I posted this when I was at Blogspot and thought I’d re-post it here.
It’s one of the nice memories of my mother.

I can’t remember the last “real” conversation I shared with my mother.
I’m sure it was your indispensable ‘what’s new with you? Ah, nothing’ variety.
She’s now moving through the late stages of Alzheimer’s and there’s nothing much left to talk about, nothing to be said that can be understood—at least from my vantage point.
I’ve all but lost her.
I sit quietly and listen as she innocently tries to carry on a dialogue that only she can speak and understand.
The last time I visited her at the nursing home, we sat and looked out the opaque windows of the rec room listening to the rain pitter-patter on the long rectangles of glass.
The sound of the rain seems to have more of a calming effect on her than I ever could. Sometimes when I’m sitting there next to her, my mind drifts and I look back on our life and all that we shared, ultimately coming to the sad realization that there’s not much left in the sharing department either.
It was as I was leaving one day that I bent down to kiss her forehead (my own ritual) and absentmindedly asked if she needed anything.
She replied, “How ‘bout a cold one next time?”
That brief moment of clarity, if that’s what it was, caught me off guard and I laughed out loud.
She looked up at me from her wheelchair (where she spends most of her time these days) and began laughing as well.
I smiled; amazed that after all her weary, cobwebbed mind had been through, she could still laugh.
I took comfort in the fact that the simple act of physically expressing happiness still lives and breathes somewhere inside of her.
For now, I’ll settle for those rare moments of laughter that still unknowingly connect us.

~m

I’m running short on time and thought I’d re-post this small piece that was published in The Sun.
The ‘Readers Write’ section is a space devoted to writing from various subscribers based on a one word prompt from the magazine.
Topics range from A to Z with many in betweens.
This was my spin on the prompt “Grace”…
~m

It’s a Sunday morning and I’m kneeling in the Church of the North American Martyrs, a house of worship I’ve gone to for the past 20 years.
It’s always the same old prayers, same old pew, same old church, the same old me.
My wife and at least one or two of my three daughters are next to me (one is always an altar server these days).
From the outside, I appear to be in a state of deep prayer, and maybe I am.
I’m usually praying for two parents that are steadily approaching the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, praying desperately for money that I can never seem to make enough of, praying for people that I don’t even know, maybe selfishly praying for myself – but sometimes I am just praying.
It seems fruitless and shallow some Sundays, but I do it anyway hoping that in some small and insignificant way my life will spontaneously be easier to bear.
The crosses I carry in life are there, so I’m told, for reasons unseen and I usually pray to Mary for the strength and vision needed to make sense out of my life, maybe to just do good.
With my daughters growing older and away from me, to my own health (physical and mental), to the mortgage payment that’s habitually late, to a wife that’s never gotten what she truly deserves, it’s on Sunday mornings that I kneel and pray for some divine intervention to make sense of it all, to make everything in my life suddenly understandable.
I’m reminded of a recent incident in Colchester, Ct., where a propane leak inside of a church ignited and blew it quite literally to pieces.
Nothing was left save for a statue of the Virgin Mary, standing virtually untouched and unblemished – a visible prayer, my rock.
I sometimes see the wreckage of my own life strewn about me, the shattered and lost minds of my sick parents, promises broken, missed soccer games, unspoken ‘I love you’s’, and I pray for the wisdom and grace to still be standing amidst my own ruins, like the solitary statue of Mary.

© michaelm 2005

What kind of ghost are you?
That’s if you could be one.
Click on the pic below to find out.
No surprise for me as far as the results.
The quiz is tailored more for a woman but it was fun anyway.
A nod to Deb Woehr…
~m

This year I think I may go as a bald guy.
What do you think?
Yeah, I know, not too creative.
Sweet Dreams to all. . .
Boo!
~m

My usual Saturday stop on the way to the train is to a little place on Grafton Hill called George’s Bakery. It’s a Lebanese/Syrian bakery that boasts several types of olives, feta cheese, grape leaves, kibbe, Baba Ganoush and the best damn meat pies in the city.
While I like their Baba, their Hummus leaves much to be desired.

If you like Hummus, try my recipe below:

1 lg can of chick peas (has to be Progresso, this brand works the best)
1-2 cloves garic
1 ½ tsp. salt
½ – ¾ cup of fresh lemon juice
1 cup of sesame Tahini (available at most supermarkets)
Pinch of cumin and cayenne

Pour contents of can of chick peas and half its liquid into food processor (save the rest!).
Process for 30 seconds.
Add remaining ingredients and blend.
If too stiff, add more liquid from chick peas (or water) until desired consistency.
Serve in a shallow dish and sprinkle liberally with olive oil and paprika.

Over the years I’ve custom-tailored it to my own preference and have found I like my own best of all. While at George’s I’m usually good for a few meat pies with feta and some grape leaves. Heaven on earth, for me.
There used to be a wonderful place near George’s on Wall Street called the El Morocco.
They specialized in Lebanese cuisine serving up dishes like Port Said, Stuffed Eggplant and Lamb Shish. My wife and I had our wedding reception there we liked it so much but sadly, it closed its doors many years ago.
Quincy Jones wrote some lyrics that went,

"Everything must change.
Nothing stays the same.
Everyone will change.
No one stays the same."

Sometimes things change for the good but more often than not it tends to go the other way; the shadows of yesterday obscured by society’s penchant for progress.
When I was a child, when ever I went to see my grandmother she would leave two quarters on the counter for my sister and me.
We’d take the found money (a fortune back then) and head off down the street to Phil’s Corner Store, one of my favorite destinations as a child.
Phil was an older man with a welcoming face; a paradox considering his curmudgeon-like attitude. I think Phil actually liked us kids, he just didn’t want to admit that fact to anyone.
He had the city’s best selection of penny candy, bar none.
At the time, penny candy actually cost a penny (a revolutionary concept long forgotten).
My sister and me would set about filling our wicker baskets with licorice whips, flying saucers (a communion-like wafer filled with candy dots), peach stones, Swedish Fish, candy cigarettes, Squirrels, rainbow colored boxes of jawbreakers and candy lipstick.
A quarter bought a sizeable bag of happiness stuffed with enough candy to last until we got back home. The store itself was dimly lit with a dusty, wooden planked floor.
There was no Keno, Lottery or credit card machine.
I don’t even think Phil’s had a phone.
If I could freeze any single moment in my life it would be the feeling I got walking into Phil’s, my childhood paradise. I drove by the old store this morning on the way to George’s and felt that undeniable pang of sentimental loss.
Phil packed up his wonderful glass jars of candy and cases of original Coca-Cola long ago.
He sauntered off into the sunset joining all the other small businesses that sadly made their way to the retailing boneyard.
The store is now called “No Name Grocery”, with neon lights in the windows covered with security grates to keep the crackheads out.
Yeah, the neighborhood has changed a bit since my grandmother died decades ago.
This store is as strange and dark as a Skittles commercial.
And there’s this obtuse Spanish feel I get from the signs haphazardly screwed to the sides of the building that read:

Food Stamps!

Casaba!

Yuca!

Plantanos!

Tortillas!

(rank profanity and nasty racial slurs were here before I decided to delete them.)
The sight would make my grandmother fill a case of Depends.
Phil’s spirit has long since been exorcised; a peccadillo that seems profoundly sad and intrinsically wrong.
Some things should never change.
Maybe that’s what memories are really about…

~m

the whisper of a song…

In the summer of ’98, we moved my mother to an assisted living facility called Hearthstone.
At the time, it was getting downright dangerous for her to stay at home for a number of reasons:
she was driving my father up a wall with questions, she was becoming increasingly paranoid
and she would leave the house on a whim and disappear in a wisp of smoke.

The facility we placed her in was secured and specifically designed for people with progressing dementia.
This was to be my first foray into the deeply fragmented world of Alzheimer’s.
So many things happened while she was out there.
From the clinging and uncomfortable goodbyes to the sad moments of epiphany when I realized I was becoming a total stranger to her.
I liked to think I took it all in stride, showing the world my brave face and big shoulders when in reality,
many a visit found me in my car afterward weeping bitterly while forsaking the heavens above.

The God I thought I knew was turning His back on my mother with a deep negligence and offering me little to no discernible shred of mercy.
I was the only one that saw the situation for the tragedy that it truly was.
I felt He “owed” me.
These days I’m beginning to believe that maybe
He was there after all.
They say that hindsight is 20/20 and I believe there were many small “miracles” that happened way back then.
I was just too angry to realize it.
This story is about one of them…

It was St. Patrick’s Day in ’99 that I went to see my mother.
It was a routine visit at best.
I sat with her in the common room at Hearthstone and talked using my one-way conversation that had become a learned ritual.
Usually, when I ran out of things to talk about it was time to leave.
I went into the kitchen and poured a cup of juice for her and went to leave.
For some reason, I decided I would check her room to make sure everything was clean and in order.
(Another story in and of itself)

Everything was fine and after talking briefly with one of the aides that took care of my mother,
I went downstairs to leave.
There’s a long corridor that takes you past the common room before turning left to the thick oak door that led to the free world outside.

My memory of that walk down the hall goes into slow-mo right about here.

I had a gazillion things buzzing through my mind at the time.
As I approached the doorway leading to the common room I began to hear music—Irish Music—Danny Boy, to be specific, one of my mother’s favorite songs simply because her father sang it to her when she was a child.
As I walked towards the door leading outside, I stopped.
Someone was singing the song.
I turned and walked back towards the doorway recognizing the voice of my mother.
I looked into the room and saw that all the residents had their heads bent down, prayer like.
There in the middle of the room was my mother, head back; eyes closed,
singing every familiar word I’d known since I was a child.
Ten minutes ago she couldn’t say or remember my name and here she was going solo.
I began to mouth the words sotto voce along with her.
It was about as close as I could get to her in that one solitary moment in time.
And it felt wonderful.
It was really her once again.
I smiled realizing that I had just been given mercy.

~m

A moment with my father who is now in the late middle stages of Alzheimers.
I wrote this on the train this morning…

I went to see my father the other day.
I needed to sign some papers so he could get a flu shot since he can no longer sign his own name.
What comes out instead are crazy lines and meaningless squiggles that would probably mean more to a child than any adult.
In my mind, I can still see his signature from not so long ago; the smooth and precise lines of legible writing that defined the organization and intellect I once associated with the man that he used to be.

He smiled softly when he saw me.
Maybe I still look “familiar” to him, which seems to me a paradox because he’s become a total stranger to me.
My sister had been to see him and asked that I stop by and trim
(please, excuse me here) his nose hairs which were, in the words of my sister, “long enough to braid”. Hey, hair grows, right?
His beard was stubbly as well; a testament to his growing aversion to anyone strange getting near him.

“Would you like a shave, Dad?” I asked.

“Ok.”

He doesn’t say much more than a few words these days and is sadly beginning to dabble in a bit of gibberish as well.
I know the pattern well by now.
He was never a talker anyway but these days I feel he’s just dog tired of trying to communicate his needs to the strange world around him.
I’ve learned over the years that it’s just easier for me to talk about… things. Anything relatively inconsequential works: my life (boring),
the grandkids (cool), the weather (foul), food, the Red Sox (suck season)… Nothing too complicated.

Questions are pointless and leave him frustrated because he searches for an answer I know he’ll never find.
I feel sad knowing my mother is flying with angels and can never tell him so.
In his heart he still thinks she’s alive and maybe that’s not such a bad thing because in some ways, she is.

I walk him to his room and have him sit in the bathroom for a shave.
I draw some hot water to soften the stubble and glance at him, he's unaware I’m doing so. He looks sad to me and my heart breaks for him, like always.
It’s almost as if he knows all that’s transpired but refuses to acknowledge it to the world.
It should be an unusual thing to shave your father’s face but after all he and I have been through it seems almost a comfort, for him and for me.
It’s simple and it’s right.
He seems to enjoy it as much as I enjoy doing it for him.
I finish and find myself face to face with him.

I look into his eyes that seem to be growing more tired by the day and I say, “How’s that?”

“It’s good.” He says.

And it is good; for him and strangely enough for me.

Shaving is an essential part of the day for any man, a ritual we look forward to, a cleansing of the soul of sorts, a clean slate we give to ourselves.
For us gorillas, it seems to complete the daily “routine”, and we like the way it feels.
So my father takes pleasure in the memory of the ritual with my help and it makes me happy.
I bring him back to the common room where the other residents are doing some light exercise.
He seems happier now than he did before and I feel I actually accomplished something.
Come to think of it, maybe I really did….

~m

A journal entry from my last day at the Cape.

*********************************************************
It’s early Tuesday morning and I’m sitting alone on Mayflower Beach in the town of Dennis. Not a soul out this morning and I have the sand bar all to myself.
I have a hot, dark roast coffee (cream, two sugars) and my favorite cigar.
It’s somewhat overcast and a bit chilly keeping most of the beachcombers at home.
Looking out at the restless ocean, I study the dark, bruised clouds floating on the horizon and think, maybe it’s not so hard to believe that there’s a war going on thousands of miles away and another tropical storm has just turned into a Category 4 hurricane.
My eyes scan the breathtaking 360 degree panorama and I think of Steve Martin’s “Let’s Get Small” routine and smile because at the present time that’s exactly how I feel: small.
Sitting on a swath of sand this vast you can’t help but feel any other way.

It’s quiet here save for the briny ocean breeze and the rushing sound of the surf.
In my mind, I see my mother standing by the shore with her feet in the water.
She’s wearing a one piece, light blue and white checked bathing suit as she stares out at the foreboding horizon.
She always loved the beach while my father basically tolerated it.
I see my father sitting under his ever present umbrella, wrapped up in a bunch of towels to avoid the burning rays of some long forgotten summer sun.
His fair Irish skin will still turn an all too familiar lobster red anyway.

“Just say goodbye to her, Dad.”

The odd sound of my voice takes me by surprise.
I know this can never happen in real life but still a part of me wants somehow to “see” it.
I want closure.
I see my father cast away all his protective wrapping, stand up, and slowly walk to the shoreline.
There, he takes my mother’s hand in his as they stand side by side, silently watching the white-capped Cape Cod Bay.
After a short time, I see her slowly turn and smile at him.
She says, “It’s ok, Wally. I’ll always be here. You know that…but I have to go.”
He looks down at the sand and nods his head, silent.
She kisses him gently on the cheek and begins walking down the shore away from him.
He watches until her silhouette sinks into the distant grey mist.

It’s at that moment that raindrops begin dotting the pages of my journal and my written words all begin to run together.
It is time for me to say goodbye as well.

~m

Several years ago I sold the house I’d grown up in.
It turned out to be much more difficult an ordeal than I originally thought.
I wrote a piece in an attempt to journal my emotional state at the time.
I put it on the blog in the hopes that someone somewhere down the road may find that they went through the same labyrinth that I did and yes, life does go on.
The piece is a bit lengthy, sorry about that.
Should you connect with anything in the story, I’ll be a happy camper.

best,
~m

The Goodbye House

The house I’d spent the better part of my life in was sold. The feeling that coursed through me was that of guilt because I was the one who decided it needed to be sold and I didn’t know if that was right or wrong. An intrinsic part of my childhood history was on the auctioning block destined to go to the highest bidder and I never had a chance to rescind that decision.
Time had come to clean the rooms and closets that had once held the bittersweet secrets of my life. Memories descended on me like white-capped waves washing the shores of some distant but familiar beach.
There was more of me here than I cared to admit, but the job ahead needed to be done and finally put to bed.

Mom and Dad fell victim to the affliction we call Alzheimer’s Disease, the memories of their lives turning opaque and as lifeless as their soon to be empty house.
In time, they were both moved from a place they could no longer remember, leaving me with a house I couldn’t forget.
Safe within the foreign walls of their new homes, I was handed the unenviable role of caretaker and property manager, a title that to this day still scares the hell out of me.

In one word, the house had been a ‘haven’ for my twin sister and myself. The world outside was safer to view from inside the four walls of the 15’X15’ living room than anywhere else on the face of the earth.
That feeling of shelter was a concept never taught: we just knew it to be truth.
The skies could be raining boulders but as long as we were inside, life was good. I looked at the scattered bits and pieces of my life, our life, resting placidly, albeit sadly, on the unseen shelves that ubiquitously lined each room.
During my walks from room to room, I laughed at myself for the constant carrying of a box of Kleenex wondering what memory would push up the next batch of ‘eye dew’.
The echoing voices of last days of school and first days of summer softly careened off walls barren as the Sahara desert during a dust storm, back into my heart where I prayed they would somehow always live and knew they would always belong.

Finding myself in the den, Mom’s piano called longingly to me. I felt the dusty keys as if waiting for some divine inspiration to strike but it never came.
I looked inside the rickety piano bench through sheet after disintegrating sheet of music and found “The Burning of Rome”, a two-step written decades before I was born, a piece of music that my mother loved playing. Oh, how she could play!
The piano brought her so much happiness and peace.
Who would take care of this sad and abandoned instrument now, I wondered.
She loved to play Christmas songs around the holidays and always made my sister and me sing for our guests. Now, most of her music books sat untouched, collecting more particles of dust than stars in the heavens and I wondered if anyone would ever love this piano the way she did.
I didn’t feel I had the heart to sit down and play but I did anyway, for old times’ sake. It was a very short and old-fashioned song she used to play:

Toorah Loorah Loorah, hush now don’t you cry…

But I did cry.
Oddly enough, the piano reminded me of a child’s music box, out of tune but pretty in its sweet own Irish way. Closing the fallboard, it occurred to me that I wrote my first song on this piano. I couldn’t remember the words or the music but I remember the feeling of writing it; of creating art out of thin air; of running to my mother ecstatic I had done it and Mom trying not to be too excited saying, that’s my boy.

Being left alone with all these emotions has a way of changing you and my insides were changing from room to room. Stripping away all the furniture and belongings that had accumulated over some 50 years was no easy task.
It was murder, plain and simple.
A part of me was dying and I had no choice but to let the spirits of the past fly out of the open windows and into that black void where all shadows go.

The second floor was the toughest emotionally.
My bedroom was the first door on the right when you reached the top of the stairs.
The walls were a soft knotty pine (good for hanging up posters- and yes, I did have the Farah Fawcett one) and covered most of the room except for a foot of bare wall that bordered the room before reaching the ceiling.
Once upon a time, there had been an orangey rust colored shag carpet covering the floor, but that had been ripped up years earlier exposing what would now be considered ‘art deco mocha’ floor tile.
It was spattered with what looked to me like black and white drops of paint.
I sat at my desk and rummaged absentmindedly through the drawers.
I pulled out a crinkled pack of firecrackers as my mind shot me thirty-five years back in time. Mom and Dad used to play cards in the dining room with neighbors and friends because Saturday night was the time for Gin Rummy.
The particular Saturday night that came to mind was different.
I had been given some Black Jack firecrackers from one of the ‘bad apples’ in the neighborhood and I decided to try and see if I could light one and get the fuse to go out before the firecracker exploded.
I guess I did it because that’s what curious (and dim-witted) boys did.
Hearing the enormous bang, Dad came bounding up the stairs two at a time assuming I had just committed suicide. He shoved open the door only to see me sitting at my little desk with that ‘deer caught in the headlights’ look on my face.
He surveyed the room wondering why it looked like a winter Nor’easter had just blown through with firecracker paper everywhere.
I had lived to re-live the tale sitting at the desk.
That night was coming back to me in living color, the pungent sulphur odor from the exploded firecracker singeing the hairs in my nose and filling my mouth with acidic smoke. But as bad as that night was—was as good as the memory made me feel.

From the window in my room, I looked out over the neighborhood I once ruled as Daniel Boone; a neighborhood I knew like the back of my hand in the dead of night.
I suddenly wanted to tell the kids moving into the house where the best salamanders were and how sliding in the winter will never get better than the Collins’ backyard and how ‘ya gotta watch the sand that covers the road on the cul-de-sac turn when you’re on your bike ‘cause if you don’t you’ll wipeout.
The seasons of my life stretched out over the neighborhood as I said out loud: I can’t say goodbye to this house when there’s still so much of me in it!
My voice echoed off the tile floor of my bedroom wanting a reply.
It would be months after the closing of the house and that final locking of the door before I would see some closure enter my life.

Business often took me near the house but I chose to stay on the highway, not wanting to admit to myself that someone else was living there; looking out windows I once looked out of; playing the piano I once played; watching the sunset from the deck in the backyard, the sky painted with deep royal purples and cotton candy pinks as stars twinkled on, one by one—that was my sunset.

But one late August afternoon, after flying into Providence after a business trip, I had the chance and the time to drive by and sneak a glimpse of the old gal.
I was happy to see that her lawn had been freshly mowed and that there was a canoe resting against the shed out back.
I couldn’t put my finger on it but the house had lost its blues.
She didn’t need me any longer.
She was once again filled with life and light. I drove down around the cul-de-sac (that once had claimed all the skin on my left forearm) and came back up the quiet street for one final look before heading back into my own life.
I glanced up at my old bedroom window, saw that a light was on and imagined some young boy staring at the ceiling, wondering what life had in store for him. I managed one last smile for my old friend as I turned on my headlights and headed for new haven.

© michaelm 2005