1980’s

At Busch Gardens

The plan is this: my mother will be going to a medical appointment this Friday, will return to the rehab center and then be picked up by Vitas Hospice and taken home. I always thought that hospice services were for the dying or for cancer patients but they aren’t necessarily. The goal is to have compassionate treatment and to make one’s quality of life better through comfort. They’ll give her plenty of extra care and attention and we’ll take it one day at a time.

The diagnosis: failure to thrive. My mother is eighty-three pounds.

There will be a ninety-fifth birthday celebration for her; she doesn’t know yet, but she is looking forward to this milestone. And then we’ll see…

This morning I awoke at 9:30, the latest I have slept in months, good decent sleep. I was deprived by middle of the night anxiety that stalked me at intervals and tore at my gut. The evening before I had a very nice interaction with the wonderful woman who runs the agency from where my mother’s aide was hired. She made me feel relaxed, that everything would work out–whatever that might be. I somehow felt at peace.

I just let go and was taken away by dreams which shook me awake with the thought of the bread at the Town Rose Bakery on East 14th Street, the bakery of my childhood that has long since disappeared. The façade was held up by two pillars, the windows wrapped and cradled the entrance and it was all encrusted with sparkling shards of mirrored and red tiles. At least that is how my child’s mind’s eye remembers it.

I would push open the glass door and be overcome by the smell of sweetness, overwhelmed by the colors of cream and icing behind the glass cabinets under the counter. Red and white striped twine hung from cones and were grabbed as needed by the lady in the white uniform with the black hair and the long red nails. She’d wrap and tie the boxes so quickly and hand them over, and the prize would be taken home. Carbs. Who cared?

On Sundays, my father would venture down to Town Rose and come back with the newspapers and brown paper bags of warm bread. There might be onion rolls, pumpernickel rolls, bialys, a corn bread, a rye bread, a pumpernickel (“pump”) in combinations and permutations to be slathered with butter or cream cheese, perhaps to accompany scrambled eggs.

I still remember my lines: my mother would instruct me to pick up bread and I would go to Town Rose and ask for, “half of a large seeded rye, sliced.”

Bread. The staff of life.

Those were the thoughts that were on my mind this morning, replayed mind-video snippets from my childhood. I was thinking about how I wished I could pack a box of this bread from the past and send it down to my mother. This was no Proustian-madeline synesthesia, just plain bread with memories of the texture, odor, that chewy crust and tasty middle. Wheat, dough, warm goodness to offer comfort.

The phone rang. It was my mother’s aide. “I just woke up,” I told her. “I am glad I didn’t wake you,” she said. “but I was excited and I have good news. This morning when I came your mother was happy and joking. She said she was hungry and she ate some pancake.

She told me she was daydreaming about bread, the bread from her childhood.

Rye bread.”

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continued here

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