Forsaken

“That Flo has found a way to make her presence known,” declared my mother, speaking about a woman who she sits with for meals at her assisted-living facility.  “She calls out to people as they leave the dining room, commenting on a nice blouse or some other article of clothing.  It’s always about clothes.”  I had never thought of my mother as an anthropologist before, but listening to her describe the behavior of residents at The Home of the Good Shepherd, I started to see her as a kind of participant-observer.  But I doubt that scientists feel envy, and it was envy that I heard in Mom’s comment about Flo as if she, herself, has yet to find her own mode of self-assertion.  She’s also told me that Flo has her eye on one of the men and flirts with him in very obvious ways.  This observation, too, is as much about my mother as it is about Flo.  She’s implicitly asking me why she can’t find it in her to talk to the eligible men whose doors are marked with blue football helmets, blazoned with “Bernie,” to distinguish them from the female doors, marked with pink flowers for “Cathy.”

On Easter I picked her up early for Mass and followed close behind as she inched her walker into the back pew, reserved for the lame.  No longer does she stand or kneel but sits through the Mass hunched over.  Ushers and others asked me wordless questions with their eyes:  does she want communion?  Why don’t they ask her?  She is a person in full possession of her faculties, who deserves the decency of her fellow humans’ regard along with the body of Christ.  Communion came but almost as an afterthought as we sang the final refrain to close the hymn and the brusque priest, who I’ve heard mocking the elderly in his parish, prepared to convey God’s blessing on us. 

Although I can bow and bend, stand up and sit down, I remained seated next to my mother much of the time to share her condition.  It is what I have done since my father died and what I feel I must do still.  Church was packed with young people—everyone seemed young compared to us old people consigned to the back—and we watched the Easter parade as if from eternity.  “I don’t see Jeannette,” says my mother, as the crowds flowed by us and we waited for an opening big enough to push the metal walker into traffic.  There is one white-haired lady who fits the bill.  “No, Mom, that is her,” I say as if I’ve sighted and identified some species of rare warbler.  She is chatting with another older woman.  Last time I was at church with Mom, I flagged Jeannette down, but on Easter Sunday it wasn’t in me to gesture like a highway semaphore.  “I’m sure she’ll see us,” I say.  But she doesn’t.  She walked right down the side aisle, and neither I nor my mother did anything to make our presence known.  I couldn’t read what my mother felt, so I went ahead and felt forsaken, almost as if I were already dead.  My mother has spent much of her life talking on the phone to friends, meeting them for breakfast, playing golf with them, and I’ve often been impatient with all the chit chat.  She has talked Jeannette through her own health problems, and I suddenly wonder—what for?  As quietly as is possible, my mother moves her walker inch by inch through the vestibule, and a patronizing usher tells her in a too loud voice to “have a good day” and to “keep smiling”:  “that smile [toothless] is golden.”

On a train somewhere in China, a daughter holds her mother's head,
 preventing it from hitting against the window.

Once tucked into the car out of the cold wind neither of us spoke of the shame, but Mom wanted to drive by my brother’s house on West Mountain Road.  I’m not sure why since he was supposedly in Massachusetts for Easter, but we do, and instead of going straight home, I turn right and head up the mountain, past the unassuming white church that I’ve almost forgotten even though it’s stood there through my childhood to this very moment.  Mom seemed to enjoy the ride.  I stopped the car near the top so she could smoke a cigarette and we talked quietly about nothing important.  I like the feeling now of talking just to talk, talking to draw out the other’s voice.  Our words don’t do anything.  They exist like the breeze or the streams of meltwater.  It’s a new and pleasurable feeling--this saying things together.

Back at home in the dark kitchen, the hours passed.  We opened cupboards full of school papers with my name on them, saved from 1972.  I was nine years old, practicing penmanship and completing worksheets on Saudi Arabia.  I find a short poem my mother must have written as an example of rhyme.  It’s obvious that she spent hours working with us, taking an interest in our schoolwork, and using her voice to coax out our own.  After a while, I get to work peeling potatoes and shredding cabbage.  The timing of our dinner is arranged around the arrival of my sister, who said yesterday that she’d come over later for pie and beer.  “Leave it alone, Mom,” I said, as my mother insisted on leaving her third phone message to invite Jennifer for Easter dinner.  “You cannot make people want to see each other.  You’ve been doing it for years, and it hasn’t worked.”  I was only partially aware of feeling that my presence and my effort—like the construction paper baskets we made in school and filled with green cellophane grass—had not been good enough.  Why?  The simple meal of ham and sweet potatoes was delicious.  Why couldn’t we savor it?  Why were others always more necessary?  The meal was over too soon for my taste, but my mother placed her knife and fork down and said “just in time” as Jenny strode in the front door out of the blazing sunshine, wearing a black fur coat with her strawberry blond hair irradiated.  She presented Mom with a spring green watering can to take back to the “Home.”  The talk turned to collectibles and vintage clothes.  Jenny pulled up on her smartphone pictures of art-deco chairs bought up in Plattsburgh for her new apartment and a purple ladies’ Schwinn bike found at some abandoned clockworks on the road to Saratoga.  Like Mom, she has definite things she likes and collects.  I listened, thinking of our predilection for other peoples’ clothes.  Vintage.  “It’s always comments about clothes.”  I saw a forest of siblings dressed alike, but some grew taller and larger, clawing their way through the dark understory and vying for light.  We’re grown up, when will the competition end?  Not a shopper by nature, I sat there, marveling at their evident ability to buy things that they want.  No, that’s not quite right:  I envied their ability to want.

Through the visit, I felt as indrawn as the old people that drop their heads on their own chests and pull the wings of garments over their heads.  I’ve got to get out of this house, out of myself.  And I did get out.  On the day after Easter before the sleepers in the house awoke, I walked along the edge of Potter woods and down West Mountain Road to the church Mom and I drove past yesterday.  Made of concrete, stolid and simple, I noted that it seems to lack anything interesting or graceful.  But when I looked closer at the stained-glass windows, I was so surprised:  in the window glass were spring flowers!  Flowers instead of the usual saints, apostles and bearded churchmen.  I thought of the way flowers come up in waves:  crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, roses (much later).  Each kind has its season.  Do the daffodils come up envying the grape hyacinths?  Do they come up to make their presence known?  I don’t think so.  They abide gracefully whether anyone sees them or not, and most people tromp on the violets hidden down deep in grass busy growing.  Only poets listen when flowers whisper, and, look!, the artist who made this window created a monarch butterfly, flitting above the irises.  As I thought about the secret language of flowers, it’s the Shakespearean heroines, Ophelia and Perdita, who come into my mind.  Today I know why they chose to speak with flowers and not words.  Maddened by neglect and abandoned to loss, they couldn’t trust the currency of language, and what they had to say was too fresh, too dirty, too rooted. 

Back home in Flint, I wander through Macy’s with my daughter Katya.  Passing the perfume counter, I spray some Chanel No. 5 on my pulse points  It is one of Mom's favorites, and Katya leans in to smell me as if I’m a flower.  “Did you see the old bottle in Grandmom’s bedroom?  I found it when I was climbing over the piles.  Probably it had expired."  I tell her how I wish I’d taken it, and she replies, “I want you to have a scent that I identify only with you.  I don’t want you to smell like Grandmom.”

I will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land (Gen. 28:15)

I press my lips to her cheekbone.  Much of her face is sunken in, but I love what remains.  If thoughts are prayers, I pray that this is not the last time.  We go through our anxious exchange that’s become routine, “I love you.”  “I love you.”  “Thank you so much for everything.”  “Thank you, too.”  It’s hard to distinguish whose is the initiating voice in this call and response that is like a liturgy or a song.  “Now what are you going to do as soon as you get home?”  “I promise that I will call.”  “Good.”  I smile and wave as I walk through the door, turning back again and again.  There is a character in mythology—a poet named Orpheus—who lost his beloved to death forever just because he looked back, clinging to the sight of his wife reclaimed from the underworld, in a show of love.  Just as I’m out of sight, the call comes, “Mary Jo?”  I rush back—“Here I am!”—only to hear one more question, “did you lock the house?” 

I know I’ll miss even what I’ve come to think of as anxiety when I don’t hear her call anymore.  I wish she would ask me something significant, something important, “leave your husband and daughter and take care of me.”  “Take your profession—all your class notes and published essays—and burn them atop a mountain that I will show you.”  I need something with a biblical charge to show my love, but maybe covenant exists in the more mundane calls I receive and the reassurance I can give here on this bank and shoal of time.

My small family of three (Paul, Katya, and I) sat with her table-mates at the Home of the Good Shepherd—Nancy, May, and Flo—as they poked around the edges of their plates.  My mother didn’t touch her food which will quickly be taken as “failure to thrive” in the place she calls prison.  Paul breaks the silence, “Do the residents still have homes?  Do they talk about their lives before they came here?”  Flo, who is part Welsh and part Italian, is quick to answer, “No, that’s private, and to ask about it would be considered probing.”  Later in the car, I remind Paul that Mom says most lunches pass in silence, and he wonders aloud again whether it’s because there is shame in being consigned to this waiting room, which will be for many, their last on earth.  “I’m getting a mental hospital vibe,” said Katya when she walked, for the first time, down the corridor to Room 106, past the faux painting of two running horses, which strikes me as a mockery of those residents who are not asleep in their wheelchairs but can only self-propel with small movements of their feet, slowly, slowly.

Paul pulls the car under the carport, and I wheel her to the spot where she can stand to grasp the door handle and pull herself up, swivel around, and lift her legs into the car.  “There.  Now, where are my cigarettes?”  I place the pack of Kools in her hand, “Oh, thank God.”  Her cigarette lit, she inquires, “where to now?”, and we tell her that Paul wants to drive east along the river looking for a cemetery in the woods somewhere outside of Stillwater.  In rain turning to snow we glide, skirting the edge of the Hudson with hills covered in brown furze like an animal hide running out in undulating strides on either side.  There is a gentleness to this landscape that has been farmed since the late eighteenth century as the stones in the graveyard indicate, and part of the gentleness lies in the easy way you can cross and recross the wide river, and find, if not quite the same, a similar world on either side.  The big comparisons and allegories form in my head, but I keep them to myself.  What Mom verbalizes between courteously spaced cigarettes (so Katya doesn’t start complaining about her lungs looking like walnuts from second-hand smoke) are memories:  being lost out in this country when she and Jenny went to get apples, buying the railroad carriage lamp in the Greenwich hardware store.  I listen and keep looking at the horses standing in the sleet on the sides of hills quiet as candles.  A group of them around a trough of some kind (but not eating) regard us seriously.  “Mom,” I venture, “don’t horses want to get out of the rain?”  “No.  I don’t think it bothers them.”  We round a bend, and I see one—it must be a young one—in what I imagine to be a burst of excitement gallop up a hill, its roan rump working hard and blond mane flying.  She remembers the summer she went out to Colorado to take college courses and to ride horses (even though she’d grown up on a farm).  She remembers taking care of the horse she was assigned.  “What was its name, Mom?”  “Always.”  As if my imagination were godlike, I’d give her a new horse—let’s call him Secretariat—when he lived he won the triple-crown and she took her four little kids down to Saratoga to watch him work out, teaching us to love his combination of grace and power.  I see her on some such horse—Secretariat, Goldie, or Always—outpacing death, and fording in an easy leap the rocky stream that prevents our red SUV from going any further down the road behind a muddy farm.  “I wanna go home,” my daughter whines, “we’re out in the middle of scenic nowhere and we’ve been driving for three hours.”  She quiets after a quick stop at the Stewart’s gas station and store in Greenwich where we pee and pick up a warm container of mac n’ cheese for Katya and a cup of black coffee for Mom, who has lit up again and blowing smoke out the two-inch crack in the window. 

Car rides always were the place where I felt most at home with my mother, coming at things obliquely—horses, cows, and all kinds of curious creatures—without the stress of eyes meeting and needing the response of eyes.  On our car ride today, just like the thousands I’ve taken with her over the course of our shared life, the landscape rolled out behind and before us—the world opened up and we looked forward to what is around the next bend.  “Oh my goodness,” she says, as we approach the store that sells wood stoves in East Argyle, “that’s where we took pictures of those animals.”  The big brown cows basking in the warm sun of late February.  She remembers the cows although I'd bet dollars to donuts she doesn't remember me.  But I don’t need recognition and am not ashamed of my nothingness.  My hands were on her shoulders in the sunlight, and that is all that matters.  Wherever you go I will go.  I promised.  “Do you fear what’s to come after death,” a bold interviewer asked the intrepid traveler, Freya Stark.  “What’s to fear?  It’s just another journey.”  And while I would never say this aloud to my mother, one day along a road she’ll have to go alone, I know a barn door will open and the voice of He who knows the mountain goats’ birthtime, who opens the storehouses of snow in April to make “poor man’s fertilizer” will call, “Midge,” and she’ll go home to work right alongside Him as she did with Grampy.  For the time being, home is a Subaru Forester as cozy as the train car that rocked lazily from side to side as it inched across the Kazakh steppe, and I ate chocolate with Katya and drank cognac with Paul.  As cozy as the train car Mom remembers, filled with music, when Isaac Stern en route to a performance in St. Louis, invited Mom, her mother, and her cousin Mildred into his compartment to listen to him play his violin.

On a drive with Mom the last day of February.  Cows in East Argyle.

We stopped in this cemetery in the middle of farm fields.  It was snowing on April 3.

Latest ebay find:  Secretariat working out at Saratoga c. 1972.  It might have been the same summer I remember the long-legged chestnut beauty being led off the dirt track.  I remember my mother's awe.

Still wild, still natural.  Secretariat with his trainer.

Glow in the Dark

            It takes time to guide her up the sidewalk and to negotiate the two porch steps to get her into the house.  Outside, the day is overcast and spitting snow.  Inside, the kitchen is dark.  I am the only one of the four children who brings Mom home, and I don’t know why I need to sit at the table where I fade into the shadows.  I must be acting on a very old impulse to restore an essential configuration of home:  two women talking at a kitchen table.  She and her mother sat in a bright breakfast room, drinking endless cups of tea while yellow grosbeaks pecked at seeds on a platform window feeder in February sunshine.  Jersey was always warm and bright this time of year when the wood of the blueberry bushes flushes red (a French house roof red) that stands out against the grays and browns of winter, and the farmers know that it is time to prune.  Mom and her sister, Ruthellen, would sit together right here, at this same table, in the blue cape cod at 22 Sylvan Avenue, sipping cans of beer, puffing Kools, while they unwrapped their antique finds, looked up prices, and made lists of guys they had kissed.  I was there, too, present in the shadows, listening and watching.  I cannot give that up—not yet anyway.

            Mom plops into her chair and raises her head to peer at things around her, finds an ashtray and locates her pack of cigarettes.  We settle in to wait for the “lamp guy.”  She’d dropped off old kerosene lamps at a local antique store, The Manor, for him to fix back in September, and we’d had a terrible time pinning him down to a pick-up time.  Bit by a tick, he'd been in and out of the hospital for complications from lyme disease.  He was to have rewired three Rayo lamps (one for each daughter) as well as Mom’s brass store lamp that hung for years over the kitchen table.  When the hanging lamp broke, my brother replaced it with what to Mom’s taste was a very ugly modern fixture.  The so-called “lamp guy,” whose name is Jason, was supposed to arrive between 12-1, but the knock at the door turns out to be Dick Sullivan from two houses away.  He is a wiry birdlike upstate guy who worked for the telephone company, bearing four cartons of Kool cigarettes that he buys cheaper in New Hampshire.  As I count out the $268 dollars, I have to wonder how Mom will ever smoke her way through all these packs when her local kids don’t support her habit since it complicates their lives and the routines of the staff at the assisted living “home.”  I stir clam chowder in a pot on the stove and listen with half an ear to Dick move fluidly from memories of the cabin at Glen Lake—“the one with the carport” (the same cabin where we lived until I was four years old!)—to the difficulties of pumping out Paul Cedarstrom’s flooded cellar while my old ninth grade English teacher is vacationing in Florida.  Dick’s a good neighbor, and I like his blue eyes and bushy eyebrows, but I’m hungry.  After two hours of unrelenting storytelling, the good neighbor heads out, and Mom and I scarf down small bowls of soup.  It’s all the food we have for the time being.

            Two hours late, Jason arrives bearing lamps.  He’s bearded and soft-voiced and, for all I know, may be a genie just out of one of the lamps he’s polished to perfection.  “Oh, don’t they look beautiful?” my mother asks rhetorically, and all the frustration of waiting five months for them melts away.  Jason sets to work, patiently re-threading three sets of brass chains through the spaces in the ring that holds in balanced suspension the lamp fixture and counter-weight fitted inside a cup of brass worked to look like a big pine cone.  

There is something beautiful about a young guy who has taken time to learn how to care for and restore such delicate old lights.  I say something like that and he replies, “I just love to find old things and bring them back to life.”  As he works he tells us about his parents’ house in Hartford where he has hundreds of oil lamps hanging—some so low you have to watch your head or bump into them.  But his special love is something called “Vaseline glass.”  It is handmade glass of a yellow-green color—some pieces are mixed with cranberry—that was made with traces of uranium before the element was needed for the cold war in weapon production.  “It has lost popularity,” says our lamplighter.  His theory is that Vaseline glass looked better in an era when people lit houses with candles because then it really glows in the semi-darkness.  He pulls out his phone and shows me pictures of vases made in imitation of jack-in-the pulpits, tree trunks with twigs, and flowers with all manner of vines and tendrils, and it’s no wonder with that spring green color and the inner glow that signifies life.  Jason tells Mom and I that he grew up in Fort Edward, and he talks about missing the trails he rode bikes on when he was a kid (all gone) and the old houses he remembers on Eddy Street (gone, too).  I used to ride with Mom sometimes when she’d take Pop to work, and I remember Eddy Street as the short road that led to the mysterious gates of the paper mill beyond which I never got to go.  His father, like mine, worked at Scott Paper, but he was a jack of all trades and taught his son the mysteries of electricity, of wires crossing wires so that the current of flows uninterrupted, until it POPs.  Mom and I jump as something causes the hanging lamp to short out.  We climb over piles of junk in the cellar to get to the fuse box, and Jason finds parts of old lamps—“this looks like so much fun!"  He offers to "help" clean out the cellar in the spring but promises, short-term, to "come back tomorrow" with a bolt of the proper length and an antique medallion that matches the fixture better.  We offer him a chocolate brownie for the road, but he’s on his way through Hudson Falls to pick up Chinese take-out on the way back out to the wide open spaces of Argyle, Hartford, and his little kingdom.

            When he leaves, I’m dreaming of some paradise where houseplants winter in greenhouses, sheep wander the wan brown slopes, and pigs fatten in warm barns.  But mostly I’m thinking about the uranium glass—eyes behind clouded cataracts—moving and glowing in the dark.  Until Jason returns to finish the job, Mom and I have to do without overhead light in the kitchen.  I prepare to bake a fish dinner in the gloaming.  Peggy Tulley comes to the door with an amber ashtray that Ruthellen mailed to her house, “big enough to hold lots of butts” reads the pink sticky note on the rim of it.  Outside it’s dark ocean blue over the mountain and Peg steps inside our house where she hasn't been for decades since the bridge parties of the olden days.  Later on she says on the phone, “it’s sad that she has lived like that,” and I imagine that Peg is referring to the clutter, the pall of smoke, and the general darkness.  I think that if only I had lit the two candles on the table, then Peg might have noticed the little lamp on the threshold of stove room’s deeper darkness.  “It was probably meant to light up a train car or a ship,” Jason observed, and I feel the rocking of rail car or boat as the name "Seashore Line" pops into my head:  it's the railroad that connected Philadelphia and Atlantic City.  In candlelight, maybe Peg would have seen the Bartlett print of the rickety house and bridge over the falls at Glens Falls or the large round Indian basket with the wooden handle resting on Uncle Philip’s old high chair.  Jason noticed all these things, and I saw how they glowed.  Even without candlelight, there had been something iridescent about the memories retrieved and moments restored that afternoon in the synaptic space between mother and daughter just sitting in the dark with the lamp guy working somewhere over our heads in the comforting configuration of home.

On Mom's Side

            Shortly after my mother fell and broke her hip, I thought of Nala.  Nala was a very large black Newfoundland that followed Mom like her shadow.  At Indian Lake, when Mom would go out for a short paddle in her kayak, Nala would stand sentinel on shore, and gaze out across the water, waiting for her to return.  Because of their size, Newfoundlands are prone to hip dysplasia, and, sadly, Nala was not an exception.  After years of nursing her on aspirin and coaxing her with treats to get up and walk, Mom gave in and let her be put down.  She bought books on grieving the loss of a dog which she passed onto me when my corgi, Poppy, fell down and got up for three months of blissful posthumous life before we euthanized him.  “Can you give him the shot so that it doesn’t happen too fast?,” I asked the vet.  Why did I think a slow death was kinder?  That it would be less of a shock?  That he would drift into sleep cradled on my lap?  I cannot know what my dog felt, but I know that two hours of watching the life leave him was agonizing for me.  I’ve done my best to block the memory of that afternoon. 

Mom caught her leg on her purse strap that was hanging from a kitchen chair.  “When I fell, I heard something snap,” she recalls.  Her hip was pinned surgically and, after I’d seen her in the hospital, I came home, bought a stuffed Newfoundland on Ebay, and mailed it to the Rehab facility.  I thought Mom might find it comforting when really the connection is very sad:  I didn’t want Mom to go the way our downed dogs had gone.  I was certain that when her willpower kicked in, she would walk and even play golf again once the snow drifts dwindle and the hard, brown earth turns green.

            Ever since my mother fell, her struggle has been behind my every thought.  Along with the primary struggle to get back on her feet, she’s in an ongoing fight to reclaim her life, resisting filial demands that she just relax, stay put, and accept that The Home of the Good Shepherd is the best and safest place for her, despite the fact that they let old men sit alone crying and despite the big article in last Sunday’s New York Times that decried the lack of oversight of assisted living facilities, calling them places where the elderly are warehoused and where they die from neglect.  In Shakespeare, filial ingratitude manifests itself as inheritance hunger.  In my family, that’s not the issue.  My brother says he wants “nothing from that house” as if it had been contaminated by plague.  What is more bizarre though is the way that the adult children have begun to act out, taking every opportunity to find fault with her and vent frustration and aggression—“he laid me out in lavender”—in what, at times, appears to be a simple show of power over a vulnerable and dependent old person.  

            A few weeks ago, I had to teach a short story by the Canadian writer, Alice Munro.  The story, called “Boys and Girls,” takes place on a fox farm in rural Canada and is mainly about the production not only of fur pelts but of gendered people—boys and girls.  The story is narrated in the first person by the young girl, who seeks every way possible to bond with her father and his outdoor work and resist the drudgery of her mother’s inside work—that is, until she witnesses her father shoot an old work horse named Mack.  She is convinced that horror she feels isn’t the sentimental attachment to animals as pets: she knows that the foxes need the horse meat for food.  Nevertheless, when peeking through a knothole in the barn wall, she senses the dramatic irony of the callous men smoking and joking before they shoot an innocent creature, “searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not to be found.” 

            “Come to say goodbye to your old friend Mack?” Henry said, “Here, you give him a taste of oats.”  He poured some oats into Laird’s cupped hands and Laird went to feed Mack.  Mack’s teeth were in bad shape.  He ate very slowly, patiently shifting the oats around in his mouth, trying to find a stump of a molar to grind it on.”  “Poor old Mack,” said Henry mournfully.  “When a horse’s teeth’s gone, he’s gone.  That’s about the way.”

            Symbols in literature don’t mean anything really until they meet with a mind that’s ready to make use of them, and my mind was ready for this one.  Back in November, I’d taken Mom’s upper bridge to her dentist to have a tooth that the physical therapists had accidentally knocked out to be glued back in.  “Poor lady,” said Dr. Garrett, “her teeth are just crumbling right out of the bone.”  Maybe so.  But just like the horse in the story, Mom was getting by, and teeth or no teeth, she was still full of life.  Who decides that “when a horse’s teeth’s gone, he’s gone”?  The hired man, Henry, who makes this remark may well be searching for a way to justify the fact that he is pacifying the horse so that he’ll be easier to shoot. 

            “Mack’s thick, blackish tongue worked diligently at Laird’s hand.”  This image has troubled me.  And even though it is hard for the old horse to eat, when he’s led out in the side pasture where he’ll die, he instinctively looks for a mouthful of fresh grass.  Life seeks the means to live.  My mother, too, wants nothing more than to get outside, smoke her cigarettes, go to Mass, drive her car, and get back home where she can live life in her own way.

            “My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.”  The girl sees Mack lurch from side to side, fall, and even kick his legs for a few seconds in the air.  The children don’t believe Mack has died, but the men do.  They are all business.  Back to business.  My siblings (so it seems to me) have been all business in this matter of Mom’s care; and I’ve been frightened by their discursive detachment when what’s at stake for Mom is LIFE.  Her fight, carried out with a characteristic gentleness, has moved me toward a stand much like that taken by the girl in the story.  When the day comes for the female horse, Flora, to be shot, she rears, gallops, and runs into the meadow where the girl (also a fast runner) has a chance to shut the gate to prevent Flora’s escape.  But as she sees the horse charging madly toward her, she holds the gate open as wide as she can.  “He would know that I was not entirely on his side,” she reflects, but in the next thought commits herself and takes a stand: “I was on Flora’s side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even to her.  Just the same, I did not regret it; when she came running at me and I held the gate open, that was the only thing I could do.” 

 

A young girl's drawing of the narrator with Mack and Flora

My students and even Steve, a colleague who is an expert in Munro’s fiction, think that siding with Flora is part of the way the girl becomes a girl.  But I think her stand complicates her interpellation into gendered subjectivity.  “Nobody likes being put in a box,” said Steve in a conversation about the roles kids get slotted into in family systems.  Animals are caged.  Gender is a pen, and old age is a box, too.  Flora resists the human will to “put her out to pasture” and engineer her end.  To side with Flora means siding with and standing for life in all its forms against a utilitarian, business-like world.  Flora was old.  Flora was of no use to anyone.  There was no wild land for her to escape to.  But siding with Flora meant supporting whatever inner instinct remained to run, leap, lap, and lick.  Siding with Mom means something similar:  it means accepting her toothless grin, taking her out walking, watering all hopes that shoot up, giving her back her car keys, and letting her have the simple pleasure of a daily cigarette.  Even the guys living in group homes on my street in Flint, MI, yell from their porches where they sit and smoke from early morning to late at night.  “Nice dog.  A dog’s man’s best friend!”  Let’s not forget that Mom is still the wild girl riding her palomino, Goldie, through the peach orchards, the thoughtful aunt who picked up Tom Southard to ice skate at Totem Village (because she knew how much the little boy liked to skate), the caring mother who fed us, educated us, and raised us.  Shouldn’t we be at least as good to her as she was to Nala?

Why does everyone only see gender when the struggle is about life resisting death in a box?

I wrote this several weeks ago but decided not to post it for fear of offense, but now I think:  what have I got to lose?  I just got back from a wonderfully enjoyable week visiting Mom, and she even had a chance to practice drive my rental car (a Toyota Rav4 just like hers) in the parking lot of Our Lady of the Annunciation.  Here she is behind the wheel:  Go Catherine, Go!  She knows she isn't going to be driving on "real" roads anytime soon and needs practice, but, as she said when we ate dinner at her friend, Peggy's house, "one step at a time."

Not Dead Inside

            It’s much too early and way to cold these winter mornings when my daughter and I make the drive to Kearsley High School, but no matter how groggy, I don’t forget to grab my cd of Bach’s Christmas cantatas.  As soon as I say goodbye and pull her blue head close to give it a kiss, I drive off into the dark morning, flipping open the cd box and just missing a bus that is turning into the school, I pop the cd into the slot, and it’s full blast joy.  I feel every cell pulsing with the notes, rushing with the shepherds and the angels to greet the light of the world.  Ten minutes later, I’m back in the College Cultural neighborhood, waiting for the second cantata to begin—the melting sweetness of flutes and oboes—when, oh when?  In the few seconds of waiting, I stare at the rough trunks of maples in the dark and think how deathly quiet the world would be without this music—the whole world like Flint of empty space and burned-out houses and trailers with shattered windows still standing in their parks.  Depressed. 

            Before Christmas, I made my fifteen-year old teenager, who identifies as EMO (black clothes, piercings, dyed hair, full of angst) go with me to the Bach concert in Ann Arbor.  We’d run around to her favorite stores and eaten in a Korean noodle place surrounded by cool-looking young people.  We both felt out of place—Flintstones surrounded by lacquer and sparkle—and she later told me that restaurants in Ann Arbor make her anxious.  But sitting in the dark of the auditorium as soon as I heard the roll of the tympanum, the call of the oboe, and then all those notes suspended one above another in motion—I felt so relieved that I cried.  I felt everything.  It was as if there was a sound board inside me, and I was making the music, too.  In that transcendent few hours, it no longer mattered that I couldn’t share my emotional world fully with my daughter or my husband or my students; the music reminded me it is there, it is real, a resource, and that was enough.  I was so grateful and so deeply happy.  And surprise!  My daughter didn’t want to leave at intermission.  She twined her arm around mine as the soprano lines in helpless love twined round the gentler movements of the flute.  “Maybe I should get out my cello again,” she whispered in the dark, and I knew that the music had calmed and reassured her, too, in ways that I never could.

            The students that I encounter in English classes at UM-F are a lot like my daughter, and, more and more, I hear them use “anxiety” or “mental issues” as an excuse for falling behind or not coming to class or not turning in a paper on time.  From what they tell me and what they write, technology and the future-oriented image-driven world we live in is the cause of their disease.  “I can’t fully digest my Instagram feed (do I even want to digest it?) or sit still without migrating to some numbing screen,” writes Morgan Troxell.  Instead of reading, more and more students listen to audio books so that they can drive or multi-task, they text so as not to be surprised by the textures of human voices, they are distressed by their felt addiction to their phones but cannot put them down.  They fashion selves on Facebook and Snapchat and speak in the “new language” of memes.  A student recently told me that my literature classes were “comforting,” and I think the comfort comes, not from me (potentially a maternal figure for many of the young ones), but from the fact that literary English is much more like music than the other forms of English they encounter throughout the day—techno-speak, business jargon and text messaging. 

As “Information” has come to predominate the modern world, English is at risk of being reduced to the language of facts, of lists, of organization, of balancing accounts, of making laws, and of being in charge.  But the tyrannical rule of “Information” cannot dispel completely our primal need for that other language of the imagination.  That other language—literary language—is full of stuff—“fruit-cakey”—is how a student described Shakespeare’s English, and she was right.  It is full to bursting with ideas, images, figures of speech, sounds and rhythms that satisfy the ear’s need for music, the mind’s need for ideas, and the human being’s need for a language of real exchange.  We don’t need to catch or understand all the words or metaphors.  We feel stuff when we hear music, and if we let ourselves, we feel stuff, too, when we read silently or read aloud.  Literature is generous that way, and it should be calming because it awakens us to ourselves—to all that there is in us that cannot be reduced to a selfie or a Facebook post.

            Scientific studies have shown that social media makes people feel isolated and depressed.  After scrolling through the perfect families and successful “friends” on Facebook or the dating sites where everybody looks too good to be true, it is a total relief to enter the world of just about any fiction.  The characters, if they are interesting, will more than likely be very imperfect.  When asked why she was always writing about “freaks and poor people,” Flannery O’Connor said that novelists were much more interested in the poor because they live with less padding between themselves and the world and because, despite what most of us would like to think, human beings are not perfectible by their own efforts.  What we have in common and, finally, what makes us human, and therefore beautiful, is that we are limited.  We long for things.  We don’t understand things.  We are in conflict.  We are homeless wanderers through this world, looking for our other half, looking to beget in beauty, looking out for our own transmigration.

Most importantly, literature teaches us to think—to have our own authentic ideas that move us to join, to act, to (hopefully) make the world and our relationships better.  The ideas I’ve just shared with you—that anxiety stems from soul alienation and that it can be cured by art that connects us to our own fullness—came out of working on a story I taught a few weeks ago—“Cathedral,” by Raymond Carver.  This is a modern story, published in 1983.  It isn’t written in verse and the language contains no no obvious musical effects.  But any master storyteller will find ways to engage the reader’s senses, and Carver, who is suspicious of explanation and information, does it by helping us feel our way into the world of the blind man, who, without eyes, navigates new situations effortlessly, sensing and swimming in the shifting currents of life.  Through much of the story, however, readers stand on shore with the socially anxious, first-person narrator—who is never named—drinking scotch, making awkward remarks, and wishing that we, too, could take the plunge.

The narrator seems like a prejudiced prick at the beginning of Carver’s tale.  He is aggravated that his wife’s blind friend, Robert, is going to be visiting his house.  At least he admits that his ideas of the blind come from movies and television, and it is pretty obvious that he uses these negative stereotypes to feel superior.  And he needs a leg up in the situation because he is threatened by his wife’s close, ten-year relationship with this man, who was once her employer.  “One her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face.  She agreed to this.  She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck!  She never forgot it.  She even tried to write a poem about it.  She was always trying to write a poem.  She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.”  The narrator’s wife showed him the poem when they first started dating, and he tells us, “I didn’t think much of the poem.  Of course, I didn’t tell her that.  Maybe I just don’t understand poetry.”  As we listen to this first-person unnamed narrator tell about his marriage and Robert’s visit, we hear that he feels like a fifth-wheel, like he’s watching through a window people having relationships.  “They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years.  I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips.”  I was surprised that when I asked how many of the students identified with the narrator (who is a very odd guy), almost everyone raised their hand.  Evidently, many of us feel like spectators of life rather than participants.

            As the story unfolds, it is the blind man who teaches the narrator to see, by helping him face his core fear that he is hollow.  The wife poops out, after having had a huge dinner, too many drinks, and a few hits off a joint, and this leaves the narrator alone with Robert to surf the late-night TV offerings.  For lack of anything better, they listen to a program on the church and the Middle Ages.  As he watches the camera pan the sculptures and frescoes of cathedrals in Spain and Portugal, the narrator realizes that it’s possible Robert doesn’t know what a cathedral looks like.  When he inquires, Robert admits that, other than what he’s learned from listening to the program’s narrative, he doesn’t have a good idea.  “But maybe you could describe one to me?  I wish you’d do it.  I’d like that.  If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”  So the narrator begins, looking around the room for clues, and winds up at a loss.  About all he can say is that they’re “tall,” “big,” “so big, some of them, they have to have these supports.”  Finally, he gives up, feeling like his awkward physical description cannot possibly convey the desire of the builders “to get close to God.”  He ends in apology and says that the reason he can’t effectively describe them is that they “don’t mean anything special” to him.  “Nothing.  Cathedrals.  They’re something to look at on late night TV.”  He comes face to face with the fear buried in my students and, I bet, in all of us:  “It just isn’t in me to do it.”

            So Robert like a gentle and generous god, himself, throws the narrator down on the floor and gets him involved in an art project.  Taking his suggestions, the narrator gets a heavy brown shopping bag, unfolds it, and prepares to draw a cathedral.  Robert places his hand atop the narrator’s hand to follow the sweeps and arcs of his drawing arm.  Totally involved in the work, the narrator builds his own version of the cathedral:  “I put in windows with arches.  I drew flying buttresses.  I hung great doors.  I couldn’t stop.”  Toward the end of the process, Robert tells the narrator to close his eyes and then, “Don’t stop now.  Draw.”  And the narrator keeps working on intuition, copying what his mind’s eye sees, following the rhythm of a feeling about cathedrals.  When Robert tells him to open his eyes, the narrator chooses to keep them shut, “I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer.  I thought it was something I ought to do.”  Arguably he’s high (and students always bring this up), but the story is trying to help us experience the high that comes from making connections (to Robert and to himself through imagining something very old and very far away that he didn’t think he cared about).  He had it in him after all.   “I was in my house.  I knew that.  But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.”  Where is he exactly?  It seems to me that he has gone down inside himself and from that very exciting and very full internal place, he “sees feelingly.”  This enables him to connect with Robert and enthusiastically create something.  This is the same man who had earlier in the story seemed so empty, with no work that he cared about, no interests, no friends.  He just sat on the couch with a drink in his hand and judged others.  

            Because Robert blind, he is obviously not “perfect” or even whole, but it is his vulnerability that draws the narrator to him.  He is not as threatening as are other people who have eyes to judge him.  The relationship Raymond Carver describes in “Cathedral” could be an analogy for the way we can be more ourselves with books and the imperfect “people” in them.  The book is blind and mute—helpless without a reader.  Its characters wait for us to care, to notice, to give them voice, to bring them to life.  If we join them, if we can bear to put down our phones, open the cover, and follow the story even if we don’t think we’ll get it, we may be surprised to find ourselves, to feel our own power to resurrect, to build and connect, and make something like a modern cathedral.  As one of my students said, “the relationship is the cathedral” and, someone else added, “it is holy” “because reaching out to others is what makes us whole.”

# bring back caroling

            Christmas was two days away.  The plan was to drive from Flint, Michigan to Glens Falls, New York to get Mom out of the rehabilitation facility and home for Christmas Day, make egg nog and cook dinner.  To realize the plan, we had to begin the cleanup as soon as we arrived.  She had to be able to get up the steps and down the hall to the kitchen table using a walker, and the hall was an obstacle course:  coat tree, pie safe, two-drawer stand, and shelf with candle-stick and a brass bowl full of buttons.  Interstate 69 was clear all the way to Sarnia, but by the time we sat in the Portugese bakery in Strathroy drinking coffee and deciding whether to buy a Christmas bread that looked like an edible wreath with confectioners’ sugar dusting big pieces of candied fruit, the snow was coming down thick and fast.  “Come on, we’ve got to decide and get on the road,” said my husband.  I bought the break and even though there was little room in our car-top carrier, we stuffed it up top with the tree I bought from L.L. Bean that arrived without working lights.  Paul had made a special trip to Bronner’s--the Christmas store in the faux Bavarian town of Frankenmuth, Michigan--to buy new ones on a hectic day of packing, wrapping, unwrapping.  Katya was curled up in the backseat with her black pillow.  Panda, our corgi, was in the very back and not barking, settled down, we hoped, for a long winter’s nap.  We were bringing the stuff of Christmas home, and, at the same time, getting ready to fill a dumpster that we scheduled to arrive the day after Christmas, making room at the Inn so to speak.  “I hope you have a nice trip,” a friend of mine had said, “and I think that whatever does or doesn’t happen at the house, it’s more important what happens here,” and she placed her hand on her chest.

            Just after Mom fell in November, I stayed in the house alone with the other mice.  The first night I remember washing at the kitchen sink before crawling over piles of stuff to get into the sofa bed in the room that had once been a family room before my grandparents came to live with us.  Us kids used to sit on a daybed and watch Bonanza through breezy afternoons filled with endless sunshine after we’d been invited to swim in the Tulley’s pool.  But this room had been repurposed when my grandparents moved in and needed a place to sleep.  There were still older memories—they didn’t go away—of my mother sitting in a rocking chair, wetting strands of hair to roll up in those wire brush, painful-looking rollers and watching General Hospital and I still remember my parents calling to us to “come see” the first astronaut set foot on the moon, weightless and bouncy on the small black and white screen where there was always “snow.”

Just as it had been years since the “family room” held a family, Mom’s bathroom was not what I would call clean.  I’d always hated the green paint that gave my reflection a corpse-like pallor.  The piles of unused wash clothes on the shelf had been collecting dust, smoke, and soot from the stove for years, and the same towel that read “Bah-Humbug” (a gag gift from Mom’s sister) still hung on the towel bar.  Was it ever used?  Did Mom ever wash it?  The kitchen sink was a safer bet.  It was deep and the porcelain basin had worn well.  It was still white.  I ran the tap cold, soaped a washcloth, rubbed it around my face, made tiny circles on my eyelids, dropped the wash cloth, cupped my hands, making them into a bowl and rinsed.  When my head was down in the sink, I thought I heard voices, happy voices, coming from the dining room where the only cheerful thing now is a carnival tiger.  I saw Mom standing in the kitchen, pulling trays of hot hors d’oeuvres out of the oven.  I was awake and dreaming, hallucinating a Christmas Eve party from long ago, back when my father was still alive, and he would gather the neighborhood kids together and we would run from house to house ringing bells and singing two songs.  Let’s do “Joy to the World,” No!  Hark the Herald Angels!  What about “We Three Kings”?  We ran and shouted suggestions breathless as we waited for the door to open—our cue to release all that red-cheeked energy that would burst forth in clouds of melody and breath.  A party would follow at our house—full of noisy neighbors and kids giddy with the excitement of getting to bed so Santa could come.  The voices said to me that somewhere in this house there was real warmth still:  it’s just that it was buried so deep in time, which had ruined everything.  Mom was in the hospital, and I was lonely in the house, listening to voices, not knowing whether they lived beneath the clutter or inside myself. 

         But this time I was coming with Paul and Katya, and I wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, join the mice.  We arrived at Mom’s house late on December 23^rd—not a moment too soon.  We’d come through the Mohawk Valley in freezing rain, and I’d seen the dark mountains looming over the lights of Amsterdam that twinkled down below along the river.  The driveway and porch steps were a sheet of ice.  After unlocking the house, turning on some lights, and checking the heat, I made my way to the garage, lifted the door on a chaos of boxes and furniture and stuff balanced it heaps, but I managed to find the shovels and ice pick to begin clearing a pathway for Mom.  Inside, I needed to make a bed up for Katya in the room with the wood stove, but it was dark.  I flipped switches on the table and floor lamps.  Nothing.  The outlets weren't working and the damper on the stove was stuck.  What to do?  Improvise.  The table top tree!  I remembered that its lights ran on batteries.  I set it up and, sure enough, the tree gave me enough light to fix the bed in the spot when Mom, on Christmases when felt ambitious, would place the manger barn that her father had made for the nativity scene.  I swaddled Katya in Mom’s puffy blankets and then joined Paul, who has already begun to sort the piles of mostly junk mail around and under the kitchen table. 

Mom’s is a house full of useless things that are there not for anyone’s convenience but seemingly for their own pleasure.  On the bay window sill sits a piece of green slag from the Batsto iron furnace, several old bottles with Glens Falls marks on them, a cobalt blue Shirley Temple glass, a black man (made of lead) wearing a straw hat with his black dog, various paperweights, little candles and crocks, shells and rocks.  Similar groupings of objects filled every available space in Mom’s house with something like personal thoughts and idiosyncratic preferences.  Having grown up here, I’d learned to treat these spaces as something like altars that should not be disturbed. 

Now, however, without the presence of the “Duchess” (as she’s called at Rehab), we can acknowledge that there is a life more important than the quiet life these objects have led.  As I lifted, examined, washed, polished, threw out, took down, and rearranged, I didn’t feel like I was marring my mother’s creation but writing in the margins of her book, adding my energies and thoughts to hers.  The next night, which was the night before Christmas, my little family ate a pizza from Amores as we struggled to hang the curtains back up that we’d washed at the laundromat, and we put the finishing touches on a clean kitchen in which—tomorrow!—we would cook Christmas dinner for Mom.  Would she notice that we’d moved things?  We can just say what we’ve been saying for years that we put the stuff “down cellar.”  Paul and I laughed at the boxes of saved junk mail and the crates of shoes—so many identical pairs, and the piles of catalogues and Country Living magazines.  We lit candles and drank small glasses of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Highland Scotch, compliments the cupboard above the oven that also contained Mom’s burnt-out light bulb collection.  I opened one more tiny drawer in the telephone stand, and near the top there is a snapshot—the only one I’ve ever seen—of Christmas caroling.  There he is!—my father totally concentrated and animated, belting out the song of the moment.  I am leaning against him, singing and smiling at the same time, and there is my brother, Jim, neighbor girls Jody Dennett, Kath Sheehan, and Cathy Canape, and my sister, Katie.  I remember that night.  We stood on the porch and rang the doorbell of our own house to surprise Mom, who was probably buried in work back in this very kitchen.  “Oh, come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.  Come and behold him, born the king of angels, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him.” 

from left to right:  Mary Jo, Joseph, Cathy C., Kathleen Sheehan, Jim, Jody Dennett, Katie 

I didn’t need the photo to remind me of that night as I had already found the feelings in myself and was, with a family of my own, preparing to celebrate the possibility of homecoming, the hope of new birth for my 87-year-old mother.  I put the precious little photo aside to look at other artefacts—all of which tell me things about the girl I was.  There is Mom’s red Christmas card address book that I once thumbed through as I wrote the cards, signed our names, and addressed the envelopes to Mom’s friends from Georgian Court College and her family who still lived in South Jersey.  There is the Christmas card that I designed and Pop had printed:  with pen and ink, I drew Mary as a young girl, holding a doll in her lap.  There are extra cards we never sent—simple scenes of a family with pets in a stable.  Mom had saved the song books I made for my wedding.  Each thing seemed to offer evidence of my energies and my desires to contribute to making a family.  I kept checking the caroling photo because I was afraid that my father’s face would disappear.  When he died, his face changed and it’s all but gone from my memory now.  Even when I look at the snapshot, it is hard to focus on his face, and I don’t understand why.  In truth, the photo was and is almost unnecessary because the memory is so alive in me, and in that memory I hear his voice singing “on a cold winter’s night that was so deep.  Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel.  Born is the king of Israel.”  Even so, finding the little photo felt like a blessing for opening the door of the past (being the genius of a new, more livable, house) and for still bringing Christmas in (with song in the way my father taught me to do).

Postcript

Finding the caroling photo did, however, explain a strange impulse I had before leaving Flint.  I’d decided that instead of just walking through the ruined neighborhoods on the city’s east side, I would knock on doors and ask people if they needed anything:  prayers, coats, gloves, kids’ toys, anything.  Because I am shy and a little afraid of offending people, I put together a flyer—a kind of Christmas card.  Still I was fearful of actually distributing the cards.  The color copying was pricey, and I think I only did $20.00 worth.  Finally, it was that that motivated me, and I did walk the familiar streets and pop them in peoples’ boxes.  I made a point to hit a particular house on Missouri Street where I’d seen a woman and man with a baby carrier walking from car to door many times.

This is the image and the text that was on the "card"---------------------------------------------------------

I walk through this neighborhood almost every day with my dog.  Things can seem bleak with all the burned out shells of houses, but the bleakness makes the shiny things stand out even more brightly:  Christmas lights, a tree twinkling in the window of a house where people live, the smile of a rare passerby, the moon, a dusting of snow, a yard that is well taken care of, and WATER … living water again.   
I wanted to wish you peace and to share whatever pain and struggle you are enduring.  If there is anything you need:  Prayers for specific things  A food item  A coat  Boots, socks, gloves  A toy for a child  Anything that wouldn’t break me (I’m just a struggling teacher) 

Please call 701-1009 or 239-5139 or email mkietzma@umflint.edu   

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Today, January 8^th, after the Christmas season officially ended with the feast of Epiphany yesterday, I walked down Missouri Street again, thinking about the connection between caroling and my desire to connect with the people who live on the streets of this poor poor neighborhood.  A woman opened her side door and yelled to me,

“Are you the lady who left that paper in my mailbox?”

“Yes!”

“I knew it was you.  I told my fiancé.”

“Well, I walk through here all the time, and just felt like making a connection and helping even a little bit, you know?  Do you need anything?”

“No, but I want to tell you that I think it was a very thoughtful and kind-hearted thing to do.” 

Wow!  All I could think as I walked away is that thoughts really are extraordinarily powerful.  As soon as I saw her house, I began wondering how my card had been received.  It was then that she opened her door and thanked me for the song, my lyrical impulse to love.  This sequence of events like my father’s face which I still cannot bring into focus, tells me that we must fully commit to every song, literal or metaphorical.  I hemmed and hawed—should I pass out the flyers or not?  My husband thought it was silly, “they’ll think you’re a Jehovah’s Witness.”  My daughter thought it was a “white person thing” to do.  I was too fearful to knock on doors, but I still did it—I went door to door and wished my neighbors well in my own way.  Maybe next year (or next season), I’ll be able to do it in full voice.