Seeing Clearly

One sweltering August day, my mother took her eye out. She was sitting on a folding chair under a luxuriant maple on my front lawn, but the sun was relentless. Not like today when the winter sun is shining crackling-bright even while the snow is falling. No, on that day decades ago, the air was heavy and suffocating. Mother's scalp was itching. The sweat was pouring down her neck. She decided it would be cooler on the porch, only three steps to negotiate. But, as in life, there was nothing to hold on to, no banister, no safety net. Her tiny feet in their backless, toeless Manhattan shoes, slipped out from under her, throwing her down so that her left eye hit the sharp corner of the middle step. I saw it happen in slow motion. By the time I got from the overgrown garden to where she lay struggling to get up on her own, the blood was pooling in her eye. I could only remember seeing her bleed once before. I was twelve and she was fifty. She had left home for an annual event in a midtown hotel all done up in tight-fitting ice blue satin. But she came home mortified with blood staining the seat of the dress. My mother was a powder blue and slate gray person. She never wore red intentionally.

The emergency room doctors at Fairview called the ophthalmologist in Pittsfield. It was a Sunday, but he rushed down to his office and we rushed up to meet him. I remember thinking it was a kindness. He could have been playing eighteen holes. The doctor explained that time was of the essence in these cases. He called Albany Medical Center to advise them that we were on our way. My mother, eighty-three years old, curled up in the back seat of the car like a small child after a tumble off the monkey bars...except she didn't cry. She didn't say a word.

At the hospital, wading into the great throng of diabetics, addicts and people with everyday complaints but no access to doctors, the seas parted for us. Apparently, this was not only a medical emergency, but a race and class emergency as well. My mother was wheeled on a gurney through the crowd of black and brown people like Catherine the Great on a sedan chair. Nonetheless, she lost her eye. She didn't misplace it, of course. She didn't lose it in the sense of disfigurement. She continued to look exactly the same, her hair swept up on top of her head and held in place by a large contingent of bobby pins, her cheeks rouged. There she is, a '20s beauty, an actual flapper, more than fifty years later. Nonetheless, she could no longer see out of her left eye and the books she read in the sixteen years she had remaining, would be reduced to what was available in large print. Romance novels, murder mysteries.

We stayed up waiting in an unsavory McDonald's in Albany when we weren't in the hospital lobby, an anthology of suffering. Then, we brought her home. My sister called to ask if I felt guilty. I guess about the missing banister. Maybe about the hot weather. But I somehow knew enough to realize it wasn't about me. It was all about my mother, who she had been, who she was becoming. I tried to shuffle alongside her in the present. I held her head back with my left hand as I dabbed her eye with a tissue in my right. I administered eye drops. Again, she was childlike, but patient, strangely undemanding. She seemed to revel in the attention as she had at the hospital. My mother was always a sucker for doctors. She developed intimacies with them. I thought....here she is. A six year old bravely standing up to iodine, a splinter in her foot. Or, a twenty-five year old with a sprained ankle smiling flirtatiously at a handsome medical student with a stethoscope hanging suggestively from his neck. Or, maybe the withered crone she would become when she could no longer see out of either pale blue eye, her smudged glasses really only a fashion thing.

Everything would be lost little by little, but everything would also remain, its lifespan beginning before memory, in a forever only hinted at by Hallmark. My mother took her eye out and I began to see her more clearly.

_________________________
Here's a link to Colin Harrington's review of my book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement that appeared in the Berkshire Eagle https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/book-review-twilight-time-is-reflective-spiritual,591980

Please share your thoughts regarding this story and Twilight Time by writing to me at
seventysomething9@gmail.com

Tin Pan Alley

The son never came to visit. If there was a son. A Catholic family like that you'd think there'd be a son, or six sons and maybe four daughters. But Teddy, Tadeuz, always sat by himself in a morgue-ish silence, last room on the left, the noise of the nurses pushing the med carts on the soundtrack of his dreams. You couldn't really tell what he was dreaming or thinking except for the occasional wry smile. Teddy didn't say anything, couldn't speak. He was a stroke patient. One morning, he was sitting on his porch in Chicopee yelling to a guy in the street he'd known for sixty years about how the Sox were bullshit and would never break the Curse. They didn't have it in them. They were losers and weaklings....when he just fell off his plastic lawn chair and started rolling into the gutter like an errant bowling ball. The ambulance came and brought him to Bay State where a team of doctors from who knows where worked him over, but in the end all they could do was stick a feeding tube in his belly and assure him he'd be well cared for at Rolling Meadows. This was four years ago.

He lay in bed until his aide, Aisha, a powerful Jamaican, lifted him out every morning and sat him in his chair.
"How you doin', T?" she asked him. "You dream sweet dreams last night? Pretty girls visit you when it get dark and nobody lookin'"?
She handed him a plastic bottle to pee in and wheeled him to the bathroom sink so he could brush his teeth and throw some water on his face. Teddy had the use of his upper body, his arms and hands, his head. So he could turn toward Aisha and smile. Then, he could do what he did every morning. Lift his right hand to his mouth in a charade of drinking a cup of coffee, his heart's desire.
"No sir, T. No way. You drink coffee, you could aspirate it right down the wrong pipe into your lungs."
Teddy had learned that word. Aspirate. One nurse or another, one aide or another was always using it to threaten him. His brain had forgotten how to swallow. He couldn't speak and he couldn't eat or drink. If he drank a cup of coffee, the sweet hot stuff would go down his windpipe. He'd end up with pneumonia and it would probably kill him. The only thing that could go in or out of his mouth was air, the stale stink of the nursing home.

After she served him breakfast, some beige slop that went through the tube in his belly, the aide propped him up and handed him the Herald sports section. Then, she sashayed out of the room into the hall where a small party of other staff, painted latinas, skinny white girls, Caribbean women with outlandish hairdos, was taking a spontaneous break. Telling affectionate stories about some residents, complaining about others.
"He keep pinchin' my ass."
"She used to be a opera singer."

They all loved Teddy. He must have had something before he got old and stroked out because they all flirted with him. There was a satisfaction in saying something a little racy or dancing around in front of him, getting his blue eyes to twinkle, making the corners of his mouth turn up a fraction of a millimeter. He hadn't been with a woman in so long. None of the men had except O'Connell who used to be in the bed on the opposite side of the room before he had a heart attack and got wheeled out on a gurney. O'Connell had a wife who came in Tuesdays and Fridays to give him a hand job. The other men listened. They looked forward to it.

There was a new aide on the floor. She couldn't have been more than twenty, blond with curls tied back in a pony tail. When she walked out of the room after she fluffed up the pillows on Teddy's bed and changed the sheets for his roommate, Kirby, Teddy watched her hips rock back and forth slowly. Sandy, her name was, and she was in no kind of hurry. He knew her name was Sandy because he read the little tag she wore, but he hadn't talked to her yet. Or, rather, she hadn't talked at him yet. After a while, a decent interval he thought, not all in your face like some of them,  she came by and asked.
"You a Sox fan?"
He nodded "Tough for you to be in here all cooped up and not even have a decent ball team to root for."
He noticed she didn't wear a wedding ring. There were so many questions he wanted to ask. Have you every been married? Do you have kids? How come a beautiful woman like you is all alone? Do you like to sing? She came in and out every day, helping him change out of his pajamas, sponging him down and getting him into a clean shirt in the morning and just visiting a bit in the afternoon before she left at 3. Teddy couldn't tell if he was special or if she was just a good person.

When she came in the morning, he did his coffee charade just like he did with all the other aides. Sandy didn't tell him he was going to aspirate it. She just got this plaintive look on her face and shook her head.
"I'm sorry," she said.
When she came in the afternoon, she sometimes read to him from the paper. He'd already read it all by that time, but that didn't matter. He loved to listen to her read and make comments about the Sox or the Patriots, depending on the season, or about the crooks in Boston, the ones on the street and the ones in the mayor's office.

One day, she was just kicking back turning the entertainment pages before heading home when she started humming "Summertime." Sandy loved show tunes. Teddy chimed in. "Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high." She looked up from the Herald and stared at him, but she didn't say a word. Didn't make a big deal out of it. Just went on singing. They sang together "Your daddy's rich and your mama's good lookin'...hush little baby, don't you cry."

Teddy couldn't talk, but it turned out he could sing like one of the old crooners, like Sinatra, like Tony Bennett. Nobody knew that but Sandy. She looked it up on the internet. Found out that the music comes from a different place in the brain. Even the words in the songs. The words in the songs were coming from a secret place where they lay in wait hoping for a chance to come out.

It was hard for Teddy to pick out a song, but if Sandy started singing, he jumped right in. They both knew all the words. "The falling leaves, drift by the window, the autumn leaves of red and gold." For a while now, he had stopped doing his coffee charade when it was Sandy's shift. He didn't want to repeat himself with her every day the way he did with the other aides. He wanted to feel the freshness, the newness every day. Teddy could see out the window that winter had come to Westfield even though it was always the same inside Rolling Meadows, like a casino in Vegas. Outside, the trees were bare. Flurries fell from a mean sky. How he would have loved that hot coffee warming his hands, his throat and his belly. And another thing. Sandy wanted to sing Christmas carols, but Teddy wouldn't have any part of it. She didn't know why, but she didn't push it.

Don't give me baby Jesus and all them kings and lambs hanging around, he thought while he shook his head no. Jesus doesn't give a shit about me. Didn't bring back my legs or give me a ham sandwich for lunch. Let's stick to "Winter Wonderland." "Sleigh bells ring, are you listening." Sandy listened. She tried to get a feel for what songs Teddy was in the mood for. Some days, he seemed to want upbeat. "The Sunny Side of the Street," as if he was feeling some gratitude for the life he had, even if the pleasure wasn't enough to fill a shot glass. Some days were dark, dead of winter dark. It was January now and Donder and Blitzen were coming down from the windows. Next thing you know, they'd be putting up the Valentines. Wives would be coming in with boxes of chocolates for the old guys, even if they were sons-of-bitches before they ended up in Rolling Meadows. Teddy's wife had left him one January. One drunken brawl too many. He didn't look up at Sandy when she came in at the end of her shift. She was singing "Unchained Melody." He kept his eyes closed while a tear came down his face. After a few minutes, she squeezed his hand and turned to leave for the day. The next morning, after she got him up and into his recliner, he raised his right hand to his mouth and threw his head back to drink his imaginary cup of coffee.

She asked "milk?" Teddy nodded yes. "How many sugars"? He raised two fingers.
She went out and came back with a steaming white mug. It was early and no one else was awake in the room. No one was working the floor. It was just the two of them. Teddy took a sip of heaven and beamed back at Sandy. He felt the heat and the sugar and the caffeine and the love. Teddy coughed as she was walking out of the room. Sandy wasn't sure she'd done the right thing. He might aspirate the coffee, but he might not.



To comment on this story or my recent book, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, 
email seventysomething9@gmail.com.  Thank you for your continued interest in my writing.

Global Witness

Offered during services on Yom Kippur in Lenox, Massachusetts



We are lost, like small children in a dark forest, hungry, thirsty and afraid. We have wandered away from our wisdom...out of distraction, out of misdirection. The way forward is obscured by a lattice of hanging vines. The way back is littered with the fallen branches of our misguided attempts at self-improvement. The canopy above is so dense that the light only flickers intermittently and the floor of the forest is covered with rocks and fallen logs that impede the progress we think we should be making. At the new year, we are called to make teshuvah, to come back from our wandering and return to our true selves. But how shall we make teshuvah this year when the shrubs along the path are covered in poisonous berries and the wolf is howling?

We must first be still and reflect on our situation. In the silence, we can hear our heart beating and the music of our breath. In out. We recognize first that we are alive, as the fox and the anemones are alive, and this being alive is an unfathomable blessing. There's no understanding it. There's no explaining it. But we can discern that the rhythm of life is cyclical. It comes and goes. The forest has a season of growth and a season of quietude. What is this path that we're so attached to that suggests a march from here to there? Is it possible that we're trudging along the wrong paradigm? That we've been hoodwinked into keeping our eyes on a prize that's somehow out there, always receding?

Consider shabbat. It comes around again and again. Shabbat is spelled with the letters shin, bet, tav meaning to cease. The same letters in a different order, tav, shin, bet, yield the root tshuv, meaning to return. The word teshuvah comes from the root tshuv with an added hey at the end. Hey is the letter of breath. Hhhhhey. So when we make teshuvah, we are returning to our origins, to our breath, to the cycle of life, to all the forest, not just the path through it. We are turning on our axis like the earth itself.

Here we are rotating, spinning like dervishes, like dreidels, instead of trodding a linear path, always staring straight ahead. Now, we can see infinite distances in all directions. There are the trees heavy with apples for the new year and over there are the honeybees struggling against extinction. There are the crops exhausted from drought. Keep turning. There are the oceans rising, flooding the streets of our towns. But look over there, a little further, there are the oceans that my grandparents crossed when they were the immigrants. There are the children starving at the border and there are my children and grandchildren becoming, becoming against all odds. Everywhere there is life and everywhere there is death and I am the witness. You are the witness.

The Torah portion for Yom Kippur, from Leviticus 16, describes the purification rituals that Aaron must perform before entering the Holy of Holies after the death of his two sons. There is bathing, dressing in sacred garments, bringing a bull to sacrifice and then two goats, one also for sacrifice and one to send into the wilderness, the scapegoat. There is incense and there is blood. Then Aaron is instructed to lay his hands on the head of the scapegoat, confess the sins of the community and send the animal to carry the sins off to an inaccessible region. But here's the thing. There is no longer an inaccessible region where we can banish the culpability, our culpability, the suffering, our suffering. Greenland is melting. The Amazon is on fire. Sending the scapegoat into the wilderness is a fool's errand.

We know that in the tradition, prayer arose in rabbinic times to replace the ancient sacrificial rituals. In our time, I'm imagining a spiritual stance that might necessarily precede prayer. I'm suggesting that as we rotate, as we see as far as the eye can see in all directions and into our own hearts, returning to the rhythms and melodies of the earth, that we witness and apprehend that we cannot turn away, we cannot banish the outcome of what we've done to ourselves and to one another. There is no inaccessible place on earth. We are the earth. We are one body, rotating and revolving through space, a little dizzy from our efforts to understand and to love.

Please join me on Friday, October 25th at 5:30 at The Bookstore in Lenox for a reading from my book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement. The Bookstore is a great venue for writers and their friends. Hope to see you there.

I'm also delighted to invite you to another reading from Twilight Time at Rookie Farm Bakery at 10 Anthony Street in Hillsdale, NY on Sunday,  November 3rd at 11 a.m. Coffee and baked goods will be served!

Metronome

Since the publication of Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement this spring, I have a renewed interest in posting stories on seventysomething. It turns out, I have more to say that I hope to share with you. Please stay in touch by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com



"I have something very important to tell you." My sister, Roberta, speaking from her recliner in Berkeley, is 84, and has her own style of dementia-inflected communication. She rarely initiates a conversation, but she can be very direct and knows how to get my attention when she wants to.
"I had to break up with my piano teacher today."

This would be August 2019. "I didn't want to, but I had to do it, so I wrote her a letter about how I felt like a fraud all these years and couldn't continue lessons." This letter was mailed from the post office on 83rd and Amsterdam in 1951.

The piano teacher, a Viennese emigré with the mannerisms of a grand dame on her way down, demanded scales and arpeggios in the years after the War when New York was a city filled with European refugees struggling to survive on a diet of strudel and hot tea in a glass. There were lace makers and bookbinders, milliners and piano teachers, the last kept afloat by families whose class status depended, in part, on subjecting their children to private music lessons. Miss Schafraneck came to the house dressed entirely in black, the hem of her ankle-length dress kissing the top of her lace-up shoes. She wore an enormous hat decorated with silk flowers and long gloves that she drew down from her elbows and off her fingers as she sat down next to Roberta at the paltry instrument, a down-at-the heels, out-of-tune spinet. She was the kind of person who might have bumped into Freud unexpectedly at the bakery on the Ringstrasse earlier in the century. Miss S. was an independent contractor working in the orbit of a Russian conservatory teacher, one Mme. van Gerova, a woman I never met but who was reputedly so ferocious that my sister never failed to throw up on the morning of the recital.

Every week, Miss S. would open the yellow book of Czerny exercises, set the metronome and turn her powdered face toward Roberta in expectation, Tick Tock. And every week, my sister, a natural musician with an uncanny gift who never practiced, would stumble over the notes. Roberta had what we called in those days "an ear." If you asked her to play "Melancholy Baby," she would play "Melancholy Baby" and if you wanted to sing along but couldn't manage the key, she would transpose it up or down as required. If you asked her to play "Rhapsody in Blue," she would play "Rhapsody in Blue" and if you asked her to play something she didn't know, she'd make a game of it. Ask you to sing a few bars and take it from there. It was like a magic act. Something out of vaudeville or the side show at the circus where people got paid to swallow swords.

The lessons continued under protest through the forties until 1951, at which point Roberta, aged 16, refused to comply.

"She doesn't appreciate my gift. Tick Tock. She just wants me to move my fingers up and down the keyboard a certain way, her way. She wants me to be someone else. The music isn't in my fingers. I wanted to tell her that at my lesson, but I couldn't do it. I was too scared and of course mother and daddy were no help. They think I'm Paderewski. They want to dress me up and show me off, see me on the stage at Carnegie Hall. So I sent her a letter just yesterday, Miss Schafraneck. I don't know how she feels about it. What do you think? Do you think she's mad at me? Do you think I hurt her feelings"?

What I think is, give 'em hell, Harry. What I think is the Andrews Sisters are harmonizing on the jukebox at the soda shoppe. Girls are wearing bobby socks and saddle shoes. TV is just starting to give radio a run for its money. The backdrop is mid-century, but the fear and outrage and defiance are doing their chemistry on Roberta in the eternal now. She is staring me down, struggling to free herself from someone else's idea of what music is and I'm the six year old witness to her suffering. Who's to say it isn't 1951? Tick Tock.

"And another thing. I wanted to ask you something else."
"Okay. Shoot."
"When you were a little girl, did you like me"?



Please join me on Friday, October 25th at 5:30 at The Bookstore in Lenox for a reading from Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement. The Bookstore is a great venue for writers and their friends. Hope to see you there.

NEW BOOK RELEASE: Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement

I'm pleased to announce that my new book, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement has been released by Wipf and Stock. The book is a collection of short essays on memory, aging and mortality, many of which originated on this blog.

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Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement is available on Amazon. Reviews would be most welcome.

Many blessings, Susie Kaufman