Cumberland Island

My college buddy, Matt, invited us to join him... and his Boy Scout troop from Baxley, GA for a day at the Cumberland Island National Seashore this weekend. Historic ruins, wild ponies, unspoiled marshes and beaches and a gaggle of young men bursting with testosterone. Memories...

The weather was great and a good time was had by all. Here are a few pics.

Shadow Boxes

Life seldom unfolds according to “plan”. Certainly no one plans to lose their mind…

My wife’s mother is aged and infirmed. She has many issues; mobility, self care, instability. But she has, for the most part, retained her mental sharpness. The nursing home system is extremely complex and she has progressed from hospital care to skilled care to nursing home care. To the extent possible, the family engaged in the process, but did not foresee the turn of events which resulted in her placement in an Alzheimer unit.

She does not belong in this unit and the family is working frantically to facilitate her transfer to a more suitable facility. In the meantime, she is confined in a lock-down dementia unit. Her attitude is so positive and her faith is strong. She said, “Perhaps I have been placed here to pray for these poor people…” Prayers notwithstanding, it has been an eye opener for us.

To enter the Alzheimer wing, access codes are punched onto a security keypad unlocking the heavy wooden doors. Often there are patients standing inside the door peering out through the two small windows… trying to find a way out. Some, who appear otherwise healthy, will insist they are staff or visitors in an attempt to make their way through those doors, back into the world. All 50 patients behind those doors are severely impacted by mental disease… except my mother-in-law.

Men and women dressed in casual clothes, tee shirts, sneakers and sweat suits, roam up and down the long hallways along the highly polished floors. Some hold dolls or stuffed animals. Some talk to themselves. Others, like loveable little Lizzy, always seem to have a roll or a handful of bread and munch as she randomly ping pongs from wall to wall along the bright corridor. Lizzy is small and painfully thin with short gray hair, her age somewhere between perhaps 70 and 80. She was the first person I met coming through the locked door.

Lizzy shuffled up beside me. Her speech is unintelligible, stuttered. But she spoke passionately, with a tight smile on her face and an urgent expectation in her eyes. “Aba aba chh chh buh…” she said between clenched teeth. She took my hand and I followed as we wandered aimlessly and silently down the hall to the activity room, There, several dozen people sat at tables or randomly wandered about the room. They took no notice of me and I stood still to take in the scene.

Some people were sitting silently within themselves, rocking, seemingly not focusing on anything or anyone. Others were animated, jabbering away about snippets of thoughts that ran through their ravaged minds. “I need to go home.”… “Has my meal been paid for?”...“Get them away from me. Leave me alone!”... “My mother is coming for me today”…  Others were speaking nonsense, words without meaning, without ceasing. Lizzy released my hand and wandered away.

I walked among them and most seemed not to see me, but few responding to my smile or words of greeting. So foreign. So disturbing. A thought… how might they react to my gentle, little white dogs? Previously, we had brought them into hospitals and nursing homes with good results. I asked permission from the head nurse and with their vet records got the OK to bring them in from the van. I was apprehensive that some of the residents might be afraid of them or that others might hurt the dogs so decided to carry them in order to control their introduction. I was not prepared for the response.

We (Sampson and Lulu, 2 eight pound Maltese and me) rounded the corner from the long hallway into the activity room. Many people broke into broad smiles.  Eyes, which had been expressionless, were alive. Hands were outstretched.

I quickly learned to approach cautiously before bringing the dogs close enough to be petted. Ken, a baseball capped, 84 year old former logger, toothless and confined to his wheelchair, howled at me, “GET THOSE SONS OF WHORES AWAY FROM ME…”

Minutes later, he gently scratched their ears and reminisced about how his old hound dog would ride with him on his skidder as he worked deep in the Maine woods.

But most of patients, some of whom had appeared catatonic moments earlier, smiled, stroked their fur, spoke to them softly and with love. One woman repeated over and over, ‘Look at those beautiful babies… look at those beautiful babies”. Another woman jabbered away excitedly about pie and walked over to me presumably to pet the dogs, The nurses broke into gales of laughter when instead she put her hands inside my shirt and began to pet me.

I moved from table to table, offering each person an opportunity to pet the dogs or, in some cases, to hold them. They were gentle, loving. There were those who were unable to respond in any way. Others who responded with fear. For those who could respond, it was an extraordinary glimpse of the person they had once been, if only for a moment.

The next weekend when we again visited, there was Lizzy walking the halls. She gave no indication that she in any way remembered our walk down the hall together, an event burned into my memory. Her expression this day was anxious, upset. She seemed about to cry. But later in the day she approached me in the hall, jabbered excitedly, reached up and gently stroked my face. “ Moh moh shibbabababa…” she said and laughed. Her eyes and her attention wandered and she shuffled away. Did she remember me?

How insidious this disease. Late one night, after everyone was in bed, I walked the halls and read the “shadow boxes’ secured on the walls at the entryway to each room. Locked wooden boxes with plexi-glass covers. Names printed on tags, pictures of smiling people now silent, of grandchildren and children, husbands and wives, of lives now gone forever, the owners but shadows of their former selves. It touched me deeply.

The following week we arrived on Friday and accompanied my mother-in -law to dinner. I arrived ten minutes after my wife and her mother were seated at a table with 3 other women to find one of the women verbally terrorizing the table. My wife looked at me anxiously. The woman’s name was Martha.

“God damn you. Don’t look at me like that. You sons of bitches. Talk, talk, talk. That’s all you do. Just shut up! Shut up!” She glared at everyone and especially me, the only man at the table. I attempted to speak with her and she cut me off.”Talk, talk, talk” she taunted and began to knock food onto the floor and put silverware into her glass of milk. We ignored her misbehavior and soon she sat, sullen and withdrawn.

After dinner, while my wife was helping her mother prepare for bed, I wandered down to the community room and found Martha sitting with another resident. She was cruelly berating him as he sat happily, pulling on his suspenders. He, in response, was laughing foolishly, smiling broadly and making train noises. I decided to join the conversation.

Pulling another rocking chair close to them, I asked if I might sit there and getting no response, began to quietly rock away, not making eye contact. Soon she began to rant. ‘HE wants it HIS way… always HIS way. HE thinks because he works he can have it that way… and I suppose he can... Peculiar… I call it Peculiar.” I began repeating her words back to her. “Yes, he wants it that way.”… “I suppose he can.”… “Yes. Peculiar.”…

“Choo-Chooo” said Suspenders, complete with arm pull. I replied “Choo-Choo”. He grinned. She rocked and ranted. “I like these rocking chairs” I said to no one.

We rocked for 30 minutes. Several times Martha got up from the chair and each time that she did, I stood in the presence of a lady as my mother had always taught me to do. And when she sat, so did I. And we rocked some more.

Finally she rose and walked stiffly down the hall, farting loudly, muttering. I resumed the conversation with Suspenders. He railed about “working and working and I told them they can’t do that. That’s not right…. not right.” as his face clouded up at some distant grievance yet traversing the wrecked synapses of his brain.

When Martha reentered the room, I stood and she walked directly to me, but avoided my gaze.

“ It needs to stay here. Right here.” she instructed as she handed me her blue knit sweater. I hung it on the back of her rocking chair and smoothed it down gently. “It will be right here for you”, I said.

She continued to mumble about her room and how she wanted to “just get back”. “Can I walk with you to find your room?” I asked. Remarkably, she took my arm.

“Good night” I said to Suspenders. “Woo-Wooo”, he replied

Martha rambled as we walked until we met Lizzy who decided she was going to hold my other arm. Martha raised her voice and cussed her away. As we walked by the activity room, the big, friendly nurse smiled and said, “You found a friend Martha?” She gripped my arm tighter.

At the far end of the hall, I spied her shadowbox. Pictures from before, when she was whole. She was not smiling in any of the pictures. Hard, stern expressions. Life had not been easy for her.

She seemed relieved when she recognized her surroundings and announced, “My room… see, my rocking chair… and my bed.” She released my arm and sat on the side of the bed. And then she looked up and locked eyes with me, her eyes softened, looked wounded. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as she spoke directly to me. “This… has been wonderful. I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed it. Just wonderful….” She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

Her moment of lucidity hammered my world view. How remarkable that she was able to surge through her disease, if but for an instant, to connect with compassion and warmth, to overcome the raging fear and anger within her crippled mind. An aberration I wondered?

I walked down the now dark and quiet hallways, past the shadow boxes and the shadow people, lost from the world, mindless, just waiting. I felt a mixture of emotions, an odd sense of awe and a profound sorrow. Lizzy wandered down the hall toward me, solitary, mouse-like, munching on a biscuit and leaving a trail of crumbs behind her as if to mark her trail back to sanity.

I felt badly that she had been driven away earlier by Martha’s bitterness and so I smiled and reached to hold her withered hands in mine. She smiled vacantly, food dribbling out the corners of her lips as she chewed with open mouth. I whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, you are my favorite,”

 She whispered back…“Thank you…” and drifted into the shadows.

Georgia Pics

Memories

Norma and Frank lived on Pillsbury Street in Willard Square in South Portland in 1950 after they were married ( left side of the gray apartment building in the background of the picture). Dad worked at Portland Pipeline as a Casual. Mom worked at a candy store in Portland until she became pregnant with me. I was born in the fall of 51. Gailie came along in the winter of 1953.

I don't remember much about this time except for some fleeting, dreamlike memories, perhaps real, perhaps invented from stories told over the years. I remember walking up stairs holding my fathers hand. I remember standing on a chair next to my sister strapped to a bassinet. I remember the neighbors dog. And I remember my first car accident.

Dad drove Fords. In the early years they were black... weren't they all. The story goes... and my memory confirms, that one day when I was 3, I stood on the seat of my tricycle and climbed in the open window of the old car. I seem to remember pushing the start button and I was told that the car started, lurched into reverse, sputtered down the driveway and struck a fire hydrant.

The fire hydrant still exists as does the apartment. Maybe my memories are correct. Maybe life is but a dream...

Odd, but Loveable

"The writer in me said, This is good material. Writers, like bears, will feed on just about anything." Philip Simmons

I smiled when I read these words in Simmons' book "Learning To Fall". True that, man!  I mean, I don't pretend to be in the same league as Phil, God rest his soul, but I have written enough to recognize the sage wisdom in his words. I have written enough that I think of myself as a writer.. of sorts. Sometimes I'm an intermittent writer, an occasional writer. There are long dry spells. Times when I don't feel like I have anything to say. According to the writing books I have read and the writing seminar lecturers to whom I have listened, those are the times to exercise discipline, grit your teeth, place yourself in solitary confinement and push through the block.

That's what Phil Simmons did. His was more than a "block". He was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, at age thirty-five and told he had less than five years to live. As a young husband and father and at the start of a promising literary career, he suddenly had to learn the art of dying. He did so by retreating to his writing shed on an old farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He processed his thoughts, his suffering, his spirituality, his profound disappointment at his impending death and his fear of the unknown by writing about them. And he shared these truths with us.

Simmons writes about finding the courage to engage Life fully in spite of pain, loss and suffering. His writing is tight and raw and true. He is a master of the crafts, both the craft of writing and the craft of living a courageous life. I wish I had known to stop by and talk with him, to tell him how much I admired his work. He lived only hours from our home in Maine. But I didn't discover his book until last week at the Saint Simons Island, Georgia library. And he died in 2002. 2002...God knows I was desperately seeking spiritual wisdom in those days. I would have so valued his unique perspective.

In the Foreword of Learning To Fall, Simmons writes,"I write as a man who has been given an extraordinary chance to practice consciously the art of living and dying." And these words struck me. Isn't this the same extraordinary opportunity, regardless of the situations of our individual lives, that is available to each of us? Perhaps the difference between Phil and the majority of human beings is that he stood at the edge and knew he was not going to be allowed to back away from it. Contemplating ones mortality is most often avoided at all costs. Strange, because our mortality along with our birth, is perhaps the most common human experience we all share... or avoid sharing.

Strange is the operant word. We human beings are a very strange species, indeed. "Odd, but loveable" my wife says... usually speaking of me.

And so, I sit in my old writers shack, on a marsh, near a beach, on an island, off the coast of Georgia and, oddly, like a bear, look for things to feed upon, for inspiration, for some good material.

We are all standing on that edge. Most of us just don't dare to look, don't care to know. And we risk missing that "extraordinary chance to practice consciously the art of living and dying."

Thanks for the inspiration Phil.
 

word of honor

What is the power and value of a man's word? In this day of continuous examples of duplicitous politics (has there every been any other type of political day, notable individual exceptions not withstanding) it is evermore difficult to remain true to the noble concept of keeping one's word. But the concept is far from dead... especially among the "working class". In fact, it counts for more than can be measured.

The waterfront is cruel, much like nature is cruel. That is not to say nature or the waterfront is evil. Just the opposite. Let's just say they are both "efficient". The strongest, most adaptive species or individual wins. Weakness is not an attribute that is tolerated, perhaps reasonably accommodated, but never tolerated. On the waterfront, if a man's back or his brain are not up to a task, he will be accepted only at the level to which he can add value by some other means. If you can't handle the heavy lifting or accurately run the numbers on the tally sheet then you had better be able to run the winch or the fork truck or operate the salter. Or you're out...

Skully was on the bleeding edge of being deemed "useless". The younger guys harassed him mercilessly, cruelly, trying to finally tip the scales and be rid of him. Skully was 55, way past his prime, crippled with a bad back, a deformed hand, illiteracy and alcohol abuse... and a nasty disposition.  He operated the fork truck and was so dangerous that no ones eyes ever left him as he raced around the shop, spilling bait, tipping over totes, hitting walls. We all knew it was our responsibility to watch out for him, because he didn't give a rats ass about anyone else. Recently the forks truck brakes were repaired. Ralph's comment was "Well, Skully's got brakes now. All he needs is brains..."You decided to like Skully, in spite of himself... or you hated him.

Skully collected bottles and cans for beer money. Some of us would gather them from the trash we hoisted off the boats and throw them into barrels and totes until Skully would drag them away. Sometimes I would load my little truck with his treasures and drive him up India Street to the redemption center. After one such trip, Skully approached me with an orange tote. "This is Sam's tote. I told him would get it back to him. Will you do that? Give it back to Sam?" I knew from the way he was atypically looking into my eyes that returning the tote to Sam was important to him. I nodded. He wasn't satisfied. "You'll give this back to Sam? Won't forget?" He wanted to hear me say it. "I'll give it to Sam. I give you my word." He nodded. It wasn't as if someone hadn't broken their word to him before. His life was a continuum of broken words, broken dreams. But he knew my word was as good as he was going to get that day... whether or not the tote was returned.

I returned to the shop and carried the tote back to the dock. "Skully wants me to return this tote to Sam." I said to the crew and threw it into the corner. Later in the day, when Sam piloted his boat, the Irish Piper, up to the dock to bait up, I would toss it down to him. I didn't think any more about it and got busy filling boat orders and shoveling fish.

We were winching totes down to a waiting boat when I spied the orange tote, filled with herring and being rigged for winching by Jeff and Cecil, two of the hard nose younger men on the crew. They both hated Skully and took any opportunity to mess him up. And this was just another chance to push him closer to the edge of that proverbial cliff.

"Hey, that's the tote that Skully wants to give back to Sam," I objected.

"To hell with Skully, that useless bastahd." growled Jeff.

"Besides, Sam already owes us 2 totes." justified Cecil.

They both glared at me. Was I going to side with them or with Skully?

I took a deep breath and tried to hold my temper. I walked over and said slowly and quietly; "Look, I don't give a damn about this tote or what issues you boys have with Skully. But I gave my word that I would return it to Sam. So that's what I need to do. OK?"

They looked at each other, Cecil nodded. Jeff mumbled, "Fair enuf. Man's word is a man's word... but Skully is still a dipshit."

I nodded. "Fair enuf."

Sam got his tote back.

On the waterfront your word does count for something. It's really all you've got.

Now if only Washington would get the message...