March 30, 2009

March 26, 2009

Spring is for waiting, and watching. Here in New York, our magnolia tree, which bloomed only the month the gardeners planted it two years ago, and last summer stood as an extravagant stick in our front yard, is showing fuzzy green buds. In Seattle, our friend sits in the hospital, after a bone-marrow transplant, watching his white counts go down to zero and back up again.

His wife has been my best friend for the last twenty-five years. We are usually physically distant; we don’t always talk; each has parts of her life the other can't comprehend. It doesn’t matter: We see the other as she would be seen, as she sees herself.

My parents offer to buy me a plane ticket to Seattle with their miles, so my father and I are now, together, on hold. When the woman comes back on he encourages her to help us. I know you can do it, he says. You can do this. She puts us back on hold while she transfers us.

In Seattle it must be spring, too, cold spring, damp spring, spring before anything has happened, spring that might as well be winter, except for a few small signs. The secret of early spring is not that warmth is here, or growth, or ease, but that it’s possible to imagine these things again, and to want them very badly.

March 22, 2009

March 18, 2009

Last year my mother needed me to pick her up at her medical group, because she had had a routine procedure that they wouldn’t allow her to drive home from. I found her in the bed, pink and healthy-looking in her gown, as surprised to see me as I was to see her. I still imagine myself to be young, no more than eighteen, with all my life ahead of me; what’s more, I know she imagines herself the same way. This is why, even though we know and love each other, we sometimes find the other incongruous, and out of place.

March 10, 2009

March 5, 2009

When we lived on East 96th Street, our neighbor had a form of dementia, and cats. When I brought Henry home from daycare she often came to the door, and invited us in. Now let’s see, she said, every time, Where have they all gone? Here’s Snowball, and here’s Smokey, and I think that Fire has hidden under the bed again. And she called Fire, and asked us to follow us back to her bedroom, and peered under the bed for Fire, and we spent most of our visit calling to Fire and looking for Fire under things.

But Fire did not come, and even though I got down on the ground, sometimes, and looked under the bed, where there were bowls of cat food, I did not see Fire, and I suppose I imagined that Fire was dead, and that this fact had been forgotten. Sometimes, though, I worried, because things were a little unbuttoned at our neighbor’s apartment, and the smell from the cats was very great, and of course because of her dementia, that if Fire wasn’t dead, Fire was in trouble, and that one day little Henry would, while helping our neighbor search for Fire, find him, and that this would be worse than Fire having died some time ago and our neighbor, who loved Fire, having forgotten this. From our point of view, if not from hers.

But in fact Fire was alive, and under the bed, exactly where our neighbor thought he was. Fire was very shy, but one day Henry and I met him, briefly, before he yowled and ran desperately from the room. Our neighbor wasn’t mistaken about this. And our neighbor was herself, and not my grandfather, who had had Alzheimer’s, and whose body, seated loosely in a chair in his living room, was a figure of dread in my youth. She was a nice woman, someone else’s mother, and I could like her and take my son to visit her and offer her, one hot day, our fan, without feeling that something terrible was going to happen to me, and that I knew what it was.

March 1, 2009