Note

Welcome. This blog is a report of a short trip I made in December 2019 to visit my grandmother, Ruth, at her retirement home in Champaign, Illinois. In the five years it had been since I last saw her she had developed dementia. This report is an attempt to clarify what was happening to her for the family as much as it was a way for me to make sense of my feelings. 

Note: All is backwards! To read about the trip in chronological order, start at the last page and read from bottom to top. There are also links to the posts by date in the righthand column. 

-Mira

Departure

I had to wake up at 4AM to catch my flight. Grandma woke up chipper and walked out into the hallway with me sans pants. I couldn't have asked for a better goodbye; maybe I was just getting sentimental but I liked to think that she hadn't really forgotten her pants this time, but that perhaps it was a way of telling me that to her I was real family. 

I took a final picture of her before rounding the corner.

In grandpa's briefs

Farewell to my new friends

It was my last evening, so I loped around the halls looking for Helen and Mack's apartment. I passed a couple Ethels and at least four Bills before finding their place.

Mack and Helen were surprised to see me, and I was only somewhat surprised to see them in matching flannel bathrobes. I sunk into their LaZboy couch and didn't move for what could have been two hours as they showed me their family photo albums. Three generations of farmers and at least that many generations of farming equipment. There was a photo album just for the tractors in fact. The photos were generally taken from the same wide shot angle, set against expansive sunny fields and machines in bright colors. This meant that faces appeared small, and often shaded under the brims of baseball hats. I had to squint to see them squinting back at me, definitely smiling.

"There's the fam damily," Helen said of this picture. Husband, kids, tractor.

Finally here were the visual aids to all the farming terminology I'd heard before. Plus more farming jargon, which at one point included "bean barn" and "corn crib" in the same sentence. They told me of lengthy procedures involving combines and tractors and aeration, and stories of bad yields and entire silos of corn rotting ("One of the worst smells there is," Mack said). On another occasion, sometime in the 80s, Mack accidentally spilled a vat of insecticide on himself, head to toe, and he carried on working in his dripping t-shirt and jeans, paying no mind to the increasing itch. 

These stories and more on my last night with my unlikely friends. It was nearly 11:30PM when I left them, far beyond curfew for all of us round here. I took my final handful of hallway coffee table Hershey's Kisses before returning to grandma's apartment.

Marty G

We got a call in the evening. Grandma picked up. I was playing guitar in the living room and from where she was down the hall I could hardly hear what she was saying. However, it didn't take long for me to detect a distinct vibe change upon catching her say a full-bodied "No!" of disbelief ("No! Well I never!"). The tone was so new that I had to stop playing. It was startling as it would've been if she had said the F word (I don't believe in her 97 years has she has even thought to say the F word).

Turns out it was Marty Griffin on the line, one of Grandpa's oldest friends. It had been ages since he'd last called--Grandma had to inform him of Grandpa's death in 2015, which she did like a champ, saying, "Well, that's the way it goes."

She was no longer disoriented. She knew what to ask and remembered where Marty lived and with whom and spoke fluidly about all of it. After the call she even looked different. There was a new warmth in her eyes that reflected revived awareness of the duration and development of events in time, which reminded me of the sun-swallowing warmth of a lake in late summer.

After the call we decided to look through file box G of the wall of file boxes in Grandpa's study. This alphabetically organized archive keeps the correspondence and tangential information of quite possibly everyone Grandpa had spoken to on a semi-regular basis. In total the boxes make a wall-sized palette of varying Army greens.

Lo and behold there was Marty G's file, the thickest one of the Gs by far (sorry to the lesser Gs out there), with letters copied and scanned and photo scraps and old addresses and flurries of newspaper clippings. The entire file I am sure contains a seamless, years-long string of correspondence between the two friends.

"Marty fucking Griffin?! How the fuck are you?"

On Jello

Occasionally there is a "Jello salad" on the dinner menu. In celebration of nostalgia, or of bad ideas, I order it whenever it's there. Already there has been Jello with marshmallows, a Jello square with chunks of orange, pineapple, and grated carrot ("Sunshine Salad"), and Bavarian jello (light on the Bavarian, I thought). Reader, I ate them.

We sat with Bob and Connie Atkins. Bob was a surgeon (Dr. Atkins) who finished his studies just as war broke out, which meant he started his 50+ year career as an Army doctor. He was kind but reserved, and too cool to be eager, giving plenty of time to answer my questions, sometimes so much that he'd never answer at all. Sparse comments trickled out in his soft-spoken, warbled voice, verging on tipsy sounding. His wife Connie was far gone with dementia. She had beady eyes and chubby cheeks that maintained optimum chubbiness by her smile as she'd recite seemingly the sole memory she had left, one about her grandkids pretending to be operated on by their grandpa, as I pictured, out of a kind of 1950s nuclear family reverence for the patriarch, giving their grandfather a chance to demonstrate his knowledge. Dr. Atkins looked on her with not a trace of impatience or embarrassment, although I knew he was also keeping track of her repetition. He added new details to each repeated anecdote.

On perhaps her fourth recitation, when she started "Do you know what the kids used to do?" I restrained myself from saying "Yes" and instead said to her husband, "Sounds like that's her favorite story," to which he, while remaining totally motionless, closed his eyes in response. I thought to myself, That is an offbeat but surprisingly effective way of responding to someone you don't give a shit about, something I hadn't ever seen before or tried myself. I made a mental note to do so someday, for when I want to convey "That's enough." Or maybe he closed his eyes in response to the arrival of my Jello, which was the Sunshine Salad. He opened his eyes eventually and it was at this time that he chose to tell me that he was specifically a stomach surgeon through the war. He later added that he operated on the famous baseball player Ty Cobb, who apparently made most of his money not through celebrity but through Coca Cola stocks and eventually ruined himself in retirement with alcoholism. Dr. Atkins operated on Cobb at this later stage, when he was all bloated and unhealthy. It was a long story made longer by interjections of his wife's repeated anecdote, with a punchline that was something like, "And I bet I am the only one who can say 'I shot Ty Cobb in the butt!'"

Anyway for the rest of the evening I trapped myself in an internet investigation into the history of Jello and looked at images of old recipes, all of which look like the cooking of a housewife on the brink of a barbiturates breakdown. That housewife would have been me---the one who nobody would really speak to anymore except in careful cooing tones, the one who out of unspeakable anxiety over everything wrong with her life would spend all day while the kids were at school and husband at work in an apron, listening to Lawrence Welk and encasing the entire house in gelatin. The sofa, knives, transistor radio, the husband's shoe horn; Toby, the family border collie.

This article gives a brief history of the post-war Jello craze, and touches on the maddeningly obvious co-optation with other empirical US brands (as seen in the pictures, note the Kraft and Philadelphia etc.); this website, one from a Jello Museum in upstate New York, provides a concise yet thorough history of Jello's beginnings as well as several recipes taken from books with titles like "Bright Spots For Wartime Meals - 66 Ration-Wise Recipes 1944." Take note of the interesting TRIVA on the side.

Grandpa's desk

In a recent email, aunt Meg recommended that I open the drawers of grandpa's desk and take one deep smell, as she did as a kid, and as she still does when she visits. It was such a good idea that i simply must share it here. Even if you don't manage to come here to see grandpa's desk, smell any desk you find, just in case it smells anything like this one. Rich smoke and rubber and pencil shavings. "Academia" eau de parfum. 

December 27, 2PM

After breakfast I said to Grandma that it might be nice for her to join me in the piano room while I play. She is eager to go. "I'll just get ready," she says.

So I am sitting on the floor playing Grandpa's guitar waiting for her. She turns from me towards the hallway leading to her bedroom, which is an arc that almost guarantees catching sight of some letter or magazine or card. Indeed, she's been caught, now hunching forward and hovering over a paper on the table. I don't have it in me to snatch it from her and tell her it's pointless to read, it's an events flyer from last July, it's a waste of the time I'd like to use to walk down to the piano room with you, so she carries on reading it while I cringe a little. "Easter Carnival at Clark-Lindsey" she reads out loud, like she's an audiobook narrator reading the title of a new chapter, giving each word a wide berth. She reads the rest of the flyer slowly and carefully: "...from one PM to three PM...games, caricature drawings, face painting..."

"Any music?" I ask. The subtlest hint I could muster.

She does not hear me and instead continues at her steady pace. "Funnel cakes, popcorn, and Other. Light. Ree-freshments."

Eventually she reads to the bottom. "July 16........ oh." She breaks from her reading and looks up at the wall and then turns back to me and looks at me looking at her and she asks "What was I doing again?"

I tell her that if she'd still like to, we were about to walk to the piano room.

"Yes, OK," she says as if deciding for the first time. She looks down at her hands on her walker. "Well I am ready."

"Grandma," I say, standing to face her. "Allow me to suggest that you may want to put on pants."

She looks past her hands this time, down at her wrinkly ruddy pink legs in a pair of Grandpa's briefs. She gives a soft giggle and says, "Yes you are probably right."

More notes on Grandma

We plucked out this wedding photo below. From the shoulders of his Army uniform to his jawline to his massive white teeth, Grandpa is all sharp angles. And Grandma has the taut and consistently blushed cheeks of a painted doll. They look like wedding cake figurines. 

 

Same angle, same smile. Here she is chatting in a daily hall encounter

Photographs iii: early days

Tonight we looked through an especially aged batch, a mix of the Fishers and Meadses. This revived Grandma's memories of her Berkeley childhood. she told me the family story about the barefoot burglar who entered the house in the night using the garden ladder. He took just a few random and basically illogical items, and left his footprints in the dewy grass in their front lawn which they saw the next morning.

Surely some of you will have noticed Grandma's poor handling of these photographs. I suggested she hold them on the edges but she kept forgetting. Oh well. I tried my best to gently clean them off

A Baby Ruth, although this one you shouldn't eat

Christmas

Finally, the day that Grandma keeps thinking is today is actually today. I know I said I'd quit streamlining but my exception will be to cross out the urgent red reminder on the calendar that reads "Christmas dinner with Spitzes."

A deliveryman arrived at our door at breakfast. He was dressed in a suit and a wacky Christmas tie that appeared to be around his neck against his will. Grandma was completely obscured by the pile of gifts he handed her. Aside from two large boxes, there were at least six cards and handwritten Christmas letters from family and friends and old neighbors.  If anyone had any doubts it should be made clear that Grandma is by no means forgotten. Whether she remembers this is another thing. Special mention goes to Aunt Meg, who sent a fresh balsam arrangement with candles, a soft sweater, and an array of special foods.

Christmas dinner was another noontime meal, and the atmosphere of the dining room was transformed with the new color and sounds and even smells of newly arriving families on visit.

Not much else I'm reporting today. Grandma had bright red steak, rare. It looked like a tongue but I held my own on this matter. Grandma triumphed over the thing with her fork and steak knife and washed it down with peppermint ice cream.

Christmas day was the warmest day this week, everyone out in golden sunshine. Saw a boy learn to ride a bike for the first time, father panicking a little behind him.

4AM

It's 4AM, and I am wide awake on the fold-out bed. The sound of Grandma floats down the hall, she's talking in her sleep, saying OK! She is even hunky dory towards the state of unconsciousness.

Soon after I spot a shadow in the dark. Grandma is in the kitchen, completely unawares, nibbling on crackers wrapped in noisy plastic. She is in her own world--it's really like I am watching her from behind glass--and with her pronounced hunch, dark eyes, and funny nibbly mouth movements, looks more squirrel than human. By the sideways movements of her head I can tell that's she's searching for something, looking all around the counter. She eventually ends this and shuffles back to her room. As she passes she says into the pitch black:

"Speed, bonnie boat...like a bird on the wing,
Onward! the sailors cry;
Carry the lad that is born to be King
Over the sea to Skye."

She may have been dreaming, sleepwalking. Or may I have dreamed all this???

CLV prairie

I took my camera this time. Here is the surrounding prairie:

Dec 23

At dinner tonight we sat with Curtis and Aletheia, a couple in their early 80s who met each other in 2005. The story goes that Aletheia had planned to go to a movie with two friends, but one of them dropped out at the last minute. Curtis was outside the theatre buying a ticket when he found out about their spare. They gave it to him and he sat with them in the theatre.

The movie left a lot to discuss among the three of them. Curtis told the two women that he just had a massive workout session on a stationary bike before the movie and didn't make time to eat, and so proposed that they all go out to dinner. "Nice one, mate," I chided in--I may have actually nudged him a bit--aiming for a kind of mutual dude-like connection, but nonesuch was made. Curtis remained innocently factual as he carried on saying that Aletheia's friend eventually went home, while he and Aletheia found they were still talking to each other by the cafe's closing time.

"We fell in love and married soon after" Aletheia said. "You never know what's going to happen in this world!"

Our dinner was interrupted by an announcement about a pill bottle. There is a mic at the front of the dining hall for such occasions, which the few social and event-organizing residents take advantage of almost every night. The speaker described the bottle as small and green with a little tassel on it. Aletheia said that there was something in the announcer's phrasing that sounded as if it was a woman's pill bottle, although the announcer never said this outright. I asked Aletheia what made her think that, which made her relax in her chair and say, "Interesting... I'm not sure why. Something in the announcer's...phrasing..."

Although I don't know if they were the youngest residents at CLV, Curtis and Aletheia were certainly the most youthful couple I'd met so far, and I wondered if this had to do with their relative newness as a couple, that their meeting each other so late in life meant that socially, they were at a fresher stage, sharing with each other the delights of speculation and observation in a world that they do not take for granted. Many questions like "What do you mean by that?" and "Yes, and what about...?" between them that evening.

Our talk about how language is shaped by our subconscious genderization of the immaterial world was disrupted when the waiter came around with challah ("a feminine bread?").

Curtis shared one of his recipes, continuing in his slow and sensitive manner. This is it in a gist:

1. Break up a stale challah loaf into big square pieces.
2. Crack 3-4 eggs, prick the yolks, add the squares to a bowl.
3. Microwave this bowl for several minutes.
4. Remove, drizzle ketchup, put back in microwave for a few more seconds, "to heat through the ketchup."

Curtis also said that as a kid in Georgia, the story went that the inventor of ketchup was an African American in the late 1800s who realized the nutritional benefits of tomatoes, back when tomatoes were not ubiquitous as they are today. I could not find any Google offerings to support this but I'm tempted to believe it anyway.

Guitar

Grandma's default is to nap; it's the central project of her life, and it's as if all other activities she does via having been reminded of them or distracted by them. She seemed pleasantly surprised to see me take out Grandpa's guitar.

Per Fisher tradition I played from Twice 55 and Rise Up Singing. The song titles of some of the standard classics--Strawberry Roan, Streets of Laredo, Juanita, Tumbling Tumbleweeds--she recalled as if they were the names of old friends. As I played Old Folks at Home, she recited all the lyrics, no help needed.

Photographs ii

Dec 23: Morrow Plots

I heard a playful series of honks from behind. Jim and Maxine had arrived in their grey Honda Odyssey to pick me up and give me a tour of the University of Illinois campus. Jim and Maxine had been professors here for over forty years.

Maxine drove. The campus was mostly deserted for the holidays, and with the bus lanes and ubiquitous crosswalk yields, Maxine trapped herself in the wrong way of a one-way. As she was trying to find an escape, I saw a montage of passersby, street-crossing pedestrians, and other drivers giving us the same upset look. Mouths agape, angry brows, and those "What are you doing?" arms. I experienced all of it in slow motion. I thought it should have been set to the Danube Waltz.

When not anxious about the road, Maxine and Jim happily carried on with the tour. They told me that the University of Illinois was the first original public land-grant university in the country. It was also one of the best designed universities for people with disabilities, both in its infrastructure and in its academic resources. In many ways, the University is still ahead of its time.

Maxine shifted her focus onto a building far in the distance, a good half-mile off. "That is the Krannert Center," she said, emphasizing the fact by suddenly yielding in the middle of the road, which gave the impression that the Krannert Center was this very spot. She was now in the campus bus lane and, still with eyes locked on the Krannert, told me that the University blew its entire quota of teak on this building, imported from Thailand. Meanwhile an almost-hit pedestrian flipped us off although I may have been the only one to notice this.

Jim and Maxine were infectiously enthusiastic about their old haunts, both encyclopedias of fun facts about every building we passed. Even the buildings they didn't know much about were at least given over to speculation. "Dorms," Jim said as we passed two identical blocky structures that indeed could be nothing else. He then explained the large population boom in the 1960s.

Our van crawled in search of an exit. There was a large city bus trundling towards us at not a snail's pace. I briefly thought of how monstrously unfair it would be if Maxine killed all of us just then before she safely tucked into the curb.

By coincidence we had stopped in front of the main attraction, what we had previously discussed at dinner: the Morrow Plots. These are the country’s oldest experimental crop fields--second oldest in the world--with the University planting maize here continuously by the same traditional methods since 1876. The sign at the entrance read: “Results demonstrate that use of science and technology as increased crop productivity over four-fold.” As a historical relic as well as a research site, the plots continue to offer many insights into the effects of fertilizers and the longevity of natural soil in monoculture practices.

Overlooking the Morrow Plots was the Astronomy building, an old buttercup yellow house with white trim and a 12-inch telescope crowning the top, its aluminum dome glinting in the sun. As an Astronomy professor, this was Jim's palace. From the window of his top-floor office, he would look down at students frantically clapping wooden blocks together in the field to scare away the crows. We giggled. “Fond memories,” he said.

Jim and Maxine

Dec 22 Sunday dinner

On Sundays, dinner is at noon.

We were placed at a table with Mack and Helen, who upon first impression looked like Florida lounger types-- something about the quality of tanness and their cleanliness and trim, delicate features. Mack had shiny steel-rim glasses and wavy hair that looked like he still went to the salon. Florida lounger types they were not: they told me they were both farmers who ran an industrial farm for fifty years. "Gee," I said. "Gee" is my go-to response to this kind of thing, which sounds as stupid as it is, because it's just a letter. "Yep," Mack said with a vacant glance around the room. "Farming is all I've done all my life."

As far as Mack knows, his entire family has been in farming, from the first guy who fled Ireland to escape the religious riots and famine, arriving with nothing more than the proverbial stick and bundle tied to the end of it. Helen had a farming background, too, but was raised in a larger town in Wisconsin-- a city girl by Mack's standards. They both grew up with small-scale, traditional farming practices, and together, on Mack's family farm, learned how to expand big time.

I asked how much machinery they had on their farm. Too much was the answer. They said in the '80s they began to require monster machines and herbicides that could cover 100 square feet of crops in one swipe. Helen ran some numbers: something about something going 8-10 mph, with 1,200 gallons, and thus spraying 60-70 acres in one filling. In one filling, Mack emphasized. I wasn't quite sure what a filling was and couldn't even imagine 60-70 acres and the conversation reminded me too much of those speed/rate problems in Algebra for me to visualize anything clearly so I stopped trying and instead just ran a mental screensaver of the more brutal moments of Watership Down. "Gee," I said again. I am rendered stupid before the unfathomable.

Amidst all the farming terms and numbers I can remember the following string of dialogue:

Me: "Coming from cities, I can tell you, this kind of intelligence of the land is superhuman to urban people."

Mack: "Yes! We see some of these kids coming out of Chicago...they hardly know a cow from a...a hawk."

Me: "Or a cow from themselves."

Helen: "That's right" she said, serious, as if this was a problem she'd heard about on the news.

Another string of conversation as we parted ways:

"What's your name again?" Helen asked me. She'd never heard the name Mira before, and looked genuinely delighted at the new word. I told her it's an Indian name, from my mother.

"That explains your dark eyes," she said.

"Guess so! And you...you get your blue eyes from the Illinois skies," I said. I had said a number of other corny things like this throughout the meal, perhaps fitting for a conversation largely about cornfields. Mack's eyes were a striking shade of blue, but more striking than the blue was how Helen's were the same exact color.

"We-he-he-ll," Helen said. The chuckle encased inside the Well. "I suppose you're right."

"I suppose you're right," repeated Mack. Mack told me I could remember his name easily: "Just think Mack truck," he said.

They still hold a little plot in the CLV community garden. From hundreds of acres to square measuring about 10X10, I guess it's their dollhouse. Still, they were matter-of-fact about what they're growing there: green beans in the summer, sweet potatoes in the fall. Even this plot is getting more difficult to manage because of their age, but they won't stop anytime soon.

------------------------------------------

In the evening Grandma and I go see the Temperley singers give a concert in the lounge after dinner. Grandma remembers their longstanding association in the neighborhood. Four women and four men, one being an older guy who had such vocal chops that he could really do whatever he wanted, which I guess he did, by being the only one of the eight to perform sitting down (and thus, in pic, blocked by man's head. Grandma in foreground).

The concert is under half an hour, including the encore. There are cookies and punch. One CLV resident was so moved by the performance that she stood up while we clapped our final claps and said, as if we were all waiting for her to represent us, Thank you ever so much, this is a real treat for everyone; you brought much-needed joy, much-needed cheer, into our lives." I recognized her as the same lady who has made several announcements during dinnertimes already. I look around the room at the disgruntled faces. A sort of "Oh brother, here we go again" feeling all around. We were in the back by the table of punch and cookies, and I pocketed several before we left. Where's Maxine with my ziploc...

CLV prairie

CLV is surrounded by serene prairiescape, perhaps its biggest perk, with a walking path that skirts past dried wildflowers and an array of outdoor sculptures. I like to cut off the path and into the actual prairie--there you can follow a more ambling network of muddy trails and hide in the tall grasses. And almost certainly spot deer, as I did. A trio of the guys who stopped their silly munching to look at me with expressions that reminded me of what I must look like upon spotting an approaching Jehovah's Witness (think mixture of surprise and dismay, with a slow shrinking back movement in search of the nearest exit). I didn't have a camera with me at the time, so instead I will provide this image I found of a guy dealing with solicitors. His energy is exactly what I'm talking about here.

I'll take photographs next time.

Notes on grandma

Grandma is six years older than when I last saw her, but what I gather must be a bigger difference than not just six years but any unit of time is how she is now alone. What Grandma would say to this I am not sure. I can't even tell if she experiences loneliness. Ever since childhood I've noticed that she's resistant to any negative emotion, in a weird, vaguely magical way, like the sight of water on new Goretex. She simply does not engage with negativity. I can't recall ever seeing her in a bad mood, or even in a room during someone else's bad mood. In fact, what I can recall is a childhood memory of crying (for some useless reason) and seeing her float out of the room. I was left almost certain that she had noticed me but pretended not to. So there it is. I have reason to believe that she simply dissolves upon the influence of anything that is not moving "onward and upward", her only direction.

I am of two minds about this. To take the childhood example, it was partly admirable that she let me do as I did, cry, and thought better than to make a fuss; partly upsetting to think she'd pretend anything. Even if she truly failed to notice me, the situation is not exempt from being strange, because how could she not notice something so obvious? (I was most likely wailing, as one does).

Her solid and steady sense has always stunned me, and stuns me even more now, as while much of the world around her seems to be stripped of meaning--names, dates, and even threads of thought have abandoned her--the "OK!" ethos remains intact. Before I arrived she set up her assembly of wooden Christmas-themed figurines. They are all in position, with baby Jesus in the center, and musicians and miscellaneous revelers facing him on either side (picture below). If there was ever any doubt: that is the real Ruth. She really has continued to go onward and upward. It really is OK! 

The rift in our personalities is helpful; being intrigued and confused has distanced me from feeling sad, which in turn makes me the kind of company that I'd like to think she prefers, or at least more similar to the company she's given me. In other words, neither of us will shed a tear this Christmas.

Photographs

It was at this photo that i said, "You know Grandma? You are a great beauty" to which she chuckled and said "i wouldn't say that"