It’s been time for a new post for a while; to continue with the story about my mother I am happy to say that I have had a break for a few weeks and it was wonderful. The illusion was that all was well. The reality was that all was well. The undercurrent was disbelief. Was she stable? Would it stay like this. Underneath it all I had my doubts. What does one expect from a one hundred plus year old person? Yet, I have heard of other elderly people who had it even more together than my mother. Her behavioral ups and downs appear to be cyclical. Do hormones play a part? Does brain chemistry? The environmental triggers?

At a recent visit I observed. I always observe. She appears to be rooted in the present, she processes information. As always the first thing that I do is adjust the air conditioner. So many people fiddle with the controls. Hey, it’s Summer, it should not be 80° in the room, the heat should not be on. My mother tells me the aides did it. The aides tell me sotto voce, that my mother did it. I don’t care who did it, I can’t breathe. So down goes the temp and I take a few deep breaths and begin my visit, unloading what I have brought:
Clorox wipes, sponges…a plethora of plastic supermarket bags for garbage. One of the aides had been bringing my mother said bags but recently had the excuse that she has to pay for them. This was a pending law on the table in state government and it didn’t go through, so why did she say that? Makeup … “look how nice it looks,” she touches her face, the face I barely recognize. The face that is connected to a four foot nine inch—if that—body.

Last week the phone rang. It was one of those weeks where I was calling and tracking agencies and doctors to find out where the order of diapers and Ensure were. It was a week of phone and phone and untangling. But when the phone rang, it was my mother with strict instructions:

“I need this. It’s on TV right now, take this down, you can get free shipping. It’s for the pain in my legs.”

I switched gears and went onto a website and was unable to find what she was looking for.

The phone rang again. “I gave you the wrong name.”

Eventually I found a magnesium-based cream in a pump bottle from Amazon and with a click it shipped free.

When I visited my mother the bottle was next to the bed and when I asked her about it she said it helped.

Slowly the conversation turned from the rooted-present into the scattered past where time and space tangle and knot. We have had the following conversation many times. It does not want to go away. I realize now that a subconscious bubble surfaced and popped in the present, a bubble that had to be addressed again. It was likely the bubble was an anxiety bubble about money.

It goes like this. But wait, let me give you the back-story:

My father was the son of an expert tailor and in the clothing workers union like his father. He ended up on Canal Street in lower Manhattan, a shipping clerk for The Neptune Raincoat Company.

I wrote in my book, The Cerebral Jukebox:

“I could see all the way down
to Canal Street, or so I thought,
where my father worked for years at
the Neptune Raincoat Company,
laboring and loading in his torn T-shirt, until his face was red
and his hairy back was wet.”

That is the image I still replay. I was about four years old when my mother took me down to my father’s place of work, on the red, Avenue B bus that journeyed downtown from East 14th Street and looped back past The Automat and  S. Klein’s On The Square. That is my mental film byte. That was my father, toiling in an open garage twisting wire around huge boxes of raincoats for shipping. That was my mother, dressed like a lady in a pretty dress. I bet it was orange and that she had peep-toed shoes. And that was me, the child, taking it all in, non-judgmentally, watching a movie.

So, yes, it goes like this. The present. We are sitting on my mother’s bed. Her feet don’t touch the floor. I am a giant and five feet one and a half, having shrunk from age. My mother is about to tell her plan again about getting rich. She is informing me again that two more of her teeth broke and that she needs to see the dentist. She mentions that she hopes the dentist will take her as a patient. She points to her cheekbones and she says, “my bones are good.”

It dawns on me that she is not talking about dentures, she is talking about implants. Implants can cost over two thousand dollars per tooth. I begin to feel alarm. I tell her that she can’t have implants. They are a lot of work and drilling and we don’t have the money.

“I have plenty of money,” she reminds me. (I am hoping that she will find a few million in her mattress, but no, that doesn’t happen)

Maybe I shouldn’t have been reality based. Maybe I should have confirmed that she IS rich and has plenty of unending funds, but that isn’t the case and each month when I pay bills I grit my teeth and watch the numbers go down, from a once‑healthy nest egg to poverty, which scares the crap out of me.

Here it comes: “I want to tell you, (this is the phrase of the day, it is repeated with a waving finger and a need for a soapbox) that we are entitled to a lot of money! They are giving it away, I saw on TV! To people who worked downtown and got sick.”

My father worked on Canal Street. Canal Street is downtown. Canal Street is near lower Manhattan. In the 1960s when I was in Junior High School, the Neptune Raincoat Company moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. My father had to start driving on that long trek to work. He took the 1963 black Studebaker Lark with the red interior. Before they bought this car, my father brought home the sales brochure. To me, there was no difference from a Cadillac. Now he was, a nervous, anxious husband, father, commuting and coming home more nervous and anxious. BUT, the change in location brought its rewards. The Neptune Raincoat Company was now situated atop the Burry Biscuit Company.

And Burry made Girls Scout Cookies. My father would bring them home in huge paper sacks: the most delicious broken cookies I ever had. Some were in pieces, some weren’t wearing their destined chocolate robes, some were mixed into the wrong batch. Who cared!? For pennies you could be in biscuit bliss! The cookie factory burned down in 2011, long after my father was there, and likely long after The Neptune Raincoat Company disappeared.

 

Now that I have spun you around and thrown more stuff at you, I’ll take you back to the future. I am sitting on the bed with my mom. She is waving her finger in the air. She is expounding on how we can get money. She wants me to contact a lawyer to “at least ask.” And, in my uncontrolled agitation and squelched anger, because I don’t want a wonky-mother, I am mean, oh I am so mean. I tell her the truth, again. I twist the knife to bring her back to reality. She refuses to come. The aide is watching me, she is listening to every word. We make eye contact. She knows I am getting upset and trying to contain myself.

The knife is thus:
My father left Canal Street in the 1960s.
My father retired in the 1980s. He and my mother moved to Florida.
My father died in 1991.

My father died ten years before 9/11. He was not affected by it. He never lived to know about it.
My mother didn’t want to hear it. “I want to tell you, he got very sick on that job.”
“I want to tell you.”

And she does.

This morning I received several text messages from the aide who was informing me that my mother is accusing all the aides who assist her, of stealing. Her tissues. Her paper towels. But, I hate to twist the reality knife and tell her the truth: nothing is being stolen from her but

TIME.

 

 

 

 

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

The previous post is here

The next post is here