Mom

Mom is in Brewer now, in a memory care facility.

She went there in late July, after her numbers, then her words, then her memory, and finally her sense of reality began to fail her. It was a painful decision to make, but all evidence I have tells me it was the right decision to make.

Ever since things began to go south for her, I've had dreams that made me question her condition:  we have conversations just like when I was a teenage kid, in need of guidance or just a sympathetic ear. Mom in my dreams is the Mom I grew up with, lucid, kind, and one of the most intelligent people I know. It's painful to see this degradation occurring.

Today we went to visit Mom at Woodlands, where she has people around her who are going through the same things. There are staff who lead activities that she seems to enjoy; she always enjoyed watching people before, and even when the activities don't seem to interest her now, she still seems to enjoy watching people.

We brought a couple of bags of candy to her today, along with some sweaters to wear outside as the weather gets cooler. Woodlands has a nice little courtyard where the residents often like to step outside. When we arrived, Mom was seated in the common area, asleep in a chair. The young attendant woke her, and when she saw me she stood up slowly, and gave me a big hug. "I love you!", she said. One of the most lucid phrases I've heard in months from her. After she saw Rach and the kids, and gave them all hugs, we gave her the bags of candy and the sweaters and started to walk the halls of the facility.

She was trying to tell us about someone who'd had two babies in visiting, and seemed to be taking us on a search to find them. It is possible they'd been there recently, and it's possible they were there days or weeks ago. It's hard to know at this point, because Mom has lost the ability to communicate details like that on command. It might come out later on, in random conversation, and no one will know what she's trying to communicate. Early on the frustration of knowing she had something to say, but that it was becoming more and more difficult for her to do so, seemed to be really troubling her. We've come to a point where it doesn't seem to matter or to register with her that her thoughts are seldom finished.

I took the candy and the sweaters to her room and dropped them off, then we walked the halls for a little while, in search of something (the babies?), but I'm not sure what. Then we went out on the gazebo for fifteen minutes or so and talked. This mostly consisted of us just reciting the things happening in our lives recently, and talking about the people who we knew had visited recently. From time to time she would ask an undefined question, and we did our best to give an answer that sounded like it might answer what we thought she was asking about. For the most part she seemed satisfied.

But then she got up pretty abruptly and led us back inside. She was looking for something, but we were unclear about what she was looking for. We wandered around for a while and tried to sit down and talk in a family area, but she was still pretty distracted by what she was looking for. She said the word "two" a couple of times, and gestured something small. I assumed it was the babies she was looking for.

After a while, a fellow resident took her by the arm and they walked around for a while. Mom seemed--well, actually a little happy. It was the first time I've seen her seem at home. She was no longer agitated about whatever she was missing, and she was just sharing the walk with someone else she seemed to like. We took the cue to leave while she was happy and not begging to come with us. Three of us have pretty bad colds, so we didn't want to infect the entire place, either.

On the way home, somewhere around Carmel or Newport or somewhere like that, Rach said: "It was the candy." Two bags of candy. They were small. She was looking for the bags of candy. I'm hoping she stumbles upon them, like serendipity, with no memory of the angst she had while looking for them. There are a lot of wishes I have these days.

It Was a Great Time to Be a Saxophonist

Man, I'm bad at this blogging thing. One year and one month ago I posted about Space Camp, and promised it wouldn't be another whole year until I posted again. Guess what...

I even started a WordPress blog a few weeks back, hoping a change of servers would get me back in the game. It didn't. I'm a stinky blogger. When I went back in today, I found that my WordPress username isn't being recognized, and neither are any of my passwords, so I've decided to come back to Blogger. Hope I don't overwhelm their servers.

Anyway, I've been giving lots of thought to my blogging tendencies lately, and have come up with the following observation: no one really cares what I have to say, so I don't have to worry about what I write about! I have the freedom of irrelevance. A forty-five year old guy doesn't have much for a hipness factor. I'm not really on the cutting edge of anything, except nostalgia. I can go on for quite a while about the pitfalls of aging if you want, as I watch my parents' health deteriorate. That could make for some serious belly laughs. Even my kids don't provide quite the same fodder as they used to; sophomores and eighth graders are pretty self-sufficient and aren't quite as prone to malapropisms or missed meaning the way they used to be. They are, however, pretty funny and awesome in their own rights, and I would much rather read what they have to say than anything I write. We'll work on that.

But today I think I'll write about something near and dear to my heart: 80's music.

A couple weekends ago, the family and I were crammed into the pickup, dropping off a bed for my mother for her new room at Woodlands Memory Unit. But I don't want to get off on a tangent on my parents' aging...

On the radio (yes, sometimes we still listen to the radio, rather than plugging in an mp3 player) there was a re-run of the American Top 40 from July 24, 1982. Casey Kasem's voice sounded as vital as it did bak then (probably because it was recorded, well, BACK THEN...) and far better than Ryan Seacrest's ever did.

You know what I found, as my son cringed uncomfortably in the back seat, and I sang along shamelessly to songs that (for good reason, it turns out) I'd forgotten existed? EVERY SINGLE SONG HAD A SAX BREAK. Do you remember the early 1980's, when saxophone equaled emotion? Kind of the same way cello=emotion these days? Strangely, all it took was a bar of each of the songs for me to say "Oh, yeah, 'HEY, PLAY THE GAME TONIGHT/CAN YOU TELL ME IF IT'S WRONG OR RIGHT/IS IT WORTH THE TIME, IS IT WORTH THE FIGHT?/CAN YOU SEE YOURSELF IN THE BRIGHT SPOT LIGHT/AND PLAY THE GAME TO-OO-NIGHT...' ", while my wife looked at me quizzically, saying "I honestly have no recollection of this song."*

Beyond that, I was struck by how horribly unadventurous the music was. They were the Top 40 songs in America for that week, and there were maybe ten that were worth remembering. That was somewhat reassuring to me. Back then, the Top 40 was what I lived for. I listened every week. I was just beginning to follow more underground music (I literally cheered when artists on this particular countdown such as Kim Wilde, Human League, Haircut 100, Soft Cell and the Motels made the countdown)** but I was still a Top 40 kid. 

But I could name you hundreds of artists now who were much more influential and important than most of these Top 40 artists, but who rarely, if ever, made the countdown. My education as a music buff went far beyond Casey Kasem. And this is encouraging to me now, as I watch my students, and sometimes my own child, idolize the crappiest music out there. I could tell them they won't remember One Direction thirty years from now, but they won't believe me. However, I have faith that their tastes will, for the most part, improve with time. Their horizons will expand. And yet some of them, will still line up for that 1D/Jonas Brothers/Hanson triple bill tour in 2043. I hope they have fun, and are ridiculed roundly by their kids.

But it really dawned on me, the early 80's were a great time to be a sax player. 

*I don't think this song had a sax break. But I don't want to listen to find out.

**Okay, so not every song had a sax break. But most of them did.