baking pies

I've been waiting all day for the call backs--from the Vineyard Church, from the Dixons, but apparently they are uninterested in helping me find my brother. I consider this appalling, seeing how I laid myself bare, explaining that "our mother is dying." Yes, I actually spoke these words to the recordings--their intimacy felt strange on my tongue, both the inclusiveness of the "our" (how many years has it been since I have thought of my brother Peter and I as a "we") and the reality of Mom in conjunction with death. Both thoughts are sobering.

I bring Mom a leaf bouquet--red and gold remnants from my morning run. Sumac, maple, birch, ornamental cherry. As I collect them, their branches begin to feel awkward in my left hand, weigh me down, soon I am going at half my usual pace. All in the name of fall color. When Mom sees the leaves, she brightens up--her face miraculously transforms from a flaccid stupor to engagement within two seconds. I wish I had a magical leaf wand for every day.

Just when we get done admiring the leaf colors, Becky (Mom's OT) walks in with a gift in her hand, something she helped her seniors make during a workshop today: a petite pumpkin that is stabbed with six toothpicks full of basil, mozzarella and tomato. Mom is charmed. When I pop one of these kabobs into her mouth, she grins, letting the mozzarella slip to the front of her teeth exposing a half moon of white cheese between her lips. Mulu and I laugh, so hard in fact that I can barely keep my camera still as I photograph Mom's cheesy grin. The effect is hilarious! Soon after, dinner comes, one of Mom's favorite--"Roasted Chicken with Olives, Sauteed Zucchini and Baked Potato." Mom has no excuse to avoid eating and she does eat, every last bite. It's miraculous!

For our mutual entertainment, I read aloud to Mom from the Ladies Home Journal for November (something my sister-in-law brought)--an anachronism I didn't even know still existed. Near the end of the issue is a spread about pies, delicious decadent pies. I read Mom the recipe for "Pear Frangipane Crostata" which sounds divine to us--Mom and I love almond paste....anything with almond paste in it, or almond flavoring for that matter, is a "yes." This particular recipe is intriguing--you make the "pie" on a baking sheet rather than in a pie pan. Pears sit on top of an almond paste creme that's been spread over a circle of pie dough. Mom talks about how she and I can make this...about how we will use a blender for the filling because Mom doesn't have a food processor and how we will cut the almond paste into small bits, to aid with getting the ingredients to congeal. We'll have to watch the oven though, she reminds me, as it cooks food irregularly, often burns one side or the other. The level of detail she provides is stunning! But then I realize she's talking about her old kitchen, the one at her Medina house--what she calls her "home home." My heart aches for her, for the "home home" she had to leave behind, for the pies we will no longer bake together. I feel sad enough to weep.

"Your Mom made pie, didn't she?" I ask Mom, to divert my tears.

"Oh yes," she says, smiling. "Mom made lots of pie."

"What kind, Mom?"

"Oh every kind," Mom answers but then doesn't give me any particulars, so I decide to prompt her.

"Cherry? Banana Cream? Pumpkin?"

"Oh yes," she says again.

"What about berry?" I ask her, and it's here where she takes off, listing off a gazillion pies--blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry...even gooseberry, though she admits that she can't remember what gooseberries look like.

"What about prune pie?" I ask her, remembering how Mom would sit in the Italian prune tree in her backyard eating green prunes until the fruit was ripe enough to pick for pie--she just couldn't wait.

I ask her, "What does prune pie taste like?" not being able to imagine the texture of cooked prunes inside a pie crust.

Instead of answering, she wanders into nonsense at this point, something about "we have to do a bit of..." and "these things are over there..." Mom's "crazy talk" continues as Heidi "the pill lady" comes in to give Mom her pills. The antibiotic for her UTI is ground into a white paste--it looks particularly uninviting. Mom makes a face as three painfully bitter spoonfuls are slung down her throat between mouth fulls of applesauce. I marvel at Mom's patience--how she must endure many such assaults to her body's integrity every day, as people make decisions for her about what she will eat, how much she will eat, what medications she will take, when her diaper will be changed, what time she will have therapy. All important events, crucial to her health, but they happen on a timeline that Mom has no control over. What must this be like? I get annoyed when even the smallest thing flutters out of my control--like horrendous traffic on I-5, for example, causing me to rearrange my arrival time to the Mirabella by a half and hour.

After Heidi leaves, I pick up our pie talk, asking where Berentina got fruit for the pies, knowing there wasn't much money. Mom says--"Japanese farmers" and I think, but how can that be, they were mercilessly interned during the war and their farm land in the Kent and Puyallup valley confiscated? And then I remember--Berentina stopped making pies in 1945, the year she died--this would be the end of Mom's pie memories.

"What happened to the recipes?" I ask her, curious about where all that cooking wisdom has gone as I have none of these recipes, only ones from the old country for things like Krume Kake and Berliner.

Instead of an answer, however, Mom bursts into tears, wailing--"There are so many things I didn't do...can't stand it...terrible...just terrible." As I rub her hand and periodically wipe tears from her eyes with a corner of her sheet, I'm thinking, what things can she mean? And then it comes to me--she's talking about the suddenness of Berentina's death--how one minute she's rolling our pie dough onto her Formica counter in West Seattle and the next she's drowning in her own lungs inside a Seattle hospital. During this time Mom is a busy college girl, going to summer school, working her marketing internship. No time to learn Berentina's pastry secrets, no time to collect her recipes. Just gone. Mom is inconsolable, continuing to wail about that--"bad bad man"--referring to the doctor who did not warn them of Berentina's eminent death. And I regret bringing up the pie baking, not imagining the grief it would lead to.

"Is it like Dad?" I say to her then, thinking of something to calm her, some experience I can share that will make her grief feel less intense. "Like how he died" I finish, "so suddenly...and there was no time to say goodbye?"

She nods her head "yes" but then launches into another tirade of tears, this time talking about what a "good man" Dad was, and I'm thinking--oh how interesting, as I've never heard Mom talk about her husband in this way. Never.

But soon I realize she's talking about her Dad, Deda, and not my father. This is something that happens often--the strange juxtapositions Mom makes in her speech, her thinking, leaping from one topic to another seemingly unrelated one--from my father Paul to her father Deda. Synapses firing at incongruous moments. Similarly, she's begun to substitute words, saying "picnic" instead of "pill," for example, or "letter" instead of "leaf." Peculiar "synonyms" that suggest her Alzheimer's is still alive and well. The world scrambled according to Mom.

"I should go to bed," Mom says unexpectedly, an acknowledgment that she's tired and beyond her coping limits. I'm relieved, as I don't know what to do with her, how to ease her grief. Her weeping makes me anxious. As I gather my things, I realize I have yet to tell her about my difficulties in finding her son. I consider telling her now but decide to wait--maybe I can solve this mystery, maybe Mom will not need to be worried by the tribulations of my hunt. Maybe a happy ending is still possible?

But I don't believe in happy endings. It's only Mom who insists they're still real.

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