Music, Movies, and the Mutt
Norma's “Hello?” call-to-action came at 7:22 this morning. (I always check the exact time so I can use it as leverage to convince it's too early to get up, even if it is daylight.). She has a TV in her bedroom that she never watches, preferring instead the larger one in the living room. But I turn her bedroom set on to the classic country audio channel, hoping it will lull her back to sleep. Ever so slowly, it does. Still she's restless. I lie on her left side and watch as her right arm, gaunt as a dead tree limb, rises and sways—not in time with the music—but as if trying to float away on its own.
Her lips are thin and colorless, her mouth slightly ajar, reminding me of a profile on a coin. Her bedroom is oppressively warm, and I wonder if she's thirsty for a sip of the water she always winces at—and sometimes refuses—when she's taking pills..
Patsy Cline's “Sweet Dreams,” Dan Seals' “Bop,” Mel McDaniel's “Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On,” Jerry Lee Lewis' “Middle Age Crazy,” . Alabama's “She and I”--none of these penetrate her sleep enough to set her humming.
I think maybe Dwight Yoakam's “I Sang Dixie” will get a response, but it too bounces off her invisible shield. When she's awake, she always asks me who's singing when a Yoakam song comes on. She developed a fondness for Yoakam years ago when she was in Los Angeles with Ralph Stanley, and Yoakam—always in awe of Ralph—bought and presented him a birthday cake. In Ralph's company, she said, Yoakam seemed as excited and eager to please as a little kid..
My attention shifts away from her when Tex Ritter comes on with “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven.” I listen and try to guess when the song was recorded by sifting through the names Ritter cites of those who are already dead and those who will be “in the next hundred years or so.” Of the ones who've already ascended, Johnny Horton is the most recent—and of those waiting in line down here on earth—all now dead—Red Foley was the first to go. My cerebral approach fails when I realize I don't remember the death dates for either Horton or Foley—and that I'll just have to remember to look it up later. Like I don't have enough problems! (As it turns out, Horton died in 1960. Foley in 1968 and the song was recorded in 1961.)
The main reason I want Norma to sleep as long as she can is that our normal days are filled with nothing much but sitting. If my mind didn't jump around like a grasshopper, life would be unbearably dull. As her infirmity has worsened, Norma is more and more insistent on keeping me in her line of vision. Even when I”m preparing her something to eat, I have to do it quickly—or else she'll be up, stumbling about uncertainly and looking for me.
Our mornings are relatively tranquil. She gets up, greets her dog, eats her cereal, takes her pills (with varying degrees of grace) and settles in to watch the talk shows. On a good day, I can steal maybe a half hour to respond to emails and write a paragraph or two. By then it's noon and we can watch the news together. None of the programs stir her to conversation, but they enable me to blather on.
The afternoons are deserts—except when our dear friend, Jewel, takes Norma for an outing and leaves me in an unaccustomed state of euphoria. When it's just the two of us, we try to fill the time with movies that I think might stir her few embers of memory. The trouble with drawing conclusions from one example—that example being Norma—is that I never know whether it's her attitude that creates the context or the context that creates her attitude. For example, we recently watched “Rear Window,” and she was riveted on it from start to finish. Was it because the movie was so good that it drew the best responses out of her, or was her attitude so open at that particular time that it turned what might have been an ordinary movie for her into a great one?
I hope it will not cause you to look askance at our aesthetics, but she and I both reveled in “Smokey and the Bandit,” as well. Jerry Reed's “Eastbound and Down” is nothing less than a magic carpet.
The one thing—more than me or music or movies—that brings Norma to life is her little dog, Cooper. She virtually squeals with delight when he greets her in the hall in the morning, and almost every night she implores me to wheel her from her bedroom to the living room so she can bid Cooper good night. At least five or six times a day, she'll try to ask me for something she can't quite enunciate, and I'll try to make out what it is that she wants. Hungry? No. The bathroom? No. Cooper? She shakes her head yes. I tell her he's sleeping in his bed behind the sofa where she's sitting. Now, she can talk. “How do you know?” she asks suspiciously. “Because he's not begging me for food,” I tell her. That answer usually satisfies her. But at other times, I have to help her up so she can actually walk around the sofa and see him at rest.
Cooper yin and yangs the shit out of me. I do not relate to pets. They give me no comfort, and I'll kill the man who brings me a puppy for companionship if I'm ever in a nursing home. But I'm so grateful that Cooper provides Norma something precious to hold on to, I'll take him to the Mayo Clinic if he ever has sniffles. Despite his benefits, he's still a colossal pain in the ass to take care of when I already have Norma's barrage of needs to handle. I would ask for your prayers if I weren't an atheist..
Tonight, as I was getting ready to wheel Norma from the living room into her bedroom, I saw her pick up the cup of water I had given her with her pills, look into it and then unhesitatingly take a sip. It was like seeing Donald Trump with an Afro. “Why you devious wench!,” I said in my best prosecutor's voice. “So you CAN drink water after all?”
She looked up at me with a glint of the old mischief in her eyes, smiled and said, “One drink.”