Tag Archives: Family

Courage at Twilight: Closing and Opening Doors

On Dad’s first day home from a month of hospitalization and rehabilitation, he poked me with two questions. First, whether I had bought any whole wheat English muffins for his diabetic breakfast diet. Second (after I motioned to the muffins in their habitual spot on the kitchen counter), whether they had or had not been sitting there for two months. I ignored the slight, the suggestion that even if I had remembered his whole wheat muffins, I had not managed them properly. The rebuff after dinner, however, flamed my already roiling magma. Sarah and I were explaining to him how, while he was away, we had studied the house in light of his challenges, and saw that we needed to replace the 28-inch bathroom door with a 36-inch door, opening into the hallway instead of into the tiny bathroom, and how our cousin David was bringing his tools the next day to do the job. I thought he would be happy with our ideas and efforts on his behalf. He was not. He walked us through every minute detail of his maneuvering around the bathroom, like a hundred-point K-turn, including using the doorknob as a handhold before hand-surfing heavily across the sink counter toward the grab bars and toilet. I promise you I was patient and calm as I explained: “I know that has worked for you in the past, Dad, but relying on a round rotating nob is not safe anymore. Don’t worry, we’ll install new grab bars. You will be able to follow a similar but safer transferring routine. I promise, it will be better.” And he looked at me with that omniscient omnipotent head-tilted smolder of his and demanded, “When you are making plans for my future, you will speak to me first,” tapping his chest. And this long dormant volcano, which has seethed and smoked for decades, suddenly spewed out its lava heat. “You weren’t here! You’ve been hospitalized. And we had to move fast when we found out you were coming home so you could move around as safely as possible. Dad, I have given my whole life to taking care of you and keeping you safe and healthy for more than two years, and you have criticized and fought me since the day I moved in!” As I hollered at him, I pounded the granite countertop with my fist, “since the day [pound] I moved [pound] IN (pound)!” (Have I broken my hand? I wondered vaguely as it began to tingle.) I abandoned the beginnings of my Christmas party chocolate mousse and fled to the dark living room, sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, trying to calm myself. I had never ever erupted, boiled over, blown up, confronted like that, not in all my life, not with my dad, not with my mom, not with my wife, not with my siblings, not with my children, not with anyone, ever. I was not proud of myself for what had just happened, but neither did I feel ashamed or guilt-ridden. I could hear Dad complaining to Mom in the next room, “Why is Roger so furious with me?” “Because you don’t listen,” she responded. “Why can’t you just be quiet and listen. And be grateful.” I cherished her firm meek support. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” He complained again: “The older I get, the more everyone just tells me what to do. Why is everyone ordering me around?” “Just listen to people and be grateful for what everyone is trying to do for you!” she countered. “And I said I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” Dad pouted, “Well, I guess I’ll just add you to the list of people who won’t speak to me. It’s a long list.” My heat rose again, but more controlled and focused, and I approached him and challenged, “Do you really think this is about me wanting to tell you what to do? To control you? Really?” He covered his eyes with his hand: “I can’t listen to you when you’re angry. I can’t take it.” “Oh, that’s rich: everyone has to listen to you, but you don’t listen to the people who are trying to care for you and keep you alive. You just complain that they’re bossy and telling you what to do.” (Eyes still covered): “I just can’t listen to people who are angry.” Me: “I’m not angry, but I am very frustrated, because I can’t listen to people who are ungrateful and disrespectful.” Dad: “Is that what you think I am?” Me: “Absolutely. Everything I do here I do to help you and Mom be safe and comfortable. I’m not interested in telling you what to do. But instead of appreciating it, you judge it.” A full Ambien, twice my typical one-half, got me through the night. David and I worked all the next day to install the new door, a 36-inch-wide left-hinged door turned inside out to be a right-hinged door opening into the hallway. The bathroom looks twice the size and is so much easier to get into and move around in. A grab bar has replaced the rickety doorknob. Dad enjoyed keeping tabs on the construction, chatting amiably with David. In the end, he enjoyed the bathroom’s inaugural visit, emerging to remark on how nice the new bathroom was.

Courage at Twilight: Long Ago Letters

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For months Mom has approached me in the kitchen or in my home office to read to me snippets of her old letters recounting my birth in Brazil in 1964. “…they laid him on my stomach…he sure has a big cry…he has very long fingers and feet…he does not have poky-out ears…he is very funny looking (as all newborns are)…he is beautiful to me.” Then follows the historical material for their favorite family stories about me, which Dad delights to tell the assembled family on my birthdays: “We seem to be living in a jungle of diapers. We have no laundry facilities [and] do all our laundry by hand. We hang [diapers] in the kitchen, bathroom, over chairs and tables…we iron them dry and put them away.” How can I divert her attention to something else, I wondered. And I recalled having a stack of a hundred letters she wrote to me from 1983-85 when I served my Church as a volunteer missionary in Portugal, letters which I saved but which no one has read in 40 years. With Dad in a hospital and care facility for a month, I have taken to reading aloud one of her 1980s letters each evening after dinner. She chuckles at the busyness of life as a mother of young children, the piano lessons, allergy shots, band concerts, basketball games, school snow days, choir rehearsals, prom disappointments, bouts with the flu, reading Newberry books, Sunday church meetings, and watching the bats at dusk. On October 25, 1983, Mom recounted how she bought a tie for my then three-year-old brother Steven. “He wears it to church every Sunday. He looks very grown up. He said…last night, ‘When I was a little boy, I was big!’ After church he went around the house singing ‘Jesus wants me for a Sun Bean!’” On March 6, 1984, she sympathized with my homesickness and discouragement, wishing she could “make things easier” for me, and reassuring me that “everything here at home is fine. We get tired and discouraged just like everyone else, but we keep going, we bounce back. I’m always at it. I have to make sure that I create the right feeling here at home with EACH child as much of the time as possible. That is really not easy. I never give up, though. I have to keep trying.” She was 44 years old. On November 15, 1983, she reminisced, “There are so many things a mother feels for her children. They are just very dear to her. She remembers nursing them as tiny infants, carrying them around as little children, making cakes and going on walks with them as they get bigger, taking care of their things, helping them in school, etc. Then, when the children leave, it is hard for her. The empty bedroom, the missing place at the table, all the little things that were fixed or made better [by the child]. At the same time, it is right that children leave. They grow and become independent and contributing adults. That’s the way of it. It’s right.” And she ended that now 40-year-old letter with the sweetest of sentiments: “You will always be a part of me and I will always love you without limit.” At age 59, as I again live with her and help care for her, her feelings for me (and my five siblings) are just as tender, and she looks at me still as her little boy. I cannot be that little boy, that infant. I am a grown man with my own life and children, and grandchildren. But I am still her son, and she deserves in return the same sweetness she has given to me all of my life.

Courage at Twilight: Pushing Buttons

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Mom greeted me as I walked through the door, anxious because the stair lift would not work. She checked the chair and receiver power chords, replaced the remote batteries, and still the chair would not move for her. As I suspected, my curious grandchildren had pushed the red power button to the off position during our Thanksgiving festivities. Turning the power button to the on position brought the lift back to life, and embarrassed Mom a bit. “I’m so dense,” she whispered. I reassured her she was not at all dense. We grabbed our coats and keys and left for the rehabilitation center. She had promised to give Dad a break from rehab food with a “treat,” code for a combo meal of hamburger, large fries, and Diet Coke. Indeed, he was pleased, though still full from his rehab dinner. For our big family Thanksgiving turkey and smoked ham dinner, Sarah was allowed to bring Dad home for three hours—the most United Health Care would allow without jeopardizing his coverage (i.e., if UHC thought he were well enough to be home all day, UHC might think he didn’t need in-patient rehab). He sat hunched in his wheelchair, smiling weakly, introducing his old standard stories with, “That reminds me…,” and sad for the too-short stay. At three hours’ end, he again had to leave his wife and family and home and comfort and return to his hated rehab room. Seeing that he was still unable to care for himself, I shuddered with terror at the thought of him returning home in just one week. I hoped he would be strong enough, but knew that if he were not strong enough, the burden would fall to Mom and me to make up the difference, to fetch this and that, to launder and mop and shampoo, to winch him up with a gate belt, to sit stiffly on my mental seat’s anxious edge. Where is this big bitterness of anger coming from? I quizzed myself, and quickly perceived that the anger did not mean I did not love him and admire him and want to care for him. Instead, my anger derived from my fear of the coming all-but-certain burdens, and of wishing they were not mine to carry. With this realization, I turned to face my realities, and the anger left. But the anxiety and the fear did not. They remained, obstinately entrenched. Time for more diaphragmatic breathing.

Courage at Twilight: Kiss Me, Dear

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Columnist David Brooks posits in his Second Mountain that conversation is critically foundational to successful marriage. If so, I am doomed. Conversation has always come hard: I expend so much energy measuring my audience and tailoring my comments for self-safety that talking is exhausting. I did not chat much in marriage, and after eight years living alone, I sometimes wonder if I can converse at all. Draper Rehab held a resident Thanksgiving dinner. Mom and I were Dad’s guest quota, and we sat quietly at our table watching all the other residents with their respective disabilities and guests, waiting for more than 150 people to be served their turkey and potatoes and stuffing and yams and green beans and gravy, all meted with ice cream scoops. We had little to say to one another. Dad drooped and seemed so old. But we were there, giving quiet loving support. As I knew he would, Dad eyed my cranberry-sprite cocktail and wondered if he could have some. Too much sugar, Dad. But when José brought the cart around, Dad motioned for a cup. I said nothing. Various residents rolled by: Mark the mechanic who loves all things cars; Mitch from Brooklyn with whom we felt an affinity as an east coaster; others who could not speak or could not move and had daughters feed them and grandchildren wipe their mouths with white towels. “The food is wonderful,” I ventured, and I might as well have commented on the weather: rain was in the forecast. The next day, Mom and I asked Dad for a report on his physical therapy—he had walked “a hundred feet” to the exercise room and practiced standing up and sitting down six times, and was thoroughly wasted. I showed him how to operate the television remote—hold the remote in your left hand and push the channel up or down button with your right index finger, like this. We talked about springing powers of attorney and how they needed durable powers of attorney because I did not want to have to testify in Mom’s and Dad’s presence to a doctor about their future incompetence to make decisions for themselves—they agreed. And I had Dad sign a letter I wrote to Bank of America asking to reverse late fees and interest charged on the same day his payment posted. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Dad,” I reassured him. That is the hardest part of living in a rehabilitation center: not the briefs and bed pans, not the food you don’t like, not the lack of interesting television, but the utter loneliness of living alone in viewless room away from your beloved home and sweetheart. “I’m not leaving without a kiss!” Mom exclaimed, juggling a smile from his smooched face.

Courage at Twilight: Greetings and Good-byes

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The needling traumas of covid and ambulance and hospital and worry and the prolonged proximity of death have sapped away my strength. I mope around feeling weak and muddy, freeze dried and vacuum packed. The numbing emptiness is syncopated with gun shots of rage, often over nothing, like a spot of greasy mayonnaise oozing from the jar rim to the butter knife to my clean fingers. When I spilled a tall glass of chocolate milk on the shag, the explosion lasted more than a mere moment, but there was nothing for it but to fill the tank with soap and hot water and shampoo the spot 613 times until it was cleaner than clean. Mom watched me from her recliner, mute, helpless to comfort. Dad has phoned her several times a day from his rehab room the next town over. “Hello, good lookin’!” she cheers. He complains to her about his lumpy hot cereal, the maddening miserable itching from his Grover’s disease, how he simply can’t do what the physical therapists are working with him to do—knees straight! butt in! chest out! you can do it! one more step!—what we keep telling him he must be able to do if he is to return home. He tells her how lonely and bored he is, with little to do and no one to see, and how badly he just wants to come home. At 87, he is again the neglected little boy wanting to be comforted, by his 63-year sweetheart, his darling girl. “Well, you just have to do it,” she chastened. There is little comfort in chastening, and little progress in coddling. I have nothing for him, no words of compassion or encouragement, no enthusiasm, no “You can do it!” Dad wants more than anything to be independent, and he wants to be tended and nursed. He is desperate to go where he feels safe and loved, to go home, but he knows he cannot go to that blessed place in his condition—and changing his condition may require more strength of mind and body than he can muster. We brought a bit of home to him, in his room, with yellow balloons, with vases of flowers, with wrapped gifts from her children, with pizza and salad and fruit and German chocolate cake, celebrating Mom’s 84^th birthday with him, and we ate and sang and opened gifts and cheered and took pictures. And then we said good-bye and left, because that is how life goes. Every party ends, and every good-bye looks forward to the next getting-together.

Courage at Twilight: I Hid My Face

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Mom and I munched on Chicago-style deep-dish pepperoni pizza (which my miracle children had delivered from a Costoco freezer) while the two of us watched Field of Dreams, because I started a new book about baseball ballparks as fundamental features in the community fabric of American cities over nearly two centuries, and I wept at the transcendently beautiful James Horner soundtrack (not available on Spotify!) that carries me up and out fretfulness, and I bawled and bawled at Ray asking to play catch with his distant departed dad, but hiding my face from Mom for wanting to sob privately and unseen and for not wanting her to see me as her little baby boy anymore, wondering about the things we say or don’t say to our dads over the long decades and the things our dads say or don’t say to us, to me, and how some things wanting to be said cannot be said because the other’s ears have never learned to hear what I need to say and so I don’t speak or we speak in cryptic codes and we slap each other’s shoulders discuss safe subjects and we end up not saying anything at all, but wondering if we should have, and wishing we could have, in time, but understanding that no one, I think, ever says everything they wanted to say before the hearer is dead and cannot hear ever again until some goofball mystic plows under his corn and builds a ballpark in Iowa, and I’m asking him if he wants to play catch, so we play catch, tossing the ball back and forth with silly smiles, finding that, in this heaven, we don’t need to say anything at all.

Courage at Twilight: Each Other’s Heroes

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After days of dissolved fiber and a suppository, the hospital cleared Dad for discharge to the rehabilitation facility. Sarah was pulled into the strange world of his hospital room for five days and nights, never leaving. She supplemented excellent hospital care with all the little things an immobile old person in a hospital bed needs in order to not suffer too terribly: brushing his teeth, slathering his back with anti-itch cream and his bum with anti-bed-sore cream, alerting the nurses when his oxygen dipped, adjusting him so he could pee into the urinal, applying lip balm, shaving his sparse whiskers, adjusting the bed angles, changing the TV channels, ordering his meals, replacing the cannulas he kept pulling out, pulling up his compression leggings (he shed ten pounds of water, from each leg, in five days), listening to him prattle past midnight. She hugged pillows over her face to block out the light and beeping instruments and snoring, not completely successfully, rising to his calls for help every 45 minutes of the night. This list of little services yanked me back to the other hospital room, 14 months ago, and the other rehab, 13 months ago, and the other homecoming, 12 months ago, when I rushed to build the ramps. “I’ll be out of here in three days!” he enthused to Sarah today with typical optimism and sudden delusion. And just today he complained he could not do it, he could not stand up from the toilet or the bed or the shower chair or to dress, could not shuffle with a walker ten feet. “It’s too hard.” Well, that’s not an option, Daddio. That’s a terminal philosophy you can’t afford. You simply have to. If you can’t do this, you can’t go home. You can’t go home and burden Mom and Roger with all this because they can’t do it for you, and shouldn’t have to—you have to be able to do it for yourself. So do it, so you can go home. Receiving these necessary reports from Sarah, memories of 2022 began to seep in, along with their tension and terror and trauma, memories morphing into anticipations, along with new stresses and trepidations and traumas, of what awaits, of the care he will need, knowing his needs may often outpace my abilities and availabilities and resilience. So, now, I am slowing my in-breathing and my out-breathing and reminding myself that memories are just that, impressions of things past, and that the future will take care of itself, day by day, and that Dad will work hard at rehab. He will be ready for home, and I will be ready for him. And we all will resume our routines to our utmost. My lovely friend Liddy from the east shores of England, counseled me sweetly: When were babies, so small and helpless, we worried our parents. As our parents enter their winter years, they worry us. It turns full circle. The feeling of exhaustion and defeat is at times unbearable. But we find the strength because we have to. We have to put our exhaustion to one side, if you will. Something inside us will still fight, and we become protectors. We do for our parents what they did for us in our time of helplessness. We become our parents’ parents. The experience your family is going through, and the feelings that go with it, allow you to be human. You become each other’s heroes. You develop a greater understanding of each other, and become wiser. You are not, and never will be, alone.

Courage at Twilight: Sorry, But You Can’t Go

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Calendar appointment: November 8: Wednesday: 2:45 p.m.: Alta View Hospital Radiology: Mammogram. “I’m looking forward to my breast squish,” Mom texted her daughters, to whom she once likened a mammogram to lying on a concrete floor and having a semi park on her breast. Pat was to pick her up at 2:00. Though she was symptomless, I had given her my last KN95 for the trip. She put it on right away. “You don’t need to wear it in the house,” I explained—I was isolating. “I like it,” she answered, never having worn a KN95, “I think it’s sexy!” But on the morning of: a little cough and a small sniffle and a rasp in her voice and a bit more tired than usual. With Dad and me positive for Covid, what else could it be? “Mom, I think you probably have Covid. You can’t go to the hospital for your mammogram if you have Covid—you’ll infect the whole place! You need to test before you go, and if you test negative, you can go with your sexy mask.” “I do not have Covid! I feel just fine. Just a little tired.” “Well, you can’t go unless you test negative first.” “I’m going! I can’t cancel on the day of! I’ll test when I get home!” (You’ll test after you expose everyone?) “Believe me, Mom, they don’t want you there if you’re sick—they’ll be glad you called to let them know.” “I’m not sick, just tired.” (“Sarah, I need your help. Mom won’t test and won’t let me reschedule. Can you give me some support?”) “Mom, you are not going unless you test negative! ” Sarah did not enjoy the call, but she’s good at being the bad guy, so she says. As they talked, I prepared the testing kit. Our two-flanked approach got her tested: Covid positive. I rescheduled the mammogram and called off Pat and informed a disappointed Mom, who deflated into her chair, wrapped in her orange fleece sweater and blue fleece throw. Her doctor sent in a Paxlovid prescription to our regular Walgreen’s, and we waited for the “ready to pick up” text. During each call I made, the automated system reported the prescription had been received, and I would receive a text when it was ready to pick up. I did not receive the text, so we drove to the store a half-hour before closing. The drive-through was card-boarded up—“We are short staffed”—so I had no choice but to mask up and go in. “We’ve been out of Paxlovid for a week,” said the tech, and he sent us racing to a store 20 minutes away that had some. This drive-through was open, and at 8:58 Mom got her medicine. The fact that my prescription never made it into the system did not matter: Mom’s was the store’s last box. I spent the next day in bed, except to warm chicken broth, when Mom announced, “I want you to help me do some things: I need to go to the post office to mail my election ballot, and I need to fill the gas tank, and I want you to drive me past the rehab center where your dad will be.” Saying NO to my sweet 83-year-old mother is not easy, but I needed a boundary. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m not up for an outing today.” “Well then I guess I’ll go by myself,” her disappointment dripped, but, in the end, she did not feel well enough either, with now a deeper cough and a stronger sniffle and deeper fatigue. But she’s taking her Paxlovid, and resting, and eating, and word puzzling, and needlepointing, and news and Jeopardy and N.C.I.S. and Incredible Dr. Pol watching. On the father front, Sarah reports that Cora, a 22-year veteran CNA from Mexico City, resembles Zsa Zsa Gabor as she coos her daily “My daaaling” greetings to Dad. With his blood glucose elevated, she gently chides, “Oh, you are just too sweet, my daaaling.”

Courage at Twilight: Round Two

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Last week I worried about sucking up leaves and maple seeds with the riding mower, and the orange cup overflowing with red ketchup packets from Burger King, and why we keep it, with a half-gallon ketchup bottle in the fridge, and the shrimp I skimped on because they were cheaper but Dad could not pull the shells off with his stalling fingers and gave up on his dinner. Last week I listened to Diana sing, “There is sunshine in my soul today!” as she bathed and dried and dressed Dad and brought him downstairs for his breakfast and got him settled in. She is always singing, bless her. But now I lie, for the second time, shivering under my blankets with the body pains of Covid while my father suffers worse Covid pains and debilitations in the hospital where my sister Sarah stays with him round the clock 24/7 to help him shave and pee and bathe and eat his unusually delicious hospital meals and change the TV channels and brush his teeth, and to not let him grow lonely, bless her, snatching sleep in one-hour increments on the hospital room couch. On the Sunday the ambulance drove Dad away, I sent and received hundreds of texts and emails, whole hours of messaging, keeping loved ones and friends up to date and reassured, fending off premature requests to visit for fear they would overtax the exhausted patient and infect the visitor, and I would have sent more messages but for an aunt and a daughter keeping their respective siblings informed. Now I wait, weary and aching, for the virus to leave me, so I can resume my duties. And in the meantime, I am isolating from Mom and at the same time watching over her, wearing a KN-95, hovering with hourly inquiries about how she is feeling, fearing she, too, will succumb. And in the meantime, my children have delivered a week’s worth of delicious prepared meals, to ease my mind about cooking, and tonight Mom and I enjoyed chicken burrito bowls with rice and beans, a salad on the side, and are looking forward to tomorrow’s chicken alfredo, or maybe deep dish pepperoni pizza, bless them.

Courage at Twilight: A Kind Doctor

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“Tell me what’s happening,” Dr. Hawkins asked me over the phone. I was not sure how to express the subtle changes my siblings and I had observed, but I breathed deeply and tried. Well, first, there’s her memory. She forgets what I told her just minutes or hours before. And she’s forgetting the names of familiar people and places. (Heck, I do that, too.) Second, she becomes easily confused. I explain simple things several times before she comprehends, and I interpret for her much of her mail. Third, anxiety. When something needs doing, it needs doing right now. Small things distress her, until I reassure her everything will be fine. And when go for a drive, she points to cows and clouds and airplanes and exclaims, “Look, a cow!…a cloud!…an airplane!” “Well, I think you’ve expressed it pretty well,” the doctor confirmed. “Bring her to my office, and we’ll talk.” Raising with Mom the subject of a doctor visit to discuss memory and confusion hurt her feelings, though I had tried to gentle and assuring. “I don’t remember forgetting anything,” she worried. Hawkins was so kind, entering the examination room with “Hello Lucille!” and pulling her into an embrace. He thanked her for having the courage and wisdom to have this hard conversation, but assured her she had done the right thing. “If we catch dementia early, we have ways of slowing it down. (And don’t worry about the name: dementia is just the medical term for memory loss.) If you had waited until there was a real problem, there is little we could have done. Dementia is caused by brain atrophy and is not reversable. You were right to come in early.” An MRI two years prior (which Mom remembered but the doctor and I had forgotten) had revealed mild brain atrophy, normal for her age, so the doctor moved right into Mom’s treatment plan, which included taking a new once-a-day pill and doing lots of word puzzles and needlepoints. “Thank you so much for coming in to talk with me about this difficult subject,” he said. “You’re doing great.” Mom left the doctor’s office feeling good about herself and her future, and I left feeling grateful for a kind doctor.

Courage at Twilight: You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To

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A blogger commented about our souvlaki and fries: “Interesting perspective on family dynamics and meal choices.” I wonder what he would quip about our incongruous hodge-podge of jam on French toast, Korean dumplings, and buttered peas. “What a wonderful looking meal!” Dad kindly commented, and blew his wet nose into his dish towel/napkin/food catcher/bib. “There were no buggers,” he rationalized when I brought him a new box of tissues. Previous to this week, all the little personal items he needed for his daily comfort had accumulated on a small end table and on the floor—everything must be within his reach. Eight dollars bought me a handy sturdy thrift-store shelf that vastly increased the items he can have with reach—books, Bible, gum, flosser-picks, tissues, hearing aid batteries, nail clippers, yellow legal pad, pens, reading glasses, check book, wallet—and reduce clutter. Conversation turned to the lawn and yard. Victor came with his air compressor, turned off the irrigation system, and blew out the lines. This week will be the last mowing, mostly to vacuum up maple and sweetgum leaves. “I almost went out to suck up all the leaves, but Lucille wouldn’t let me,” he pouted. “I would have just ridden in my wheel chair and transferred to the mower.” I was incredulous, and I asked, carefully, if he remembered the nearly impossible effort of getting him on and off the mower last spring, how I had to hoist and heave and shove and pull, how I hurt my back. He did not remember. But he remembers the distant past. Struggling behind his walker, he announced to our company, “I have a vision Roger as an infant standing in his crib and gumming on the top rail. You must have been teething.” Not again, I reddened. At least it wasn’t the washing-the-cloth-diapers and ironing-the-diapers-dry story again. Mom diverted attention by inviting me to inspect the drawer full of new towels—church sister Marla had taken her to Kohls—the old towels were stained and worn thin. Last week, church sister Barbara took Mom to a music store, and brought home a 1940s song book. She bought the book of 104 songs for fondness of song #104, Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to,” and wanted to show me the moment I walked in the door from work.

It’s not that you’re fairer than a lot of girls just as pleasin’,
That I doff my hat as a worshipper at your shrine.
It’s not that you’re rarer than asparagus out of season.
No, my darling, this is the reason why you’ve got to be mine.
You’d be so nice to come home to.
You’d be so nice by the fire, while the breeze on high sang a lullaby.
You’d be all that I could desire.
Under stars, chilled by the winter, under an August moon, burning above,
You’d be so nice, you’d be paradise, to come home to and love.

Dad’s new organizational setup.

Courage at Twilight: French Fries for Dinner

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Mom worried the “meat” would upset Dad’s stomach, and I wondered, since when does meat upset Dad’s stomach? Not with last Sunday’s post roast or the hamburgers from Jeanette’s visit or…. The “meat” was four small chicken chunks on a kebob—Greek souvlaki—with a mountain of fries on the side, and a spot of salad and a dry pita. I had arrived home late from the NOMÁS free immigration clinic, which, after two years of nightly cooking, I now use as an excuse to order out on Thursdays. Look at these French fries, Rog! Dad had been hoping for French fries, had been craving French Fries, all day, but Mom had not felt up to driving alone to McDonald’s or Arby’s or Arctic Circle. These are such wonderful French fries, Rog! Mom took a swallow from her glass of Juicy Juicy mango juice, and the swallow sounded wrong, and she sputtered and choked and her face turned red then purple and she coughed and coughed with her lap towel to her face. As with so many of their hardships, I could only watch and worry. But she recovered, and chuckled with an embarrassed squeaky rasp that things sometimes go down the wrong pipe. As I well know, from my own frequent experience. One of my siblings drinks only from a straw to avoid certain aspiration otherwise. Is it genetic? Dad choked through his own mis-swallow: I just love [cough] these French fries [cough], Rog! [cough cough]. I’m glad, Dad, because apparently you are having a mess of French fries for dinner, since you are worried about the chicken and pick at your salad and nibble at your pita. I spent the whoooole day wanting French fries, Rog, and here you just walked through the door with the best French fries ever! Thank you, Crown Burger, I think. Cough cough cough.

Courage at Twilight: English Ivy

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English Ivy clad the three-story brick wall hemming in the Edgewater playground, and Chicago’s breezy updrafts lifted every leaf in unison, looking like thousands of tiny green baffles rising and falling with each caprice of the wind. My fearless garrulous year-and-a-half-old grandson William worried his mamma by walking on the low walls and climbing the rain-slicked stairs, and he soaked his pants sliding into the pool gathered at the foot of the slide. (Why do playground designers always make slides that gather pools of water at the bottom?) Admiring the ivy, sticky with after-rain humidity, I called Mom and Dad to let them know I had traveled well and arrived safely and was enjoying William and his mamma and papa and their third-floor brownstone apartment and Lex the coy Maine Coon cat. (I know he likes me, or at least tolerates me, because he deigns to touch my offered nose to his, sometimes.) How nice to get away from the duties of home and caregiving for a week, and to visit a beloved daughter. The week passed in a happy instant, with long urban walks and bagels at the kosher deli and the farmers market and the annual Andersonville yard sale day, but especially reading to William and playing with William and chasing William screaming and running down the creaky hardwood hall. Sarah had looked after Mom and Dad in my absence, and when Dad had lamented over how hard it was to transport himself to the bathroom to brush his teeth after meals, she had told him about flosser-picks, and he asked Mom to ask me to get some from the store, but I had some already and could quickly deliver a bag when I returned to Utah. Flosser-picks and Mentos gum keep his teeth clean until he can take the stair lift at night to his master bath water pick. The flossers delivered, I drove away to meet some people I did not know at a local park, under a pavilion. At a friend’s suggestion, I signed up for MeetUp notices from groups that interested me, like kayaking and hiking, painting and mountain biking, and another group caught my eye, and I swallowed hard and headed into the unknown to meet people I do not know, with whom I may or may not have anything in common, to play Apples to Apples and to laugh and be pleasant and to try to remember all their names—Sally and Julie and Johnny and Greg—the names of people who, like me, had joined a MeetUp group named Introverts Who Are Not Total Hermits. Yeah, that fits. And I actually enjoyed being there with them, these people I did not know.

A Chicago wall in winter with defoliated English Ivy.

Courage at Twilight: How Does Your Garden Grow?

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The man died fully four years ago, at just 28, and yet she keeps coming every day to his grave, where the flat headstone bears only a first name, but does contain a carved silhouette of him holding two named children by the hand. Remember: there is no wrong way to grieve. Mourn loud and long if you wish, or quick and quiet, mourn until the love and the loss and the anguish seep into your soul as you stagger on. On Sundays, Dad and I sing the hymns with the televised congregation, holding our hymnals, and he is either ahead or behind the tempo, finishing the words too early or quite late, and often on the wrong verse. But he is singing, and I with him, and he still reads the bass part well. On Wednesdays, Mom has gone with the Church sisters on little outings, to Trader Joe’s grocery store, to Deseret Industries thrift store, to Pirate O’s import store, to Hobby Lobby craft store, for nothing in particular, but some little thing always catches her fancy and comes home with her, like secondhand colorful plastic cups, like O’Henry bars from Canada, like the round artist sponges she likes in the shower, like two small terra cotta pots to replace the ones I gifted to Solange with volunteer blue junipers to transplant to her yard, if she wants. What could I do for the young woman grieving daily at her dead lover’s grave—what could I do that would not be frightening or unwelcome or weird? And on Sundays while Mom sits with her friends at church, I pronounce the prayers upon the morsel of bread and the swallow of water, sacred emblems of sacrifice and hope, and stretch them out to my father, and he accepts them with quaking hands. As customary in my Church, he received the priesthood and was ordained a priest at the age of 16, in 1951, a priest who is not a pastor or a reverend but a youth who pronounces the prayers upon the bread and the water and reaches them out to the covenanting congregants, promising to mourn with those who mourn, to comfort those who need comfort, and to always remember Him. Dad always found his priesthood participation meaningful, as have I, being part of something holy and transforming. His mentor, the Bishop (who in my Church is the unpaid pastor or reverend), passed him a scrap of a note that read, “that is exactly how the sacrament should be blessed,” which praise never did leave his heart, from years 16 to 88. The simple note I wrote to the woman at the grave, tucked under her windshield unnoticed while she slept wrapped in a blanket on the dewy grass, read “a gift for you in your grief,” and in a bag Megan’s book about grieving for as long and however is right for you as you pull the anguish into you and hold it and sit with it and rock it until it becomes forever part of who you are. Then I knew I had done enough and should leave her be. Dad asks me often about my pumpkins, needing me to be his eyes, and I answer I don’t know because I have not checked them in weeks and do not seem to want to check them, preferring they grow or wither without me knowing, but I tell him one plant seems to be very happy and climbs each day a bit higher up the chain link fence, and today reached the top, and perhaps in some weeks some little pumpkins will have turned from green to orange and be plucked from dead vines to sit squatly on the porch for the neighbors and us to enjoy.

Courage at Twilight: Pulling Teeth

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A young woman has been sitting by a grave every morning at 8:00 as I commute past, and I cannot help wondering about her story, and her grief, and her devotion. Fresh flowers appear weekly in the vase, this week white and passion purple. The bright warm colors of the mums I planted have brought me happiness each morning and evening I leave from and return to my parents’ home, which they keep telling me is my home, too. Color is happiness, I think. Fushcia. Yellow cream. Tangerine. Scarlet blending to barn red. Dad effused as I maneuvered his wheelchair for him to see them. Color is happiness. And color is grief, and color is comfort. The hardest aspect of having the basal cell cancer scraped from Dad’s left nasal fold was the effort of the trip with its great strainings into and out of the Faithful Suburban. Every aspect of the next day’s visit to the dentist, or should I say the oral maxillofacial surgeon, who pulled and yanked and twisted at the infected tooth which finally came forth with it enormous roots half again the size of the tooth, proved arduous. Mom asked for the tooth. “I don’t want to see it,” I announced, but at home she wanted to show me anyway. “Why would I possibly want to see that bloody tooth!” I retorted. I quease at blood and everything else that belongs on the body’s inside. Sarah, though, will find it fascinating: she has a strong stomach and an eager medical mind. Poor Dad had to deal with a bleeding mouth and an anesthetized face and bloody gauze and salt water rinses and feeling beat up. Waiting for the surgeon, Dad told me had been in lots of fights in high school, but his fights involved stepping in to stop other fights and to rescue the bullied, and his toughness intimidated the tough guys, even though one punch did break his nose, and the doctor rammed two rods up his nostrils and lifted the broken bones and set them back where they belonged. Despite the tooth extraction trauma, the pain never came, which astonished me for the depth of the abscess and the size of the gape left behind. Grandpa Wallace had lost all but his front teeth before Mom outgrew girlhood. She remembers his slightly sunken cheeks, and she remembers standing by his side as the dentist pulled what teeth he had left—she had insisted on being there, a little girl defending her dad. Dentures followed healing, and Wally was so happy with his full cheeks and full mouth of teeth, for now he could eat everything he loved but had been denied him for years, including apples, carrots, and corn on the cob. And Mom was happy for his happiness. The family, as it grew, had no money for dentists. “Thank God for Harvey!” Mom sighed. Uncle Harvey had married into the family and become a dentist, and forever after gave the children free dental care, including many fillings. His jolly laughter resounds in my memory these decades after his death. This morning the young woman lay in the wet grass wrapped in a blanket against the cold and slept on the grave, and I felt a blend of admiration for her great love and of sadness for her great loss.

Courage at Twilight: Pulling Puncturevine

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I lamented to mom that now she had eight sets of sheets and eight towels and eight pillowcases to launder, and I offered to help. But she enthused, “That’s okay. I love doing laundry! I have always loved doing laundry!” The bathroom in the Bawden house sported above the tub a small hinged door, behind which descended into the darkness of the basement a laundry shoot. As a little boy I felt tempted to slide down the shoot, but I never did—a good thing, I am sure. And I remember the old washing machine and wringer and tanks, long disused, and the drying lines still spotted with clothespins like wooden birds below the open joists of the seven-foot-tall basement, perpetually dark. As a small girl and then a grown-up girl, Mom used these machines to wash the family laundry. The washing machine churned noisily back and forth. But there was no spin cycle. Mom slopped the soapy wet clothes into a tank of clean water for a rinse, then passed them through the electric-motor wringer, pressing the clothes between two tight rolling pins made of wood. The launderer needed to be very careful not to let the wringer grab her fingers or hair shirt sleeves: serious injury could result. A second rinse in a second clean water tank, a second wringing, and the clothes were ready to be hung on the lines, either outside during spring through fall, or in the basement in winter. “I’ll do it a little at a time,” Mom reassured me, not at all put out. In fact, the thought that our company had been comfortable and dry with these bed clothes and towels gave her a sort of familial connecting comfort. She finished on this National Day of Service, the 22^nd anniversary of the shocking and traumatic destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and so much incinerated life by a new kind of terrorism. The service I chose lacked glamor, and I wondered guiltily if it were worthy of the trauma and sacrifice that produced this special day. Millions of people in thousands of places doing all manner of service. Me? I chose to pick weeds. Not just any weeds, mind you, but puncturevine weeds growing along the Jordan River Parkway trail, with their two-pronged “goat head” seeds that puncture all passing tires and ruin many a bike ride. I joined Jordan River Commission staffers, and other volunteers, and after four hours, my heavy-duty black plastic bag was full and heavy, weighing perhaps sixty pounds. It must have contained ten thousand goat head seeds, which I was happy to equate to ten thousand saved bicycle tires. One monster had creeped to a diameter of six feet and bragged hundreds of noxious seeds. At a convention for city officials this week, I spent my networking breaks tying quilts for Stitching Hearts, quilts which will be given to foster and homeless children, a warm, soft, comforting homemade possession all their own that they can take with them from home to home or camp to camp—for some kids, the quilt will be their only possession in this world. Stitching and cutting and tying with these silver-haired ladies in their seventies and eighties, my loneliness ebbed a bit. While not the love I have searched for—a kind, intimate, whispering partner love—I felt happy in this new relationship, joining good people in service, small service, like pulling puncturevine, filling out immigration forms, tying quilts, washing sheets—I felt happy in this other kind of companionship and love, that comes with the giving of oneself, no matter how small the service. For me, smaller is better, because big always overwhelms. I can do the little things. Stitching and chatting and chuckling, I wondered if this is the type of love and companionship which will temper my sadness and loneliness, which will bring me a measure of happiness and joy, which will carry me through my future days. It just might be.

(Pictured above: a three-foot radius puncturevine spotted with hundreds of goat head seeds and flowers, hanging from a Russian Olive tree.)

Courage at Twilight: Veils Black and White

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Eight family guests flew in Friday night for the next morning’s wedding, the beds set up and clothed with sheets and blankets and the towels stacked and the groceries bought. And the water heater broke, so the wedding day brought cold showers all around, and no one grumbled and everyone smiled and looked beautiful at the temple, radiant and soft as the light through the stained glass and the zinnias and roses on the grounds. The officiator instructed the groom and bride after vows to cleave to each other and to labor together in love, and that the groom may now communicate his love with a kiss, and the bride quipped grinning that he was a good communicator. Soft laughter rolling through the temple. My predominant emotion at weddings is doom, for marriage has brought so much sadness and pain and grief to me and to so many I love, the termination of built hopes and the loss of future memories the absence of whispers and touch, and I struggle to want to celebrate. I wished them luck and congratulations, wanting to believe theirs could work. My children have chosen well, and I encourage them often to just keep talking and giving, come what may. This white-veiled wedding has brought the family together in hope and love, at least, and that is a good thing. I have noticed a young woman sitting graveside in the green expanse of Larkin cemetery, morning after morning. Sometimes she is lying on the patch of new sod, a white bouquet in the vase, and I sense her black veil of mourning. You know you have a gift for her, came the thought, and I slid Megan Devine’s book into a zip loc bag with a note: A gift for you in your grief… to leave by the bouquet for her to find, but she lay there again, sleeping wrapped in her blanket against Fall’s chill, so I secreted my gift under the windshield wiper of her blue Jetta and tiptoed away, glad for the anonymity that might ease the gift-giving and avoid the awkwardness of a stranger’s strange approach. The man had died at 28, leaving behind two children and, presumably, this grieving young woman. I wonder if I will see her again sitting graveside. Not today, as I returned from the happy wedding, stuffed with Brick Oven pizza, returning to do what I do best, eradicating weeds and pruning dead wood, the blooming geraniums belying my aching arthritic hands. Their infirmities did not allow Mom and Dad to attend the wedding festivities, but Mom called and pleaded and Scott came on this Labor Day Saturday and brought a new water heater when he could have not cared and made us wait until Tuesday, but he came, and the water heater was under warranty, saving us $2,200, so he said. And $900 later everyone is happily but tiredly home, enjoying sprays of warm water, languid on the couch, munching Oreos, the couple married off, off on their adventure, having stepped into the mystery of marriage.

Courage at Twilight: Such Nice Neighbors

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Mom fussed over Dad as she and I left for Smith’s. “I will miss you,” she cooed, patting his hand. “Will you be alright until we get back?” At the grocery store, she pulled a sandwich from a bank of coolers, and whispered her excitement: “I’m getting this for your father. He is going to love it!” The sandwich looked unremarkable, but her whisper conveyed the pride and power of a simple choice and purchase, when so much has fled her influence. She delivered the sandwich to Dad immediately upon our return, and looked chagrined at his request to add slices of sweet onion and slathers of mayonnaise and mustard, requests she perhaps thought challenged her whimsical magnanimity, rained on her pride, and poo-pooed her power. But, in the end, they both happy munched on their lunch, with Special Agent Gibbs on the screen. For the first time in a year, Dad successfully watched our neighborhood church services online. Zoom has failed him consistently, with bad microphones making the speakers unintelligible with their underwater garble. Frustrated week after week, he merely fell asleep, later receiving Mom’s report. With polite urging from several congregants, including me, the three local congregations pooled their budgets and purchased the equipment to connect directly to the Church’s broadcasting system, with a dedicated camera and hard-wired mic. “I loved seeing church today, Rog! Weren’t the talks great!” I stayed home with him so I could refresh the link when the screen froze from low bandwidth. There are always things to improve. But he sang from his hymn book, and appreciated the emblems of sacramental bread and water. Walking down our street that evening, Mom relished the fresh air, and Dad admired the gold-tinged clouds, and a distant airplane flew by the moon, bright silver from the western sun, and Steve and Marla emerged from their house “to wave to the parade” of two wheelchairs, one pushed and the other motorized, and to say hello. Nice neighbors. But I cannot take my parents for walks often enough, and Mom aches to get out of the house. I asked the Church’s women of the Relief Society if they could assign “sisters” to take turns picking up Mom every Wednesday for half-hour outings. The “sisters” were delighted—“we just love your mom”—and texted the next day with September’s schedule. Such nice neighbors. I will report her adventures.

(Pictured above: a mere four hours’ effort to extirpate weeds and shape shrubs in the back yard.)

Courage at Twilight: Dry

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The ink has drained from my Lincoln rollerball, and I lack the means to refill. But the sun never stops its monotonous movement morning till night. I asked Mom if that day were a good day for me to do laundry, and she exclaimed, “Yes! You can do laundry forever and ever!” So I began. The next day I came home from work to find them in Dad’s office, organizing his papers, a team effort, their combined age pushing 175 years, Dad instructing Mom from his coastered office chair: File this. Shred this. Throw this away. Shred this, and this. File these. No, throw those away—away! They both beamed their pride at their tidiness. This week brought hard conversations about fading finances and funerals and planning for the end of life, and after. They have always managed to afford their generosity, until now, when their spirit of giving exceeds their means to give. To my great calming relief, they were open, accepting, and grateful for my “thinking logically about things.” After all, they are one illness or fall away from assisted living and selling the house to pay. They proposed, and I agreed, that the only practical solution is for them to die in their own home. Dad has three abscessed teeth, poor guy, to be extracted soon, poor guy. But he felt inspired as I cast to their sagging television the national steeplechase championships where the BYU runner fell on a hurdle and rolled and rolled and jumped up to rejoin the group and win the race, and he felt happy to see all the dozens of photos I took on my mountain camping trip with Hannah (17) and Brian (33) and Avery and Lila (3 years 11 months) and Owen (10 months) and their smiles and explorations and crawlings in the dirt and splashings in the river pool and paddlings in the kayak on the high mountain lake and their roastings and burnings of marshmallows over the hot cedar fire, and the ripe thimbleberries. He still says, “I love life.”

Above: about to kayak on Moosehorn Lake, Mirror Lake Highway, Uinta mountains.

Below: peek-a-boo with baby; thimbleberry bushes with ripe sweet berries; the Provo River next campsite #18 at Cobblerest; view of the Uinta mountains from Bald Mountain pass, with two of the hundreds of lakes.

Courage at Twilight: I Really Want To Go

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1953-plymouth-cranbrook

Old patterns seem to reassert themselves without my even noticing. I had pulled and raked weeds for three hours in 95 degrees. The gardens looked beautiful, and I definitely did not. At 3 pm I took Mom to the grocery store to cross off our lists. At 4 pm we put the groceries away in various pantries, cupboards, refrigerators, and freezers. At 5 pm began the peeling and slicing of vegetables for roasting: yams, carrots, onions, potatoes, mushrooms (plus sliced Kielbasa). At 7 pm dinner was served to grateful parents who cannot cook their own. At 8 pm came the washing of dishes and cleaning of kitchen. And I was so glad to be done with my work for the day. But at 8 pm Mom asked if we could go for a walk now, and, in fairness to her, I had hinted earlier in the day a willingness to take them on an evening walk. Now, I complained about having been on my feet the last five hours and about wanting my day’s labors to be done. “I really want to go,” she persisted sweetly, and I felt my weak attempt to draw boundaries and wind down my Saturday giving way to a kindly old lady’s pining to get out of the house, to feel the evening air on her face, to see trees in their multitudinous shades of green, to wave to the waving neighbors, to revel in freedom and calm and beauty with her arms raised exultantly to the sky. So, out the door we trundled. Nick drove by in his vintage Mustang, waiving, and smiled at our “We love your car!” and said he’d be back with something she would really enjoy seeing. Every night I sigh wearily, wanting my day’s labors to end, and there is always more work to be done. I am remembering back to Saturday mornings pulling weeds for three hours in 95 degrees, to the days of two decades of raising my seven children, when I often fell asleep comforting a crying child who himself soon slept sprawled and drooling on my chest, when I would seethe over dirty greasy soapy dishes at midnight, when the next day’s unbearable stresses already came crushing. “I love it!” Mom exclaimed after passing an enormous blue spruce twenty feet across and forty tall. I confessed to enjoying our walk, too, and heard her relieving sigh. Boundaries feel selfish to me. Every boundary I draw limits another’s needs and my service to those needs. Trying to draw lines leaves me feeling guilt for others’ disappointments. But a life without boundaries, as I well know, will leave me empty and dry and weary and resentful and depressed—all used up. I am getting a little better at saying, “That will have to wait until tomorrow,” Mom or Dad. Our walk finished at 9 pm. The doorbell rang at 9:10, just as I sat down to rest. Nick had come back, this time with his 1949 Plymouth (blue). “What do you think of her!” he asked. His gray mustache grew from his lip down his cheeks to well below his jawline. “It’s a Plymouth!” she impressed him, hanging on my arm as we walked slowly to the rumbling car at the curb in the dark. She told him the story of how she and Dad as newlyweds had driven their 1953 Plymouth (green) for five days from Salt Lake City to New York City, in 1963, at a top speed of 40 miles per hour, on local and state roads before interstates. The city had alternate side of the street parking rules, and Dad sleepily descended the apartment stairs at 5 every morning to move the car to the other side of the street to avoid tickets and towing. After three days of that, they decided they didn’t need a car in Greenwich Village, put a “For Sale $50” sign in the window, and sold the big rounded old Plymouth to a clerk at the corner grocery, who waxed it up and proudly cruised the Big Apple in his new Plymouth. I shook Nick’s hand. I became so weary raising my family, my love for them notwithstanding, and I am weary again now, my love for Mom and Dad notwithstanding. My work feels never done. That is the human experience: the work to be done always outpaces the time and energy to do it, and we tire despite ennobling lives. The thermometer reached 102 that day, the same day an email came from the company that hangs our Christmas lights on the house, asking for a deposit. How strange to think about Christmas in 102 degrees in July, waiting for parts to repair the air conditioning, grateful for refrigerators and freezers and ice and little water cooler fans bedside. We will forego the house lights this year. Is there irony in my hanging three August calendars on my bedroom wall, one for Push-ups, one for Planks, and one for Prayer? They can wait for August, I decided, and dropped into bed before 10.

(Picture of 1953 Plymouth from Dragers.com, used under the fair use doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Waiting for Miracles

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Dad talked with me for 63 minutes about bedding and food and shampoo and vehicles for the wedding guests coming in a month, and about Cecilia’s food poisoning and the country’s ammunition shortage and increasing road rage and the weeks of 100-degree days. Climbing the stairs to change after work, I felt the temperature rise with every step. My west-facing home office had turned sauna: 90 degrees and rising. (In Phoenix, Jeanette’s house rose to 109 when their AC quit.) Our air conditioner hummed but pushed only warm air through the vents. Dad complained about not sleeping at night and instead lying awake sweating and sticky and stuck. I escaped to the basement, perpetually cool, but he and Mom have no escape. A “bang” in their room startled them in the dark of night three. “Lucille, get up and see what that was!” Dad instructed; he would have done it himself in earlier years, when he could move. Mom found that the ceiling fan I had turned on the move the air had flung the metal trim off a glass blade into a wall, thankfully not hitting a mirror or a window, or them, so the fan had to be turned off. Another thing for me to fix. The floor fan I borrowed from Terry only transformed the sultry night into a hot hurricane. Across the region, Home Depot and Lowes and other stores had sold out their indoor air conditioners, except for the models $400 and up, exceeding my budget, but I found at Target two tiny seven-inch-cube coolers that blow air over cold water, and I set them up for us bedside. The repair technician will save us in two days. The lack of air conditioning is a first-world problem, I know, but high temperatures can be deadly to 88-year-olds in any country, and I felt oppressed by both the heat and the responsibility of Dad’s well-being as I scurried to provide some relief, a bit of which the little water boxes brought by gently blowing cooler air on him all night, helping him sleep. He has asked me to bring him a scraper, a pallet knife, a sanding block, and the spackle—he had resolved to fill the old banister holes in the wall above the chair lift, and I resolved to let him do what he could do before jumping in to do it myself. The chair, unhappy at being stopped mid-rise, chirped continually at him as he worked. But he succeeded, and thanked me for giving him a job he could do. Dripping with sweat in my own chair, nervous about tonight’s pain and tomorrow’s root canal, I whined to Liddy about our woes, and she listened and affirmed and told me she was, at that moment, lying on her bed an ocean and a continent away listening to the waves lap the surf, and I asked her how she has been, and she said about the same, waiting for miracles but counting blessings.

(Pictured above: dried spackle ready to be sanded and painted, which Dad wants to do himself.)

(Pictured below: the ceiling fan glass blade metal trim.)

Courage at Twilight: Apron Strings

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When I moved out in 1982 and drove 2,200 miles from New Jersey to Utah and to Brigham Young University, her first child to leave home, Mom walked the house for weeks feeling an aching emptiness, looked in my room to find me gone, missed my voice and my laugh and my presence at the dinner table and in the church pew and at Sunday afternoon games of raucous Pit. “Where Roger?” two-year-old Steven queried, lacking the experience with space and time and life to understand Mom’s answers about me being “at school.” I was simply and suddenly gone, and she experienced a mourning like for the dead. We had no internet, no mobile phones, no unlimited data plans, no email, no texting, no Facetime or Zoom or Messenger or WhatsApp for video calling, no Snapchat or Instagram or Marco Polo. We had hand-written letters that took a week or two each to cross the country. And we had exorbitantly expensive long-distance calls on chorded telephones. That old apron string had been cut clean through. And I did not give it any thought, had no awareness of her grief, did nothing to fill the hole. And now at age 60 I am home again, and Mom sees me in the hall and finds me in my room, and hears me practice piano, and waves good-bye from the porch when I drive away, and like a relieved chick she raises her hands and her chin and her expectations for her dinner. I am learning that apron strings come in myriad colors, patterns, hefts, lengths, and strengths. And they are never fully cut, but merely injured and stretched and tearing. Some mend. Others strangle. All scar. On Friday night at 8, after another late dinner, Mom asked if I would please take them for a walk in their wheelchairs, and we loaded up and rode down the ramps and rolled up the street, jogging out into the road around the neighbor’s big blue spruce. A sprinkler caught us, and Mom reveled in cool wetness with a squeal and her arms stretched to the sky. I announced at 9, with bedtime at 10, that my day was done and that I needed to wrap things up and move toward bed. Disappointment showed on her face, exhaustion dragged at mine, and she squeezed out, “Just know that I will miss you!”

(Pictured above: Yours Truly about to drive away from home.)

Courage at Twilight: “R” Mountain

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Sweat trickled down my arms and dripped from my fingertips, and my growing girth stretched my shirt against its buttons. I shall be thin(ner) again: I have signed onto the galactic S.U.G.A.R. treaty (I cannot remember what the acronym represents) and have foresworn all things donut-cake-cookie-candy. Ice cream once a week is an important negotiated exception. Breaking for breath, the trumpeted cackles of sandhill cranes float up from the Snake to where I stand on the rim of the world’s largest tuff cones, the Menan Buttes, ancient volcanos formed by magma boiling upward through groundwater. A pair of red-tailed hawks screech overhead, circling each other on warm currents, the same screech TV commercials ascribe to the mighty magisterial bald eagle because it sounds cooler and more mighty and magisterial than the eagle’s pinched laughter. On this high Idaho desert my four sons have struggled at university, jogged in fifteen below zero Fahrenheit wrapped and bundled, set climbing routes at the gym, served smokey sauced meat at Blisters BBQ, rafted class 4s on the Salmon, discovered the spirituality of a stone labyrinth laid out in the sagebrush, found dear wives and seen babies birthed, and graduated. They make me proud, because I love them, come what will. And when I walk through the front door to shouts of “Welcome Home!!” Mom and Dad have me sit right down to tell them about it all. They will not remember what I tell them. Dad commented to Mom last week, “I’m having trouble remembering peoples’ names,” and she answered, “Whose name?” “Nobody’s name!” he retorted: “I can’t re-mem-ber….” They won’t remember what I told them, but they will remember my pride in my sons’ personalities and my happiness in my sons’ successes and how beautiful were the photos of the high Idaho desert and the Snake River and the alfalfa pivots and the views from “R” Mountain.

The core of the volcanic tuff cone.

Views of the Snake River to the North and South

Courage at Twilight: Is Today Tuesday?

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“Is today Tuesday?” Dad suddenly asked. “No,” I responded carefully, “today is Sunday.” “Oh, right,” and he observed how the days melt together, for during all of these days he sits in his recliner reading bestseller books, except for the compulsory state and national news and political commentaries. But I suspected this was more than the melting together of days. He is forgetting, losing his bearings. For my part, having made a study of grief and empathy in recent months, my word for the week is integration, by which I mean the perpetual process of welcoming into myself all of myselves: my fearful child and anxious adolescent, my flaws and brilliance, my wounded divorcé and bursting-with-proud father, all of my joyful wounded grieving giggling selves, the Me’s of every day and year and hour, with every cruelty and kindness meted out and swallowed—all of me, every bit, every moment—they are all here in a single whole Me, and I am working to love and to welcome even the unlovable and unbelonging pieces of my fractured whole. Integration eddied and swam in my thoughts as I sat in the 100-degree sun ridding the grassy strip between street and sidewalk of tentacled clover choking the grass, for hours, my hands aching and my head pulsing with heat. But I could not stop weeding. Was I trying to impress Mom and Dad, or the neighbors? Was my fealty working out a good son’s guilt? Was I aching for praise, or craving perfection? Dad cannot do it, so I will, and we will enjoy the results together. On that hot afternoon, their bedroom registered 85 degrees Fahrenheit; my room climbed to 90. So, I slept in the basement where the air always flows cool. For reasons he cannot fathom, Dad stuck his gym on the armrest of his recliner, then stuck himself to his gum, which promptly stretched and gooed in his fingers. Mom pulled out the trusty old (banned) bottle of Thoro and cotton-balled it onto his fingertips and forearm and the armrest and quickly dissolved the gum. The room reeked of naphtha, and Dad complained of the chemical taste on his tongue even though Mom and I both washed and scrubbed the armrest with various detergents and covered it with towels. “Thoro: The All-Purpose Spot Remover Since 1902!” the bottle title boasted, with the small-print subtitle, “Fatal If Swallowed.” We really did try to be careful. At least the gum is gone.

Courage at Twilight: Looking Him in the Eye

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“Mom, I need to explain something to you,” I ventured. When I tell you something—Dinner will be in ten minutes—and you respond Excuse me, dear? and I raise my voice—DIN-NER WILL BE IN TEN MIN-UTES!—and you answer, I’m sorry, dear, like you think I’m shouting at you, and I am shouting because I am trying to be heard this second time around, but I am not angry (maybe a little frustrated because you can’t hear me and don’t wear your hearing aids), I’m just trying to be heard. “I know,” Mom sighs, “but I HATE them!” and around we go. She came to me meekly and asked if I could possibly find time to take them for a wheelchair walk to the end of their street and back sometime that evening, and we commented on each neighbor and their house and trees and shrubs and the perfect blue sky and the day’s 100 degrees cooling a bit in the dusk and how happy we are Mark and Julie are back in their home after remodeling it for their disabled grandchild and how pleasant the fresh evening breeze feels. Dad had called Steven earlier, and I listened vaguely from my kitchen coq au vin alchemy as they reminisced about scout camps old and new, old when he was 12 (and when I was 12) and Dad manned the waterfront and checked out the sailboats and swam the mile swim with us in Lake Seneca at Camp Liahona summer after summer—he always came and stayed the week—and now Steve is taking his sons to camp and manning the waterfront and wrestling and scrapping with boys on the dock and in the water and breaking his toe. Dad laughed at the old memories and grimaced at the paining toe, and did not want the talk to end, and waiting a bit too long, and sent me upstairs for fresh clothing. And he said to me that he didn’t think about dying, but rather about passing over into his next life, and when he gets there and sees his Savior he is not going to fall blubbering at His feet but will stand straight and look Him in the eye and say, “I love You, and I did my very best.”

Courage at Twilight: Oh, That Bird!

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“Lucille!” I thought perhaps I might have heard from under my cool-morning covers the calling of Mom’s name, but I could not deny even in my profound grogginess the second “Lucille!!” with clearly Nelson-like tones, and I jumped from my bed fully alert and threw on my bathrobe and bolted to Dad’s room. Mom, alerted from downstairs, whence she heard his bellowing even without her hearing aids and even with her ever-present morning music plucking away—this time a harp concerto—raced upstairs, a slow sprint across the house and up on the stair lift in time to hear me call: “Is everything okay, Dad?” Of course, everything is okay, he said, oblivious of our cause for alarm. “When you go to Harmons,” he said cheerily, “if they have fresh cherries, open the bag and squeeze one to make sure they are ripe and not rotten or green, and get two bags, no, three, because John likes them, too, and tap on the watermelon like I showed you to make sure it’s ripe and not overripe or green—of course, you can’t tell the taste by tapping.” Mom sat on her cedar chest crying quietly from fright and relief and frustration, and I could not help remonstrating that I have been sitting on the edge of my metaphorical bed for two years waiting to hear him shout “Lucille!!!” so I could run to his rescue, save him from some crisis, lift him off the floor, and he’s shouting “Lucille!!!!” to make sure we check the ripeness of the cherries at Harmon’s? “Why, yes,” because company was coming, and everything had to be just right, including the tomato bisque, including two loaves of gluten-free bread, and sliced mild cheese, but no meat for the vegetarian melts, and guacamole and salsa and humus and two bags of corn chips, and gluten-free cakes, and just-right cherries and watermelon. “I told you we were shopping at 10!” Mom burst out, “and it’s only 8!” and “why would you shout for me throughout the whole house to tell me to squeeze the cherries!” and she stumbled back to the slow lift down the stairs to her harp music and her soggy breakfast, and I could not be angry because of how comical the whole scene struck and because everything was okay, because he was not dead or on the floor but was okay. “I’m sorry I shouted for Lucille to come,” Dad lamented as I yawned, for my body so ached in the night that I could not sleep and had taken naproxen sodium and half a fluoxetine hydrochloride at one in the morning and had a lovely sleep until I heard “Lucille!!!!!” because 13 miles on the Jordan River down rapids through eddies and mysterious invisible cross currents and from long portages around the dams and with the awkward ins and outs from my kayak on the muddy banks had pulled and twisted and tired me out, but that bird we saw, oh, that bird, that black-crowned night heron that watched me float within ten feet before it flew a hundred feet downstream and watched me again approach until I could see his crimson eye and the long white head feathers streaking loosely down his black back and the hint of yellow on his neck, stretch after hundred-foot stretch, mile after mile, until he flew back up stream back to his territorial stretch to stalk for ducklings and fish. “You can go back to sleep if you want—it’s only 8 o’clock.”

Courage at Twilight: Solar Winds

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The sun spews huge masses of atomic particles in loops and flares and flashes a million miles above its seething four-million-degree (F) surface into a stellar corona. And the sun shoots immense volumes of cosmic rays and subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light, a solar wind that picks apart human DNA when given the change. But the earth’s molten iron-and-nickel core sloshes spherically around inside, generating a massive magnetic field that deflects most of the solar wind. What this all means, Dad explained to Cecilia, is that we can live, here, safely on earth. “Without the magnetic field….” His cosmology lesson came from volume “C” of the encyclopedia: corona; core; cosmology: this morning’s reading. Cecilia reminded Dad about his shower, and his breakfast of a whole wheat English muffin and two slices of pre-cooked bacon and a tall glass of cold milk (and 19 pills). The chair lift shook and boomed at the bottom of the stairs, and I worried he or Mom would tumble onto the tile. Accessible Systems came the next morning to repair it, under warranty, so now I need not worry, as much. “Do you think we might cut the grass today?” Dad asked me after work, and I felt sad that he felt he needed my permission, though certainly he needed my help. 6:00 p.m. I reminded him about how frightening and difficult it was for him to mount the mower last time, but could not say “no.” Don’t rob him of what little he has left, I thought. But this time we managed impressive transfers to and from the mower, and he motored around the yard, sun hat askew, all the jogging neighbors waiving and smiling their astonishment. Pull weeds and trim bushes. 7:00 p.m. Cook dinner and serve. 8:00 p.m. Clean up kitchen. 9:00. Listen to thoughts and stories. 10:00 p.m. I am just too tired to read or to pray or to clean my teeth (though I do the latter anyway). No time for TV, for 6:00 a.m. comes early, and I am too old to go without sleep. And I self-assess: Why am I so irritable? Mom thinks of me wistfully as her little boy, her first baby pulling pots out of cupboards and crawling, cloth-diapered, across the floor, smiling and untroubled. When, troubled, I say good-night: “I will miss you.” When, troubled, I arrive at home: “I’m so glad you’re back.” But I am almost 60, too prickly, less cuddly and cute. It would be better for them if I visited here rather than lived here: the visits would be more joyful and less chore-full. But they need me, and a visiting life cannot be the agenda. As I said good-night, I wondered aloud to Dad: How is it that the moon is just the right shape and size and distance and orbit to just block out the sun and reveal its beautiful chaotic million-mile hot hot corona? And he shrugged with like wonder.

Courage at Twilight: Valeu a Pena

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Three hundred ninety-two. An arbitrary number, I suppose, but a number representing at least three hundred ninety-two hours, hours I spent thinking about and writing and revising and revising these short creative non-fiction essays—is that what they are?—pieces of the story of a nearly-sixty-year-old divorced nearly-retired still-commuting lawyer living with his aged parents to help them keep living in their own home, living with their books and needlepoints and (mostly) healthy delicious food and television programs and recliners and all the familiarities of a long life together: 61 years and counting. I was neither prepared nor worthy to be their caregiver. What family member is, I wonder? But I was available, and my lack simply does not matter: here we are, together. Valeu a pena. (Continental Portuguese: It was worth it.) The New York Times delivery lady in the squeaky broken Durango has just tossed the newspaper onto the sidewalk. Dad is sitting on his bedroom sofa reading volume “T” of the World Book Encyclopedia (1998) waiting for his CNA, his naked legs covered with a crocheted afghan throw. Merilee no-showed last Sunday, so I had the privilege of a son learning the routine of getting a father safety to the shower, then drying and dressing him, while Mom went off to choir practice. I will conduct the church choir today—“Precious Savior”—and am terribly anxious about being so visibly expressive and expressively visible, two-hundred congregants watching my waiving arms. My pumpkin seeds have sprouted, and the deer seem to be leaving the landscaping alone, whether from the cannisters of dried blood, or the putrescent egg spray, or the dangling bars of Irish Spring. I have placed little rings of stones around the volunteer juniper saplings to connote their belonging and because they look cute that way, cared for, embraced. Dad has been wondering about the bottle of honey that claims to come from Uruguay, India, and Argentina, and suggests I next purchase a Utah brand. Within minutes of the desert downpour last week the lawn care company mowed the lawn and left a rotting mess for me to clean up the next day: it was either rake for two hours or watch a thousand patches of turf suffocate under wet steaming clumps. Three days later, Dad came motoring down the ramps, wanting himself to mow the lawn mid-week, and I helped him transfer from the wheelchair to the riding mower, surely a never-intended transfer, impossible of grace, but with shovings and heavings and unspoken curses and doubts I muscled him awkwardly onto the mower and watched him tool around the yard, utterly happy. Transferring back to the wheelchair was even more ungainly and frightening: I doubt he will want to try again soon. And last night the thick smell of skunk jolted me from sleep, a smell far beyond a smell, a noxious choking vapor that penetrates and lingers and reminds me of my former family-raising life in the country.

Courage at Twilight: Keeping Both Legs

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Zoe on Zoom taught me that an “access point” is a moment in space-time when I feel sufficiently safe to risk human connection, and I found myself musing after sundown that every moment of my lifetime of space-time is either an access point or the absence of an access point: I am either seeking or avoiding connection. Dad felt safe enough to tell Cecilia his leg felt “off.” Cecilia felt safe enough to tell Mom that Dad’s leg was alarmingly swollen and red, and Mom told Jeanette, and Jeanette told her siblings, and announced to Mom and Dad: “We are going to the doctor, now.” And fear entered my heart, and I wondered, what does this mean? and I thought he might lose his leg to diabetes and infection and gangrene and amputation, altering his life and our lives horribly, this story’s end sprinting too-fast forward. But the doctor diagnosed cellulitis, a skin infection, and sent Mom and me to Walgreen’s for antibiotics while Jeanette trundled Dad home. A mere skin infection—nothing serious—a relief. Sarah sobered us with facts: cellulitis can lead to sepsis and to septic shock and to death, and she was soooooo glad Jeanette acted quickly. My sisters are heroines, aren’t they? They regularly save the day. Dad became downright chipper, perhaps from the relief of realizing he would keep his leg, and he tooled around the yard in his power chair with his electric hedge trimmers giving each of the many bushes a mullet cut: he could not reach the bush backs. When Dad was six, he used that leg to climb the neighbor’s old cherry tree, high into its branches, and the neighbor groused, “Get down from that tree!” but the boy only climbed higher. The neighbor threatened to squirt him with water from the garden hose, but the weak stream reached only part way up. And the neighbor sighed and pulled a nickel from his pocket and offered it to the boy if would climb down from the branches of the old cherry tree. That day in 1941, a six-year-old boy skipped home five cents richer. On another day in another tree, Dora grumbled for the boy to come down at once, and he did, with a “Yes, Mother,” because he loved her. Zoe told me over Zoom that our first and deepest question as human infants is this: Are my needs in life going to be met? and I found myself reflecting that I have asked this question long past my infancy, across my childhood and over my adolescence and into my marriage and my mid-life and will ask this question still in my old age. And with the asking I also answer: Yes, I will give myself to you, to you, and to you, and to you….

Courage at Twilight: Someone Else to Push the Chair

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Jeanette has come, and I have left her with the work and fled to my upstairs office to read Brian Doyle’s humorous penetrating moving essays, and have escaped to the yards to trim low shrub runners and pluck crab grass and spray the arborvitae with putrescent eggs spiced with clove oil that mule deer despise, and I beg off from the evening walk to the end of the street and back, my feet aching from a bloody self-pedicure and the day’s hike, content that someone else has come to push the wheelchair. I want to heave at the odor of commercialized rot—I am desperate to deter the deer—and decide to follow a neighbor’s suggestion to cut in half bars of Irish Spring soap, drill a hole in each half, and drape a green perfumed necklace to each faltering arborvitae tree. Nearly half of the trees’ greenery was eaten by deer, and nearly the other half froze and dried and sluffed away, but new green, darker than the soap, richer, is peaking out from what I thought were dead twig ends. A new day, and Sarah has come, and she has rousted Dad from his reading lethargy to come watch the cousins play cards and to coax the cousins out the front door and down the homemade ramps, and Jeanette and Sarah have struck off to the end of the street, Amy aahing at divinely gorgeous flowers. I had followed, too, and waived at Greg, the thirty-three-year veteran retired police officer whose garage walls are speckled with five thousand police agency shoulder patches from all over the U.S. and the world, though he used to have six thousand patches and has sold one-thousand on e-Bay to self-fund a missing dental plan. I shoved off and caught up, and we ended the walk in the back yard on Memorial Day and encouraged Mom and Dad to tell stories of their long lives. Dad’s first memory of his mother came when he shut his finger in the screen door and sprouted tears and a purple blood blister, and Dora cooed and chortled over him and kissed his finger and comforted and promised he would be okay, and Dad decided at that moment in his life that he would be okay. Dad’s first memory of his father came from working outside in the yard, where Owen had a bucket of dirty transmission oil, and where Owen and Owen Jr., the latter only three, each dipped a paint brush in the black oil and slathered it darkly onto the thirsty sun-bleached wood-fence slats, an inexpensive waterproofing stain. Dad’s first memory of Mom was of the church dance when he was 25 and she was 21 and they met and he asked her for her phone number and she willingly gave him her number, and over the coming months he gazed at her often and thought how kind and smart and beautiful she was, and how nice it would be to live a long life together. They have moved inside for ice cream, and I have watered my pumpkin-seed mounds, waiting for sprouts to emerge, upon which I will shave flakes of green soap against the deer.

Yours Truly with sweet sisters Jeanette and Sarah.

Courage at Twilight: She Loves Me

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“I slept so much better last night,” Dad crowed, reporting how much softer his mattress felt now that it was flipped over. I quietly asked Mom if she had noticed a difference, too, and she slightly shook her head no. Whether placebo or fact, I felt glad his sleep had been more comfortable, devoid of aching hips and nightmares. What would an 87-year-old have nightmares about? Answer: dreams of walking effortlessly to any destination he desires, and then waking up paralyzed. The waking is the nightmare. He grunts and he groans, but he rarely complains, and he keeps fighting for his best life. With Dad awake, showered, and breakfasted, the time had come for Mom’s requested Mother’s Day gift: an outing in the faithful Suburban to the forgotten little town of Copperton, located 20 miles straight west of us. Dad and I did not even know it existed. “This is very educational,” he opined. Copperton lies hidden behind a sandy bluff at the foot of the world’s biggest strip mine, the Bigham Canyon Mine, boasts about six gridded blocks, houses 829 inhabitants, and was founded by Utah Copper in 1926 as a model subsidized town for Mine employees. Mom and Dad grew up in the shadow of the Mine, and Dad postponed his education to work for Kennecott prior to university study and missionary service. He labored at two grueling tasks, the first shoveling up ore that had sloshed out of house-sized steel tumblers, tossing the escaped ore back in, and the second keeping free of obstruction sluices conveying rushing liquified ore. The tumblers destroyed his hearing. The sluices swept away lives as well as ore, lives of men trying to clear mine beams and fence posts and boulders from the flumes and instead getting swept away and drowned and crushed by the rushing rock. He risked limb and life for his education, for his mission, for his future. But in Copperton, all those agonies were 70 years past. Today, in the Mighty V8, we crawled past well-maintained century-old brick and stucco houses with steep Scandinavian gables and porticoed porches, neat little lawns and rose bushes, and friendly old-timers returning our waves. Mom loves roses, especially yellow roses. She instructed Dad to buy no more than a single yellow rose, but I bought her a dozen-cluster of miniature yellow rosebuds, ready to burst. She set the vase on the fireplace hearth where she could see the roses all the long lazy days. Washing dishes that evening, I watched through the kitchen window a scarlet-headed house finch perched on a lilac twig, tearing at the tiny purple petals one at a time, as in a game of She loves me—She loves me not—She loves me.

Courage at Twilight: With a Vehemence

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“Welcome home!” Mom cheered with a bright smile and her arms raised high. “Welcome Home, Raj!” Dad echoed. (“Rog” looks sensical but rhymes with “Frog.”) The day was just another of 400 days I have come home to Sandy from work 55 miles away in Tooele. Yet Mom and Dad made me feel like the son newly home victorious from the front lines of life. Slurping our Lazy Rigatoni with sausage and sauce, I told them about volunteering that day at the free NoMas immigration clinic (No More a Stranger), and how I wished the facts for my asylum application were stronger, but that stronger facts would include kidnappings or beatings or murders, and how returning the man and his family to Maduro’s Venezuela likely would mean kidnappings and beatings and murders, and about how well I performed my work might mean escape, and if not escape, returning the man and his family to…. That morning, the shower pipe had again slipped into vibrating screams, which I loathe with rending vehemence, screaming in my soap-slimed face: “You’re doing it wrong! You’ll never be good enough!” and I had again adjusted the water quickly to quiet the unbearable banshee. And that evening, after dinner, Mom handed me a note Dad had written to Tamara, and asked if could deliver it, but after a twelve-hour work day I did not want to find the emotional energy needed to deliver a note to a woman dying of pancreatic cancer, feeling awkward with what to say, but I said simply, “My Dad wrote you a note: he loves you and hopes for you, we all do.” Tears and smiles: they arrive with our suffering and hope. We do hope for her. This is our faith, that in healing or in dying she finds hope and finds love. Pine needles had fallen thick over the years, an unruly mat in the back yard, and I quickly filled both cans, pensive about Tamara, waiting for next week to fill the cans again. With his bowl of chocolate ice cream and a slice of warm chocolate-chip pecan banana bread, Dad complained that he could not sleep the night before, how his hips and legs had hurt, how he sat on the edge of the bed in darkness wondering whether years of sleeping in the same spot on the same side of the same mattress might suggest turning the mattress over. In the day’s eleventh hour, I hurriedly stripped the bed, flipped the queen mattress over, and strapped on fresh sheets. Rising slowly in the stair lift, still they caught me in the last tuckings. “Which way did you flip it?” Dad asked. “I flipped it,” I answered. I hope he sleeps better. We shall see.

Courage at Twilight: Reminiscing with Mr. Towhee

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The Spotted Towhee pecked at seeds on the ground and flitted from tree to rock to limb. I watched him for a full 20 minutes, and decided he was such an adorable little creature. I think he has taken up residence in the tangle of arctic willow trunks. Watching the pretty bird in the cool evening breeze, I reflected on many things. On how Dr. Seegmiller has decided to care for his invalid patients by making home visits, kneeling at recliners to clip nails and shave callouses. On how the new Church missionary from our neighborhood, off to Argentina for 18 months, had discounted her “simple faith” because it was not more sophisticated or profound, not realizing, yet, that simple faith is pure and powerful faith: genuine. On how Dad observed one evening, “Rog, if you got married now, we would be in a rest home” and I thought he might be right, and I determined to continue my mission to minister to my parents in their days of feebleness and need. On how I gave an ethics presentation to the city’s Public Works Department (water, sewer, and roads divisions), a tough crowd in boots and ball caps and dirty jeans, and how I coaxed them to laugh and to think, and how Mom and Dad insisted I show them my PowerPoint slides in an abbreviated show, and how we learn ethics through living, and promise to do better next time. On how I took Mom and Dad for a roll, pushing Mom’s wheelchair, past the guard shack and gate, into wealth and privilege, all the Porsches and Audis and Lincolns and BMWs racing by, and how they are not representative of most of America, or of me, and how I joked with Dad that he would be pulled over if he didn’t stop riding off the edge of the asphalt trail. And on how Steven had remarked that for all Dad’s disappointment and misery, and despite two minutes of agony every two hours (when nature calls), he is happy in his life, reading his books (several a week), scanning the New York Times (daily), watching television (totally at Mom’s mercy since he cannot operate the remote), enjoying tasty nutritious food (yesterday French sauteed chicken in onion cream sauce), visiting with visitors (from church, mostly), balancing his checkbook (check register in one hand, pencil in the other, calculator on his lap), doting on grandchildren and great-grandchildren (I have lost count), and chatting with his white-haired sweetheart (of 62 years). And Mr. Towhee hopped and flew all the while.

Above: French sauteed chick in onion cream sauce, roasted tarragon asparagus, and scalloped potatoes from a box.

Below: The melted jumper cables from my failed attempt to jump start Mom’s dead car battery.

Courage at Twilight: Recharged

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Dad has tired of ham-onion-Swiss sandwiches, and Mom has had to get creative with his lunches. A plate of mixed nuts, applesauce, a slice of cheddar, carrot sticks, celery and cream cheese, and a peach cup—do not forget the diet Coke, on the rocks—have been this week’s fare. And the bag of kettle-fried potato chips on the floor by his recliner. Mom assembles Dad’s lunches simply because Dad cannot. He seems to enjoy ordering her around a bit, e.g., “Lucille, get me some crackers.” While they munched, I dug out the Subaru owner’s manual and read the jumper cable instructions carefully, three times, connected the jumper cables, carefully, to Mom’s Legacy and the Mighty V8, rechecked the instructions twice, started the Mighty V8’s engine, then turned the key to Mom’s Legacy. Dad’s faithful Suburban soon began to falter, then died, and smoke curled up from both batteries. Mom’s car never started. Continue reading →

Courage at Twilight: 1920 Model-T

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“There’s a hole in my head!” Dad groused, fingering his newly-stitchless scalp. “Why did Hinckley leave a hole in my head?” I examined Dad’s new scar, which curved over eight inches of wispy-haired scalp. The scar centered on a remaining scab, where the initial cancer had been scooped deeply out. I reassured him that his head looked fine, that there was no open wound, that what he felt as a hole was just a scab. “Why didn’t he stitch the skin together so there isn’t a hole in my head?” When the scab falls out, I suggested, I was sure he would see how neatly sutured the whole incision was. “But there’s a hole in my head.” Mom scowled and rolled her eyes, and I let the matter go. I would not be able convince him there was not a hole in his head, and did not want to argue. Maybe the surgeon did leave a hole in Dad’s head—what could I do about it other than watch for both healing and infection? Continue reading →

Courage at Twilight: Booby-Trapped

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In the three weeks since Steven and I planted the four emerald green arborvitae, I have watched them disintegrate before my eyes, each day more pieces of green leaf littering the ground. I emailed the nursery pleading for help to keep them alive—we had worked too hard and brotherly to let them die—and the nursery’s diagnostician replied that the trees looked alive but badly eaten, and he wondered if we had deer in the neighborhood. Boy do we, I fumed to myself for the thousandth time. Mule deer roam the neighborhood by the dozen, nipping at tulip sprouts and lily petals and other flowers and shrubs and garden produce, transforming from wild novelty to neighborhood bane—but I had not thought they would eat evergreens full of resins. I drove to Lowes immediately and purchased two deer repellent products, the first a powder of dried blood (the package did not say whose) that would trigger the instinctual flight response in deer (so the package promised), and the second a liquid concoction of putrescent egg solids graced with garlic. Eager for the trees to begin their recovery, I sprayed them liberally with putrescence, and discovered instantly why deer and rabbits—indeed any sane creature—would stay away. Then I spent an hour manicuring the tree moats and surrounding grounds, skunked and gagging the while. I would have done well to reverse the order of things. But by the time I had finished, the revolting stench had become strangely comforting: if it worked, our trees would recover and fill out, emerald green and evergreen fragrant (except for the days of repeated treatments). After my report to Dad, he explained how he has had increasing trouble rising from his shower chair after bathing. He thought he must be getting fatter because the arms of the chair hugged his hips tighter and tighter. Today he could not free himself of the chair, but stood with the chair clinging to his backside like in The Bishop’s Wife. Surely, he thought, he could not have gained that much weight in just a few days. He asked Elie to take a look at the chair. After turning the chair over, Elie announced that the chair’s metal supports had cracked, allowing the chair to bend and the arms to squeeze, and that if Mom and Dad kept using the chair it would soon snap in half and collapse beneath them. Sarah lost no time sending over a newer, stronger chair, a pleasant blue color. I have contemplated many times, in fact constantly, the value of the help and service my siblings have gifted to our parents, and how the gifts are in turn mine, lessening the weight of burdens, making room for a break, unstringing the bow. And I am grateful. After dinner Dad declared, “Roger, it is so nice of you to get home late from work and make us a dinner of roasted vegetables.” The sweet potato and butternut squash wedges, roasted in olive oil and salt, had indeed been delicious. But the odor of putrescent garlicky eggs remains arrogantly in my nostrils.

Courage at Twilight: A Magic Box

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The sconce light on the garage had worked itself loose in winter’s gales, and when the finials fell off, the fixture hung by its wiring, daring me to fix it. I did not take the dare for a month, but finally found the courage to attempt. Home from work, ready to face the challenge, I heard Dad call me over. He detailed for me his “mental list” of chores he needed to do, including 1) power thatch the lawn, 2) purchase crabgrass and weed killer fertilizers, and 3) apply the fertilizers. He was clear that this was just his mental list, and that the chores needn’t be done right away, although rain was forecast in two days. He thought he would hire Victor to do the work, but I told him I could and I would do them, and he should save his dwindling funds. I promised to pick up the fertilizers tomorrow on my way home from work, to run the mower over the lawn, and to spread the fertilizer, this last one a quick and easy chore, for me. He wishes keenly that he could do the work, but he just cannot. Maybe, just maybe, I can push him in his wheelchair down the ramps and into the garage and help him transfer to the riding mower (a most difficult machine to mount), just last year a doable and delightful chore for him. I am willing to try. But today I had planned to attempt the sconce light repair, I told him, and walked outside to study the situation for a long spell while attempting to envision a solution. I could salvage the two brackets, though they had twisted a bit in the world. And the wiring remained intact. But I could I find the right bolts, nuts, and washers in Dad’s bolt box? Bolts and nuts can be hard to match for their varying thicknesses and treads. I had scoured the blue metal box as a teenager when learning to fix broken things and to assemble my own creations, and the blue box never left me wanting: I always found the hardware I needed. The box seemed to have a bottomless supply of bolts, screws, washers, and nuts, with an occasional hinge, and I enjoyed the clinking sounds and the rough poking on my fingers as I rummaged. The box seemed a tinkerer’s tiny treasure trove. The box was Dad’s meager inheritance from his father, Owen, who in turn received the box from his father, Nelson—both Owen and Nelson died before I was born. And today, a century after, here I was searching for, and finding, exactly the hardware I needed. “It must be a magic box,” Dad mused as I boasted of my success. Indeed, it must be, in more ways than the supply of random parts, but also the sounds and scratches and smells that carry me back generations to my forefathers, master mechanics in the mines of Utah and Nevada. Truthfully, I was more relieved than proud to have succeeded in remounting the fixture to the brick, and whispered a “thank you” to heaven to have been spared the frustration of very possible defeat. Mom just had to come and see the makeshift repair, and we stood staring at the light with delight. As the sun began to set, I suddenly knew I needed to get Dad out of his recliner, out of the house, and into the cool twilight sun for a “walk”—winter has been so long, and the snow finished melting just yesterday. Dad struggled into his power wheelchair and zoomed away toward the front door and the ramps that followed—I called after him a warning that his new chair is much faster than the loaner—in fact, I had just tested top speed and had frightened myself careening through the house, with G-force sensations similar to flooring a Tesla (well, almost). I gathered Mom into the other chair and pushed her down the driveway and up the sidewalk, Dad tooling independently behind, feeling a new awareness, similar to the pleasure of walking one’s beloved pets—but not quite—and somewhat like the simply joy of walking one’s children around the block—closer, but still a bit off—and I thought how nice it was to be able to take both of my parents for a walk in their wheelchairs at dusk.

The magic box and the sconce light:

Courage at Twilight: Grandchildren and Easter Eggs

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Each prior reunion had been held in the basement great room, but this year Dad had to acknowledge that their first mission reunion since Covid-19 swept the world could not be held downstairs. He confessed to me that in his obsessive deliberations he had even thought of going downstairs by sitting on the top step and “like a baby” sliding down on his butt, one step at a time, to reach the regular basement venue. Several disastrous and humorous images of potential outcomes flashed through my mind, and I acknowledged with a chuckle that this might be possible—but how would we ever get back up those stairs? He certainly could not crawl up them “like a baby.” Sarah and Megan moved the sofas and set up 60 chairs, upstairs—59 people came, beloved friends and former missionaries all. Mom and Dad thrilled to see them again, chatting up a storm, remembering the old memories of Brazil and of trapsing through the big cities and along beaches and on farm country roads, remembering especially the people they taught and loved, and singing the fervent songs—and eating Brazilian food! This twentieth reunion would be a cherished memory. A different and quieter assembly occurred at the house, when Brian brought my new grandson Owen to receive our Church’s traditional “Name and Blessing” ordinance. Normally performed in a church setting, Brian had obtained permission to conduct the simple ceremony at Mom’s and Dad’s house, so that Dad could participate. Brian held Owen inside the circle of family men, four generations of Bakers—Dad had maneuvered his new power wheelchair to join his hands with ours in holding the baby as Brian pronounced the blessing and made official the baby’s name. Of course, we enjoyed good food afterward: my big pot of savory chicken vegetable soup. And a fun and festive gathering transpired on Easter Eve, with Brian’s family serving traditional homemade Polish pierogi, with kielbasa, and with my French purple cabbage (baked with bacon, carrots, onions, tart apples, and sweet spices like cloves and nutmeg). I also boiled a dozen eggs for Lila (3) to dye. She plopped the color tablets into clear plastic cups, and I added first vinegar and then water. I coached her in using the ever-awkward wire egg spoon to dunk each white egg and a few minutes later retrieve magically brightly colored eggs. She called the order of dipping: “red” then “pink” then “green” and so on. Her dexterity impressed me. Tooth stockers and eye stickers and fins—this was a dinosaur egg-dying kit—added to her fun. Mom and Dad watched from the next room and chuckled, remembering their own three-year-old children, and then grandchildren, dying eggs at Easter. She called to me “Love you, Grandpa” as the little family drove away toward home. I love you, too, sweetheart.

Pictured above: One of Lila’s dyed-egg dinosaurs.

Pictured below: Yours truly with Lila and Owen and dyed eggs:

Some mission reunion photos:

Courage at Twilight: Spicy Dumplings

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I made Mom cry twice in one day. And I feel terrible. For dinner I served Korean dumplings with fresh steamed asparagus and zucchini. After serving Mom and Dad, while fetching my own plate, I heard Mom erupt into gagging coughs and turned to see her surprised and red-faced. “These dumplings are HOT!” Oh no, I thought, running for the bag, which revealed the dumplings to be Spicy Pork & Vegetable Dumplings, the word “Spicy” in conspicuous red letters which I had missed at the store for my focus on the photo of the yummy-looking dumplings. Indeed, the dumplings were very spicy and burned my tongue and my lips unpleasantly for an hour. After dinner I stood to clear the TV tables and clean the kitchen when Mom asked me to tell her one thing about my work day. I sighed and rolled my eyes. I literally rolled my eyes! I wanted to move on with my day and rush to the next task to be checked off the to-do list. And I am not good at shifting mental gears once moving in a mental direction. And I spent six years utterly alone with no one to talk to after work about my work day. And I spent three decades not talking about my work at home because my work was overwhelming to me and uninteresting to others and I wanted less to do with work, not more. And I have never been much of a talker. And I run all day from task to task to task and after dozens of tasks I struggle to remember what I even did that day. And those are my excuses, anyway. Weak ones. And as I rolled my eyes Mom coughed strangely and I looked to see her moving to cover her reddened face and tearing eyes with her soft blue fleece, her cough in reality a choking cry. My heart sank. I had hurt my sweet octogenarian mother. And I could not unhurt her. “Let me think,” I said, looking at the ceiling and not at her, to avoid her feeling self-conscious, “if I can remember what happened today.” I told her about finishing the book Just Mercy about a young Harvard lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in the deep South and fought for the freedom of Black men who had been wrongfully arrested and maliciously prosecuted and who spent years in solitary confinement on death row before their executions, or, for the lucky ones, their exonerations. I told her about working with my friend Paul the engineer to resolve difficult problems with real estate developers. I told her about the high-pressure 14-inch natural gas pipeline embedded in the bank of a flood channel and how the bank is eroding and how the gas company and the property owner want the City to fix the problem at taxpayer expense. And I told her about my commute home and the high winds that tried to blow me off I-80 and the clouds of dust and fog and snow and how heavy the traffic was. And I feel terrible, but I cannot un-ring the bell, or reverse time, or breath back in my words, or undo any of the other things I wish I could undo after I have done them. I am thinking tonight about how blessed I am that my mother loves me and is devoted to me and is interested in my day. I am thinking tonight about Mom announcing to me, “You will be so proud of me: I rode the bike today!” and about how she needs me to be proud of her, and about how I am proud of her, and need to tell her. I am thinking tonight about the responsibility I have to buttress her self-esteem, to affirm her, and to return love and devotion and interest. I am thinking tonight about how tomorrow night she will not need to ask me to tell her one thing about my day because I will have two or three already lined up.

Courage at Twilight: As If They Belonged

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The March afternoon shone sunny and warm, and after struggling to help Dad transfer from his recliner to his power wheelchair, I asked him if he would like to take a “walk” to the end of the street and back, thinking he would enjoy a change of scenery and the fresh air. “What I’d really like,” he replied, was to ride his mower, set low, to pull up winter’s dead grass thatch. I sighed. I told him I respected his desire to ride the mower and prep the lawn, but if he was having so much difficulty climbing into the chair, I did not think he could safely mount the mower. He sighed. And he yielded. And I suggested the alternative of riding in his power chair to inspect the yard in preparation for riding the mower next week. He nodded, and I walked after him as he rode his chair out the front door, down the ramps, and onto the lawn. In the back yard, we found the grass saturated and squishy, and I urged him toward the higher ground. But he felt afraid to tip the chair on the incline and stuck to the lowland valley, filling the wheel treads with dead grass and mud. I sighed again. Back in the house, I parked the chair on the hardwood floor and let the mess dry, and in the evening picked the treads clean with chop sticks and vacuumed up the detritus. For dinner I cooked Tieghan Gerard’s delectable garlic lemon shrimp, to Mom’s delight: “I love shrimp!” I did not know but was pleased to discover her “favorite.” Sarah came over and, with the hospital bed gone, helped Steven and me reestablish Dad’s office—he had invited us to bring back his grandfather Nelson’s solid oak desk, but to orient the furniture so he could see out the window while using the computer. We grunted and strained in moving the desks and shelves and cabinets and books and endless computer chords into a simple configuration we thought best utilized the space. Dad ambled in and disapproved, but struggled to express what he wanted. I had lazily resisted trying other configurations—the stuff was heavy and awkward, after all—but dug into my shallow reservoir of patience, breathed deeply, and acquiesced. He finally announced his great pleasure in the outcome, and I felt compelled to confess his configuration, indeed, was the best, and to acknowledge the office was his and should be organized as he wanted. But my reservoir was dry, and I felt exhausted and desperate for time in a dark cave. Recovered by the next day, I enlisted Steven to help me select and plant juniper trees in place of the fallen spruce. We measured and drew the space and planned the tree spacing and earth sloping. At Glover nursery, we texted photos to Dad of seemingly acceptable replacements—we were not about to bring home trees he did not like—and he selected an emerald arborvitae. Four would occupy nicely the space yet leave room for them to fill out. As we dug the holes, Dad tooled out in his power chair and watched the entire two-hour process, contributing his encouragements: “Don’t dig the hole too deep.” “Are you sure it’s okay to bury the balls in their burlap?” Mom watched from the warmth of the kitchen window. Having approached the project carefully and technically, and having involved Dad in every decision (Mom was happy with whatever we did), the result pleased us all, and we had four new friends marshalled together under the falling spring snow, standing as if they had always been there, as if they belonged.

Pictured above: four new emerald arborvitae.

Nursery staff expertly stuffing four 7-foot-tall trees into my Subaru.

Dad’s “new” office.

Courage at Twilight: Wet Feet

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“Could you help me with something?” Mom whispered to me with concern wrinkling her face. For the first time in her adult life, after more than half a century, she could not reconcile her checkbook with her bank statement. We spent the next hour studying each entry, each check, and each deposit, adding and subtracting each entry on the check register. I just could not find the mistake—the math worked. Where had the money gone? I realized abruptly that one deposit had been entered twice, inflating the balance she had thought available. Visiting from North Carolina, Steve suggested I add forensic accounting to my resume. A simple login and transfer of funds on my smartphone set things right, to Mom’s tremendous relief. “You saved my life!” she exclaimed. Thankfully, Mom and Dad added me to their accounts just last week, so I was able to quickly and easily fix the problem from the comfort of the kitchen table. To cover her account, Mom had thought we would need to drive to the bank to determine the true balance, then return home for a check from Dad to move from his account to Mom’s, then drive back to the bank to deposit the check. The experience impressed Mom and instilled greater confidence in on-line banking, though Dad still will not allow me to deposit a check with my Wells Fargo app. The night before, I arrived home at 10 p.m. after a 14-hour Wednesday (due to City Council meeting). After greetings to Mom and Dad, I sat in my recliner (yes, I have one, too) to relax a moment before going to bed. Steven poked his head around the door frame and ventured, “Um, there might be a little problem in the basement.” Standing in his basement bedroom in stockinged feet, he began to notice an odd physical sensation, his brain slowly waking to the strange realities of wet socks and squishy carpet. He found the window well inundated with six inches of water, which somehow was finding its way through the foundation. We grabbed cups and buckets and began bailing gallon after gallon of muddy water, pouring at least 20 gallons carefully down the toilet, flushing between pours to keep the line clear. Steve stomped on bath towels while I ran for Dad’s carpet cleaner. The towels (a dozen) soaked up additional gallons, and the vacuum even more. We pointed a box fan at the moist area and will let the air blow for a week. We drew straws to see who would give Mom and Dad the bad news (Mom had spotted me trying to hide a five-gallon bucket as I slunk down the basement stairs at 11 p.m., still in my Sunday suit) and I lost. But they took the news well and appreciated our quick thinking and response. Several feet of snow, banked between our house and the neighbor’s, had melted too quickly on that one warm day, oversaturating the lawn with little lakes, and the water followed low spots in the landscaping to flood the window well. Happily, the other window wells were dry. The next day Steve texted me a photo of a baby cottontail rabbit which had fallen into another window well. “What next?!” I texted back. Donning long sleeves and gloves (just in case, though I have never been bitten by a rabbit), I opened the window and gently pressed a hand on the bunny, but he kicked at me and astonished us by jumping four feet straight up the window well wall, a foot short of the top. On my second attempt, I pounced more forcefully and captured the little creature, but it screamed and screamed, and there was nothing little about that human-sounding scream. I dredged from old memories a method of calming distressed animals by covering their eyes with a cupped hand, and succeeded in calming the bunny. I rubbed its little head and loose ears and soft gray fur. We introduced the bunny to Mom and Dad, stepped out the back door, knelt low to the ground, and released the rabbit. It bounded across the lawn, then stopped to look back, doubtless contemplating the miracle of having survived the attack of a gigantic predator. How grateful I felt that Steven had been here, at this time, to discover the flooded window well that would have gone undiscovered for weeks, that would have destroyed the basement bedroom, and here also to find the baby bunny that would have perished in another window well, and see to its rescue.

Courage at Twilight: Drying the Dishes

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Home from work, I cleared the countertops and sinks of cups and bowls and spoons, loading them in precise fashion in the dish washer—I know exactly how each piece fits in its space. For decades I have taken great offense [hear my self-pitying sigh] at finding a dish in the sink after I have used copious quantities of my time and energy to empty the sink, and since I am the one that empties the sink, leaving a dish in the empty sink implies an unfair presumption that I am the family dishwasher servant [more self-pity]. When Mom takes these random dishes out of the sink and puts them in the dishwasher, I thank her, and am grateful for her courtesy to me. But it was time to stop ruminating and to load Dad into the Faithful Suburban so the dermatologist could examine this tag and that mole and this scab that will not heal, the skin doctor who is smiley and polite but profoundly disinterested. “Hello! How are you!” Three minutes of examination, and a declination to remove this or that because it is harmless even if Dad does not want this or that attached to his body because it does not belong and asks to have it removed. “Good-bye! Have a great afternoon!” I had terrible trouble getting Dad into the car, both times, succeeding only with an ungainly combination of pushing and lifting and shoving until he was on the seat and my muscles quivered and my lumbar complained. I had wondered what I would do if he could not rise from his wheelchair or if he collapsed once risen, and I had no answer—the only answer was getting him in somehow. “That was our last trip to Dr. Jensen,” I whispered to mom, distressed. And that distress and my tweaked back stalked me through making dinner and eating dinner and cleaning up after dinner and up the stairs and down the weeks and months of wakings. But Mom is sweet, and recently has taken to putting aside her needlepoint and shuffling over to the kitchen sink to towel dry and put away the pots and pans I have just washed, and I appreciate her effort to say thank you with a towel and an empty sink.

(Pictured above: felt rose craft I made for Valentine’s Day.)

(Pictured below: my valentine from my sweet granddaughter Lila.)

Courage at Twilight: Calling Stanley Steamer

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Poor Dad has been obsessing over the imminent missionary reunion, making a long mental list of everything to be done. He had become justifiably worried, to the point of fright, about holding the reunion in the basement great room: the stairs would simply be impossible for him unless he were carried, and with a bunch of former 20-year-old missionaries now in their 70s, attempting to carry his muscular bulk up and down a flight of stairs would be dangerous and reckless for everyone involved. While I was taking way too long to slowly and gently bring him around to this realization, Sarah simply announced the change of venue as a fact for him to deal with. Quick and efficient and effective. Dad knows not to argue with Sarah, though of course it was his best interest she had at heart. I appreciated her bringing quick resolution to the issue. Dad wanted the cream shag carpets to look clean and new, and called his favorite carpet cleaner Stanley Steamer—using the name “Stanley” makes the company seem downright personable. He did his best with poor hearing and trembling fingers to navigate the endless telephone menus only to be stonewalled by a nation-wide collapse of Stanley’s computer reservation system. Before I had my winter coat and traditional Portuguese hat off after work, Mom asked me to help Dad call Stanley Steamer. After dinner, I suggested Dad try again, and he called the number. Ten seconds later he handed the phone to me: “You talk to her. I can’t hear a thing she’s saying.” A minute later the reservation was made, for the next morning. Mom and Dad both sighed with relief at crossing this item off the mental list. Even his recliner received a steam cleaning, along with its food-stained carpet curtilage, and he sat in the chair with the protection of two blankets against residual moisture. I had mentioned to Mom and Dad the thick layer of dust lying on their closet shelves and clothes and other contents, and wondered aloud about the possibility of having the air ducts and vents vacuumed. They rightly stewed about the cost, but got a consultation and bid from friendly Stanley. Stay tuned. While I assembled our Hawaiian chicken and coconut rice dinner, Dad moseyed over to me behind his walker, puffing and grunting with the enormous effort—I could have told him not to bother, but did not want to insult his dignity—to apprise me of their strategy for paying this year’s income taxes and for stretching out their dwindling savings, and to tell me all the reasons why planet Earth is perfectly situated for life, rotating on an add axis angle that allows for changing seasons and hydrologic cycles and a balanced breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and how the moon’s gravity causes ocean tides and even land tides. Did you know New York City rises and falls 14 inches each day under lunar tidal forces? I didn’t.

Courage at Twilight: Dusting the Chandelier

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The reunion is not for another month yet. But Dad wants everything to be perfect for his former missionaries when they come. He has made a mental list of all the little jobs he wants done, though he does not say he wants me to do them. He and Mom have not been able to hold an April reunion for two years due to Covid-19. But on March 31, up to one hundred of them, all dear friends, will descend upon the house and descend the basement stairs to tell stories and sing hymns and eat Brazilian food and bask in love and memory. As their mission president, he was a young 36 (Mom 32), and they about 20. Now he is 87 and they about 70. As Dad rattled off his list, he tossed sections of the New York Times from his chair to the couch—better than dropping them on the floor to be tripped and slipped on, although sometimes he misses—and I grabbed pen and paper to write the tasks. (I can remember a list of only two things; give me three and I am sunk.) The first task was to clean the chandelier and replace all the bulbs, and I volunteered. I could see no dust or grime, and all the teardrop lights worked fine, so I thought it a wasteful task. But to honor him I dragged in the ten-foot step ladder, climbed to inspect, brought up a pack of baby wipes to wash off the dust, and swapped out all seventeen bulbs. While I could see nothing wrong with the chandelier before, now it seemed to shine with twice its prior brilliance. Most important, Dad was happy, which made Mom happy. While I question the wisdom of a reunion, not wanting to see Dad push himself into an exhaustion difficult to recover from, the camaraderie will make him immensely happy. And who knows if this will be the last reunion he hosts. Dad’s days are growing shorter and shorter, by which I mean he rests longer and longer at night and during daytime naps. He no longer reads until three in the morning. Even midnight has been trimmed to 10:30, when Mom helps him upstairs after the ten o’clock news. He keeps a volume of the encyclopedia upstairs and another downstairs, to sneak in minutes of study between CNAs and naps and Mom’s NCIS and meals and voyages to the restroom. Upstairs is volume “A”. I heard him telling Cecilia all about Air and Africa. Downstairs is volume “R” and he reads until his bladder forces him to move. I have wondered what should be my reaction to his grunts and groans as he moves around. Are they signs of acute distress to which I should run in response? Or are they a learned habit reflecting a pervasive state of chronic daily distress? I know I cannot live my life poised tautly on the brink of anxiety, responding in a rush to all his distress, which would become my own acute and chronic mental distress. I would break down teetering always on the edge of emergency. My present reaction is to continue my activities while listening with one ear for signs of extreme distress, like Dad yelling, “Rog! I need your help!” That is when I run. Far from acute, but still distressing, is when Dad or Mom ask me about things I have just finished telling them about. I brought home from Zacateca’s Market three Big Burritos, filled with chopped steak, and announced the steak-filled burritos for dinner. Taking a bite, he asked, “Is this steak? My burrito has steak in it.” Yes, I respond, I just told you it was a steak burrito. “Oh,” he said, both of us feeling bad, for different reasons. I am learning too slowly to be patient with fading memories and ears hard of hearing.

Courage at Twilight: An Argument over English Muffins

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Sleepiness oppresses me on my hour-long drive after Wednesday night City Council meetings. I often arrive at home after 10 p.m., in time to sleep and make the return commute the next morning. My late-night commuter ritual includes a stop at Macy’s grocery store for a bag of bulk milk chocolate almonds or lemon yogurt almonds or Bit o’ Honey candies, which I munch compulsively until they are gone or until my stomach growls at me to quit. On less disciplined nights, I fall for Franz donuts and chocolate milk. This bad habit has become entrenched, and needs to be reformed. So, I bought instead a bag of raw peanuts, having the virtues of being tasty, cheap, healthy, and wakeful. Healthy and wakeful and cheap they may have been, but tasty they were not. I reckon I am too accustomed to salted roasted nuts to enjoy them raw. Mom wants Dad to avoid white flower breads, due to diabetes, and since Dad has been enjoying English Muffins, she instructed me to pick up the whole wheat variety: tasty and healthy. My stomach gnawing for dislike of raw peanuts, I toasted a whole wheat English muffin, topped with butter and raspberry jam, and crunched off a bite with high anticipation. But the taste and texture were awful. The next morning, Dad declared, “Rog, those whole wheat things are not English muffins, they are just bread, and they’re awful.” I was ready to concede they were awful, but not that they were not English muffins. “Yes, they are English muffins,” I countered, “but made with whole wheat flour.” “No, they’re just bread.” “They are not just bread. You may not like them, but they are still English muffins.” “They are not English muffins: they have no wholes in them: they’re just dark round breads they call an English muffin.” “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I yielded, “because I bought some white flour English muffins I am sure you will like,” and toasted him one. Though arguing over nomenclature, we agreed they were horrible, and I threw them away. That night brought 15 inches of new snow, followed by hours behind the snow blower. CNA Cecilia called to report the roads were impassable, which they were, and apologized for not being able to come, which we understood. While I pushed snow, Mom helped Dad shower and dry and dress. I settled Dad to his chosen breakfast of yogurt and a toasted white-flour English muffin with butter and sugar-free jam. I had not thrown the raw peanuts away because Dad suggested a little hot oil and salt in my iron pan might roast them nicely. My roasted and only slightly-burned peanuts were in fact tasty, in addition to being cheap and only slightly less healthy. The roasted peanut aroma permeated the house as I wandered to the basement at one in the morning to flip the heat cable switch so the gutters and downspouts would not fill and freeze. I followed a whining sound to a glass bowl containing Dad’s hearing aids, and opened them to disconnect the batteries. I munched a few homemade peanuts. The snow continued to fall.

Courage at Twilight: In Shadow Still

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The doorbell rang, and my friends, our friends, came happily through the door I opened for them. One spoke no English. Another spoke no Portuguese. The other five all spoke fluently or toward the proficient end of the spectrum. On the menu was Indian butter chicken, which I had simmered and stirred in the crock pot all day, to be served over coconut basmati rice. I had arranged the visit because I love Portuguese and I love Brazil and I like her and her friends, and wanted to meet her mother who is here for a month from Brazil. I pulled the dining room table apart and inserted the two leaves that allowed us to comfortably seat ten. She contributed cotton candy grapes, delightfully delicious. The conversation slid quickly into the old times of 1956 and 1964 and 1972, when Dad and Mom knew their families, the old ones now passed away. And Dad launched into all the old stories about becoming honorary members of an indigenous tribe, about trips to the beaches at Santos and past the tall paraná pines in Londrina’s interior, about my bus trip to Rio de Janeiro as an infant, where I sat on the beach in a picnic basket—yes, I have been to Rio—about taking the bonde (trolley) to the fim da linha (the end of the line) just to see what was there, about Mom pushing me in the stroller to the American Embassy every day for our mail, and remembering half-century-old conversations. Everyone chuckled and chimed in. I tried to add my boyhood experience, but could not quite find a way in—I do not like talking over people. And Dad and the guests laughed and reminisced and talked about the old Brazilian crooners, like Vinícios de Morais, and Tom Jobim (think “Girl from Ipanema”), and Dorival Caymmi, who I adore, who sang about a heartsick youth missing the beaches and palm trees and girls of his home town, and Dad broke into croaky Caymmi song with “Coqueiro de Itapoã” (Itapoã coconut palm) and the areia (sandy beach) and the morenas (beautiful dark-skinned women) and the youth’s saudades (such nostalgia pulling at his heartstrings), and the guests giggled and shouted “I remember that one!” But I could not quite find my way in. “Não vale a pena,” I whispered to her: It’s not worth it. Everyone loved my butter chicken, and as they talked and sang, I cleared the table and washed the dishes. When they left, my work would already be done, and standing at the kitchen sink I felt no pressure to compete or contribute or wiggle my way in. Between plates and pans, I munched on cotton candy grapes, delightfully delicious.

(Photo from eBay, under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Standing Guard

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Dad explained that with the hard plastic mat under his new office chair, he could not stand up from it because the chair moved chaotically around beneath him on its coasters, and he invited me to remove the mat. This was fortunate for me since my mat was cracked and broken. A week later Dad remarked that without the hard plastic mat under his new office chair, he could not move the chair at all because its coasters sank into the shag and refused to roll, and he is stuck, too far (three feet) from his walker. He asked me to return the mat. I had since thrown my broken mat away, so now my chair is stuck in the shag. As I carried the mat downstairs in the early morning, Mom walked past the door of her dark room dressed in her long white night dress. She joked with me later that I must have thought I had seen a ghost. I rejoined about having seen an angel with white hair in flowing white robes. She laughed. Bringing Dad home from the doctor at the end of the day, I prepared to build momentum to roll him up the long ramp. (I am amazed at the gravitational difficulty one single foot of elevation makes behind a loaded wheelchair.) “Where’s my javelina?” he interrupted. “We just passed it,” I replied, not about to stop our progress mid-ramp to point out the pig. I position the pig at the foot of the ramp, a warning to would-be ramp walkers (trippers), but moved it to make way for him and his wheelchair. “Well, make sure not to leave him out in the rain and snow where he will rust too much,” Dad instructed. You may recall that this particular javelina was plasma cut from a sheet of pre-corroded sheet steel, intended to mature with age and element, to continue rusting out of doors, the surface corrosion adding to the sculpture’s rustic charm but not damaging the structure. I admit to returning the javelina to its guard post after depositing Dad inside. But he was pleasant all evening, he praised my dinner of spicy chicken-and-sausage dirty rice, and this morning, when Cecilia asked cheerily, “How are you?” he responded with his trademark, “Marvelously well, thank you,” and moved on to his life’s great physical challenge: the journey to the shower.

Courage at Twilight: A Still and Silent Pen

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My pen has been still and silent. No pleasant scratching of the nib with Shoreline Gold on porous paper. No clicking of the keys. But my mind? Though my tongue is quiet, my mind screams what cannot be written for want of vocabulary, for want of courage, and for fear of offending the innocent. I spent a week away, helping family move along a flip house toward the closing that will pay the debts and determine the quarter’s income. I painted, schlepped, installed vanity lighting in three bathrooms, and installed six ceiling fans, dubbing myself the Ceiling Fan King. Jeanette worked with me, cutting, twisting, and splicing wire, holding parts aloft for long periods of time while I installed insanely difficult-to-insert screws, bolting on fan blades (making sure the right color faced down), and leveling light bars, and by some miracle our record of correct installation, meaning the lights came on, was 11 for 11. And my sighs of relief were 11 times audible and sincere. And then the time came to leave for home, the home I cannot seem to make my own because it is not my own, but someone else’s, in which I borrow a small space, in which I produce culinary delights, with flops here and there—which Mom and Dad still call brilliant—because I’m not a nurse but a general problem solver and cook. And I am shouting again because they do not wear their hearing aids and I would rather shout that say everything twice with a “What’s that?” in between. And Dad dictates the news as he reads it from the New York Times: 35,000 Russian men seeking asylum to escape conscription for Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine; former President Trump’s latest lunacy; the ongoing hunt for dark matter. And Dad says again the absurdly obvious, “Lucille, I’m getting weaker.” Last week, Mom gave me a page from her 1983 journal, written when I was 18 years old, after I left home for college, when a mother’s heart broke for the first departure of her firstborn. “I miss Roger,” she wrote. “There are so many things a mother feels for her children. They are just very dear to her. She remembers nursing them as tiny infants, carrying them around as little children, making cakes and going on walks, helping them in school, etc. She remembers hugs and kisses and little things they made for her. Then the children leave, and it is hard for her. The empty bedroom, the missing place at the table, all the little things that were fixed or made better by them. At the same time, it is right that children leave. They grow and become independent and contributing adults. That’s the way of it. Roger will always be a part of me and I will always love him.” I do not think I have ever read a sweeter rumination about the pining sweetness of a mother for her child. And here I sit, home again—to stay—at 58, a full 40 years after leaving that first time, and Mom remembers my leaving still and appreciates my coming home all the more, and calls me “Dear” and “Baby” and asks me to text her when I get safely to work, and asks about my day when I come home, and has a problem or two for me to solve, which I solve, and clings to me sweetly with the softest skin of an old woman’s hands. And the next time one of us leaves home, it will be her, and I will miss her, and I will gaze into the empty bedroom, and I will remark the missing place at the kitchen table. And I will write my feelings about it all, though for a while my pen will be as still, and as silent, as the empty house.

(Pictured above, Mom at 82 holding great-grandson Wiggy.)

Courage at Twilight: Members of the Tribe

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My ears are attuned to every little sound: the clicks of the break release handles on Dad’s downstairs walker; Mom’s syncopated shuffle; the single beep as the stair lift arrives at the end of the track, upstairs or down; cursing from the bathroom. This morning I awoke to the muscular sound of an industrial-strength vacuum in the master bedroom. Through the doorway I saw Dad sitting on the walker seat and pushing the carpet cleaner forward and back next to the bed. I did not ask, but I knew without asking. His weekday CNA Cecilia—faithful, pleasant, and kind—came shortly after and helped him shower. From my home office I could hear their one-way conversation: she said very little. “Do you know how old the earth is?” he asked her. “Four and a half billion years old!” He knows and loves the Bible and its God, but informed Cecilia that “God did not make the earth in six days.” Rather, He probably took billions of years to make our globe. Dad explained to her about the sun burning hydrogen in nuclear fusion, with enough hydrogen still to burn brightly for billions of years more. He told her that the only way we know how to use nuclear fusion reactions is with a hydrogen bomb, and referenced the atom bombs dropped on Japan. He expounded about ocean currents, and about the hydrologic cycle of evaporation and precipitation and the rivers of water vapor coursing through the skies, and about Argentina’s defiant propensity to default on its international debts, and about the formation of galaxies and stars. “I like to know things,” he summed up. Cecilia, an excellent listener, interposed an occasional affirming “really?” and “oh.” He told her about our family visiting an Indian tribe in Brazil in 1974, and how the tribal elders would not let us into their compound without being members of their tribe, and about how the tribal elders allowed us to become members of their tribe by following them on a course through the grounds and buildings, ending at a ceremonial tree, and about how we bought blow guns and bows and arrows from the indigenous women of the tribe. This is a true story. I know because I was ten and I was there. Dad’s stories sometimes jump from one unconnected subject to another, shifting like an old car with a worn out clutch. Dad lamented to Cecilia, “A few months ago I was a normal person. I could walk. I could do things.” That is not true. I know because I am 58 and I have been there with him, watching the insidiously steady downward degeneration culminating in painful undignified immobility and having to use the carpet cleaner in the mornings. He is not untruthful—he just forgets. And he cannot retrieve his books from his bookshelves or his checkbook from his desk or a glass of ice water, and has to ask Mom and me to fetch these and other things for him. He asked me to bring him Mom’s youthful portrait from his desk, placing it on the end table by his recliner, where he can see it all day as he reads. I remember seeing that portrait of Mom on his desk thirty years ago when I visited his New Brunswick office in the Johnson & Johnson tower. He has gazed at Mom’s youthful portrait for more than six decades, and he tells Mom everyday what a wonderful person she is, and that he loves her. And he steals hugs when she walks by, and she returns the hug and runs her fingers through his sparse wispy hair.

Courage at Twilight: Mangos for Lunch

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Hyrum called me from Brazil, where two weeks ago he began his two years of missionary service for his Church. He was tired but happy, overwhelmed but enthusiastic, intimidated but feeling the Spirit of God, not knowing the language but still communicating, exactly what a new missionary would expect to feel. I encouraged him to be patient and compassionate with himself, to not think about the long two years of days ahead, but about today, one intentional day at a time. The burly tatted barber gave him a nice haircut. And I talked with Brian in Tooele. Poor Lila has another cold, and Owen is already laughing. Avery’s business is looking up. Brian’s Fiverr clientele is growing—he raised his prices because he was too busy with too many clients, but they all requested him anyway. He and Avery are finding balance in the chaotic life of a young family. And I talked with John in Idaho. Their bathroom ceiling fell in while they were out of town. Luckily, the leak from their upstairs neighbors was gray water (washing machine) not black water (toilet). Their landlady put them in a hotel for a few nights, and hired a handyman to fix the ceiling and walls. I fasted a Sunday to seek God’s help in their search for employment after graduation. Henry is almost walking, and puckers and blows kisses. And I talked with Caleb and Edie in Panama, who arrived safety despite cancelled flights and chaotic connections. At church they rejoiced at seeing dear mission friends and converts. The hammocks by the mangrove lagoon were nice, too. Edie is a Marco Polo wiz. And I talked with Hannah over lunch at Costa Vida. This father is trying to find ways to connect with his teenage daughter. We are writing in the pages of a daddy-daughter journal, passing it back and forth, sharing our dreams and goals and interests. She drove herself to my office for the first time. And I talked with Laura in Chicago. I sent her pretty fabrics, and she is full of quilting ideas. Connor is studying furiously in medical school. William has four teeth and loves blackberries. And I talked with Dad and Mom. Dad’s CNAs help him bathe, dress, and get settled downstairs. He has been sending them home early, but paying full price, partly from magnanimity, partly from disliking pampering. Mom and I frequently do chores they could do, like vacuuming the floor of spilled food around his recliner. They are sweet to him; they are his friends; they listen patiently to his stories and laugh at his jokes and sympathize with his pains and indignities, but also need to work the time for which they are paid. He did not disagree. And I talked with Chip at church, who said he would stop by to see Dad, and did. He is a retired east coast cop who speaks his mind, and exclaimed, “Just put on a double diaper and come to church anyway!” He was only partly kidding. “We miss you.” People do miss Dad at church, and inquire after him. A few actually come over, walking the talk, practicing what they preach. Terry brought over a bag of cold apples for Dad to enjoy; peaches are not in season. In Patos de Minas, mangos are in season, and my missionary son’s church meetinghouse nurtures two enormous mango trees in the yard. He is loving both the mangos and the mission. He is feeling the truth of the Gospel message, sharing the good news of the restored Church. He is feeling the presence of God through His Spirit, and love for the people and the place. He says he is Brazilian at heart. A father could not wish for more for his son.

(Pictured above: Yours Truly with 6 of my 7 wonderful children, plus spouses (missing one), and my four beautiful grandchildren.)

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