Venice, Hotel la Fenice et des Artistes, 1984

I hadn’t had a FaceTime visit with Robert  in a week, and yes, I felt bad, but I have appointments and calls and it’s time to take care of my own health. Some big stuff came up that scared me, filled me with dread and a pounding heart and I need to follow up. It’s been very strange since Mercury went into Retrograde. It always happens: Miscommunications, broken stuff, missing stuff, weird stuff going on with electronics. So I will begin my post with the air conditioner story.

The bedroom air conditioner might be eight years old and was ostensibly working fine, still cooling, but it was doing something weird: blowing globs of dirt all over the floor beneath it. Sometimes the dirt was a substantial clump, other times paper-like. This went on for three years until finally I called the guy who sold it to us and asked for it to be cleaned. Don’t get me wrong: I tried to get this done in the first place years ago and described the issue but he said he never heard of such a thing; I am pretty much convinced that there had been a hive of yellow jackets within and it was disintegrating, blowing out all over the place. I would sometimes hear birds pecking around in the morning, their feet tapping on the sleeve, maybe they were having breakfast. Occasionally I’d find a yellow jacket on the rug.

So, Mark came with two guys named “Kurt,” and the Kurts yanked the culprit out of the wall and had to get the machine to the first floor and into the truck. I wouldn’t want that job, for sure. Off the machine went for a six day hiatus before a heat wave.

When it was returned and carted back up the stairs, shoved back into its overhead sleeve, they ran it and left. When I came in to inspect the cooling, I gasped: now there was even more junk coming out of the thing, it was blowing all over the floor and the bed. I called the store and they asked me to run it for a day, to see if it got better. It was a continued mess. I also noticed that the thing was making more noise than usual. Back they came to see what was happening and then it was decided, I would get a new machine. They pulled mine out and back they went with this mammoth, down the stairs and to the truck.

They came back with the new machine which was unpacked on the street. Up they came, lugging it carefully to the bedroom, hauling it up to the sleeve and shoving it in. The insulation was packed. Mark looked at me sheepishly and said something about it not being 220 V and that sometimes these thing happen.

So, the two Kurts pulled the new, incorrect machine out of the sleeve and carted it downstairs and to the truck.
“We’ll be back soon,” they said.

The truck left, returned later, the new-new machine was unpacked on the street and the two Kurts got it through the door and up the stairs and into the bedroom down the hall, and lifted it and shoved it into the sleeve, packed it with insulation and turned it on.

The buttons didn’t work. They loosened the cover as directed in the manual and got it working. It cooled: We were on the verge of  a heatwave and it came just in time. I turned it off to save energy and went about my business.

Later I tried to turn the machine on and could not. The power button didn’t work, the panel buttons didn’t work. The remote, when pressed got the panel glowing but no information. It was after 5:00 pm on Saturday. Mark, Jay, and the two Kurts had left for the weekend. I told them in my message to think about me in my room in a heatwave with a nonworking AC all weekend.

I began to monkey-around with the remote and after pressing the power button twice it engaged and I was able to turn it on. I left it on all night and noticed that these things, if listened to carefully have a deep background drone akin to WW II water torture. I tried again to engage the power button on the face of the unit and it seemed to get stuck. The control panel buttons still didn’t work and I was doomed to using a battery operated remote which I resented.

I turned the machine on in the middle of the night. I was trying to get to sleep after hours of tossing and turning due to an overactive head, and all of a sudden, spontaneously, as though someone had engaged the remote, the face of the AC lit up brightly, freaking me out, lighting the area around me, displaying all the settings. Just what I needed. Then it went dark as mysteriously as it went light.

I am waiting again for Mark and the two Kurts to come up with a solution or to explore the possibility of poltergeist.

And then it was this morning. I had an 11:00 am appointment to see Robert, without the confines of the air conditioned reception area. We were going to meet al fresco in a garden-like setting which I had never seen before. Of course with Mercury doing its tricks, the gate couldn’t be unlocked from the outside or the inside for a good five minutes. When I finally got in  I could see Robert in his special wheelchair facing away from me. A small, broken man with a mask beneath his nose. I approached, I made my presence known verbally, I pulled up a chair and sat down, took off my mask and took his hand. He gripped it.

He said, “Hi, Snooks.” (Nice greeting!)

Hi, Rob!

I made small talk not expecting much. There were beautiful songbirds singing, my brain made careful note. I had never heard those bird calls before. We were under a portico that provided shade, there were lovely black iron tables and chairs, flowers, two large, professional barbeques. It looked like we were early for a big party. It felt like we were in another country. The aide brought us each a cup of ice water.

There we were.

Robert was staring and staring…he said, spontaneously, “it’s a good day for a courtyard.” That was a first, an observation and an appropriate comment. And it was a good day, despite the heat and no air conditioning, it was for that moment, OK, everything was OK. For a while we just stared at one another. I brought his Ansel Adams wall calendar, the one he never unwrapped. Each year he asked for a new one. He kept calendars since the 1960s, using them as a short-form diary.

I showed him how many months he had been away from home…January…February…March…”you fell here, you were in the hospital here, you were in the Bronx here, you had Covid here, you came back, here. I think I heard him say, “Wow.”

I told him about his friend Ted and his passing, looking for a spontaneous reaction. No affect. I told him about how Ted’s daughter talked about Robert with her father when she visited him in the hospital shortly before his death. Robert and Ted were good friends for many years and like many other friends, he met Ted at work.

I told Robert about Evan’s latest gig, doing 300 puzzles for a book and how they had a theme about National Parks, and how he ran out of U.S. places and was using those of other countries and my mind was failing under pressure, I circumlocuted and said “when he ran out of parks, he started using famous places.”

To which Robert responded: Landmarks. I was shocked and surprised. He knew what I was saying and again responded appropriately in high level vocabulary, able to retrieve the correct word.

I babbled some more. I told him about my friend, Marilyn and how she has helped me so much with confusing paperwork and how we filed the RMD on line. I forgot what RMD stood for and he said, “Required Minimum Distribution!” Bingo! again! He was connecting better than I had seen in months. Maybe this was post Covid clearing of brain fog? Maybe my prayers for better communication were heard, maybe he was getting better on some level. I told him his memory was improving. I was startled and surprised and I tested him again and said I had forgotten again what RMD meant and he told me:

Required Minimum Distribution.

At one point I said, “you are a genius!” and he said, “You never called me that before.” I was shocked to get that reaction in a full sentence.
But everyone called him that.
He was the guy who knew everything.

It was getting hotter, approaching noon, he didn’t want his ice water. It was the best ice water I had had in a long time. Felicia returned to bring him upstairs and bring down the next person. She wanted to know why she couldn’t get me last week, why the facetime calls went unanswered and I took her aside and said, mask to mask, I was dealing with some health issues. “I thought it was something like that,” she said.

Before Felicia carted Robert off in that bed-chair, wearing the special booties to protect his paper-thin skin, I said, “I love you.”  His mask held his words in. I gave him the big Ansel Adams wall calendar. Maybe the speech therapist could use it as a communication booster. Maybe she could visibly explain the passage of time by turning pages, counting the months he has been away, naming them, and at the same time, marveling at the black and white landscapes.

I was thinking, how did Robert’s memory get jogged? Was it that we were outside, was it the change of environment?

Maybe his communication buttons were stuck, but somewhere there is a remote that would turn his system on.

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

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