OFFICE
Originally uploaded by Charlie Roberts
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
EASTER SUNDAY
It's Easter. My mother and I miss church so we cab to Columbus Circle and sit on a park bench.
I use my walker to reach the bench. It takes 15 minutes to walk 200 feet.
I'm careful not to fall because if I fall I can't get back up.
I let sweating, panting, muscular New Yorkers pass me and I stay focused on the bench.
The bench is a short walk, a tiny jog away. But for me, it takes mental preparation to reach it.
As I move toward the bench, I try to recall my former self - jogging haughtily through the park entrance. Could my former self imagine this would happen to me?
No.
My mother and I stare (vacantly) at passing New Yorkers - sharing the same lost expression exposing our related genes.
I unbutton my shirt exposing a vee of skin. My skin looks rosy and healthy (to me). Shouldn't it change ?- To make my transformation complete?
The speckled sun feels fantastic. It's 81 degrees. Competing jazz bands play dissonant music. New York City (it seems to me) is the most popular plac
e on the globe. (It bugs me). I try to picture the rest of the world on this perfect Easter day. Is Toledo Ohio (or some city in Nevada) this crowded today... this popular?
I remain on the bench and order my mother to investigate different areas around the plaza and report back.
We stare at tourists. They chain smoke. They look terrible. Why do people mess with their health?
We sit on the bench for three hours and taxi home. I'm reluctant to leave. It feels so hopeful.
________________
When we get to my floor in my high rise apartment building, my mother runs ahead and yells back that ... "You left the door open!" and walks into a stranger's apartment.
I have to shout (as best as I can) "Get out of that apartment. That's not my apartment!"
My mother (who had a stroke recently) deflects my potential taunting by admitting "I'm nuts" - before I can start in on her.
_______________
I start dinner (potatoes in the oven) and mom is off to get us Easter wine.
The wine store is a block away, but still, I'm nervous. I tell her to bring her cell phone.
She calls me from the store and tells me she forgot her wallet. She has $10 on her. She buys an a mini bottle, the kind you get on an airplane.
__________________
Before dinner we notice the cat. The cat is oddly mute. The cat is sick. The cat has a fever, dry nose, and yellow eyes. We stare at the cat and incant the cat's name, over and over, like the cat is drugged up or drunk.
"Aroo." we state.
"Aroo!! " we implore.
"AROOOOOOOO!!!" (snap out of it).
We emphatically announce the cat's name but the cat won't move.
We decide to take him to the doctor tomorrow.
(Turned out - the cat is very sick - and like me, will have to stay in the cat hospital for b12 shots and IV's).
____________________
My mother and I sit down to lamb, potatoes, zuccini, and sauteed mushrooms. My mother has vodka in a wine glass and I sip the mini bottle wine.
We light a candle. We say the family prayer and hold hands.
"The eyes of all wait upon Thee, O Lord, and Thou givest them their meat in due season: Thou openest Thine hand and fillest all things living with plentiessness. Amen."
We eat.
My mother tells me she doesn't want to go to a retirement community.
"Do you want me to start acting like a little old person? Your sister wants to put me away - she won't stop talking about it- that place in Redding. I don't want to go there. All those people talking about what prep school they went to, who their families were! It's awful. Like Sally Bettram. Let me tell you something about Sally Bettram. Sally Betram came over on a boat from England eighty years ago. My family has been here for two hundred fifty years but Sally Betram looks her nose down on me. Her husband was a letch. A child molesting letch. Still Sally Betram couldn't be bothered to say hello to me at the grocery store. I do NOT want to spend the rest of my life with Sally Betram and those people. You know I visited that place in Redding. It's on a cliff. It's not near anything! I drove in there one day to look at it and there was a swimming pool. Not a single person was in that pool. I do NOT want to go to a place like that and be the only one in the pool. I don't want to do it."
My mother is looking at me forlornly, like I have some power over the situation, like I have some political connections that might put her right.
"Mom, you can do whatever you want to do. Tell Sister you don't like that place and let that be the end of it. She's just worried about your safety."
"Well, it's too soon anyway. Maybe I'll look in Florida. I just don't want to be in the middle of nowhere with those kind of people. What about you? Where are you going to go?"
"Oh, don't even think about me. With me, it's a month at a time. That's all I can do. It's pretty likely you'll outlive me. Unless they come up with a cure, or slow it down or something."
"Do they have anything?"
"Not really."
______________
After dinner, my mother reads "Alice in Wonderland" on her kindle. I watch the documentary "No Impact Man" on my laptop, another film glamorizing New York (of the past ten years).
Before bed, I check messages with my ALS Yahoo users group.
There is a posting from a caretaker, a daughter. Her father has had ALS for two years, she writes. Last year they went to Israel to gather stem cells. He's going back soon to have them implanted. "It's our last and only hope. Anyone else going to Israel?"
Stem Cells. I need stem cells.
I need a caring daughter. I am f-cked.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
