Notes from the Home - March 2, 2014

   A few days after Al’s ninetieth birthday, I happened upon a piece by Roger Angell on the New Yorker website. I was attracted by title: “Life in the Nineties,” which refers to the lives of nonagenarians. What I found were a few things that applied to a certain sexagenarian of my acquaintance. Take the second paragraph:

   “Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or head: nothing in the middle. But cheer up: if I reverse things and cover my right eye, there you are, back again. If I take my hand away and look at you with both eyes, the empty hole disappears and you’re in 3-D, and actually looking pretty terrific today. Macular degeneration.”

   I could have written that paragraph, although I probably wouldn’t have written it so well. And, in truth, my right eye isn’t as bad as Angell’s. If I covered my left eye, I would recognize you, although what I’d see would be something right out of a funhouse mirror.

   Macular degeneration does have occasional benefits. I had an appointment Tuesday at the West Georgia Eye Care Center. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays Covenant Woods provides free transportation for residents with medical appointments, but the bus was in the shop early last week. They offered to take me and my lightweight chair in a car. Russ was available, however. He likes to push the old man around, so he packed me and wheelchair in the Aveo and off we went. The bus was back Thursday, and Friday’s trip to the Springer Opera House to see Les Miserables was on. To make up for Tuesday’s inconvenience, Penelope, the activities director, said Covenant Woods would pay my way. A more honorable man would have said, “No, no, Russ was the one inconvenienced, not I.”  But twenty-five bucks for a ticket is twenty-five bucks, and what Penelope doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Thus, at no cost to me, I got to enjoy an excellent production of Les Mis.  And since I wasn’t required to cover my left eye, my view was undistorted.

   Later in the article, Angell talks about running into people he hasn’t seen for a while.

   “ ‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, ‘Holy shit—he’s still vertical!’ ”

   That hasn’t happened to me in Columbus, where Russ and Karen are the only people who knew me in the pre-MS days. The closest they’ve come to that is when Russ’ Uncle John sent them a video of some family gatherings back in the day. “Oh my God, Dad,” Russ said. “You had so much dark hair.”

   But back in Ashtabula, my path sometimes crossed the paths of seldom seen friends and acquaintances. When it did, those folks would gush about how good I looked, which always left me thinking, “Holy shit – I must have really looked like crap before.”

   Al’s favorite passage is when Angell writes, “I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver on the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.” Al particularly enjoys sharing the third rule with other residents and the staff, and then he adds, “But I haven’t had one in twenty-five years.”

   To stay young as you grow old, Angell recommends romance. “But I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.”

  

   The trip to the eye doctor went well. He and his assistants peered into my eyes, took pictures of them, made me prove I can’t read the chart with my right eye, told me nothing has changed and to come back in October. He didn’t have to stick a needle in my eye. That was a relief.

   And yet . . . Grandma used to say, “As a rule man’s a fool. When it’s hot, he wants it cool. When it’s cool, he wants it hot; always wanting what is not.” The last time a doc stuck a needle in my eye was in January 2012. Sooner or later, they’ll detect bleeding in my eye and have to give me an injection of the stuff I can’t remember the name of, but it starts with an A. Up in Ohio, I had five or six shots from early 2011 through early 2012. I didn’t look forward to them, but the doctor administered them skillfully and painlessly, and I was getting used to the routine. Now every visit without a shot makes me more apprehensive about getting one. I keep watching the doctor for signs of klutziness, lack of fine motor skills and latent demonic tendencies. So, while I walk out of the eye doctor’s relieved that I didn’t need an injection; there is the fool in me that thinks a shot in the eye would do wonders for my peace of mind.

   Fortunately, before I could get too tangled in the web of my thought, Russ said he had something to show me. “Those apartments over there are where Karen and I are hoping to move,” he said as he drove me home. Their lease at Whisperwood is up in a couple months. One of the things they’re looking for in an apartment is wheelchair accessibility, so I can go over and hang out. I’m probably more excited about their moving than they are.

The Train to Falls Creek

   It must have been the summer of 1955 when we took the train to Falls Creek. I would have been seven and about to go into the second grade. I’ve always thought I was younger when we went, but I remember Dad saying more than once over the years, “We were on one of the last trains up there.” According to several websites, passenger service between Pittsburgh and Buffalo on the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh ended in October 1955. So, ’55 it must be.

   We went to Falls Creek to visit my dad’s Aunt Al – Alice – his cousin Helen and some other relatives whose names I don’t recall. I don’t recall much about Aunt Al, either, and might not remember her at all if it wasn’t for a 1943 letter – an essay on the fanny, really – my grandfather wrote to my dad, who was in the Army at the time. He began by reviewing various synonyms for fanny. To illustrate one, he wrote, “Or as your Aunt Al said once when she took a cooking class, ‘I can cook the ass off all those experts.’” My grandfather died a few months after he wrote this, and Dad gave Nana it and the other letters he’d received from his dad. Occasionally, at family gatherings Nana would get the letters out and have someone read them aloud. My parents, and their parents, were staid Protestants. But Aunt Al had married into a family of Irish Catholics and could say such memorable things. My grandfather ended the little essay by reminding Dad that toilet seats come in just two sizes: the small training seat for toddlers and the standard adult seat. And he wondered what would happen if the same were true of brassieres.

   But back to the summer morning in 1955; the Harris family – Mom, Dad, Barbara, Ed, and I – gathered in the living room of the house on South Park Road and waited for a cab to arrive. The cab took us a mile or two to the Brookside stop on the Pittsburgh Railways Shannon-Drake streetcar line. A few minutes later, the streetcar appeared, and we were on our way to the Baltimore & Ohio’s Pittsburgh station.

   My memories of the trip are few. The B&O station, which was torn down a year or two later to make room for the Parkway East, was at the downtown end of the Smithfield Street Bridge, just across the Monongahela River from the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie station, from whence, a few years later, we would depart on a family vacation in Florida. I’m not certain, but I believe the streetcar stopped in front of the station. All I remember about the station is the Union News kiosk. Why it stands out is a mystery.

   I don’t remember boarding the train. I don’t remember the train pulling out of the station. In fact, I don’t remember anything at all until we got to Butler – forty-four miles and an hour-and-a-half later, according to a 1931 schedule I found on line. As the train approached the Butler station, it passed the Pullman Standard plant. Outside the plant were railroad wheels-and-axel assemblies, millions of them, or so it seemed. But even a sea of steel wheels will hold a seven-year-old boy’s attention for only so long, and I was soon asking Dad why the train was just sitting there. “They’re changing engines,” he said.

   The excitement for the remaining ninety miles of our journey was supplied by the western Pennsylvania topography. Several times we were thrust into darkness when the train entered the tunnels that made it possible for it to go through hills, rather than around them. When the train did go around a hill, it was often possible to see the engine up ahead as it rounded a bend. The steam locomotive, the smoke from its stack stretching out behind it, was endlessly fascinating.

   Our arrival in Falls Creek – or perhaps it was DuBois, the two are only two miles apart, according to the 1931 timetable – had to have taken place with all the attendant hugs, kisses, and expressions of awe over how big Barb, Ed and I had gotten since the last time, but I don’t remember it. And I don’t remember a darn thing about our visit, or whether we stayed just a day or two, or if we spent a week with the Casey clan in Falls Creek, or what we did while we were there.

   But I do remember standing on the crowded station platform on a sunny afternoon waiting for the southbound train. Everyone anxiously looking down the track, hoping to be the first to say, “Here she comes now.” When the train was spotted, I remember turning to look and seeing the locomotive’s headlight brightly shining and smoke belching from the smokestack. A moment later, accompanied by the hissing and screeching of the brakes doing their work, the iron horse eased by the platform, its great drive wheels slowly turning. A thrilling and unforgettable sight for a boy of seven.

   Two hours later, in the fading evening light, the train sat motionless in Butler. “Why?” I asked. “They’re changing engines,” Dad said. I accepted his explanation but never asked why they always changed engines in Butler. The sun was down when the train reached Pittsburgh and backed slowly toward the B&O station along the banks of the Monongahela, which sparkled with reflected light. A decade later, when the young man’s fancy had turned to love, I would remember the sparkling river, and picture a beautiful young lady and me, looking very Cary Grantish, of course, in a Pullman compartment dreaming romantic dreams as our train traveled along the banks of a river sparkling with the lights of a big city. Then I’d remember, the mighty Mon that night sparkled with nothing more romantic than the reflected light of Jones & Laughlin’s South Side Works.

   I don’t remember getting off the train or our trip back to South Park Road. But I do remember that for several years after our trip to Falls Creek, I would sit often sit and dream of being on that train, of seeing the engine up ahead, of watching the scenery flash by, of the sudden darkness of going into a tunnel and of standing on the station platform as the train pulled into Falls Creek. There is so much I’ve forgotten about that trip, but I’ll never forget the thrill of my first train ride.

  

Notes from the Home - February 21, 2114

  
   Al celebrated – celebrated might not be the right word – let’s say, Al noted his ninetieth birthday last week. Besides lots of good wishes, he was given chocolates of various kinds by various people. Extolling the benefits of chocolate and warning of the dangers of sugar, he distributed the bounty among his friends. He gave Isabelle the Whitman Sampler he’d received, Ron got some tarted-up  Oreos, I got a bag of Ghirardelli Valentine’s Caramel Chocolate Trio and he re-gifted some other chocolate treats to a couple of women who live near him on the second floor.

   I was beginning to wonder if Al was ready to turn ninety. As we were leaving the dining room Thursday, Alisha met us coming the other way. She is an attractive twenty-something who handles the evening shift at the front desk. She was wearing a black top with “Guess” spelled out across her chest in glittery silver stuff.

   “What’s that say?” Al asked.

   “ ‘Guess.’ I got it when I was in Las Vegas.”

   “It’s not spelled right, is it?”

   “Yes it is.”

   With that, Al, normally quite the chivalrous fellow, went into dirty-old-man mode. He got a little closer to Alisha and looked down at the letters. “G,” he said, and poked the G. “U,” he said, and poked the U. “E,” he said, but before he could poke the E, Alisha said, “I better get back to the desk.”

   “He wasn’t fooling anyone,” she told me later.

   Friday, whether it was the Yuengling, the Lake Country Red, the hydrocodone, the marinol or a combination of some or all of them, Al less steady on his feet and more at sea in conversation than anyone could remember him being before. But over the weekend he got back to just being Al, and last night he was positively jovial. We were in the dining room, working on the menus.

   “I wonder if anybody knows any good jokes,” he said.

   “I do,” Annie said, as she blew by on her way to the kitchen to get something to eat before she went to call bingo.

   When she came back through, I asked her to share the jokes with us.

   “There’s no sense in me telling them,” said Annie, who has strong lungs and proceeded to use them. “If I do that, Al will look at me funny, then he’ll turn to you and say, ‘Tom, what did she say? I can’t hear a word she’s saying.’”

   “Help me out, Tom,” Al said. “What did she say?”

  

   What a difference nine hundred miles makes. Yesterday, before the sun was up, an e-mail from Nancy appeared in my inbox. “Snow day!” she announced giddily. Ash/Craft and Happy Hearts would be closed for the day, and she was going to work on her quilt and then go cross country skiing down at Cederquist Park.

   Here in west Georgia it was spring. Frogs, toads and some of their amphibian friends provided the background noise with their croaking. In the morning, shortly before eight, I went out, wearing a light jacket. 

  

   These days, all my Saturdays start the same way. After getting dressed and attending to the matters that must be attended to in the bathroom, I turn on the coffeemaker, pour a glass of orange juice, gather the bottles with the child-proof caps that my prescriptions come in, and go to the table. There, I pick up the little plastic daily-pill-organizer thingy, take out Saturday’s ration and wash it down with a slug of OJ.

   Saturday is the last day of the pill organizer’s week, and I set about restocking it. I pick up a bottle with my right hand, open it, tap it against the open palm of my left hand, hoping seven pills roll out on to my palm before one or more roll out on to the floor, put one pill in each of the organizer’s little compartments and repeat the process with the next bottle.

   While doing this mindless task, I am amazed at how fast Saturday got here. Long periods of time – weeks, months, years – seem to speed by. In six weeks I will have been in Covenant Woods for two years. But it feels like just a few months ago that Russ and I pulled out of Ashtabula, U Haul in tow, on a rainy Saturday morning.

   The days though go on forever. The afternoons are often month-long affairs. And they’re creeping by even more slowly in the early months of 2014. The dreary days – overcast, raining, more overcast, drizzle, more overcast, thundershower, a moment of sunshine, overcast, ad nauseum – are partly responsible. But the truth is an old-folks home probably isn’t the best place for a person young enough to be the offspring of many of the other residents. Richie and William, who are both younger than I, drink their way through each day.

   One morning earlier in the week, I made my way around the parking lots and stopped to talk to James, who was tossing the accumulated garbage into the dumpster. As we discussed the Olympics, William came up the path from the shopping plaza next door.

   “Why the cane?” James asked when he saw William.

   “I’m having balance issues,” William told him.

   James and I managed to stifle our laughter until William was out of earshot. Then we wondered aloud about the twenty-four pack of Coors in the Piggly-Wiggly bag William was lugging, and how it might affect his balance at eight-fifteen in the morning.

   My balance being what it is, I better find other ways to pass the time.

  

   I woke up a few minutes before midnight last night. At precisely the witching hour, an alarm went off next door in Leila’s apartment. The beep, beep, beep, beep of what was likely a clock radio went on and on. At ten-after, I called the office. The woman who answered the phone transferred me to security, and I told man about the alarm. He asked me what room I was in. I told him, and he said, “Thanks, 

darlin.’ ”

   I’ve been called “ma’am” by strangers on the phone – male and female – a thousand times in the last six years. But it is the first time in all my nearly sixty-six years that a man has called me “darlin.” It is nothing to worry about, I tell myself, just another example of MS and the telephone playing tricks on the people I talk to. Then I think, Deliverance was set in Georgia, wasn’t it?

  

The Week That Was

   February got off to a sputtering start here at Covenant Woods. Saturday, the first day of the month, dawned cloudy, cool, and damp. It was a morning when a wise person has another cup of coffee and keeps busy inside. Not being a wise person, though occasionally called a wise guy, I opted to saddle up the wheelchair and head to Piggly-Wiggly.

   To get to The Pig, I go down the asphalt path that links a Covenant Woods’ parking lot to the service road next to the store formerly known as K-Mart but now called “Building for Rent.”  At each end of the path, asphalt has been packed in to create a short, steep ramp, to allow wheelchairs to get up onto the path and down from it. The ramps extend just a foot or so from the berm and are too steep to drive straight up – the wheelchair’s footplate gets in the way. They have to be approached at an angle.

   On the morning in question, I made it down the path and did my shopping without incident. The problem arose when I attempted – and “attempted” is the operative word – to get back on the path. I approached the ramp as I always do and started up the incline when the wheelchair, of its own accord, circled sharply to the right. In a trice, the chair was straddling the berm, and neither of the drive wheels was making contact with the ground. I was stuck. But the cell phone – don’t leave home without it – was in my pocket, and I called Covenant Woods and explained the problem.

   Moments later, Cepeda and Cliff, who are both on the kitchen staff, were headed down the path. Cepeda’s brother’s name is Orlando; their father was a big fan of the former major leaguer. Cliff has the height of a basketball center and the build of a defensive tackle. I was in good hands. Cliff got behind the chair, gave it one good tug, and it was on solid ground once again. I did my best to disguise my embarrassment.

   Weatherwise, Tuesday was just as unpleasant as Saturday, but the prospect of going to the Columbus Clinic for a colonoscopy consult made it at least slightly more unpleasant overall. To be fair, much of the unpleasantness was borne by Russ. It was another cold, damp morning, and his old man’s legs were about as stiff as they could be. Russ expended a great deal of energy helping me get in and out of the car.

   Once at the clinic, a nurse led us back to a room where she took my vital signs. My blood pressure was a stellar one-twenty-something over seventy-something; a real surprise given how I was dreading the whole colonoscopy thing. That was followed by a video which explained the procedure. The video included a clip of the probe making its way through somebody’s large intestine. It looked like a coal mine.

   From there, we were taken to the office of a nurse practitioner, who asked bunches of questions about my bowel habits and explained the procedure in more detail. She said they would e-mail – or however they do it these days – three prescriptions to the Publix pharmacy across the street from Covenant Woods. The prescriptions, she said, were for stuff to clean out my system. Then she asked how much trouble I have getting on and off the toilet. I told her I’m stiff and slow in the best of circumstances, and if my brain were to receive messages from my nether regions that a world-class bowel movement was imminent, I would likely end up on the floor buried in it.

   She looked at me with eyes that said, “That’s what I thought.” And she said, “Maybe we ought to call this off.” I was agreeable. She told me to pay close attention to my bowel movements, and if there were any change, or if I noticed blood in them, to let the doctors know; they could put me in the hospital for a night so there would be trained professionals to help me on and off the throne.

   Wednesday morning, the phone rang, and I listened to the recorded message from the Publix pharmacy. They had three prescriptions for me ready to be picked up. When the recording ended, I called the pharmacy and told a real person that I wouldn’t need the prescribed items. He tried his best to be understanding. But it was only a few weeks ago that I had to call and tell them the prescription for blood pressure medication that was ready for pickup should have been sent to my pharmacy benefits manager.

   Thursday was the kind of day I used to hope for back in Ashtabula when the Star Beacon sent me to cover a high school baseball or softball game in early April: cloudless sky, plenty of sunshine, just a hint of a breeze, temperature in the fifties. It was a day for getting outside and touring the Covenant Woods’ parking lots. In my travels, I began to wonder if I was at fault for what had occurred Saturday, or did the wheelchair misbehave.

   On Saturday, I didn’t have any trouble getting on the path at the Covenant Woods’ end. And I didn’t have any difficulty when I tried on Thursday. Then I turned around and went back to the parking lot. The only difference between getting on the path from the parking lot and getting on it from the service road is my approach. In the parking lot, the left front wheel hits the ramp first; on the service road, the right front wheel is the first to make contact with the ramp. Simple enough, I thought, all I have to do is head for the ramp from the other side and see what happens. I did, and what happened is just what happened Saturday. As I sat cursing my fate, a fellow, on his way to visit his grandmother, came by and asked if I needed a hand. I released the wheels, and he pulled the chair and me back far enough to get the drive wheels on the ground again. The rest was easy. I don’t know how he felt, but I thought he timed his visit perfectly.

   Friday, I got an e-mail from Life in Spite of MS, a website. I came across the site several months ago. Life in Spite of MS was looking for poems about MS by people with MS, and I sent them one I had written a few years ago. Friday’s e-mail was to let me know all the poems they received had been collected and published as two e-books – When Life Gives You Challenges, Write a Poem: Book 1 and When Life Gives You Challenges, Write a Poem: Book 2. My poem, “A Short Walk”, is in Book 2. The books are $1.99 each and available through Amazon. There are several days when the books can be had for free. And the Kindle app I needed to download them was also free.

   And that was the week that was.