Tuesday,
August 09, 2011
Dear
Suzy and Jonathan,
Mom was in pretty good shape
today! It was definitely one of our best
visits.
I arrived just as she was excusing
herself from the full room of Perry residents, who had apparently been
assembled to hear her play and maybe sing along. (The music on top was Fur Elise, so I can’t
be sure about the sing-along.) Mom was
standing and saying something like “I enjoyed being with you, but now I must
go.” In any case, she was being her
gracious self. I said, “Oh, I missed
it!” and Mom was willing to let me take
a picture of her in the door of the room (where Franz peed two Sundays ago
during the PBS Metropolitan Opera broadcast).
And someone called out, “Did she smile?”
Then we went back to her room
together.
“She’s in there,” Mom told me, and I
said, “Oh, dear.”
But Mom said, “That’s all
right. Just be quiet.”
I heard Kay, who was lying on her (Kay’s)
bed, saying, “They hate me. They’ve always
hated me, from the day I was born.”
I didn’t say anything because I
didn’t want to interrupt or let her know I’d heard her, but it made me sad that
she was attacking even herself.
Later, when I took Mom’s music to
her desk and Kay saw me, I said, “Nice to see you, Kay,” and I really meant it
in the sense of if she had to be there, I really didn’t want her to suffer any
more than I wanted Mom to suffer, and she said something like “You’re a big fat
liar.” Or was that Al Franken?
I’d just made some lemon bars
(Grandma Evelyn’s recipe), but Mom, who usually gobbles down the sweets I bring
her, said, “No, I can’t have things like that, and she’s sick. She shouldn’t have it.”
Mom and I went out in the garden
without her even stopping by the bathroom, and I reminded her, “You love to be
outdoors.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, “and I like
to be in the sun.” (A nice contrast to
last time, when she said, “But I love my bottom more.”)
That surprised me because her eyes
are kind of sensitive to light. But we
sat in the sunniest spot, on a bench in front of the fountain, and then I got
out the book. This time we were sitting
side by side, so it was easier to look at the pictures together.
She thought I had read a couple of
stories that I don’t think I had read,
but I’ve always said I’d like to be at Aegis when my time comes.
We read about the Dachshund and the
piglet who were good friends, and when I came to the part that said the pig
“quacked,” I said, “Quacked? Isn’t it
suppose to go oink oink?” Mother turned the book to the front cover and
looked at the author’s name.
“Well, she’s pretty knowledgeable,
so I guess she knows what she’s talking about,” Mom said.
She probably does. And if a piglet and a Dachshund are hanging
out together, they’re probably not uttering the garden variety of sounds.
Then we read about the donkey and
the mutt, the elephant and the dog (which made it to YouTube a couple of years
ago), ferrets and big dogs, a Golden Retriever and a fish..
I circled parts that I thought were
interesting (having that carnal relationship with a book the way Anne Fadiman’s
family does), and Mom said, “I’m glad that you haven’t gotten too old not to
write in books.” I guess she was
thinking of toddlers who take their crayons to their parents’ rare collections
or, like Umesh, tear up all physics books competing with the one written by
their father. {Here I was referring to
Jonathan’s friend Umesh, whose father Ramamurti Shanker, wrote an authoratative
text on Principles of Quantum Mechanics and in the acknowledgement wrote
“Little Umesh did his bit by tearing up all my books on the subject, both as a
show of support and to create a need for this one.” }
On the subject of pens, Mom said,
“I’m going to be celebrating my 90th birthday soon—on Halloween—and
that would be a wonderful gift if you think of it—four or five pens like this.”
“We’re going to have a really nice
celebration,” I said, promising more than ballpoint pens, “because we all love you so much, and you’ve
been an inspiration for us.”
She said, “Well, who all is
coming? Do you mean the family?”
I said yes. Suzy, Kathy, Nan.
“And there’s another…”
“Ethel?”
“Yes,” she said. And there’s a guy…”
“Jonathan?” I asked.
“Javier?”
“Well, I’d expect them to be there,”
Mom said. “But there’s another man
bopping around.”
I didn’t think she meant Franz of
Aegis. I suggested Karl, and she said,
“Maybe that’s the one.”
She might have meant Tom. {Kathy’s
brother}
“And the people across the street,”
Mom said. “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.”
She didn’t mention “A Nightingale
Sang at Berkeley Square,” though. That
was the song she used to say she and a group of friends were going to London to
sing on her 90th birthday.
We stayed out in the garden a pretty
long time, and she said she should really be getting back to work because they
wouldn’t know where to find her if they needed her.
But it was very enjoyable
reading. As you know, she’s sometimes
made comments about the weird grammar (structure) of the sentences when she
can’t follow them, and I was aware today that it gets very complicated when
they’re talking about Bella and Tarra and you have to remember which is the
dog, and which is the elephant. Maybe it
was when I started labeling the animals with their names that Mom made the
comment about my not being too old to write in books.
At one point she said, “Let me read
for a minute and see if that makes it easier for me.” But
after she’d read a couple of sentences, she said, “No, that works the
opposite. It makes it harder for me to
follow.”
But she enjoyed looking at the
pictures and telling me how to pronounce German words like dachshund. (Now it’s the only German words I know that
doesn’t come from The Sound of Music
or Cabaret.) When we were wondering about the
pronunciation of Macaque, she said, “Maybe I could get you one of those little
dictionaries that you could carry around,” and I told her that I had a way of
looking it up on my iPhone, but neither of us had the interest span that that
required. (I just looked it up online
here at home, which you can do too.)
Mother made the same comment she’d
made before about the author: “She must
really have fun writing this book.”
Also, when we were identifying who was who among the animals, she said,
“This is she. This is her. This is she,” as if she were trying to get it
right, and I suggested that the grammatically correct was “This is she” but
that every one said, “This is her.”
I noticed that she was wearing the
shoes I got her, and I asked her whether they were comfortable.
“Yes! She said.
And I’d forgotten you got them for me.”
At one point I said, “Well, let’s
read one more before—“
And she said, “Before we separate?”
She also asked me where I came from
to visit her.
Did I say this was an especially
nice visit? Well, it was in the sense
that Mom didn’t seem frantic, we were in the garden, and she seemed bright.
Nan will go tomorrow, and I’m going
to try to go really early on Thursday because I’d like to hear her play the
piano.
Once I start my classes, I think
I’ll have to switch the days I go.
Do you know when Kathy is really
going to be in Pleasant Hill? I know she
left Ireland today, but is she going to go to Pasadena before visiting
Mom?
Love,
Tina/Mom
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