A Garden Scene, in a Dream Sequence with Mom

In May, I'd still had hope that Mom would be able to go home for her 90th birthday.  Memories come back in the present tense--more present, sometimes, than the present!

A Garden Scene:  In a Dream Sequence with My Mother

         I try to imagine the scene in  my mother’s brain sometimes—the haunted corridors she’s trying to flee, determined to rescue others on her way.  But today the weather in my mother’s brain is as fair as the weather is out here.  Blue sky with healthy white clouds and a gently warming sun.  Today her mind is here in the garden with me.

            She’s sitting with me on the bench in front of the three-tier fountain with water running gently over its granite sides.  The base is surrounded by succulents,  and  and on a lower level there are  impatiens and pansies.  Everywhere we look there are shades of green—full-leafed trees I know by heart, not name,  and a cobblestone path with green grass on every side  that  leads to what look like separate houses but are the two sides of  the care facility, a clean gray house with white trim—this place Mom lives called Aegis. 

            “It’s so beautiful out here,” I tell my mother.  “It’s the place I’d like to be myself someday.”

            “Will we be roommates?” Mom asks, and before I can answer she asks, “Remember when we were on campus together in Kansas?  When I was a senior and you were a freshman?”

            “Yes!”  I say.  “Wouldn’t it be something if we wound up here together?”

            “If I’m still alive,” my mother says.

            I can see Mom’s room from the outside—the birdfeeder we hoped would make her happy right outside her window.  Aegis is heartbreakingly beautiful.  But what’s most beautiful of all is my mother—-thin and elegant with her white hair cut in a stylish bob.  No longer the woman with wild long hair that made her look like an eighty-nine-year-old motherless child.  Now she looks like a picture I saw of her when she was fourteen.  Her once corpulent body has grown skinny and the missing pads of fat have revealed the features from her youth—big dark eyes, a straight nose, full lips, beautiful white teeth. 

            Her blue-veined old arthritic hands are holding a book of Easy Crossword Puzzles with a pen marking her place.  She can no longer do the hard ones, but she still needs to fill in those boxes.

            “I’m going to be celebrating my ninetieth birthday soon—on Halloween—and that would be a wonderful gift if you think of it—four or five pens like this.” She shows me the eraser.

            I promise her more than ballpoint pens.

            “We’re going to have a really nice celebration,”  I say,  “because we all love you so much, and you’ve been an inspiration for us.  Are you still thinking of being a witch for Halloween?”

            “Yes.  To show that not all witches are bitches. “

            “How do you envision your birthday celebration, Mom?”

             “It’s going to be at her house.  At our house.  So we’ll have to decorate the house.  I’ll  stay at home and have my friends come.”

         “Do you want to make a guest list?”

         “When I moved away, I moved away from my friends, too,” she says.  “I don’t remember their names.”

          “Well, there’s Ethel and Nan.  And your book club friends.   And then the family.  Kathy  of course, and Suzy and Jonathan."

             “Yes,” she says.  And there’s a guy.”

             “Javier?” I ask. 

            “Well, I’d expect him to be there,” Mom says.  “But there’s another man bopping around.”

            I like the word "bopping around." Does she mean in her mind?  I don’t think she means Erik of Aegis, the resident  she thinks is sexually harassing her.  I suggest Karl, one of her grandsons, who is studying at Touro in Vallejo, and she says, “Maybe that’s the one.”

            She might mean Tom, Kathy’s brother, the one who helped Kathy take Mom in the night that she went crazy.

            “And the people across the street,” Mom says.  “But maybe if they brought their kids, that would be too many people.  We could have the kids in the morning and the adults in the evening.  Well, we’ll see.”

            “What would you like to say on the invitations?”

        “Something cheery.  ‘It’s not everybody that can be a bossy 90-year-old, but I do so want you to come.’”

        “’And be bossed,’” I suggest, and Mom smiles.   

            “What time would you like to have it?”  I ask.

         “Oh, ten-ish.”

         “Ten-ish in the morning?”

         “Or two-ish.”

         “And how long would you like it to be?”

         “As long as people want to stay.”

         “We can have a sing-along,” I say, “with you at the piano.”

         “And everybody can think of a memory.  Nadine can be the…what?  Marquee?”

             “We could all write our memories on a page too, so you could have the memory book of what everybody says.  And you could say something if you want to.”

         “I think I’ll say ‘We’ve had other events here  including birthday parties of many of you here today.’”

         “That sounds good!  Because it’s true.  We’ve had parties for you and Kathy and Suzy and Jonathan and Karl.  Lots of the people who will be there.”

         “But we don’t want to be too strict,” she says, looking at her watch.  “It’s time for lunch.  But I enjoyed planning in this forest of lilac bushes.” 

          I walk Mom back into the lobby—the one with the grand piano she plays on occasions even though it’s on the side for the better-functioning residents. She can still play the piano. We walk down the hall with all the beautiful paintings on the wall—-impressionistic oil paintings and water colors.  There’s a vibrant floral mural on the door to the Memories section, too, but when we reach it, she says, “I don’t want to go in there.  That’s where I can’t get out!”

         I put my arms around Mom and tell her that it’s lunch time, and after lunch time there will be an activity, and she can come out with the staff.  We’ll talk to them and be sure.

             “You’re delivering me,” she says, and I know that doesn’t mean that I’m accompanying her but rather that she is a Jew seeking a safe place in the attic, and I’m turning her in to the authorities. 

            Her mind is out of the garden, back into the nightmare.