thank you, Lord, that the words you chose to preserve in my father’s end days are kind and gentle words.

Thank you for taking care of him with kind nurses and aides.

Thank you for Dad’s gentleness our whole lives.

Oh, and BTW, thank you for the grocery store lady’s courtesy to that cashier. Despite my reaction Thursday, I treasure kindness and your having ingrained it in so many people in my life.

Sappy Anniversary

Sappy Anniversary [first posted April 4, 2012]

I really don’t want to think about this anniversary. 

Unlike tomorrow, which is the 10^th anniversary of our being in this house. I will want to celebrate that. I will want to hold my husband’s hand and walk around the yard and celebrate every strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry we savored from our own fruit patches. I will want for us to tell their stories. For example, when we first moved here to a house we had little furniture to fill, we made a trip to southwest Michigan and purchased one-of-a-kind cottage-style stuff, which we crammed into our little red Mazda up to its ceiling. On the way home, we passed a blueberry farm selling blueberry bushes for $3. We bought six and since the only space left in the car was the back shelf, that’s where the bushes rode on their way to their new home in Chicago.

Today, however, is not a homey blueberry-cobbler type of anniversary. Rather, it was one year ago today that my sweet father, content to smile over peanut butter sandwiches at his beloved wife of 62 years, entered the Alzheimer’s wing of a nursing home so near and yet so far from the kitchen table where he’d squeeze Mom's hand after lunch and announce, “I’m going to go brush my tooth.” It was what he had said for years after meals, and we always laughed. Not so much because it was funny or even one of his many priceless puns. Just because he thought it was funny. And he was so happy to toddle around his home from table to toothbrush to TV with maybe an unannounced stop at the cookie jar

Home is where the heart is. One year later, my dad’s distance from his home evokes strong emotions in me. My broken heart over his broken heart, which he keenly felt one year ago but most likely rarely remembers now, is a hand holding an hourglass whose “sand” is my life, my very breath, and my tears. Sometimes Dad’s safety in the nursing home opens my grateful palm to lightly swing the timepiece in rhythm with the folks who kindly feed and clothe, cheerfully bathe and diaper my hero as Alzheimer’s shuts off switch after switch in his body. Sometimes, with reminders of his simple pleasures stolen, choking grief tightens its grip on the hourglass throat so that my breaths trying to flow freely barely dribble through. Sometimes, outrage that he is reduced to helplessness is a fist angry enough to crush the hourglass to shards, sending tears cascading.

Yesterday I drove 20 miles to visit my father. I was crying so hard in the car that I drove right past the nursing home and drove 20 miles back home. The last few months my hand has been swinging the hourglass. I’ve been able to breathe okay and haven’t cried much for my father. My mom’s health crisis in February rendered my visits to Dad delightful child’s play. I thought perhaps my grief over his decline had plateaued in the acceptance stage. 

But yesterday I passed a tiny, white brick, two-dormer colonial house that played a part of an early childhood memory for me. When the high school my dad taught at was still the only one for four towns around, its homecoming parade route went past this house, which in the 1950s was red brick. What most fascinated me as a little girl was a tiny pond with gold fish in the front yard near where my parents, my brother, and I sat on a blanket to watch the home team’s cheerleaders, pompom squad, and spirited band march by in all their red-and-white youthful glory. No one else in my family remembers this event. The pond has long been sodded over. Memory Lane hit me hard as I drove to visit my father on the day before his one-year anniversary. I couldn’t visit him. I just couldn’t.