Tag: dad

Admirals Club

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

Admirals Club.  Dad going through a USA Today.  Cup of coffee going lukewarm in front of me.  I just sped through a sudoku and it didn't blow up.  The chair I'm in is leather, comfortable.  Thoughts of the dog are stressing me; have been since before I left the house.  I'll feel much better when my wife returns to the house tonight, back from a trip of her own; lets me know everything is alright.  Also, rain today.  Gray day, Gray Davis.  Remember him?  Total recall.  The e-mail that never was.  Unknown sender, no subject, blank body, unsigned.  A friend is to let the dog out mid-day but problems with the front-door-knob plague me like a vice.  Is the roof keeping out the rain?  I rain onto paper, letting everything out.  Grip on my temples easing.  Hoping there aren't any leaks; nothing I can do about them now.  American Airlines, AMR.  Flying in the rain.  My father went to use the computer.  When he's back he'll tell me if the market's up or down.

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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“3 AM Eternal” published at Sheila-Na-Gig Online

~ johnbrandall

I've had a poem posted online at the website of a poetry journal called Sheila-Na-Gig. The poem is titled "3 AM Eternal." You can see the winter edition of Sheila-Na-Gig Online posted here. This link will take you to a series of headshots and you can either find my photo or my name. Click on the photo and it will take you to the poem. Thanks for reading and thanks to the Editors at Sheila-Na-Gig for giving my poetry a place to be seen and to be heard.


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...”


Read the full journal entry here...

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...


Click here for the full journal entry...

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.


Memorial

~ johnbrandall

Somewhere in the 
    lamp-lit dark of
this hospital parking lot
    aye, yes, the hospital I was
born at, a killdeer
    beseeches the night.
It’s got a nest to protect
    a shallow scrape, it’ll
break a wing if it must.

Ambulances come & go.
    For a moment, leaf smoke wafts
while LEDs burn bright
    and it’s quiet, even peaceful.
The beer helps, engines idle.
    A wind sock lit in orange
dangles lazily on the
    hospital roof in a 
mild November breeze.

The night shift leaving in threes
    makes me nostalgic for exit.
Leaves litter the grass below a
    healthy-looking ash.  
The ash gleams leafless
    in this blue-white 
hospital parking lot light.

The first time I was here I
    arrived safe in my mother’s belly.  
Dad had just finished mowing the grass.
    Now I remember.  Even when I can see forward
that forward is never enough.

I awake at two-something in a 
    start.  Is that Mom, coming out?
A tall woman in boots, headed this way,
    unmistakable, alone.  Dad
on a bed somewhere inside.  I rifle through
    my pockets in search of keys;
she is only getting closer.  I find 
    them under me, hit the button,
clamber out of the back seat to greet her and

take her away along empty streets
    to the place we all called home.

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...  


To read the rest of this essay, click here...

Sketches of East of Here

~ johnbrandall

I. Setting Out.

My brother is driving. I'm in the backseat at liberty to write. Dad, riding shotgun, shuffles through sheets of paper explaining stock valuations and physical therapy exercises.

The car is a 2015 Buick Lucerne with 62,000 miles on it and counting. Destination: Ludlow, Massachusetts, where my dad grew up, where he's from, where he still has family: his cousins, his aunt (who turns 88 in two days), his sister (who he hasn't seen in 25 years), his niece (likewise).

We left Belleville, Illinois, at 8 a.m. this morning, yours truly behind the wheel. Football (a.k.a. soccer) streams on satellite radio, channel 157, the European Championship tournament. This is the first round of the tournament, dubbed group play. Earlier, Russia knocked off Finland. Now, it's Turkey and Wales.

It's been awhile since I've been in a car's backseat. I'm enjoying it; it feels like a luxury. Like I'm flying on an airplane. What else is there to do but to read, to write? To describe, to explain, to tell?

At the first rest stop, my dad pointed at some new socks he was wearing.

"What do you think of these?" he asked...


Click to continue with my account of traveling by car to Ludlow, MA with my dad and brother to visit family there...