“Lots of traffic today,” I say aloud to Mom, watching the
residents move along the corridors.
Mom nods her head, as she scrutinizes each resident who
passes us. P. is always walking. Thin,
with sturdy shoes, P. also owned a little dog, but I’m not sure what happened
to him. She is on her third lap, when
she bumps into the marketing staff person, accompanying a new resident and
family.
Sons and staff are convincing this woman she is in her new home.
As the woman enters the hallway, her son magically appears to coax his mother towards
her room.
These are the games we play.
As family, we don’t always play nice, like our mothers chided, but we
play with the best intentions.
P., when encountering all the fuss, looks up and says,
“Great, just what we need. Another person living here.”
I nod with a smirk. There are sixty rooms here, about 50
full most of the time.
Just what they need,
she means, is another person she has to adjust to, become familiar with seeing,
but not remembering.
While this interaction with P. has been taking place, J.,
one of the few males, is now doing laps. Mother shys away from J., often
shooing him away. His blank stares scare
her, but other than that, he is harmless, and when I look into his eyes, I see
fright in them too.
When J. circles back around, he is now locked arm in arm
with R. R. often stops, when I am
cranking the Frank Sinatra, as if he too is transported back to a time when
life made sense, or at least Frank Sinatra did. I often wonder if he wants to
ask Mom to dance, but Mom would chase him away too.
As the strains of New York, New York, kick up in volume,
another woman, S. has stopped to ask where Room 43 is, and as much as I have
spent time here, have to answer, “I don’t know.”
Its beginning to feel like a parade, as five minutes later,
S. has stopped by our sitting area again.
Lost, again. She too is tuned in
to the music, “I get a kick out of you….”
She overhears Mom, who utters a well-worn line whenever she
hears Frank. She will interrupt whatever
is happening, and point to the sound, or grab my arm to force me to halt, and
say, “Now wait minute…..what’s that sound?”
Mom doesn’t actually mean, “what”, she knows the “what”. It
is the sound of her youth, before her disease, before her kids, before Dad.
But she can’t always put her finger on the “who”, in that
she can’t name him. Almost as if the naming is sacred, but really the name just
escapes her mental grasp.
“Mom, its Frank,” I say.
“Oh, yes, that’s right.”
“Old Blue Eyes?” I
ask a knowing question.
Then she gives me a stern look, as if I am speaking down to
her, “Of course, its Old Blue Eyes, did you think I didn’t know that?”
S. is standing over us, still confused, looking for Room 43.
But it’s clear that she has made a connection to the voice.
“Did you like Frank Sinatra, when you were younger?” I pose
to her.
“Oh yes,” she responded.
“Did you ever see him in person?”
“Oh, once or twice, in Chicago and Indianapolis.”
She could have been making this up, but she answered so emphatically.
“He was a big part of my life when I was young, but I don’t remember anything
anymore.”
“My mouth never shuts up, but my mind doesn’t do anything.”
S. sighed, and walked away. She really
hadn’t given herself enough credit. That
was more than I will probably recall.
The parade continues this day, reminding me of the Italian social
tradition of passegiatta, where folks would come out in the evenings, following
dinner, and promenade around the piazza.
Mothers looking for activities for their youngsters, older gentlemen
deeply engaged in the day’s or world’s events, young men looking to impress the
young girls, and young girls pretending not to care. There is an art to this act of strolling,
depending on who you are.
Mom instantly rises because she hears a noise, and walks
around the first corner, then the next, and spies her singular moment of
recognition in the past hour, a poster that contains the Ten Commandments of
Health Care, as practiced by the center. She is drawn to the swath of blue ink
at the bottom of poster, and always is fascinated by its odd shape, a hill
irregularly sloping downward.
“What is this?” she asks, tracing the line with her finger.
I shrug. She shrugs.
“C’mon Mom, let’s walk,” and I nudge her away from the only
thing in this hallway anchoring her to the present.
We rejoin the lappers, making their rounds, adding their
voice to whatever conversation makes sense to them. Here, the passegiatta,
though it happens a bit earlier in the day, is its own art, demonstrating to
others, I am still here, convincing
the self, I am still me.
For another take on Passegiatta, visit this blog post. Passegiatta in Washington Park
No comments:
Post a Comment