home: part six

The Bread Queen arrives at 5:15--Mom and I and Lorna have been waiting since 4:00, me knowing what delights are coming and Mom having no idea except for the fact that I've told her that something wonderful is arriving after 4:00 and that the daughter of a friend of mine is bringing this wonderfulness. When I get there at 3:50, Lorna has Mom decked out--her black skinny E. Fischer pants and her red shawl. She has black jet beads strung around her neck twice and she looks better than I've seen her in a long time.

Mom and I chit chat for a while...and I read to her bits of the day's newspaper. I tell her about the Nobel Prize being awarded to two women (and one man) for work with chromosomes; I try to explain about the "telomeres" (end caps on chromosomes) and that the research done illuminates how telomeres are lenghtened and shortened which then controls the life-span of a cell. For cancer cells, there is an unlimited life; for victims of certain diseases these telomeres are prematurely shortened. Mom nods at me, understanding very little of this, I imagine, but glad to be listening anyway.

All the while I'm nervous that by the time The Queen arrives Mom may be too tired to participate in our bread binge. Her eyes are drooping shut and her conversation is limited. There are many sentences begun but not finished and much of what she says makes no sense--"crazy talk," as she calls it in her more lucid moments. "Nobody's name for...the things...you know...not today...when we were...having..." Or, "We need a plot..." Or, "tune the telephone...we need to...she (Lorna) knows how to get things..." I have no idea what Mom is talking about and no amount of careful listening seems to make any difference. Her stroke and Alzheimer's have assumed control.

When finally there's a knock at the door, I see Hanna standing there--The Bread Queen" at last.

"Mom," I say, "this is Hanna, Deb Hedeen's daughter."

Mom lights up--beams a smile to Hanna like I haven't seen since I got here today.

"Hanna's brought you something," I continue, "she's brought you a loaf of homemade bread, still warm from her oven."

If Mom smiled before, now she's positively glowing--like she's radioactive. If I touch her, I might glow too--her excitement is contagious! Mom knows what bread is and she know how much she loves it, and how much she and I loved going in search of "good bread," wherever we were--in Firenza, Italy or Seattle, Washington. Bread is elemental to Mom, something that brings her home to her roots, home to me and my childhood and girlhood with Mom, before she decided I was an inadequate daughter and before she replaced me and my brothers with my brother Eric's children--younger (less flawed, at least for a time) embryonic versions of her own children, Peter, Eric and Christine. That these grandchildren are approximately the same ages apart as my brothers and I (and the same genders) never ceases to amaze me.

Hanna brings the loaf--a three pound extravaganza--in a cotton hand towel, the kind my mother's mother used: light, gauzy, embroidered and feeling like home. She's even come with napkins, bread knife and butter: we are ready for a feast. Mom is more than ready, all of her senses suddenly alert. Her hands are shaking and her eyes are darting from me to Hanna to the loaf of bread. I let her smell the loaf first, let the yeasty, olive-oil perfume her brain cells. She tells us then about her mother who made bread, in fact was an amazing baker, both in Norway and in Seattle. Mom talks about how her mother baked bread and she, Mom, would watch, intrigued. I wonder at where these bread recipes and this knowledge have gone, where the collective wisdom of such a woman as my grandmother Berentina has vanished to?

Hanna slices open the loaf, and the fresh-baked smells bleed from the crust, aerate our noses and palettes. When I butter the first slice Hanna hands me, I realize what a whopper this loaf is--a ten inch diameter of whole wheat/white floured rustic wonderfulness. Take note that Hanna's loaf is already half eaten by the time I snap the photo; in the excitement of the loaf's arrival I've forgotten to memorialize. I tear off a small buttered bite for Mom and hand it to her; she watches my hand intently, ready to grab what I offer her. When she works the snippet of bread to her lips, the fingers of her left hand charting a shaky course between fingers and teeth, I see a smile growing, one that can only be called a "bread grin." I catch Mom in the act, snapping three photos to memorialize this moment: the before (analyzing what's in her hand), the during (concentrating on consuming her hunk of bread) and the after (as the delicious bread morsel dissolves between her teeth and tongue). Mom's ecstatic!

We talk of ordinary things--what bread we like and why handmade bread tastes so different than mass produced, even when it's an "artisan" mass produced loaf. Hanna explains how she crafted this loaf--the hours that went into making the biga the night before, the flour and water and yeast mass that must be started and then left to sit for 12 hours. She tells us about the process of adding the flour and the water and the olive oil the next day (today)--how it takes patience to make these opposites congeal.

In the meantime, we are munching our bread--I've cut and buttered additional slices and we are all stuffing them into our mouths with wild abandon. Calories don't matter. Even Lorna is eating bread--the woman who disdains all bread in favor of rice. We are sure we have eaten nothing better, so sure that it's irrelevant that dinner will be here in a few minutes, fifteen to be exact. I see a mass of butter globbed on Mom's red shawl and there's crumbs of bread dribbled down both Mom's chest and my lap. Pigeons would have a hey day with our debris. We don't care.

Mom's engaged--she's asking about Hanna's job search, remembering that she has an interview on Friday, and I'm thinking, how can this be? Just minutes before Hanna came, Mom was disorientated and bleak, barely maintaining her equilibrium. Now, she's chatting away, smiling and cognizant in a way she hasn't been for the last three days. I'm afraid to say a word, afraid to cross or uncross my legs, afraid that anything I might do or say might disturb this hiatus of clarity. I want this to go on forever.

When I walk Hanna to the elevator, my voice threatens tears as I try to explain to her what she's done for my mom. She's twenty-two: she has a new husband and a Mom my age who's healthy and vital. Everything is in front of her. All of this experience with my own mom is beyond Hanna's life story. But someday it will be real, as it is for most everybody--perhaps then she will understand, perhaps then she can care-take her own mother's journey.

After Hanna leaves, I wrap up Mom's remaining loaf in the cotton hand towel Hanna has left for us; she will pick it up the same time next week when she will bring yet another loaf of fresh loveliness for my mom. Mom's bread looks like a large bun there warming on her lap, or a large egg to be hatched on the oven-like comfort of her thighs. Mom's two hands rest lightly in either side of the wrapped loaf, like she's sure her soon-to-be-born young-in is going to prematurely flee the nest if she doesn't make use of proper maternal measures. Her loaf remains there, hatching in her lap, till I get up to leave.

We are still aglow when dinner arrives: "Pork L'Orange with Buckwheat Noodles and Broccoli." While dinner smells inviting, Mom eats only half of it. This time, Lorna and I don't say a thing--Mom's tummy is already happy, with or without dinner. This is enough.

I look at Mom and ask--"Is your tum-tum happy?" Mom smiles at me and says--"So very happy."

Just after we've cleared away the remnants of dinner, my brother's family arrives--Terry, Eric and one of their son's Alexander. The energy in the room shifts immediately. It's show time now.

Terry immediately begins to chatter about what she's reading in her "425" magazine and Alexander settles back into the corner to read the paper. Terry and my brother carry on a lively conversation full of staccatos phrases and humor, all of which is way beyond my mom. I turn every now and then and watch her face: it's expectant and focused, like she's trying to follow the volley of what's being said only the nuances are beyond her grasp. Every now and then she'll start a sentence but, after a three of four words, her voice collapses and the conversation moves on around her, in spite of her--the sheer volume of my family's words swallow her own like a tide at ebb, leaving everything submerged in its wake.

I feel like a tourist or worse yet a voyeur--like I'm here but I'm really not. This is no longer Mom's room. This is no longer my mom.

When Terry and family get up to leave and say their goodbyes, Mom raises her left hand and says in an excited voice--"But we need to...to...you know...leave...go."

Terry stops mid-stride and comes back to Mom's chair. "Leave to go where Gamoo?"

"Home," she says, "to your home."

While Terry quickly says--"No, it's your home Gamoo," I think to myself, Mom is smarter then we think she is. This is not the first time she's referred to her own home as my sister-in-law's. Mom bought the home with her own money, furnished it with her own furnishings, pays for its upkeep (even now) with her own annuity, keeps it clean with the labor of her own caregivers, Lorna and Mulu. And yet, despite these obvious ownership ties, the house remains her daughter-in-law's because Terry and her family have claimed it as so. Mom feels like a visitor in her own home. This is unspeakably sad.

It's a fine October night when I kiss Mom goodbye and steer my Miata through the dark Seattle streets. There's a waning full moon, but, because of the buildings, I can't quite see it's glow. Once I pull onto Denny, I punch the "On" button for my CD player, wanting yet another repeat of the song I've been listening to for the last four weeks. I don't even know the song's title, only that it's from a homemade medley lovingly created by a friend of mine. Lora has carefully labeled the songs, but I can't find the CD case to check out the listings. All I know is that halfway through the chorus each time there's a refrain stating--"...we find out that you and I collide." I don't know why, but the sadness of this line is what I wait for--why I play this song all the way to and from the Mirabella. It's like a drug, something that keeps my mind in the stupor it needs to be in, both to see Mom and to leave her again each day. It takes a scant 3.5 minutes to get from beginning to end of the notes, so, you can imagine there's a lot of punching going on of the rewind button. It takes concentration to keep abreast of this constant need for repetition.

My commute is soon interrupted, however, when at the end of "you and I collide" my attempt to punch the rewind button leads to nothing. I punch again and again, thinking that perhaps in the dark I've missed the correct button. But when I take a glance down to the console, I can see that I've got my finger on the right spot. It's just stopped working! "Damn," I say into the night. "Of all the luck." Soon the disk is playing a completely different song, by a female recording artist, one that I realize I've never heard, as each time I get to this point in the CD I've already repeated the song before. "Rain, rain, rain," she belts out, "and then the telephone rings." I can't quite tell what she's singing about, the clatter from my tires running the road is too distracting, but this refrain seems fittingly sober. So I listen some more. Maybe this will do, I think. Just maybe. Soon, however, there's another song, something about "love makes me lie, love makes me fly," and I conclude--this is not working for me. I have no interest in the pernicious failings of love.

"Fuck you," I say aloud to the CD player just then, my hands slapping down hard on the steering wheel for emphasis, because I can--because no one else can hear my profanity. "Fuck you," I repeat again. All I want is to make my drive in the company of my song--the "Collide" song. Is this too much to ask? Why my CD player has decided not to work at this particular moment is more than I can know or accept. I JUST WANT MY SONG!

What I realize now is that the only thing I can control is whether the CD player is on or off; the music selections are beyond my keen. Since I want it "On" for safety reasons (keep myself alert), I am captive to what ever will appear next on the CD.

I feel my tears before I realize I'm crying--feels like rain on my cheeks, torrential, continuous rain, though the night is pavement-dry. And I am swept away with the flood. I cry for me, I cry for Mom. Big messy drops that surprise me in their volume, their wetness. I cry and cry--the cotton of my T-shirt stuck wet to my nipples, transparent with pain. My skin goosebumps in the urban night and still I cry. For the home Mom may not be able to return to. For the home that's not really hers to begin with. For everything there is to regret about how we got to this point. I cry for it all. Alone in my car with the night shrieking by me. My driver's window is wide open and by now I've got the CD ratcheted up--I no longer care what's being played. My CD's so loud I can't even hear the road racket, a sound that's (normally) incredibly invasive at all times. It hurts this much.

When the CD finally works its way around to the first song of Lora's selections, "Breathe" mercifully appears, a song that's nearly as effective as "Collide" in its mood stabilization possibilities. It occurs to me then what to do--each time "Breathe" comes to an end, I can punch the eject button, grab the CD as it's spit out of the player, and then shove it quickly back in, all the while remaining between the two white lines of my lane. "Breathe" will play again and again. Control has returned.

For the rest of my drive I eject and re-insert my CD. Between my sobs I try to breathe, long shaky gulps of air that fall short of the stress-reducing measure I regularly perform while at yoga. I breathe and breathe some more, taking in the exhaust-fumed night as it comes to me through my open window, because really this is all I can do.

Breathe.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--