The ribbon on Mom’s typewriter must have been running out of ink, because quite a few letters have disappeared and others inexplicably stand out. Who knows, perhaps she was thinking of clever ways to seduce editors at literary journals like Granta and The Kenyon Review with an intriguing mystery.
It’s hard to believe Randy wrote:
A delicate hand is preferred for reasons obvious to anyone with eggs in mind. The fingers must be narrow, soft and able to fit through small openings in all but the younger trees, because when all’s said and done, a closed fist in the Lab isn’t worth an egg in the pan. With steady nerve and careful transport, the label V for various markings of the dodo, dove, and duck is just the beginning of the hard part. Each bird egg is individually wrapped in a felt jacket and sent to x-ray for proof of age and estimated release. If there is the slightest scratch the egg is sent back to its mother and she decides in what fashion it must be raised. This brings out the woman in all of us, and the sudden urge to nurse anything made of porcelain becomes painful and downright obscene.
Why did Mom type this poem and place it here? I can’t begin to imagine what she was thinking when she transcribed the bizarre reference to being raised by a woman who needs to nurse anything made of porcelain, a process not only painful but also “obscene.” She couldn’t possibly have thought this was one of Randy’s engaging page-turners. Was it a reference to his hypersensitivity and abandonment? Layering such a bizarre statement over a photograph of her son staring down into what must have been the poem itself, if it was a poem—who was going to be the audience of this ill-defined project? No one. Only me. And only fifty years later.
The two of them, Mom and Randy, were “the Almost Artists.” Randy didn’t have to follow the rules and learn. He took his form of expression, collage and poetry, to the limits of his ability. No matter how misguided he became, Mom flew to him without question, celebrating what he described as his “mad gathering of words in an attempt to explain black wishes set against the earth’s silence.”
CHAPTER 15
LET IT GO
After Randy settled into Sunrise Villa, he began knocking on the neighbors’ doors. Imagine their surprise to find a tall, elderly man with a white beard. After “Hello,” and “Can we help you with anything?,” Randy asked them if they would mind driving him to his mom and dad’s house at 905 North Wright Street in Santa Ana. He needed to go home. Despite being turned down several times, Randy continued knocking on several other doors, until the police arrived and took him across the street to his new, real home.
Now deemed a risk, Randy seemed to be repeating patterns that created the same problems he had had in Laguna when the police were called. It was like he wanted to be given a chance to go back to Mom and Dad, to find a way into a safe world that removed him from responsibility. Some things never change.
The next day, Randy was taken out of his community suite and moved into a studio apartment on the first floor of the “Memory Care” wing at Sunrise. According to Sunrise’s brochure, each resident in their Memory Care program has a “life enrichment manager.” All tenants have access to everything, with the notable exception of both entrance and exit doors, which feature keypads with secret code numbers to prevent independent strolls outside the perimeters of the kindly detention center for seniors with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. There are no views from inside the seven-thousand-square-foot walled-off living quarters. Most travel takes place within the six-foot-wide corridor. Randy’s fellow residents John and William must have put in a few miles the day he passed them to enter his new one-room apartment. A former Air Force pilot turned stockbroker, John didn’t cotton to people. As for William, when he wasn’t walking the halls, he liked to sit next to female residents and stare at them for hours.
Randy’s first night in Memory Care was noteworthy. At 1:00 a.m., he took the liberty of exploring bald-headed Bob’s room. Once inside, he removed his clothes and defecated in Bob’s trash can. Completely naked, he proceeded to the next room, pulled down the sheets, and got into bed with eighty-one-year-old Lillian, who woke up screaming bloody murder. Lillian, a former bookkeeper from Boston, rarely spoke, much less screamed. Residents didn’t talk much unless they were spoken to. When one of the staff members asked Randy what the heck he thought he was doing in her bed, Randy claimed he had to get Hillary’s car keys, because he was going to drive to his mom and dad’s house in Santa Ana.
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I began visiting Randy and his new friends every weekend. On our way to lunch in the dining room that first Saturday, we passed wheelchair-bound fifty-seven-year-old Mark, an entertainment lawyer who prematurely wound up in Memory Care after several strokes affected his ability to walk. Frisky Monty, a former race-car driver, had short-term memory loss. One of her twin boys fell off a rooftop and died at fifteen. She never recovered from his demise. Everyone agreed that Elizabeth Taylor’s alleged former seamstress, Eleanora, was a “tiny pistol” ready to explode; one staff member quit because she repeatedly tried to attack him. As petite as Eleanora was, she’d consume three helpings of food at a sitting, and always with her hands. If she didn’t like what was on offer, she tossed the entire plate across the room. If someone gave her the wrong juice, she’d throw it at them. It took three caregivers to shower her. After several months, she was politely escorted out of Memory Care.
Sitting in Randy’s room with his weekend caregiver, Delia, I was surprised by Randy’s insights on Eleanora. “I try to steer clear of Eleanora, because I find her an abstraction. But, today, she struck me as informed, for a change. Someone said she caused people to say weird things. I don’t understand the big hoopla. They’re dead wrong. What she does is cause people to think. Eleanora’s someone I would like to write about in the future.”
Suddenly Smitty walked into Randy’s room, enraged. He didn’t belong in this zoo. He’d been falsely diagnosed with a so-called serious case of Alzheimer’s, which, he said, was on the brink of being cleared up in a matter of weeks.
The Memory Care residents were much more entertaining than the “Independent Living” seniors on the other side of lockdown. One could say that Randy and his new friends were on the losing side of life, but the truth was, they shared a unique capacity to respond in the moment without fear of consequences. The “Independents” seemed stuck in a routine that boxed out extemporaneous behavior.
After six months, Steve, the new occupational therapist, Delia, and I were walking Randy around the hallway when he suddenly blurted out, “Don’t talk, ’cause I’m swimming.” When he had blown out the candles on his sixty-ninth birthday, Randy paused to make this announcement: “Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I’m really confused. I remember my girlfriend wandered off. It was inevitable. It just didn’t work. It wasn’t meant to happen. Remember Sally? She used to live in San Diego. Now she lives in the expensive area. I don’t begrudge her anything.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his ex-wife, Sally, had died in 2006 after a botched surgical procedure.