Voice of the Prophet

A friend in high school told me that his little brother, eleven or twelve years old, sat bolt upright in bed one night and said, "The populace is exploding into bushels of wheat." I've always thought the boy must have been visited by a prophetic voice, a deep call echoing out from a mountaintop, choosing to speak through him. Why else would someone normally fixated on Sandy Koufax say something biblical like that? He was probably preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and had heard about Joseph, the Dreamer...how he predicted the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine. Still, it was an unexpected turn of phrase for a boy whose previous experience of famine had been limited to finding the cupboard bare of mallomars.

In my experience, a sure sign of a prophetic visitation is the uncanny sensation that the words coming out of your mouth must have been said by someone else first. That's how I felt when I recently heard myself say, "Mortality is the mother of compassion." It seemed that I had known this all along but had somehow forgotten it. I ran to the computer to see if that was really mine or if I had inadvertently lifted it from Emerson or Thomas Merton by way of Frank Zappa. I did not find it. Where did it come from? I knew I could not have developed that idea out of whole cloth. It was as if it were in the public domain, available to anyone who found it rummaging in the back of the coat closet. I knew it was true because it didn't surprise me. Like all wisdom teachings, it winked conspiratorially at me as if to say, "We both know this is an old joke. Feel free to use it." But I have to say that receiving a complete sentence that sounds like you would expect to read it on a scrap of white paper after gorging yourself on shrimp lo mein, that was something. It got my attention.

But what did it mean? What did I mean when that sentence flew like a bird of paradise unannounced out of my mouth and into the world? Both the word mortality and the word compassion tickle the soul. You don't hear either of these words the way you hear the words pillow or toothpaste. Just drop mortality like a stone into the lake of association and it will ripple out to remind you of your mother, of Virginia who died recently of covid-19, of yourself some day when the tremors in your hands decide to migrate to other parts of your body. Then, toss compassion into the mix and you will think back on your time working as a Hospice chaplain, to your encounter with dying and the way it changed you, working so hard to stretch yourself to meet Daniel and Regina and all the others on their way out. But that isn't it. It's something else.

It's the discovery of the universal truth of mortality, not the specific losses I've known. It has something to do with impermanence, the lifespan of a rainbow or a firefly. The miracle of a rainbow fades while I'm looking at it. A firefly lights up in the night sky in early summer for a fraction of a second, then vanishes. If I go out to the back of the house after dark where the peonies luxuriate during the heat of the day, I see June bugs leaping for joy. I witness their dancing and chattering. But fireflies and peonies and mothers don't live forever. They die and are transformed into new life deep in the earth. At Hospice, I had this gift for engaging with that transformation, for envisioning eternity.  It was sometimes comforting to the patients. I believed absolutely and still do that death is not the end and I was sometimes able to pass that along to the dying. But I was not yet filled with compassion for our impermanence. All of us, those deemed essential and those who go unnoticed. The universal, undeniable fact of it. Mortality had not yet mothered compassion in me. It had not yet nursed me in the pathos of our common fate. It has taken the pandemic to deliver the milk of the human condition to my doorstep, reminding me of what I have always known but had long forgotten.


Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Jigsaw

Jigsaw puzzles have been selling like hotcakes. I'm tempted by the hotcakes, but I'd probably be better off doing a jigsaw, pandemic weight gain being what it is. I gave a one thousand piece puzzle to my son for his last birthday. This was BCV, before coronavirus, but it has since come in handy as he, like the rest of us, is looking for something soothing to occupy his mind. Jigsaws have the odor of convalescence. My father and I used to do them on a bridge table when I was fifteen home sick with hepatitis, my skin jaundiced and peeling. Daddy was a stamp collector, so he had the necessary eyesight and patience for detail. Me, I was never all that keen on looking for the straight-edged blue of the border pieces with puffy clouds that you could string together to create the sky over Paris. Now, reconstructing the broken world on a table seems all too appropriate. When the puzzle is complete, I can see the horse-chestnut trees along the Champs-Elysee. I can reassemble the fragments into one satisfying whole. In what other world does everything fit together so perfectly?

Each of us is a part of the puzzle. The little rounded male of us inserts itself into the gaping female of the adjoining piece. Now the picture is somewhat more complete. This is what I'm learning from the pandemic. Each person brings an essential quality, a color, a shape to the complex weave of the corona carpet. Without the person furiously baking pecan pies, the picture would not be complete. Without the person swimming in disinfectant, the picture would not be complete. And without the person sitting in perfect stillness, the picture would not be complete. We are all essential workers laboring in spirit together, crafting our own offerings out of vigilance and lovingkindness. As Pope Francis has written, "rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit."

This morning, I was thinking in particular about my friend Virginia, a precious piece of the puzzle. I haven't seen her since she moved to an assisted living facility in New Jersey about eighteen months ago. In 1998, when I first met Virginia, an irreverent Irish Catholic spiritual director, I was lost in the wilderness. She seduced me with her street-wise, almost belligerent style, inviting me into an encounter with the sacred that was as honest and direct as she was. Virginia and I began looking for God together, turning over rocks and searching high in the branches of flowering trees. We dug down into family stories, meeting every few weeks for more than fifteen years to talk about the inner life. I was born into a secular Jewish household and initially found the subject unfamiliar and embarrassing. We did not do God where I come from. But Virginia was matter-of-fact. God was an old friend she wanted to introduce me to, to make a shidduch, an arranged marriage. She was not at all like a proselytizing zealot. More like someone extending an invitation to the best party in town. I couldn't get enough of her.

Months ago Virginia, now 88, stopped picking up the phone in her room. I would connect to the nurse's station and they would wheel her out to take the call. I knew that was no longer possible in the time of corona, but I hoped they had a phone they could bring in to her this morning. The nurse said no, I needed to call the family for information. I said, I wasn't really looking for information. I just wanted to say hello and tell my dear friend that I love her. Again she turned me down and added ominously that Virginia wasn't there. Virginia, her daughter later explained, had tested positive for covid-19. She is in the ER, all alone, blind and bewildered. There is nothing anyone can do.

The puzzle feels incomplete without Virginia's audacity and grit, her capacity for making common cause with a person like me. So different, so unlikely. She marched out of Easthampton, Mass., a mill town studded with churches for the Irish, churches for the French, and embraced me, a Jew from New York. She said I was a natural. We shared an understanding that was outside of history.

Once years ago, I brought her to a Jewish Renewal shabbat service in Manhattan attended by 800 people. Afterwards, inspired by the sight of all the davveners swaying in their talitot, the men and women sitting together, she went up to Reb Zalman of blessed memory and said in a voice right out of Fenway "you made one Irish Catholic girl very happy." And Zalman said in his cozy shtetl-inflected diction, "sometimes it heppens."


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Take Heart

Some of us see a dark future or no future, a lunar wasteland replacing the paradise we have only recently come to notice. Some of us see a renaissance, a flowering of art and justice replicating itself in all directions and dimensions like a hall of mirrors. And some of us can't make up our minds. We have good days when we inhale in common with the Chinese their freshly laundered air. And we have bad days when we're no longer certain where good retreats and bad advances. We have days that unfold in the paradigm of science - what little we understand - and days that unfold in the paradigm of metaphor, a more familiar territory. These are not points of view so much as personality types that come and go, even within the consciousness of one person. I can wake up a virologist and go to bed a metaphysician. In between, I scavenge for disinfectant. Some days, I vacillate wildly between thinking it's all random and knowing for an undeniable fact that it's my fault. I have eaten my fair share of BLTs.

Of all the words written since the beginning of the pandemic or, to be more honest, since the scourge, in a Marco Polo u-turn, reached St. Mark's square and the Campo de Fiori in Rome, the remarks of the Pope have given me the most comfort. Francis says, anticipating an end to the crisis..."Tonight before falling asleep think about when we will return to the street....Every second will be precious. Swims at sea, the sun until late, sunsets, toasts, laughter. We will go back to laughing together." I appreciate especially "return to the street." Francis, despite his clerical costume, has a novelist's love for the world.

Every day that the virus claimed more lives, new flowers appeared in Berkeley. I was there making my annual March pilgrimage to celebrate the birthdays of my niece and my sister, this year turning 85. There were California poppies the color of tangerines. Enormous bushes of rosemary smelling like leg of lamb and bursting with purple blossoms. Jasmine and camellias. My sister sat in her recliner and took it all in. On St. Patrick's Day, she and I performed our own arrangement of "Danny Boy," until we were undone by the Irish tenor high notes. We fortified ourselves with cashews. We did our trademark imaginary tour of upper Broadway, seeing if we could remember all the stores and all the shopkeepers from the fifties. Every morning, my sister read the dire headlines in the Chronicle. We explained that there was a virus like a wildfire in the Sierras spreading out of control all over the world and she nodded. You couldn't tell if it registered, if it meant anything. But then again what did it mean to us? No more Thai food? No more browsing and people-watching at the bookstore? It's not like a terrorist attack. It dawns on you slowly, this new day.

At first, I kissed her forehead each time I entered her room and each time I left, marking the coming and going as if my sister were a mezuzah holding a sacred text. And maybe she is and maybe I am and maybe you are. But in the last days of the trip, I was no longer kissing my people. We were communicating our love for one another virtually, sometimes in words, but more often in chaste adoring glances like shy Victorians. I put my hand to my heart and she put her hand to her heart. When I sat opposite her on the final day before heading to the airport in Sacramento with my N95 mask and my supply of blue plastic gloves, she was leaning back in her chair under a wool blanket. She reached out from under the weight of it and grabbed my pinky finger with her pinky finger. We made a pinky promise, the way schoolgirls do, and despite the potential contagion of her skin touching my skin, we promised to love one another no matter the wreckage of this broken world.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by commenting here or writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Twentysomething

When in doubt, tell stories.


There they were, round and puffed up in their winter coats, standing in her doorway around the corner from Barney Greengrass, her mother and father. She often spent Sunday mornings in Barney's lox and bagel establishment, doing the puzzle, reading the wedding notices with a rich mixture of envy and contempt. Delaying the time when she'd have to return to the empty apartment. She fought tooth and nail for this, this barely furnished, drafty studio, four blocks from the slipcovers and cushy carpeting of the family home. Now, she was stuck with it, its provisional feel, the high ceiling echo of its loneliness. Backpedaling was not an option.

The shaming and blaming went on for weeks. They weren't a screaming family. Too decorous. They were more of a sulking family. When things got really bad, her mother would take to her bed with a Victorian lack of amusement. Her father made it clear he didn't think she could manage living alone, paying the rent, that he couldn't understand why she wanted to live three blocks north and one block east when she had a perfectly good room with a matching maple headboard, dresser and desk at home. In the end, she hung in and moved out, her greatest adult accomplishment to date.

When she was small, she liked to bury her face in her mother's fur coat, an unexpected encounter between otherwise unacquainted mammals. She'd seen seals, sleek and dripping, sunning themselves on the rocks overlooking their pool at the Central Park zoo. But the coat, though dead, was more approachable. In the doorway, however, her mother was not wearing the Alaskan seal and this was noteworthy given the bone-shattering cold of the February day. Her mother was more modestly dressed in a gray cloth coat with no color at the neck. Funereal, Randy thought, bordering on churchy. Her father wore his signature fedora, but that didn't mean anything since he never left home without it. She'd been dusting the New York soot off her bookshelves and wasn't expecting them. Damn, it looked serious. Grandma was already dead so it wasn't that kind of emergency. But it was clearly something.

What do you say when you're twenty-two and your parents appear unannounced at your door? Surely not "can I get you something," since Randy didn't have a thing to offer. Her fridge was stocked with the remains of last night's mushroom pizza, an ancient, shriveled grapefruit and a jar of stuffed olives. She looked at the two of them and they looked at her, not even taking off their coats. They had something to say and, apparently, they were going to say it.

Randy's mother and father sat down on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in some muddy brown synthetic material and settled their swollen feet on the orange-lollipop colored rug she bought at Macy's. Her friend, Joanne, wondered why she'd bought a rug when she wasn't even married.

"We got a call," her mother launched in with a blank expression on her face. "From someone named Leila Weiss. We don't know her. We had no idea who she was. She said she was getting divorced," and here her father chimed in so that the words came out in stereo. "She's naming you as the co-respondent in her divorce case."

Randy didn't know what a co-respondent was. It sounded like something you were responsible for learning about in high school, in algebra class or English, maybe a part of speech. Randy didn't know Leila Weiss either, had never met her. But the name registered, rang a carillon of bells. It was clear that the call had come from Mark's wife. Mark was her boyfriend.

She met him in the elevator of the office building downtown where she was working as the intake person for civil cases at the Legal Aid Society, the next best thing to finishing law school. She had high hopes for law school, how she'd eventually be sitting behind an enormous desk with a great many telephones. But law school was a fucking nightmare. Four women in an advancing battalion of male faces, the professor calling on them randomly to analyze cases. Property. Contracts. She tried to make herself even smaller than she was, willing herself invisible and it must have worked because in the six sleepless weeks she was there at BU she never got called on. Not once. She didn't exist.

At Legal Aid, she had an alcove at the front with a desk, not enormous, but all hers. Clients would come in and sit opposite her and she got to ask them all sorts of personal questions about their income, their domestic arrangements, the installments remaining on their kitchen appliances. Mostly, it was landlord-tenant or slip and fall. People were either being evicted for being in arrears on their rent or they were trying to sue the city for failing to repair the sidewalk outside the building where they weren't paying their rent, so that they could get enough money together to pay their rent. She was six months out of college and it was her first real job. She loved it. For some reason, it was a slow season for family law so she wasn't up on the pertinent legal jargon. Had never run across a client who was being named as a co-respondent. This was virgin territory although that ship had sailed a number of years back.

Mark was a forty year old married accountant, but kind of good looking. Jeez. They were both standing in the elevator holding cups of scalding, undistinguished coffee. He caught her eye and gave Randy a sheepish smile that felt empowering. She was needing that bad after she had to drag her father up to Boston to bail her out of BU back in October. The two of them were ushered into an office wallpapered with framed diplomas for an expensive and mortifying negotiation. The dean noted that women weren't really cut out for the law. He and her father didn't seem at all surprised that she was packing up and going home. Expectations fulfilled.

Her parents had only met Mark once. It was New Year's Eve. The two of them had planned a big night, dinner out then maybe some music. But on the thirtieth, Randy woke up with a toothache so over-the-top that it dwarfed everything else in the world. There was only the toothache. It turned out to be an impacted wisdom tooth that had to come out immediately. If the dentist hadn't been her father's cousin, a grizzled person with medieval dental equipment, she never would have gotten an appointment right before the holiday. She probably would have been forced to kill herself. As it was, she had the thing extracted and crawled back to her parent's apartment, crushed, defeated and stoned on Percocet.

Mark came by at around eight with a dozen purple roses. Her mother was extremely impressed. He had taken off his wedding ring and just looked like an attractive Columbia graduate, which he was. A tad old, true, but charming and solicitous. Randy was lying on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in gold brocade. She was close to suffocating under a pile of blankets. Through the narcotic fog, she saw the two of them, Mark falling in age precisely between her and her mother. The scent of the roses mixed with the smell of her own unwashed body nauseated her. She mumbled a weak thank you and turned away.

Now, her father was looking at the orange rug. Randy could see that he was trying to make eye contact with her, but couldn't quite pull it off. "Just tell him you can't see him anymore," he suggested, sighing with weariness and resignation.

"Of course, we know it isn't true," her mother added, tight-lipped. "What this awful woman said. It's unthinkable that this Leila Weiss would lay this in our lap. Call us and say you were involved with her husband. Involved in that way," she added with emphasis. "Your father and I know you'd never do anything like that."

And Randy thought, I can't get credit for anything. Not even being a half-way decent bad girl.



Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Cotton Candy for Breakfast

One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever. This was a no-brainer for the author of Ecclesiastes but for us, forever has lost its distinction, its credibility. We can't count on it. It's become unreliable like snow in January. Forever, it turns out, is a scoundrel, a womanizer, an over-hyped Hollywood romcom. To say goodbye to this central illusion is to fall into a sinkhole. These days in New England, it sometimes snows in honor of Dr. King's birthday, but sometimes nothing falls out of the sky but freezing rain, daring me to walk down the treacherous steps to the driveway to scrape the frost off the windshield. And sometimes, it's sixty degrees in January and I get to wallow in the guilt of enjoying what I know isn't a good thing. Cotton candy for breakfast.

The loss of forever casts a dark, elongated shadow. It puts greater pressure on the present. It demands that I look reality in the eye in a way that I resent and resist. I can't expect anything going forward. I can't count on a damn thing. Neither good health, nor wisteria, tumbling purple over a fence, nor witnesses, standing red-faced before the Senate. All I have is now, sitting on a deck in Panama, one more gringo in Paradise, letting the winter do whatever it's doing back home while I hide from it. All I have is the company of words to encourage me when I fear for the future. Words are my friends. They make nice to me. They graciously allow me to twist them into unexpected shapes like animals made from balloons at children's birthday parties and bounce them around like ice in a cocktail shaker at parties for grownups. Even so, in my writing I am aware, that I long to skate backwards into a time that feels reassuringly less like a horror movie. This may be another flavor of cotton candy, another sticky confection designed to sugarcoat reality.

I remember how my mother looked lying in her nursing home bed with the railings raised, her eyes unfocused, her cheeks hollowed out. She would not allow me to tell her she was beautiful, shaking her wobbly head vehemently from side to side and tsk tsking. She didn't remember much by then, but she remembered beautiful. How she could weaponize her crossed legs and fluttering eyelashes to get things done. How it had been decades since she was that person. But I refused to see it that way. When I looked at her, I saw the grace of her earlobes and her narrow wrists and I thought this will go on from here to eternity. I embraced the illusion of forever even though she died five days later. If it's true, as I read recently, that a writer is someone who plays with the body of his [sic] mother, I must be Shakespeare's second cousin. I am avid for her, for her long life that appeared to go on and on and the stories I continue to tell about it.

It's curious that I'm pondering endtimes here on the southern edge of the continent, dense with jungle vegetation, an opera of birds singing, a nearby creek whispering. It may be the long days absent errands, appointments with the auto mechanic, the skin doctor. It may be the burnt faces of the indigenous farm workers descending the hillsides at the end of the day, exhausted. I can't tell if they are registering any variation in the anxious stink pouring off the American body politic. These people, the Ngobe, have harvested the coffee since pre-Columbian times. Every barista at every Starbucks in Seattle owes her job to them. This ancient way of life could vanish, a victim of climate change. What if there's not enough rain? Or too much?

As a hedge against extinction, I buy a bag covered in a geometric design made by the Kuna people from the San Blas Islands in Caribbean Panama. Later, online, I learn that the islands may be rendered uninhabitable from sea level rise later in the century. For everything there is a season, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote. This is the season of disbelief and the season of denial. As the sun revolves around the earth, there may come a time when spring will not follow winter or when all the seasons become confused and forget the natural order of things as we perhaps already have.


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Lost and Found

Anna, second from the right in first row
Photograph taken in Iasi, Romania in the 1880s

In the backward glance of time travel, grandmother Anna is reaching up to put her veiled straw hat on a shelf above her dark, crepey dresses. The bedroom in the back of our apartment fills with the acrid smell of camphor, her winter coat packed in mothballs at the rear of the closet. Anna has just returned from breathing her own allotted share of toxic fumes. She's been gossiping on the bench in the middle of four lanes of Broadway traffic. The whale-size Pontiacs and chubby Checker cabs drive by northbound towards Harlem and southbound towards the diamond district. Mrs. Mandelbaum's grandson has graduated from law school. Mrs. Ziegler's husband is at Mt. Sinai for his gall bladder. In the kitchen, mother is working on her beef Stroganoff. Mixing the sour cream into the flank steak remains a liberation. She has held her ground against Anna, insisting on certain expansions of the family diet, but agreeing to eat the mouthwatering outlier foods only at Shanghai Palace.

Further back, mother is a small girl with a piece of chalk and a key playing potsy in Mt. Morris Park on 105th street. Boys are marching out of the tenements, boarding ships sailing east to France. Mrs. Mandelbaum's mother has died very young of influenza. Anna is tasting the soup she prepared for her husband. It might be too salty. Louis doesn't like salty. But it might not have enough flavor. He wants it to have flavor. He wants this and he wants that. Anna tries hard to get it right. If she doesn't get it right, Louis becomes sullen, frightens her little daughter. He doesn't smack them around, but still they cower when he comes into the room. He leaves a sour taste. Louis is not the man Anna thought she would marry.

I can almost see her before she makes the crossing from Romania, the city of Iasi, where hoodlum Jew-haters threw rocks in their windows. Mrs. Ziegler's father has been attacked in the street. It's suddenly clear that this has gone beyond the usual threat. Everyone has to pack up and leave in a hurry, sailing west to New York. Anna has a suitor in Iasi, Chaim Greenstein. He plays the clarinet and speaks flowery, literary Yiddish. Long before she dies in the nursing home on Long Island opposite the woman who lies awake at night making shadow puppets on the wall, something dies inside Anna when she says goodbye to him, Chaim. Something gets left behind. This remnant struggles to breathe. It reaches for me, for my son and his sons. It wants us to love one another extravagantly to compensate for the love lost in transit, blown off the deck of the ship into the Black Sea. It wants us to create openings for love.

But these boys, my grandsons, are growing up so fast. They never get to meet Anna's daughter, let alone Anna. In Minnesota, all they have from long ago and far away is me when I visit, weak tea no longer served hot in a glass. They are wallowing deep in America, kayaking down the Red Cedar river, running the bases on humid upper midwest summer nights. I want to gift them with the old stories. Make them some good soup, not too salty. I want to say to them, look, here is this little girl in Romania studying French and here is her daughter skipping rope in the gutter uptown. Here is your great great-grandfather Louis, a sad sack, a sorry case. See him glowering in a corner, empty pockets, emphysema. Maybe they can take his mind off his troubles. In some back-to-the future science fiction, Louis is walking with the two of them down to one of their favorite fishing spots on the big river, the Mississippi. It reminds him of the Danube, one summer outing when his mother laid out a picnic of cold chicken and pickled beets while he and his father dug for worms. He overhears his mother singing and clapping her hands. There is his Anna the day he fell in love with her in the English for immigrants class downtown, her blue eyes, her hair swept high off her lovely neck. Louis looks these boys up and down. He's bewildered by the noise and lights flashing around them, all the things they've accumulated in their short lives. But somewhere under the commotion of their America, he recognizes them. They belong to him.

-----------------------------------------
"The young and the old are linked in one long breath."....Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

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