Tag: Belleville

Coffee for Loretta: Notes from the Shrine, 8.16.2024

~ johnbrandall

My dad's feet are really swollen. Purple. He's got some sort of sock on, except they don't cover the most part of his feet. They're like something a gymnast would wear—ankle wraps.

But he looks alright. He's got the cradle/holster thing under him, the red, yellow, green, blue loops sticking out at four corners. I've never seen it under him before so maybe they are using a different crane than what Taylor used on him Wednesday.

Loretta is here on B Hall. She's nice. I heard her talking to one of Phyllis Nester's daughters one day. Ann. Their families were friends. They went to Michigan together. Went swimming, played tennis, enjoyed the air. Those were fond memories.

Director of Nursing Rose came in and put one pillow under his feet, to get them off the floor. I added one more. His bed is stripped of its sheets. The housekeeper whose name I don't know (not Peggy) swept in here earlier. Now she's cleaning the bathroom. If I wrote a book about this experience it would be called, The Shrine: One Year in the Hell of a Good Nursing Home.

I smell coffee from the hall. I'd love some. I didn't get any made before I left. My mom had some left in the pot at the house but I forgot to take some.

Lunch is here. Pasta, veggies, garlic bread. It smelled good. I'm sure it is. I'll never know. It'll be better than my Cucumber Worry sandwich. Side salad with egg wedge. Tapioca. I wonder who, if anyone, is eating in the main dining room. Who's allowed in there. Me?

I don't know what my objective is here today; how long I'll stay. I don't even want to go back to Rockingham. Maybe I won't stay. If so I wouldn't see my brother, but he hasn't come into the house this week anyway.

To leave Rockingham out of the day I'd have had to come over here at 8 or so. Do 8:30 to 11:30, then get back to University City to get Hugo walked and fed. That would have been fine, really. But I figured preparing to cook a meal tonight for my sick mother was the right thing to do. To make the effort. I guess my effort is not effortless enough...


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Notes From the Shrine: Your Dark Glasses Are Now Ready

~ johnbrandall

Peggy cleans the bathroom next. Mom sends another text telling me to open the blinds, if I haven’t yet. Dad rips into another blustery hacking cough.

I want to know what else is going on in the rest of this place. Dammert. Has anyone died recently? The last five days? How bad is this Covid outbreak? How many staff are sick? But I won’t or can’t venture out.

Peggy is mopping the bathroom floor. CNA Taylor is out in the hall. Her and Rachel. That’s a good duo. He’s in good hands. It was bleak in here Monday. Thin. There was a puddle of piss on the floor when I got here, under his wheelchair. His pants were wet. I took it up with a towel.

Taylor checks in. She tells my dad she’s going to get him up when the floor is dry. Peggy is mopping the rest of the room, where the puddle was the other day, then where the cranberry juice was spilled. She mops with a slight bleach solution. Fine. The floor is clean.

Taylor asks him how he feels. He says, “OK.” But you sound terrible, she says. Peggy interjects, “A lot better than he did, though.” She says this as much to me as to anyone, and it makes me feel pretty good. Peggy is really nice. She has red hair. For a while I had forgotten her name.

I’m in my N-95 mask with blue disposable gloves on. My exhalation fogs up my glasses. My hands sweat. I would love a cup of coffee.

The stingray documentary has been over for a while. Now it’s Christianne Amanpour hosting a world news program.

“Is Netanyahu ready for a deal now?” she asks her guest.

I had gotten a book out of my bag, an old book that belonged to my dad called Zen Buddhism. I’ve had it for three years. That’s the last time he was home, in Ludlow, Massachusetts. His cousin Anna now lives in the house he grew up in, what I used to know as my grandpa’s house. His name was the same as mine except for the middle name. His was Beresford, after a Lord in England. Mine is Brian, after my dad.

Anna had a box of his books that had been sitting in the basement of that house, basically forever. I remember her telling me about books of his, boxes. Was I interested in them. I couldn’t really muster the energy to get excited about them. I was sitting out by my great aunt Elsie’s pool enjoying some downtime during what was a challenging trip. It was June 2021. There was a party for Elsie’s birthday. My brother and I had driven my dad out to New England, in what would be his last Buick…


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Lucky You a Pen

~ johnbrandall

In 1986 my dad’s favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, lost the World Series in heartbreaking fashion to the New York Mets.  The Red Sox had twice led the Mets late in Game Six, repeatedly coming within one strike of winning the game and thereby the Series.  But bad relief pitching and an infamous miscue by the Boston first baseman allowed New York to prevail in extra innings.  

I was seven years old so I don’t remember the game well, but I do remember my dad moving from one room of the house to another, depending on how the game was going, believing superstitiously that how and where he watched the game could affect the outcome. 

The next spring my mom bought me some clothes from an erstwhile store called Venture.  Or it could have been Glik’s.  What I remember is that among those clothes was an orange t-shirt that I really liked.  The Mets wore uniforms with orange trim and their logo is orange on blue.  The t-shirt disappeared.  I asked my mom what happened to it.  Apparently my dad had banned the t-shirt on the basis of orange being a “gang color” but I suspect that the shirt reminded him of the Mets.  

~

You can’t make your bed while you’re on it.  That’s what my mom would say to me as I tried to straighten the covers atop my bunk bed, the higher of two bunks in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother.   At the end of the bunk was a window that looked out over our driveway, toward the house next door where Domino the German Shepherd lived, along with the couple who owned the house.  I could lie prone on the end of my bunk and look out the window, high above our driveway.  

Even though my bedroom was on the first floor it felt like a second-floor view because our driveway sloped down as it ran from the street to the back of our house.  On our side of the driveway was a lovely terraced rock garden that my mom looked after.  On the other side of the driveway was a steeply slanted hedge of unruly ivy and honeysuckle that my dad sometimes clipped.  The valley-like feel of the driveway put our yard at a remove from our neighbors’ yard even though they weren’t but twenty feet apart...  


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Weed Chronicles, Volume One

~ johnbrandall

10.02.2022

What I’ve got here is some OG #18.  I taste meat, grease, gas, incense.  Not fruit.  Bong rip.  No cough but a little tenderness in the throat.  Harvest was June ninth, twenty-twenty-two.  The THC comes in at 26.1 per cent.

Creeping high.  I’m on my first drink, which is not usually the case.  Usually I’ve had a couple of drinks by the time I’m craving a smoke but we’ve been driving all day.

It’s Braves 5, Mets 3.  An urge to write is a good early side effect but this urge might not be due to the weed.  It could be the driving.  It’s happened before.  It’s the movement, my body through the gravity-controlled space of this planet, the vibration of traveling seventy miles an hour, backward in time, against the spin, in a car.


Read the full first volume here...

Time’s Beach

~ johnbrandall

Lunch rooms
in old department stores. Or
on the ground floor
of the office building downtown
where my pediatrician practiced
upstairs, that sterile waiting room,
booster shots, dropping my pants
so I could pass the physical but then
lunch with my mom in the bustling
café downstairs, like something
from the fifties, the glamor of my
own personal history, a café that
must be decades gone, its existence
now inexplicable, part of the long
beach of time that will somehow
also include the rest of this, my
unraveling life

Note: This was among four of my poems published in February at Parhelion, an online literary magazine. You can see all four poems by following this link. I also wrote a short essay about my writing process to accompany the poems. Poems by other writers published in the same issue, along with an incredible painting of a farmhouse, can be found here. Thanks again to Parhelion for including my work on their site.


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Once upon a time in Belleville

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

But I hide behind the spa I had installed.Gravel and country clubs and khoury league.Stoners in the high schools,Businesses long ago come and go.East end, west end — what’s the difference.It’s not city, it’s not country.  What is it?People call it Bellevue. They’re like, “Oh yeah, you’re from Bellevue….”Sometimes I correct them.Fast food, soft serve, … Continue reading Once upon a time in Belleville