Houses

I dream about houses a lot.

In dreams of longing, I somehow get transported to the house on Louther Street in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We lived there for a miniscule year and three months; it was a five-bedroom palace of neglected antiquity, with huge wooden pillars, a warped hardwood floor, eleven-foot ceilings ... and I could have lived there all the rest of my days. I loved that house. Should I be so fortunate as to get to Heaven, that house -- or its counterpart -- will be mine.

But for many years, every house in my dreams has been what was my mother's house. In my dreams, I lived there, no matter that nearly 40 years have passed since I did. The enclosed back porch, what had been my bedroom, the living room, the side yard ... one or more features would form the backdrop of my dreams. There's no wonder at that; my mother's decline into Alzheimer's and my sister's death anchored my subconscious there. What I had to do, and what I failed to do, what I watched crumble into an unholy mess -- all those things burned themselves into my heart.

Waking from dreams of my mother's house, I'd sigh, and wonder if I'd ever be free of it, rise, and go about the day. Sometimes you just have to let the dreams go, otherwise, you go nuts trying to outsmart your subconscious.

A couple nights ago, I was back there again, but there was a difference. Yes, there was still a sense of frustration that things couldn't be put right; yes, there was still a sense of accusation that I had failed somehow; but one thing was different: I was packing stuff up, getting ready to move away.

I stood at the top of the stairs, looking at the basement (that my father had in real life dug out and finished, but in the dream had been made into two rooms), and thought, "Well, I'll be out of here soon, and won't have to come back again."

What a thought for a dream! All the symbols in dreams are our own selves. Did my dream mean that I am soon going to die, and so the house that is me will be left behind?

When I woke, I just drifted with the sense of relief in the dream, and let it go at that. We're all going to die, some sooner than others, and I can't do anything about that. But relief -- that made me smile.

The next night, I dreamed I was back in Mifflintown (where I grew up) again, but instead of being in my mother's house, I was in this truly cool little boutique hotel down town, with wide cement steps to the upstairs, and comfy rooms. Why haven't I always stayed here when I've visited? I asked myself in the dream. It was so pleasant, and peaceful, and pretty -- a delightful fabrication of my dreaming mind.

And then, perhaps born of the triumph of not being in my mother's house, the next night I dreamed that I was staying in a beach-side resort, with very wide floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the beach, and a flight of wooden stairs leading from sliding doors off the bedroom to a deck below on the beach. Yeah. I could get into that. Big dark brown stones made a natural windbreak for the deck, and the sand was the light brown of the Pacific coast rather than the white sand of the Atlantic. I love it here, I thought, and woke up.

Yesterday I was poised to use this photo and bounce my entry off it, but one of the photos I took (in a series of seven) crashed and burned on my computer, saying that it was a file of an unknown type and couldn't be opened.

This scared me so I didn't want to even use my computer. WTF???

Once I found that my files were intact this morning, and that my computer was free of virus buggies, I thought about what I had wanted to say yesterday, and found that the picture of the eucalyptus leaves against the autumn sky was more apropos than I had thought.

I had been remembering my mother. She said, on numerous occasions, that her mother had been a great story-teller, sitting on the front stoop of their apartment building, telling tales to a small group of neighborhood kids who hung on her every word.

Hmm. What stories, Mom? What did she tell stories about?

I know she must have told stories of La Llorona, the weeping ghost seeking her drowned kids, because my mother told it to me. What hispanic kid never shivered in the night, hearing crying sounds on the air, wondering if La Llorona was coming to claim them to replace her dead children?

But.

How many Mexican kids were in that tenement block in Bethlehem, PA, in the 1930s, to cluster around to listen to Josefa Palos tell stories? My mother never mentioned any other Mexican families living there. Mom mentioned Irish and Slovak families, racial epithets tossed as the immigrants sought a balance and foothold in America. But not other Mexicans. How could my grandmother have garnered an audience of non-hispanics, when she didn't speak English?

I know she didn't, because we (very infrequently) visited Uncle Buddy's house, where resided my uncle and Aunt Lucy, three of my cousins, and my grandmother Palos. She did not speak to me or to my sister, or my father; she spoke only to my mother, in low, nearly-whispered tones, in Spanish.

My mother claimed all her lucid life that she learned Spanish in school, because her mother insisted that she and her brothers all spoke English exclusively, to moor them in the country they had been brought to.

I studied enough of language and linguistics to know that was a lie, because even when my mother's mind began to fail, she was fluent in Spanish. In my high school years, she would not speak Spanish to me, saying that I had the accent of a Cuban. I took four years of Spanish in high school, acing every class, and another class or two in college, having exempted out of all the basic courses. Yet by the time I was twenty-five, disuse had paralyzed my ability to communicate in that language. Mom's disuse had no affect on her, ever. She was a native speaker.

See those chewed-up leaves on the tree? Our memories are subject to chewing, the mandibles of regret and remorse and denial munching up the files of what we think we remember. The leaves on that eucalyptus tree don't remember the leaf-cutter bees that snipped at them to make their nests; by and large, most of us have missing chunks of our memories that we don't know are gone, and sometimes, even when we have a visceral knowledge that they are gone, our mighty intellects furnish an alternative memory that seems to make sense.

Some day, I hope to actually meet my grandmother, and give her huge hugs, and jangle all her stories from her, unhindered by language. She will probably think that I am a pest, but then we will mount our horses, she upon her horse Liston, I upon Crow, and we will ride off on the hillsides to gossip about my mother's weirdness, and bridge the long chasm between our lives.

The Biting Poltergeist

Back in 1972, I drew a cartoon episode called "The Biting Poltergeist."

It was drawn on a cheap newsprint pad, 24" x 30", and I've carried that pad along with me back and forth across the country. This past few years, I couldn't help but admit that the paper was crumbling, that the cartoon in blue Bic ink was in danger of disappearing into dust. I knew I had to figure out a way to preserve it, even though it's really not very funny. 

The process is being discussed in my other blog, Resolution Every Day, in which I goad myself to create something ... duh, every day. But here, I'd just like to talk about the thing.

My friend Bill and I played role-playing games before we knew there was such a thing. Or maybe we imagined mini-series. Or maybe it was story-volleyball. We didn't worry about it, we just constructed a castle on the Rhine River, and peopled it with Helmuth de Witt (the Elder -- that was me) and Cousin Siegfried (that was Bill), and a myriad of characters. He has a pasteboard Christmas tableau of a veritable forest of characters that he still keeps (he's a better archiver than I), and I have a couple of cartoons.

Nearly forty years later, I can't honestly remember what made us cackle about a biting poltergeist; it might have been a headline from a tabloid, or a book of ghost stories. Nevertheless, the cartoon was drawn, and eventually I hope to put it in the Piker Press so that it gets that little copyright symbol on it.

Helmuth de Witt the Elder and Cousin Siegfried were both "old fogeys" back in 1972; although I'm not as fat as I drew Helmuth, and Bill is not at all as bald as Cousin Siegfried, I can almost recognize us NOW from the old cartoon. This is a pic of Bill and me in 2007.

We've been friends since we were both in first grade together, and admired each other's artwork since then, too. He says he can't wait to see "The Biting Poltergeist" again.

Inexorable Things, and Poppies

The late afternoon sun was perfect for illuminating these poppies and giving them a glowing color that needed no touch-ups in Photoshop.

In a month, it will be ten years since we moved into this house. I can't forget the first morning we woke here, to a quiet neighborhood and the sweet sound of birdsong. At that time there were maybe two or three spindly poppy plants on the back bank, which, along with the lawn, were dying for lack of water. We collected their seeds and sprinkled them on the dry ground, and were rewarded the following spring by a humble crowd of wildflowers.

Every winter since then, we've looked for the first poppy sprouts on the bank, a promise of spring to come soon.

I tried and failed to get hold of my mother's doctor today; but the caseworker from the Area Agency on Aging called me and we compared notes. Apparently my mother has been turning off the ringer on her phone. Now, does she know she's doing this? Is she doing it so that the phone doesn't ring while she's eating lunch, and then forget that she has? Is it her way of avoiding the caseworkers who try to call to schedule appointments? Connie the caseworker said she's turned the ringer on Mom's phone to the "On" setting twice now, after calling and calling and getting no answer.

Yesterday my mother-in-law tried to call, and getting no answer for the second day in a row, drove to Mom's house to see her. They had a nice visit, but Mother-in-law was appalled to see how thin and desiccated my mother looked. Forgetting to eat, perhaps?

Connie told me that last Monday, when she arrived to take my mother to her doctor's appointment, that (of course) my mother had forgotten about the appointment and tried to get out of it by saying she wasn't ready. Connie told her to go ahead and get ready, they had plenty of time, and while Ma was out of the room, Connie spoke to my sister, just chitchat. Amazingly, Jan answered her, and spoke to her ... until Mom scuttled back into the room and told Jan to stop showing off. Jan clammed up and spoke not another word. Still, I was elated to hear that Jan is still responsive -- she's been so quiet for so long that I worried that she had lost the ability to interact.

The consensus seems to be that Jan should be removed from my mother's home as soon as possible for not only her well-being, but her safety. If Mom can't remember to feed herself, is she actually remembering to take care of Jan? I know that it is going to cause upheaval in their lives, but I think that even in the short term, getting Jan out of that house could only be the best for her.

The other thing is the issue of my mother driving. She's already admitted to getting herself "lost" on her way to church once, and a friend called me to tell me he saved her ass when she hit a cloud of confusion at the local gas station and suddenly could not remember how to put gas in her little truck or how to pay for it; I've been instructed to tell her physician about the incidents, and in light of his evaluation of her condition, he will probably send paperwork to the Pennsylvania DMV to require her to go in for a driving test -- which I cannot imagine she would be able to pass.

She has good days sometimes, when her laugh sounds relaxed and easy, and she understands the things I tell her. I like to let those conversations hearken me back to the days 20 plus years ago when I lived in Pennsylvania, too, and we would meet in the earliest hours of the day to fish in the river while our respective households slept in. She was there to see me cast from 15 feet away into a tiny creek that emptied into the river -- and come up with a 17-inch trout, much to our surprise. Or the time we were surf-fishing on Hatteras Island, and I caught a little shark -- and Mom had to come to the rescue and take the hook from its mouth. The beast was still twitching and switching when we took it back to the cleaning station, and in shame for my earlier cowardice, I grasped it by the tail and whammed it hard on the wooden gutting table. I don't know that I ever remember my mother laughing that hard at anything else I ever did. (And she did appreciate the way I cooked the shark that day.)

There was a time when she was a good, good friend. Maybe in the next life we'll be able to recapture that friendship.