The View From 72

My mother lived to be over 100, my father dead of a heart attack at 58. I am balanced somewhere between the two, 14 years older than my father (which brought strange feelings when I went zooming by his last benchmark), and I am more than twice that many in years from my mother right now. She was three decades older than her youngest son when she died a couple of years ago on Christmas Night.

I can use facts and now something new called “alternative facts” to list why the three of us made it to the ages we did. My father drank too much and smoked all his life, having one of his Kent cigarettes to calm his nerves while walking into the emergency room where he would die a couple of hours later. By the same mixology of real facts, until a couple of years ago, I was following my father’s footsteps and drinking too much and smoking a pack a day.

My mother had an amazing life free from major illnesses. Oh, there was the time at the family camp on the Amite River when my father was rebuilding the rotten back steps, warning her they would be gone, and she stepped out the back door anyway and broke her arm after crashing to the ground. The flu, colds, her teeth pulled early in life. Older, during Jen’s illness, my mother had arrhythmia and a pacemaker was installed after shocking her old tumbling heart back into normal rhythm. Late in life she took a handful of pills morning and evening: one for her heart, one for blood pressure, others for memory and blood-thinning and to keep her bathroom visits regular while clumping down the hall and grunt-sighing. But all those pills and infirmities, spread out over the course of her long years, a century of them, revealed a graph heavier at the end, sure, but plenty of white space for all the good health during the years of putting up with my father and raising three sons.

Despite all my drugs and drink and nicotine and unprotected sex (in the early days), knock on wood, I have followed more at this point along my mother’s trail that I must have blundered along while ignoring any signposts. A tonsillectomy and a few broken bones early on, I have battled the more serious RA and diverticulosis since I was 33 years old, the latter finally catching up with me in a big way. So cruising along, ignoring the healthier route usually, I had my first scary detour two years ago. Mild discomfort for a day and a half and I drove myself to the hospital (not recommended by the experts) and in thirty minutes I was being wheeled down the corridor to the cath lab. The hands of nurses pulling at my shirt, I emerged sometime later with three stents in an artery that had a 99% blockage. Waking after an emergency or suddenly being free of long aggravating pain is like being a goose in the morning in a new world, everything fresh and the clear absence of what came before. I was glad I had more time.

Seven months ago a backdoor check of the plumbing revealed a 6” stricture in my colon, a  crisis, scary, the abdomen pain and discomfort during the previous decades blooming into emergency surgery and again emerging, glad to be alive, thanking young Dr. Cook for saving my life. Now all vanity forever gone, hanging for only moments from a colostomy bag, the first abhorrent thoughts of carrying a bag of shit around at times. It was a worse nightmare coming true. But eventually I traded the dropping away of the horror for being able to watch my granddaughters continuing to discover their world.

Five months in and looking forward to reversal surgery and the pain was back, scary again, enough so even after dealing with severe daily arthritic pain for 40 years, I had to walk the floor during the night. Blockage in the colon again? The pain radiating from stomach to bowels perhaps diverticulitis, or the pain now higher in the chest perhaps the old once-blackened heart sending broken signals from a life made hard? A week in the hospital having chest x-rays and CT scans and blood work and sonograms and urine-checking and eating what passed for a liquid diet: bad Jello, watery grape juice, rancid coffee. Another test, a MCRP (Magnetic Resonance Cholangiopancreatography), and I had a “nasty, diseased gall bladder.” Unsure until the surgery began, it was touchy but the surgeon was able to operate laparoscopically. So only a few more puncture scars joined the foot long scar from the colostomy that insures a t-shirt on the beach to avoid stares at a never ever very firm six-pack.

So here I am, recovering still, from both operations, my daily walk now limited to the end of the driveway, the reversal surgery for the colostomy delayed for now, but the idea (like my mother) that my more severe health tumbles are coming on this far end, and I am still here to enjoy family and friends. And after a long year of nothing, just reading, reading, reading, whether only okay or otherwise, these finger taps left on cyber paper are the first impressions left outside of myself in too long a time, with more to come, I hope, the spark of being driven to open a hardening vein over the keyboard never quite dimming out.

No profound lessons here, folks, you are free to move along to the next post. These musings at age 72 are the same as experienced by millions: old age is a tough journey with a payoff kick in the ass like no other. But one of the good things is that most of the useless shit continues dropping away and you are left with more appreciation for the good times, the times the granddaughters do “sleepovers” here like my two daughters did at my mother’s house when growing up. Old age and you do learn the old circle is unbroken, and you learn the circle certainly does grow ever smaller every day. 

Holiday Labors

In the old days, fathers were not allowed in the delivery rooms. Admittance for them beyond a series of swinging doors even in the early stages of a wife’s labor was strictly forbidden.

Go, sit in the waiting room, watch the television high up on the wall, we’ll keep you informed of the ritual secret birth and call you when your life has changed in unimaginable ways, when you and your wife are forever marked as blessed by a tiny life you’ll come to love above all else. So go on, pace the halls and lobby of The Woman’s Hospital if you must but never ever go through those swinging doors because you are germ-filled and are only the father.

Dee woke me early Thanksgiving in the still-dark morning and told me she was in labor. No old Dick Van Dyke routine with a cap on the top of the headboard, ready to sit up in bed and put it on in one quick motion, no fumbling for a suitcase that springs open and dumps all the womanly clothing and items needed after becoming a mother. It was simply excitement and a call to the doctor who said he would meet us at the hospital. So eyes puffy from lack of sleep, excited heartbeats felt in our throats, we met the doctor and he said Dee was barely dilated, to go on home and enjoy Thanksgiving. So we mentally put my baseball cap back on the headboard and had breakfast and waited for the Thanksgiving meal at Dee’s mother’s apartment. Miriam had baked the requisite turkey and her usual delicious fare of dressing and squash and butterbeans and cranberries cooked fresh that morning, a late afternoon feast with Dee’s brothers, David and Ricky, rounding out the family.

Once seated and no prayer, my first forkful of food heading toward my mouth, I swear, the first forkful heading up on an arc toward waiting teeth and tongue, and Dee said quietly, My water just broke. My fork clattered down on the plate and catapulted a piece of turkey to the other side of the white linen tablecloth like some invading eat-or-die mongrel hoard launching the only ammunition they had left.

A quick trip home to retrieve the suitcase and we were back at the hospital, me handling the check-in paperwork, Dee in a wheelchair facing the corridor of swinging doors leading to the Labor Room and, ultimately, the Secret Birth Room and special reclining chairs with here’s-one-for-the-boys-in-the-balcony leg stirrups in a wishbone Y. Hurried kisses and reassuring hugs, finally losing sight of Dee through a small window before being exiled in the waiting room.

Dee attempted Natural Child Birth but it was a long hard labor, stretching on into the night and all the next day, so long, in fact, that when they did finally wheel an exhausted Dee into the hallway and finally allowing me back by her side, she put her hand on my face and told me we had a daughter and wondered if worry made a man’s beard grow.

When she went into labor with Jennifer two years later, two weeks after Christmas in January of 1972, Dee remembered the two long days trying to deliver Laurie. She started holding out her arm for a shot as soon as we hit the hospital parking lot—or at least as soon as we cleared the first doors of the hospital. But Jen’s birth came much easier, not nearly the physical ordeal of Laurie’s first appearance on the Cothern stage.

I posted a sign on the door of The Rainy Day Bookstore that we owned, saying the store would be closed for a day or so and giving proud father details on Jennifer’s birth and weight. A reporter for a newspaper from one of the smaller towns around Baton Rouge took a photograph of the birth notice and we were told it had been published, one of those feel good items smaller newspapers seemed particularly fond of trumpeting.

During the time both daughters were born, their historical holiday birthstones included the still raging Vietnam War and the sometimes violent push for racial equality. While the Beatles’ “Come Together” / “Something” was climbing Billboard’s Hot 100 as a two-sided single (and would peak at Number One on Laurie’s birthday of November 29, 1969), The Plain Dealer published shocking photographs of the massacre of Vietnam villagers at My Lai, and in a more subtle approach John Lennon returned his MBE medal to protest his government’s support of the war in Vietnam. Two days after Laurie was born (and something that concerned her father), the first Draft lottery was held in this country since World War II. Three days before Jennifer’s birth on the 13^th of January, 1972, a local reporter and anchorman, Bob Johnson, and his cameraman, Henry Baptiste, were covering a rally for a group claiming to be Muslims from outside the state who parked cars in the middle of North Boulevard to protest racial discrimination. The crowd grew, 200 or more strong, deputies arrived, and bottles and bricks flew. Two by three they died, two deputies, three Muslims, and the enraged crowd attacked Johnson and Baptiste as they fled, and it was Baptiste, a black man, who dragged from the scene his co-worker and friend, Johnson, a now comatose white man, who would remain in a coma for almost four decades.

So in all the years down the road, there were celebrations of birthdays while historical events swirled amid the holidays, always making reflections of the season a little deeper, more poignant. The girls grew up so quickly, and in the rush and hassle of living day to day we sometimes blinded ourselves to the simple sentimental facts that no matter the season of discord in the world, loving and sharing and protecting and giving to one another were the best gifts we had to offer.

Foreshadowing

It occurred to me only later that there was a hospital episode when Jennifer was a senior in high school that was a sampling of what was to come for her and us. When she contracted encephalitis and battled for months to stay alive while in a coma and battled for years rebuilding her life from the ground up, the earlier botched tonsillectomy was a foreshadowing of the dark days to come as parents, helpless, worrying about a sick child, worrying that earlier time about the outcome of a second surgery needed to correct the weakness of catgut or silk in the back of the throat, the placement or tightness of the sutures, all done in the operating theatre by a masked man performing badly.

The initial surgery went well, we thought, all according to form, we thought: a sedative to relax Jen, an intravenous line in the arm for fluids and antibiotics and whatever, general anesthesia before the procedure started, a breathing tube through the nose and down the throat, the mouth propped open, and the tongue no doubt pulled to the side like a thirsty hound on a summer day, snip, clip, suture ligation, the recovery room until the anesthesia wore off, and finally the white-sheeted bed.

But all during the day, after Jen was awake and aware, she said she could taste blood and assurances constantly came from us and the nurses about that being normal. She threw up once, twice, three or more times, each episode filling one of those kidney-shaped yellow plastic bedside pans. Aahhh, that will make you feel better, to get all that blood out of your stomach. And it went on and on until early evening. Finally, finally, the man was called back, unmasked now, Dr. Breaux, so obviously put-out by being called and having to come back, doubting until he probed the back of Jen’s throat with long crooked surgical tweezers and mumbled something about the sutures, straightening and telling the nurse to call a surgical team back to the hospital.

Now more assurances to Jen from us that everything would be fine, a stitch needed repair, that was all, and the pan again filling up with blood, her teeth and lips smeared with bright blood. You’ll be okay, here’s the gurney, slide over, that’s it, we’re going with you as far as we can, everything will be fine.

A nurse maneuvered the gurney out of the room, bumping the door facing a couple of times, pushing Jen by the nurses’ station, some of them registering slight surprise, and Jen sat up suddenly, hemorrhaging, gagging, leaning over, and the blood coming out, a projected wide stream like dark rusty water thrown across a yard out of a full bucket, covering half the gurney, Jennifer’s lap and legs, and splashing down to the floor, some of it rolling down the framework of the gurney as if the chrome tubes were being magically transformed to a bright Christmas red.

The speed of the gurney picked up and Dee and I were racing down the hall to keep up, drops and plops of blood marking our trail.

Dee and I waited in an empty pre-op room, the stillness and evening quiet unsettling, the worry now manifest in furrowed brows and tight lips and eyes moist with concern, pacing, arms across our chests, hands squeezing biceps in rhythm with our thoughts, Dee suddenly giving out a quick sob, telling me to please come hug her, asking me why I didn’t know she needed that, me wondering for a moment what was pushing me to stand at a distance in the empty room, apart from her, some solitary grieving ritual denying us both comfort.

Reelin' in the Years

   After my husband passed away, oh, several days later, a nice man took me in.

   My mother has compressed time, my father dead of a heart attack 43 years ago, and the man is my older brother, Willie, who a year earlier brought her to live with him and his wife.

   I am the youngest son standing, bringing my mother for weekend visits where she perseverates like a sad Abbott and Costello routine, the same litany over and over, wondering when her family is going to pick her up.

   Oh, I don’t know what to do.

   What do you have to do, Mama?

   I thought somebody would come for me.

   You’re living with Willie now, your oldest son. You're visiting me, Raymond, your youngest son.

   Her mouth rounds in momentary understanding.

   Pause, rewind, repeat.

   My Mama will spank my butt ‘cause I didn’t come home.

   Her memories are a collapsing star, my grandmother gone almost six decades.

   Sometimes she can be diverted briefly.

   After a supper of fried chicken, I lean over and say she must have eaten a lot of fried chicken growing up on the farm in Mississippi.

   You raised chickens, right?

   Oh, Lord, yes.

   So you must have eaten plenty of them.

   Oh, yes. And eggs.

   And your Daddy had a smokehouse, didn’t he?

   He did.

   She nods once, the memory sharp for a moment of the smokehouse some distance away from the farmhouse.

   Meat was cured there, right, Mama?

   Another nod.

   Probably butchered hogs and calves, maybe some venison.

   Yes.

   There was a garden also.

   Oh, yes.

   A nod, chores growing up: picking butter beans and string beans and peas, potatoes and okra.

   You ate good things on the farm.

   A nod, less decisive, looking down at her hands, rubbing them.

   Your hands hurt, Mama?

   Old and wrinkled, she says softly.

   That’s okay. All of our hands are getting old and wrinkled.

   My Mama is gonna whip my butt.

Journal / December 10th / 11th

Baton Rouge General Hospital

Friday December 10, 1993

   Long night.

   Back on the Critical Care floor.

   Dee sleeps a couple of hours. I watch the oxygen and heart monitors. Heart rate 130+ at the highest. Oxygen saturation good throughout. Jen is having facial seizures and they give her 2mg of Valium in case it is the brain seizuring. Dr. Rogers is called to let him know what is going on. EEG scheduled. 12:30 PM and Debbie who is doing the EEG chases me out of the room for an hour. Eat gumbo and a small salad in the hospital cafeteria. Sitting down the hall from Jen's room, reading Social Security, a play we are considering doing at the theatre, I see Debbie leaving the room and follow her as she wheels the machine along the corridor.

   What did the EEG show, Debbie?

   Can't say until it's evaluated by the doctor.

   I'm her father, give me a hint.

   I'm really not allowed to do that.

   Make an exception.

   I'm sorry. Not allowed.

   Bill from Respiration is suctioning Jen when I get back to the room. Jen's face is still contorting. I ask Suzie to have a look and ask her if Debbie said anything about the EEG. She looks at me, says Debbie told her the test showed no seizure. Have to cry, the feelings of helplessness so overwhelming.

   Visitors today: Mom arrives with food; an old theatre friend, Daryl Wedwick, comes by; my brother, Bill, and sister-in-law, Marie; nephew Dennis and his wife, Christy, other sister-in-law, Peggy; Jen's friend, Dawn; friend Nathan and his daughter, Melissa.

   Dr. Rogers comes by during rounds, says there were no seizures and that Jen seems lighter in affect. We take any small gain.

Saturday December 11, 1993

   At the elevator, bump into Campo, the Internal Medicine doctor on BHU. Says he is disappointed Jen is not responsive. Like everyone, shakes his head, says there is no way to tell what will happen.

   Too many visitors yesterday. Even in a coma too much talk becomes chaos and upsets Jen.

   Dr. Campanella does rounds instead of Stewart. Says the same as all the others: no one knows . . . wait, time will tell. All recommend trying to loosen the junk in Jen's lungs, especially on the right side where there is pneumonia.

   Dee dry-shampoos Jen's hair. Jen keeps making faces.

   Dee and I have yet to talk about what the future may be for Jen, for all of us.

   Rita, a nurse from some agency, has to get the Charge Nurse to show her how to use the feeding tube. Doesn't inspire much confidence. The care is alternately very good--Maddie, Suzette, Karen, Suzie--and then spotty on weekends when nurses come in from agencies and other hospitals.

   Dr. Haas, doing rounds for Stewart, comes in and says, "I hear she had a seizure."

  8 PM. Jen has fever. Her face continues to contort, grimacing strangely. Stroke her forehead and talk softly to her. Dawn Knight, one of Jen's best friends who grew up three houses down the street, comes back and brings photographs for the wall, of her and Jen, Jen and Ashleigh and Molly. Great shots of Jen, so pretty and vibrant, and I can't look at them for long.

  May be coming down with something: sinus, upper respiratory infection, something. If so, I won't be able to stay with Jen.

   Please God. Just one minor Christmas miracle.

Settling in Baton Rouge

   A year of farming, having their first child and naming him Willie, once battling a pair of snakes using their chest-of-drawers as home, a year for W.T. at Wesson Junior College, then on to New Orleans after Onetia's sister-in-law, Zita, writes about a job for W.T. in a grocery as a butcher handling salt meat for $10 a week. At first Onetia and W.T. live on Valmont, renting from Marshall and Effie Wilson (no relation), then later, after W.T. goes to work as a regular butcher for Mr. Saniford at $15 a week, they move to Arabella, near the streetcar barn, and they are living there when Onetia miscarries their second child. They move to Willow Street and rent a place for $7 a month. Being a butcher in New Orleans, even in the tough times of the Depression, seems infinitely better than toiling in the fields under the hot Mississippi sun. Banks continue folding and over 10% of the state's population is unemployed. Onetia's brother, Dick, and his wife, Zita, transfer to the 7-Up plant in Baton Rouge. Tough times striking home for all.

   Back in Mississippi for a while, W.T. jobless after Mr. Saniford's store closes, eventually another letter from Zita arrives, again offering help in finding employment. To raise money so W.T. can go job hunting in Baton Rouge while staying at his brother-in-law's, Onetia sells her wicker furniture to W.T.'s mother for $10, then settles down with her son to wait for word from Baton Rouge.

   It is 1937, maybe a little later, when W.T. finds work at Central Tradeway, again as a butcher, working for Mr. Crespo at $30 a week. Dick and Zita and W.T make the 150 mile journey over rough roads to Mississippi, no doubt visiting relatives while there, bringing Onetia and Willie back to Baton Rouge with them. After Zita and Onetia find a small room to rent, W.T.'s father gets permission to cross the Mississippi state line with a borrowed schoolbus, carting their furniture (minus the wicker set) to their place on Government Street. They settle in for a while, then find a house on Flowerdale Lane, where a second child is born, Wayne, and after a time to help with expenses, renting their front room to a woman and her two children.

   During the next couple of years, their family growing, Onetia and W.T. move to Istrouma Avenue (which later becomes Capital Heights Avenue) before buying a piece of property of their own for $250. Even with the approaching world war, life seems fine; a steady job for W.T., friendly, helpful relatives in the same town, other family within driving distance, two healthy sons, a small piece of the earth of their own.

   It is 1941 when W.T.'s father and another man, perhaps named Hemphill, with materials purchased from Currie Lumber Company, build a small house, on the small lot, on Bernardo Street in Lofaso Town, Lot #48, Square #3, two short blocks from the Baton Rouge General Hospital, where a third son, Raymond, is born in January of 1945.

The Moon Yellow / The Night Young

   Onetia Mae Wilson meets Willie Talmadge Cothern at Topeka High School in 1930. Having seen him at some dances, she's aware of who he is and that he has a reputation for drinking. On the first day of school, the students there to register before going back home to chores or to finish picking cotton with their families, Onetia is standing with a group of her girl friends near the door of the school. Just inside the doorway, sitting on the edge of a desk, W.T. watches them, no doubt with that sly Cothern smile. The girls chatter about their summer, their hopes for the upcoming school year, and, probably, there is talk about the boys, gossip and the inevitable judgment about their looks. Glances are exchanged, perhaps a shy smile from Onetia, perhaps a slight nod from W.T., some acknowledgment of the future.

   The two weeks at home, daily chores of cooking, mopping the broad plank floors in the house, feeding the chickens or wringing their necks, those days before school starts, before Onetia can see W.T. again, those days drift ever so slowly along, stretching out ahead like an horizon that never seems any closer.

   W.T. never drinks beer or any homebrew before coming to see Onetia. Sometimes he uses his father's automobile to travel those rutted red clay roads in Mississippi, sometimes a bicycle, and a few times he walks those dusty miles. Once after getting a late start home, still miles to go, he spends the night on the porch of a colored family, perhaps before drifting off to sleep, his head propped up on a piece of firewood, listening to nightsounds and watching stars wheel above the tin roof.

Daughters

   The first time Laurie visits Jen in the hospital she moves slowly around the bed, her back pressed against walls and furniture, keeping as much distance between her and her younger sister as possible. It is that first time shock of seeing someone you love, the unexpectedness of serious illness no one is prepared for, of viewing something hard to understand, accept, something creating changes in the everydayness like the wake of a boat long after it passes.

   Still standing away from the bed, still acclimating herself, Laurie calls Jen's name. Visibly, Jen fights her way to the surface, is able to open her eyes for a brief moment, tries to find her sister in the dim room, is able, for the last time before descending, to speak with sense, to mouth the words, Hi, Laurie.

  

   Two years apart, always different in most ways, the girls grow up with our idea that they are coming into our lives, that we are not going to center everything around them. We walk around the house normally when they are sleeping babies, play music, loudly sometimes, have friends over and laugh and argue. Dee and I make all the right moves, disciplining them with a swat on the butt when they are learning right from wrong, no means no, never letting them interrupt adults when they are talking, never letting adults interrupt them, loving them and caring for them, treating them like we wish we could have been treated as children, always aware of everything we are doing is molding them, especially the first two years; during all those days in the late 60's, early 70's, referring to Dr. Spock occasionally about ailments, aware we are doing it differently from our parents, we make all the right moves and still fuck our children up.

   Only a few months old and Laurie is sleeping all through the night. (Nothing to this child-raising gig.) Always independent and head-strong about food and clothes and opinions, even as a child, she is looked at by others with a touch of envy because decisions come easily, no endless debating like most folks over choices and consequences. Choose and move on. Just like her mother. On the other hand there's Jennifer--who doesn't sleep through the night as a baby, whose disposition is reflected in a photograph of her on the front porch on Bernardo Street in her windup swing, arm on the front of the seat, chin resting on arm, eyes staring straight into the lens, questioning, reserved, a weary resignation like she's had enough of this childhood thing.