On reading

Grandma is the same solid, sensible Ruth. This is apparent enough by the contents of her refrigerator: soy milk, cottage cheese, orange juice, walnuts. She still gives affirmative MMMs! and little nods to her Raisin Bran, paying the old respects to a square meal. She still wears a necklace over her turtleneck (and when it's time for bed, takes it off, neatly coils the string around the pendant and puts it on her dressing table). Eucerin is still her only lotion of choice. She still leans forward in a way that suggests there is something to do, even when there really isn't. Maybe this is residual momentum from the previous nine decades, her body frozen in action like a bristlecone pine. It was while she was reading out a two-line Christmas card she'd already read the day before that I realized I've never seen her sitting and staring into space or giving up.

Any scrap of paper will catch her attention so long as it has words on it, especially if it's on the dining table. Large and cluttered and directly under the main light in the room, the dining table seems to represent the Present, the Pressing, which for a while can jolt some new kind of energy into her. I haven't seen her engage with any other part of the house in this way. I don't think she's even noticed the walls at the far end of the room, with the Californian paintings and last year's calendar and the dusty bookshelves and the windowsill with its drooping plants. These plants are pretty far gone dead but I'm trying to bring them back to life, in some clumsy struggle against death.

Most of the stuff on the table is junk, so I started clearing a lot, assuming that the irrelevant notes may make her distracted and confused. Especially those irrelevant notes that are guised as relevant to the utmost ("LIMITED TIME ONLY- BUY TWO GET ONE FREE PIZZAS AT LITTLE CAESARS!"); wicked rhetorical bait for the elderly. But it also felt wrong to reduce the opportunity for her to engage herself in this way, to read words for the sake of words. If she's attracted to text, she should have plenty of it, let curiosity and engagement lead her to her own discovery of the truth. Even if it amounts to an endless cycle of hold-ups before bed. And what's this urge to streamline, anyway? In conclusion I've left everything in its time-worn pile, only making sure that she first reads the most recent stuff.