Category: Shrine

Mouse Lady

~ johnbrandall

I had another encounter with the mouse lady. Yesterday. I didn't realize it was her; that's how tired I was.

My dad and I were sitting outside, near the St. Francis Center entrance. A woman came out very straight-backed, serious air. She sat down and said, "I just wanted to see who was out here."

And we said, "OK, yeah."

She said, "It's not because I'm nosy. It's because I'm blind."

Blind? Hmmm. She didn't strike me as having a problem with her sight. She had no cane, no walking stick, no walker, nothing. She didn't reach about to feel for the chair when sitting down. I thought she looked familiar but I've been coming here long enough to where most of the people look familiar, because they are.

She remarked on how nice a day we were having, the weather. She asked where we were from. Not from St. Francis, she observed. And now I know where she was coming from, what she was getting at. She's a wasp. I'm a wasp. Her tendency is also mine. To be curious to a fault. To gate-keep.

"My dad's in Dammert," I told her. "We like to come out here for the view."

Then she started talking about wanting to see some of the area cleared. The vines, their tangle, the brush. This is the area you see when you look out, west, southwest, from the St. Francis Center entrance. My dad would start calling it Porcupine Hill. Why, I don't know. And he wasn't calling it Porcupine Hill yet. This was only April of 2024...


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Notes from The Shrine 3: Let’s All Sing Some Songs

~ johnbrandall

We are sitting in the lunch room.  Me, my dad, Bob, Father V.  We are all drinking coffee. Bob is singing along with the music that’s playing.  Patsy Cline.  He is not quite singing the words but he is howling, slow crooning, lamenting.  

The song is “Baby, Baby.”  Once it ends he says, “Yeah!  Write something else!”

Lunch is grilled cheese, tomato soup, fries, and applesauce.  Nothing wrong with that.  My dad is eating well. Bob gets an extra sandwich but he hasn't gotten through the first one yet. It's a warm nursing home lunch room now gone quiet except for Patsy Cline singing “Always” one afternoon before the approach of some very bad weather.

The song ends and Bob exclaims, “Yes, indeed!”

Then he makes to get up from the table.  “Well, the wife is wonderin’ where I’m at,” he says, and my dad laughs.  

“I know she does,” Bob says, trailing off.  He doesn’t get up after all, stays seated.  He sits with his back to the wall, looking toward the wall of windows on the west-facing side of the lunchroom.  Bob's problem is his sight.  He can still get around just fine, using his walker, but his vision is failing.

“Look at the clouds all the way out,” he says, “I think they’re going to be there a while.  I think we played football together...”


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Notes from The Shrine 2: Like It or Lump It

~ johnbrandall

Bob was talking today.  We were at the lunch table and I was telling my dad about getting a dentist appointment set up for him.

“What’d you say about a weapon?” asked Bob.  

I wasn’t sure what he might have heard so I said my dad and I were talking about teeth.  Then I was telling dad about taking mom back to the dealer so she could pick up her car once it had been serviced.  New brakes.  I guess it really doesn’t take that long.

Bob mused on driving, which he said he hadn’t been doing “for about a year now.”  I asked him what kind of car he had.  Or maybe, I wondered aloud, did he have a truck.  He laughed at that idea.

“No,” he said, he never had a truck.  “But who knows once the kids get their foot in there.”

“You never had a truck as part of your job?” I asked.  “Getting up on those poles?”

“That job,” he answered, “was a real pain in the ass.”

Bob was a lineman.  He worked for what then was called Union Electric.  He has spoken fondly about his job in prior conversations so I took this expression of displeasure as a reference to one specific job, some beef or failure or disappointment he must have had out in the field one week...


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Notes from The Shrine 1 

~ johnbrandall

Early May 2024

My dad slowly wheeling himself away, his feet pulling, scraping along.

“Yeah, he walked him,” says a woman with glasses, another resident.  “We were down in our house.”

Mass is on the TV, in the common room of this nursing home.  Lunchmate Bob is singing along with the hymn, just the notes.

“Soft smell, the all cough coughs,” says the woman with glasses.  I do not remember her ever saying anything before.  But I do recognize her, she must eat in the assisted dining room.

“They were asking for the Christmas Day,” she says.  “I never heard that one before. Least they’ll give it to the other Christmas.  Have fun.  We had a little.”

She trails off.  I can’t follow the meaning of her words but hers is a musical nonsense language.  Lyrical and sporadic, like a strange bird.

“I throw ye in the class now!”

“Hmm?” asks Bob in reply, thinking maybe she is talking to him.

Lillian, another resident, rocks back and forth in her wheelchair.  She’s spoken to me a few times, thinks maybe I am one of hers.  A lunch will be served in the main Dammert dining room, Dammert being the name of this place, this wing of the retirement community, the last stop on the route, the end of the line.

Bob has gotten an early start on his lunch.  Someone has gotten him a bag of cookies.  Maybe his wife, who lives over in the apartments, independent.  

“I call on the on-derin,” says the woman with glasses.  

“Yeah, hmmm,” says Bob, “Mm-hmm.”

She holds her hands tight, clenched and clawed, thumb to index finger, pill-rolling.

“Hmm?” says Bob, “I can’t hear you.”

The Mayor’s mom is also a resident here.  Helen.  She fell recently, landed on her head.  She looks pretty beat up, a gash on her forehead, dark red, purple, dried blood.

“Thank you,” says Bob.  

Later, at lunch, he turns to me and holds up just the top half of a hamburger bun.  

“This is nothin but bread,” he says, and I can’t disagree.

For most of this year, I have been visiting my dad at a nursing home near Belleville, IL. Dammert, the place he's in, is the skilled care wing of a retirement community at Our Lady of the Snows Shrine. I have kept a journal during many of these visits. It is time for me to begin to type up these Shrine journals. They will not be posted in chronological order. I didn't take many photos early on so some of the photos might be redundant.