When I Was Young and In My Prime (5 page)

11 the blue jay
(cyanocitta cristata)

Aunt Anne was Grandpa's favourite sister.

She hated blue jays because they were greedy at her feeder.

And that is all I know

about Aunt Anne.

did the question disturb you

What is it Like to Have Alzheimer Disease?

(
from
Alzheimer: A Canadian Family Resource Guide)

Another way to find out more about Alzheimer is to try to imagine what it is like to have it. Obviously, you can't know exactly what it is like. However, the following scenarios should give you some insights into what your family member is going through, and how he or she feels. All of the examples in the list happen to people every day; they were chosen because they are everyday occurrences that are analogous to having Alzheimer Disease. They are not signs of the disease.

Think about the last time you lost your car in a parking lot. How did you feel—frightened, angry, bewildered, panicky? Did you feel as though you might never find it?

How frustrated did you feel the last time a vending machine didn't work? It wouldn't give you what you wanted and it wouldn't return your money and nothing you did (kicking, hitting, swearing) made any difference.

Have you ever left your house and later were unable to remember whether you turned the stove off? Did you go back to the house to check? Did you call a neighbour to see if everything was all right at the house? Did you do neither of those things, and then worry the whole time you were away? Did you then become obsessive for a while, so that every time you left the house you went back to make sure the stove was turned off?

How did you feel the last time you met someone you knew and couldn't remember the person's name? How did you feel when you wanted to make an introduction and could not because you forgot a name?

Pussy willows for sale in buckets outside the corner store where I buy my cigarettes: sure sign of spring. Not to mention the fact that James and I are having twice as much sex as we usually do. But I know it's officially, officially spring when my neighbours Connie and Bill emerge from hibernation.

James and I live in a spacious one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a once-grand, now-verging-on- squalid old house in Parkdale, one of Toronto's more liminal neighbourhoods (rich meets poor, crazy meets sane, old meets new, wild meets tame—meetings so haphazard and insistent that sometimes the aspect shifts, and you'd be hard- pressed to say which is which). Connie and Bill live on the main floor of the house next door. All winter we don't see them, then one day they come out. After that, they're around for the next four months, smoking on their porch, radio tuned to the oldies station. Billy used to be with the Hell's Angels. He's quiet, doesn't do much else besides smoke and mumble the occasional greeting, one hand stroking his stubble. He's always looking off into the distance, as if someone stole his bike some time ago and he's been marooned here ever since. Connie, on the other hand, never stops moving.

She was the first Native woman to ever be a supervisor in the Children's Aid Society, but she quit all that years ago, fed up with the generalities of policy trumping the particularities of people every time. These days she's planting seeds she stole from the seed heads of flowers she admired in other gardens last year—or, like yesterday, she's waving me over to give me a box of twenty-four jars of sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil. Connie volunteers at the food bank.“We got a whole truckload,” she said,“but no one in the lineup will have a thing to do with them and the soup kitchen volunteers can't be bothered figuring out how to fit the things into a meal.” Last week it was a truckload of kiwis. I looked up a kiwi jam recipe for her on the internet. Once last summer, as I was on my way out of the house for my morning walk, she summoned me over for a serving of the chicken cacciatore she'd made at four that morning because she couldn't sleep.

When James and I moved in four springs ago, she called out from her porch and introduced herself, then got me to follow her inside so she could give me a slab of carrot cake. I watched her transfer it from her Pyrex pan onto a green Styrofoam tray, the kind they use to package snow peas in the grocery store. I took it home and shared it with James. The cake was exquisite, moist as anything, thick cream- cheese icing. On my way out later that day, I spotted her still on her porch and called over, saying it was the best carrot cake I'd ever had.

The next morning there was a knock at my door: Connie with the carrot cake recipe written out on a piece of cardboard from a pantyhose package. “It's from the Sun,” she said.“There's a helluva lot of oil in it.”

Then she eyed me as if she knew all my secrets and said, “Don't skimp.”

Spring means time for a garage sale.

Though we've been organizing for weeks, the basement is still filled chest-high with artefacts. Mary and Peter Friesen have saved everything that has ever come their way. Wooden chairs—with cracked seats and spindles missing—float stranded in corners, legs in the air. There are striped and polka-dotted hat boxes with hats inside that look like birthday cakes. Cream separators and butter forms. A step- ladder. A skill-testing puzzle of coat hangers, which I utterly fail to solve.

Three large boxes full of plastic milk bags, all slit open at one end, cleaned, folded once and bundled in stacks of twenty, wrapped with twine like presents.

An old violin with a bowed fretboard and a black- lacquered cardboard case.

Crates of Christmas ornaments, grade-school test papers, sheet music. Stacks of moth-bally quilts and old board games—Chinese Checkers, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Scrabble and Clue—the boxes crushed and most of the pieces missing.

A small black album displaying sepia photographs of a flood.

Rows of glass-topped mason jars, some with labels saying what they once contained, some still full. Apple butter, 1973: the year I was born. Pickled asparagus. Homemade eye ointment. Plum jam.

The garage sale doesn't even make a dent. Grandpa is gruffer than I've ever seen him, and Grandma is hoarding trinkets, throwing subtle tantrums, shaken to see the contents of her basement appearing on the front lawn, haphazard and shabby in the sunlight, spread out suddenly in public, strangers taking it away piece by piece. She's by turns generous and fierce: “Would you like these dear?” offering me a stack of old
Reader's Digests
, then refusing to give up a red plastic poinsettia, clutching it.

When Grandpa finds out that Mom has sold the bird bath right off the lawn, gruff becomes bewildered. “I didn't even know it was for sale,” he says. He says it in the tone of someone who's slept in because of a time change and missed something important. He keeps on saying it, to anyone who will listen.

things that might survive a lifetime

1 the answer to the question, what do you do?

This almost always survives a man's lifetime.

my great-grandfather was a farmer
 

mine was a steelworker
mine a butcher
mine a preacher

my great-uncle was a harness maker
 

mine a labour leader

mine a soldier

mine gambled a fortune away

2 refusals

Sometimes refusals
survive a woman's life: oh it was a scandal when Aunty May
 

refused that widower's offer of marriage.
(I have some of her paintings,
hang them as reasons why.)

And I am told my namesake, Great-Grandma Helena,
 

refused to marry her murdered husband's brother
 

until his invalid mother died—
said she wouldn't be a slave to another man's burdens.
 

For eighteen years she refused.

Then, after the funeral, accepted.

And Aunt Olga refused
to roast a chicken if she didn't have anise seed.

3 odd details

Aunt Anne hated blue jays
because they were greedy at her feeder.

And that, as I said, is all I know
 

about Aunt Anne.

(Oh yes!
and that she lived in a place called Turkey Point.)

4 secrets

Not the content, perhaps, but the
silence, the wariness surrounding them (a pocket
 

of stale air in rock where a living thing
is preserved for a time after death
then dissolves, leaving fossil).

The way the whole family lifted
a leg to step over Arnica the dog lying
 

in the kitchen doorway long
after Arnica was dead and gone.

5 habits and tricks

Grandma would buy no ketchup but Heinz, no grape juice but Welch's, said toothpaste gets out certain stains and only bought Crest, said baking soda takes away fridge odour and only bought Cow Brand.

The elements
of daily life, more basic now than air earth fire water.

Nothing but Ivory soap, nothing but 2%.

In the grocery store, my hand is drawn as if by tractor beam
 

to her brands.

6 a violent death

Almost fair, isn't it? How if you die, as they say, in an untimely fashion, at least the memory is likely to survive?

We all know (though can scarcely imagine) how Grandpa's father died in 1919. He was the overseer of an estate in the Ukraine amidst war and revolution—the landowners long gone, the peasants hungry. He held a meeting, decided to start the threshing early and pay the peasants out in grain. Slept that night in a neighbouring village for safety.

Next morning, pregnant wife at his side, on his way to the first day of threshing, two young men stopped him, demanding the ox and cart. He gave it up, helping his wife down and then was

shot
through the neck as an

afterthought

on the road

blood

leaving him
 

neutral and

red.