Well friends, it has been almost a week since Robert arrived to The Bronx rehab. I was supposed to receive a call from his “team.”

I never did.

Oh “tomorrow.’

I never did.

Sunday I received a call from the social worker on his “team.” I was promised a call Monday.

I never received one.

So I called. As it turned out the same social worker was eventually on the list I bounced around on.

“Oh yes, Denise, We spoke yesterday, you said you were going to go to my husband’s room with a phone and call me.”
(How quickly they forget). She asked me to give her a few minutes…

My cell rang, the phone was handed to Robert: he knew who I was and was happy to hear from me. “You’ve been moved to the Bronx,” I explained, as I am sure others had told him.

“What am I doing in The Bronx!?”

The hospitals have too many Covid patients and they need the beds, they had to move you. It is a nice place, on the Hudson River!”

It was a fairly pleasant conversation but once I brought up food he got agitated. I call it his Primal Scream. Robert is used to great meals out and all things food, food in restaurants, cooking shows, food delivered, food picked up. FOOD! Glorious food! You don’t get Cordon Bleu cooking in a hospital or rehab. And that’s part of the problem: he is failing to thrive, he needs to eat, he’s about thirty pounds underweight and no one knows why. His weight is so low it is scary.

But I must say, that this place, The Hebrew Home/Riverwalk, has a much more receptive staff on the floor, a staff that no matter what their title, they will blur the line, look in, bring a phone to a patient so they can talk. The general affect is warm and upbeat; there is a nicer feel to this place than the former one. Yesterday, Robert and I had a conversation that was peppered with that tone of belligerence I had been telling you about, however, if I brought it to his attention he would say he wasn’t angry. Today, I told him that I was blogging about him and that the readers were enjoying the stories about him. He understood, he was very pleased, he said: what is there not to like about me?

Then the phone rang after 9:00 pm. The psychiatrist had seen him, he wanted my input. Remember I told you about the strange, angry bellowing in response to my questions or statements, the “ALRIGHT!” episodes? And, when asked if he was angry, he’d bellow that he wasn’t? The doctor was confused and curious about this too. My feeling is that when someone is so malnourished and has had so much brain cell loss, wires are bound to be crossed; in any event, it is heartbreaking.

So, let me pull up another Robert anecdote.

But first, let me just say that Robert was not an easy kid. If he were in my class he might have driven me to distraction. He was a clown, he needed to be recognized and in doing so he broke rules; when his Junior High School art teacher, declared “clean-up,” and Robert was asked to “check the floor,” that is just what he did: He painted check marks within the lines of tiles, with the parameters of those boxes and out of the bounds of protocol.

Then we come to this.

Graduation Day.
Flushing H.S. 1963.

Robert in the senior yearbook

 

The graduation ceremony was held in the RKO Keith’s movie theater, near the school; one of those grand, palatial, dream-like structures of the ’20s, built before people flew out of windows in despair during the Great Depression. Movie theaters were the houses of reverie and mystique. And then they fell into disrepair.

 

 

 

The ceremony, like all Board of Education graduations, was toward the end of June and in those days of yore, it was hot, It was damn hot. You squeeze enough bodies into an old venue and it is even hotter. This day was no exception: it was a day that was hotter than hell.  Thousands of proud family members crammed into the theater, shvitzing in the desert of the final days of academia. The graduates were plotzing in their caps and gowns. The ceremony was never-ending and every graduate was called up to the stage receive a diploma. A fake diploma.

The graduates would hand their names on a piece of paper to Mr. Something-or-other to read aloud and he would, and in exchange, hand over a scroll, a blank paper tied with a ribbon. Applause.

The ceremony seemed to be interminable and the heat worsening, The line of sweaty graduates snaked up to the podium on the stage. It couldn’t be any hotter or boring. Robert reached the head of the line, handed over his piece of paper:
Robert K___!, and received his fake diploma.

The graduates kept coming. Robert got himself another piece of paper and joined the line at the back.

The line continued snaking, the tassels on the caps kept waving, the sweat kept schviting, the parents kept cheering, the end of the days of high school had arrived. Hundreds of students marched up to the stage.

It was a monumental year: President Kennedy had been assassinated. Civil rights protests continued in the south, met with beatings and arrests. In a few months there would be the March on Washington: Dr. Martin Luther King said the march “was the greatest demonstration of freedom in the history of the United States.” Sixteen thousand troops were deployed in Viet Nam. Ron Howard played Opie on The Andy Griffith Show. Japan developed portable televisions. Mount Agung erupted in Bali. Diane Sawyer was seventeen years old and was America’s Junior Miss of 1963. There was a 114-day newspaper strike. Dorothy Bell, 19, of Birmingham, Alabama, waited at a lunch counter for service that never came and was later arrested.

A month before graduation, Gordon Cooper was launched on board the Mercury Atlas 9 Rocket, from Cape Canaveral on the final mission of the U.S. Manned Space Program. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel in space.
George Wallace blocked the enrollment of two African American students to the University of Alabama. Medger Evers was shot and killed by a member of the White Citizens’ Council. An artificial heart was installed into a patient.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performed together during a civil rights rally.

Yours truly graduated from Junior High School.

Robert reached the head of the line for the second time and handed in his paper.

From the stage, Mr. Something-or-other took the slip of paper and read it:

“Alfred E. Neuman!”

It no longer mattered that it was hot, that people were sweltering, that it was the end of life as everyone knew it, that adulthood was beckoning and maybe it wouldn’t be all that cool. But, to maintain that moment of ridiculous fun, that childish joy and nose-thumbing at authority, it was worth it. It was priceless.

Mad Magazine had come to graduation, to the rescue, on the wings of one student who saw the humor in everything.

Robert.

His diploma was held-hostage by the principal for weeks.

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

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