No day comes back again.
—Chinese Proverb
One inch of time is worth a foot of jade.
My dad looks unkempt. Long fingernails, and dirty ones at that. Is food, or something else on your hands? Unshaven, matted hair, a wild look in his eyes, and he’s wincing a lot as he shifts in his chair, still with that blue holster under him. Pedals still on the wheelchair, where I left them less than 48 hours ago. He is no better. A puddle, a large puddle in a wheelchair.
“You got pain somewhere?” I ask him.
Slight shake of the head. Earlier I asked him, “What’d you have for breakfast?” No answer. He pill-rolls, twiddles his thumbs, slumps off to sleep.
The nurse at the desk, the OG—her name is Julia or Karen—told me that the Dammert halls are able to congregate with one another again. That is very good news! Covid still has the rest of the Benedictine Retirement Community off limits to Dammert residents but it’s nice to see people in the Bird Room again. That’s where I found him slumped when I arrived.
It thus appears likely I’ll see Bob today—Bob Lanaghan, I mean. Lunch in the main Dammert dining room, just like old times. Unable to wheel my dad through St. Francis (assisted living) to get outside, I took him out the Dammert front door, down the gravelly access road and around just past the St. Francis entrance to a spot where we could sit and look, now, at Porcupine Hill. It’s pleasant. The humidity is lifting, implying a breeze. Mid-seventies. Cloudy. The sun attempted to break through the clouds for a moment, rebuffed. There’s a smell of smoke, especially when the breeze is scarce.
It’s Saturday, August 31st. Two days before Labor Day, when Brook and I will drive (back) to Tucson for a couple-a weeks. A Red-shouldered Hawk utters its plea. A woman pulls up, and picks up a St. Francis resident who I would guess is her sister. I don’t know them. I haven’t sat out here since…mid-July. Geez. Trip to Tijuana, Covid sickness, Covid lockdown, six weeks gone in a flash.
I was refreshing myself on the names of some of the Dammert residents. I forgot one lady’s name. Crikey. I want to call her Loretta but that’s not right. I know Loretta. And I know this woman whose name I forgot. She’s also an OG, been here since the beginning. Speaks to me sometimes. She has once or twice asked me, “Are you one of mine?” Is it Lorraine? No, not quite. I sat in the Bird Room one time and listened to her try to get a few other ladies interested in making a K-Mart run. “The prices are very reasonable,” she said. “It’s just down the road.” Actually, there did used to be a K-Mart just down the road.
More than once this woman has insisted that I must be in school. “So you’re in school, then?” she’ll say. And I’ll say no, I’m past that. “Really?” she’ll say, raising an eyebrow, giving me a very skeptical look. She is the only person who has ever labeled me as being “successful.” And she has told me twice that I “look good.” Early on she stopped me and asked, “Do you know who I am?” I said no. “Well, you will,” she said, “and watch out because they’ll try to get you in on one of their schemes.” Now I cannot remember her name and that vexes me.*
The storms of life. An excellent Randy Travis album. And a way to describe what the last few years have felt like. I know I’ve got it pretty good. But I’m still just a tumbleweed. Driftwood. A passing satellite. Whatever that was that flew over us at camp on the last night outside Tijuana, a chunk of space junk falling out of orbit. Smoking, burning, succumbing to gravity, soon to be wreckage.
My dad had that album on cassette. I’m playing some of it for him now but he doesn’t seem to hear it. He’s out of it. I’ll say this as long as I need to: This could be one of the last times I see my dad alive. His body is tired. The hawk cries again. I cry again, and I want to. All of the emotion. I’m a glutton for it because it makes my life feel real. At least I’ve got some purpose here, visiting my dad, for as long as he lasts. After that I gotta find another act.
Back in the lunch room. Bob is here but he’s not saying much. The other Bob, my dad’s old roommate, coughs.
“I don’t know if I woke him up last night,” says Bob Lanaghan, seeming to speak for former-roommate Bob. “I woke up a lot of people last night.” He is tapping along to the music that Brad has playing. The woman with the laugh is named Susie. Someone just made reference to her but she is not in here yet.
Bob is saying something again about last night. “A lot went on last night,” he says. “It was hot last night.”
Then he says something about somebody going to Rock Island last night. He’s from Rock Island, I believe. His dad ran a Sears & Roebuck up there. I went to high school with someone from Rock Island. The Quad Cities.
Someone asks Joyce if Susie is still a resident of Dammert.
“Yes,” says Joyce, “so I’m surprised we don’t see her. Or hear her.” And Joyce gives a little laugh herself. Joyce is the one with the puzzle book. Find-a-Word. She’s often doing them. Her children visit pretty often. Sunday staple. She has one daughter who lives in Florida, but a couple other daughters who must live nearby. And a couple of sons.
“There was a batch of ’em right over here,” says Bob.
“What’s that?” I ask him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “It’s pretty early.”
The nurse, the OG, her name is definitely Karen.** She just rescued Bob from out of here. He was feeling the call of nature. He kept trying to get up. He still uses a walker whereas most residents are in wheelchairs. I was trying to tell him not to get up, that lunch was soon to arrive. But he said he had to go, if I knew what he meant.
Other CNAs were bringing other residents in, pouring drinks, exhorting him to sit down. But he wasn’t having any of it. I helped him get his hands on his walker. His eyesight is basically nonexistent and he was disoriented on top of that. I was afraid he was about to fall. Karen came in and guided him out of here. He said something like, “I’ve got a lot of stuff and my body’s saying I’ve got to get rid of it.”
We have reached the stupor phase of lunch. There is old-time music playing. My dad is groaning with pleasure; sighing. Probably peeing. The coffee, he used to say, goes right through him. The meal was turkey club, waffle fries, and mushroom bisque. I traded my dad half of the tuna salad sandwich I had (courtesy of Mom) for the entire Turkey Club. My dad never really liked deli meat. The club is fine but the tomato slice on it was too much stem and didn’t taste quite right besides.
Sinatra is singing, the CD is called “The Crooners.” Or maybe it’s not Sinatra but the guy I often confuse him with, whose name is escaping me. Dean Martin. The patio outside this lunchroom is still under construction/being repaired. I never had the pleasure of seeing it open or “in use.” One of the large concrete slabs had sunk, capsized, jackknifed. That piece is gone. I saw excavators here one day. There are doors leading out there from this dining room, and it looks like a decent spot to spend a nice day but the doors have been locked, the venue remains off limits.
Bob walkers back in. A woman at the first lunch table says, “I’ve lost all enthusiasm for those Cardinals.”
Bob digs in to a dish of Nilla wafers, special order. He eats the wafers then licks the dish. He eats some of his turkey, drinks some of the shake thing they give him, eats a couple of fries. I was eyeing those waffle fries while he was gone. He has not touched his soup. He might not even know it’s there.
The lunch room has gone totally quiet. Jack is in the back but he looks like he’s in pretty rough shape. Bob spits out his tomato! I was right. And his tomato looked good but something wasn’t right there. Karen had to wheel Jack in here backward, his shoes rubbing, bouncing, thudding, drumming along the ground. When someone in a wheelchair can’t or won’t pick their feet up to be wheeled ahead you have to turn the wheelchair around and go in reverse. Jack’s voice is as strained and as hoarse as ever.
Dirk wheels out former-roommate Bob. Lunchmate Bob coughs. He keeps trying to get more shake out of the little shake milk-style carton. The carton is empty but he must be aspirating because he is coughing again. They are a little short in here today. Bless the ones who are here, and bless those who do not have to be here. I hope they are enjoying their time away, and I hope they come back.
My dad is ready to go.
“Where do you want me to take you?” I ask. “Outside?”
He says OK so we head out of the lunch room. On the way back down the hall, I stop by the announcements board. Three obituaries. I knew all three, in some way or another.
One was Ken Bassler, whom I have already recalled in a recent entry.*** The next I saw was Judith Tomlinson. Early on, I wheeled her back from a musical program in the main dining room. “Will someone please take me back to my room?” she asked aloud. My dad had just moved into Dammert. I told her I’d take her back to her room. Which is the room my dad is now in, a single room on B Hall, her passing opening the way for my dad to get a room of his own.
Judith’s obituary was not long. She was a lover of music, a world traveler. Her favorite place to visit was Antarctica. She was on the Waterloo Library Board for 40 years. I remember her from the lunch room. She was a presence at the first table. She often had headphones on. She loved jazz. What she was listening to all those days in the lunch room, I never asked. She died on July 30th.
A few days before that Timara McMillin passed away. Timi. July 20. She was the woman whose sister was here so often. Blond, energetic. Pushing her sister’s lounge-wheeler around. They were here, all of a sudden a common sight. Then gone, for weeks, maybe even two months. Then they returned. But more family were visiting, not just the sister.
Timi was on A Hall the second time around. I would write about them when I saw them, here and there. There was a day outside St. Francis when Timi’s sister was trying to push the lounger over to where my dad and I were sitting but one of the wheels caught on a rock on the sidewalk and the sister was trying to re-route the lounger to get over to us but the wheels were not having it. She said something like, “Well, we were going to come over to say hello but I guess not.”
Now I see Timi’s photo with the obituary and I do a double take because the photo doesn’t look much like the Timi I saw here but it looks a lot like the sister who came to visit her. Were they twins? I continue to read the obituary. They were twins! That was her twin sister, whose name I thought was Tami, short for Tamara. Timara and Tamara, Timi and Tami. Timi was diagnosed with cancer last year.
The walls are closing in. The wolf is at the door. My dad is definitely in some kind of pain. He hardly says a word. This boat is obviously sinking. This is for those of us who remain.
*The resident woman whose name I could not remember was of course Lillian, an OG who as of this typing (3.6.26) is still a resident of Dammert. She has recently been sitting at the same table as my dad in the Dammert Assisted-eating dining room.
**It’s spelled Karin. She is still working in Dammert but has moved (up?) to the role of Social Worker. She still seems to fall back into the nursing role when needed, kind of like Shohei Ohtani.
*** I have a longer entry about Ken Bassler, which I have not yet typed up. “It’s daylight in the swamps,” he used to say.
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