I am 69 years old this August. I have three memoirs sitting on a hard drive, almost finished. What there is - is good. Really good. Scenes from my life. Stories I wrote down. I have sat with them for years. I just want to show them to people. So I’ve decided to place them here - in the monastery. I’ll get them out of the notebooks. That’s the first step. After that, I will post them, one by one and later, organize them into books, as they emerge.
Keys
My father’s aide, Neil, does the housekeeping and grocery shopping. He helps Dad take a shower and get dressed, he spoon feeds the meals my mother prepares. In the evenings, Neil helps him climb the stairs, brush his teeth and prepare for bed.
”I’ve been a home care aide before,” Neil tells me as he washes the dishes. “There was an old man I took care of in Wisconsin. When he died, I jumped on a bus and came to New York.”
Dad and I are sitting at the kitchen table. I have my tea. Dad is sipping hot coffee through a straw when Neil breaks into a medley of show tunes at the sink. A colorful selection from “The Music Man,” “Oklahoma,” and “South Pacific” which he weaves together, without regard for which line goes with which song.
I look at Dad.
“He’s an actor,” Dad shrugs.
Mom says that Neil steals her special food—the imported cheeses she serves to her poetry class, the organic cream she hides in the back of the refrigerator for special occasions.
About a year before my parents separated their lives, Dad went to the dentist and had his bottom teeth pulled.
“All of them?” I asked.
“It’s easier this way.”
“Easier for who?” my mother laughed. First, she had to puree his meals—reducing her carefully layered lasagna, her lemon parsley chicken, her sirloin tips in Bordeaux wine reduction to unrecognizable pulp. Then, when his hands lost their grip, she had to feed him with a spoon. But when he started snapping at her, “What’s wrong with you?” she set the spoon on the table.
“I don’t have time for this,” she said. “I have other things to do.”
My mother’s psychiatrist, who is also her best friend, is named Esther. Under Esther’s supervision, my mother swallows 76 pills—mostly vitamin and mineral supplements—a day.
“Don’t you think it’s excessive?” Mom asks me. She holds a capsule of Omega 3 oil up to the light. “What would happen if I just didn’t take this one today?”
“I think it would be all right.”
“I don’t even know what they’re for,” she says, squinting at the clear golden pill.
“Why don’t you try it, just skip that one, and see?”
She flashes the grin that makes her look like a ten-year-old boy, up to mischief. “Okay,” she says. “But don’t tell Esther.”
“I won’t.”
“She worries about me.”
“What’s so worrisome?”
“I don’t know... that I’ll die.”
“Everyone dies, Mom. Esther’s a doctor, she knows that. Tell her no matter what pills you take, you’re going to die.”
Mom cocks her head to the side like a bird. “You tell her,” she says, and pops the pill into her mouth after all, washing it down with a gulp of warm decaf from the stainless steel thermos she carries everywhere she goes.
Somewhere in this part of the story, I am sent by committee (my sisters, my husband and Neil) to deliver the message to Dad: When a person can hardly walk, it’s probably time to stop driving.
‘It’s none of your business,” Dad responds.
“Of course it’s our business. If you kill someone, we’ll be held liable.”
“Butt out,” Dad says.
“I was 17 when my brother taught me to drive,” Dad says. “And this was David,” he clarifies, “Not Vernon. We drove in circles around the parking lot, learning about the clutch and the gearshift. We took the car on the back roads, then to Bell Boulevard and when I got really good, Northern Boulevard.” But even though he performed his road test flawlessly, the testing officer said, “I want to pass you. I just don’t know what the precedent is. I don’t know if I can.”
“What do I have to do to prove I can drive safely?” the 17-year-old who’d one day be my dad asked.
The officer considered the question. The kid could drive. He had a perfect score on the test. “I’m going to send you for an advanced driving course in New York City,” he said. “If you can drive in Manhattan, you can drive anywhere.”
My father took the subway into the city, completed the course and took his second road test, in New York City.
“Well, you passed,” the city’s testing official said. “But I’m not sure what to do. Maybe you should take the advanced license requirement.”
So Dad went back to driving school, fulfilled the requirements for an advanced license and finally, passed through the maze of requirements they’d designed just for him, my father was so highly trained he could have driven freight from coast to coast.
Now, Dad leaves his keys in the ignition because his hands can no longer manipulate objects and he can’t insert or withdraw them. He cannot pull loose change from his pocket— but has no EZ Pass so it can take as long as five full minutes for him to pay a toll.
Last year, he asked his mechanic to install a handle on the steering wheel— it’s a doorknob, anchored to the wheel with clasps—with which Dad turns the wheel with one hand. The other hand rests, dead weight, in his lap.
“We could report his driving anonymously,” Matthew suggests. “Let me call,” he says. “I’ll pretend to be a neighbor. I’ll be like, ‘Hey, you should come and see this guy and decide if you think he should be driving anymore.”
I taste the stew I’m making, adjust the spices. Reach for my wine glass. “Maybe Neil could ‘accidentally’ lose his keys,” I say. “He could put them in a drawer and we could go pick them up.”
Matthew nods. “Whatever we do,” he says. “We should do it soon. He’s going to hurt someone—or hurt himself.”
Three sisters, lined up on the wide vinyl backseat of the family car, a Dodge Dart. “Put your arm out the window,” Dad used to call to us. “Cup your hand. Feel how the wind pushes on it? That’s how an airplane works. The faster you go, the more resistance you get and that lifts the wings off the ground.”
Dad drove us to school when we missed the bus and picked us up at our friends’ houses. Sometimes, he’d take me into town to Krieger’s, the old-fashioned ice cream parlor where they made their own ice cream.
“You know they used to put a raw egg in these,” he’d tell the teenage boy who was making his egg cream. If he ordered a chocolate malted, he’d say, “Don’t forget the malt powder. It’s not a malted without the powder. Last time they just gave me a shake.”
I say it. “Dad you just can’t drive any more.”
My father begins to cry. The tears squeeze out slowly, sliding down his cheeks as he says, in a voice I don’t recognize, “If you take my car away from me, I’ll die.”
“If we don’t take your car you’ll kill someone else—I couldn’t live with that.”
“It’s not yours to live with!” he explodes, in that way that someone who can barely move explodes.
We blink at each other. He lowers his eyes. He stares at his hands, shakes his head back and forth, repeating quietly, “It’s all I have left. It’s all I have left.”
“No, it isn’t, Dad.” I reach for his hands. “You have your life. You have your family.”
He shakes his head, his shoulders all droopy, silently weeping.
“There are car services. You’re a social worker, you know this already. There are buses.”
“They take forever. They make all these stops so it takes three, maybe four hours to get to work. I don’t have that kind of time.”
“There are taxis...”
“No driver is going to go out to Melville—an hour and a half without a return trip.”
“Hire a driver.”
“I can’t afford that!”
“It’s twice a week; how much could it cost?”
“Too much.”
“Beth and Jenny and I will pay for it.”
“You can’t afford it.”
“We can, we want to help.”
“I won’t let you. It’s a waste of money.”
“Then I’ll drive you myself.”
He sighs. “You live two hours away—and once you get here, it’s another hour and a half —each way. You want to drive 7 hours a day?”
“I would. All I do is sit and write in cafes anyway. I could listen to my courses on tape on the way here. We could talk on the way out to Melville and I could hang around and write while I wait for you.”
“Why? Why would you do that?”
My throat closes with emotion. “Because I love you,” I choke out.
“Not that much you don’t.”
I leave Dad sitting at the kitchen table with Mooky nestled in his lap. As I drive away, I imagine his hands, clumsily stroking her head. Tears of frustration and outrage fill my eyes. And then, in that weird symmetry we’re living in right now, as I’m sitting in traffic on the Bronx River Parkway, my cell phone rings.
“Mom!” my son crows. “I passed my road test!”
—
Two weeks later, on Thanksgiving, ABC airs an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” in which an elderly man crashes through an outdoor marketplace, killing several people. We are watching with Matt’s family after the holiday meal has been served. Max and Katie and the cousins on the sofa, me and my sisters in law on the floor. Matthew is standing in the doorway, sipping coffee when, at the end of the show, the doctor makes his diagnosis: Spinal Stenosis.
"Isn't that what your father has?" my sister-in-law asks. It is — but it's only the latest thing, layered on top of the cerebral palsy he's carried his whole life. The CP has always been there, in his hands, in his step. Now the stenosis is taking the rest.
I catch Matthew’s eye, then back to the screen as the TV man’s wife collapses in tears, apologizing to the people whose lives have been ruined by her failure to take away her husband’s keys.
“It’s Neil, Mrs. Oscar. We need to talk. I don’t think your father should be driving anymore.”
“You watched the show?”
“What show?”
“Grey’s Anatomy. Last night... about Spinal Stenosis.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Neil. I just assumed you watched the show—because you’re calling about this today and they just did the show, you know, last night.”
“I’m confused…”
I sigh and my hand reaches for the pinchy place between my eyes. “I’m sorry, Neil. Why did you call?”
“I wanted to talk about your father... and the driving. I was hoping you’d talk to him. Take his keys away.”
“I’ve tried talking with him,” I tell Neil. “Maybe you could give it a shot.”
“Um... Mrs. Oscar. I have talked with him. I’ve told him I don’t want to drive with him anymore. I’ve shared my concerns but he just yells at me. Someone in the family needs to step in here.”
“He yells at me, too! Yelling is the only defense he has left.”
“So I’ve learned.”
Two days later, as my sisters and I are volleying emails about how to handle this, Neil hitchhikes to New York City on his day off and disappears without a trace.
“He’s left everything behind,” Mom worries. “Maybe he’s hurt. Maybe he’s wandering around Central Park not remembering where we live! He left his medication. He was on medication, you know?”
“What kind?”
“Anti-psychotic. He was always asking Esther to give him prescriptions. But she refused.”
My hand reaches for the pinchy place between my eyes.. If I rub my fingers there, sometimes, the headache goes away. “He’ll come back,” I say, “If he was in trouble, he’d call.”
Dad calls from the other room. “He isn’t coming back.”
“How do you know?”
“We had an argument. He wanted twenty bucks to go to the city and I wouldn’t give it to him.”
“Why not?” I snap. “Why not give it to him – it would have made him happy!”
“It’s my money,” Dad says. “Mind your own business.” —
Mom packs Neil’s belongings into boxes for the thrift store. “It’s a shame,” she says, holding up a sweater. “Maybe this would fit your father. Maybe we should keep the books.
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.
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your writing is the most engaging wonderful captivating ever!!! everything i read of yours … i feel like im there !!!
Gah!!! You must publish these. You simply must. I will help you. Whatever you need.