Happy Birthday

Today is my dad's 75th birthday. At first when I called to wish him a Happy Birthday, he couldn't quite do the math to figure out his age. After I reminded him of how old he is, he seemed to remember it throughout the conversation.

Talking to my dad over the phone is getting more difficult. He remembers many things about me and where I live, but his own daily activities and plans are becoming hazier and harder to discuss. Even talking about politics at a rudimentary level was more difficult today. Who is John Boehner? Where is his district? After asserting that Marcy Kaptur is his congressman, which she is, he then told me that her district goes all the way to the Indiana line, which it does not. It actually goes in the opposite direction along the lake and encompasses Sandusky. These slips are in the realm that was previously unimaginable for my father. Even when I was in high school, he might have left the oven on all day, come home to some small, charred shape on a pan and have no recollection of what it might have been or why he had put it in the oven, but he could tell you every intricacy of state and local political information.

In an attempt to find something else to talk about, I googled my grandfather, and much to my amazement, his full name brought up quite a bit about him. I came across a description of an archival collection at Northwestern University with documents pertaining to his tenure and work there. The PDF started with a biography that was accurate and gave me some information that I had not known before. Within the results I even came upon a sight that boasted pictures the matched my grandfather's name. Some were the facebook type photos of modern people with the same name or a kitten in a football helmet, but two of the photos were actually of my grandfather!

My dad was able to latch onto bits of information as I read it to him. He would either say that a name or some information was familiar or he would help to fill in some detail or connection with what he had been doing in his life while his father was busy with some accomplishment that graces his resume even in death.

My grandfather was a well respected and very successful man by all the standards of the world. Until I had read this official biography by his employer of over thirty years, I had not quite realized how much so. Despite his brilliance, hard work and great success, he was struck by the same problem that is now stealing my father's mind, struck at the very time that he should have been enjoying the fruits of his labor.

The year my parents were married was the year my grandfather retired. I was born the year after, the first grandchild. By the time I was five or six we knew that my grandfather had this problem. My grandmother had become suspicious when he started paying his bills twice. The former Associate Dean, Professor of Marketing was paying his own bills twice. When I was 7, my grandfather was 75, and he still knew me then. By the time I was ten, he was a bit foggy on who I was exactly. Tall for my age, even then I resembled my grandmother who had passed away a few years before. Waking from a nap he could mistake me for her without his glasses, yet outside playing with a friend he would refer to the two of us corporately as "the boys," a reference to his own two sons.

A large part of my childhood was spent watching my grandfather decline and my father taking care of him, as much as he could. Also an academic, my father would take my grandfather to his old lake cottage in Wisconsin, a place he still remembered, and they would spend the summers there together, my father "doing research" and my grandfather puttering around. One summer my grandfather painted all of the decent wood and wicker chairs white. There had been a can of white paint in the garage. I suggested to my dad that he leave some paint stripper out next and then some wood refinisher, since he wouldn't remember and could then restore the chairs. My dad didn't think that was a good idea.

Gradually and painfully my grandfather slipped away. My father, the good and dutiful man, didn't have the heart to even pull the feeding tube when he finally entered a completely vegetative state one month before his death. He finally passed away when I was 17.

Later in the day after our conversation and my bit of Internet research, I sat in a staff meeting at work staring out the window and doing a little math. What was my grandfather like at my father's current age? How old were they both when diagnosed? If I project my grandfather's case onto my father, how much more time do I have left with him? How much longer will he know me? How much longer can we have some semblance of a conversation?

And when this subsided, I thought about my own life choices and wondered how much this has effected them, remembering that I dropped out of my doctoral program only a few months after I found out about my father's diagnosis. Not that I believe that their choice of academic lives led to their manifestation of the same disease. Rather, I am overwhelmed by the seeming meaninglessness of such achievement and of academic pursuits, especially when it is lost so cruelly and so quickly. Did they enjoy their work or did they look forward to enjoying their lives later? Their academic lives and capabilities, that part of them that took up the largest portion of their vitality and strength, was the first thing to go. What can that mean?

What is left behind

One morning last week I called my father, a retired political scientist in the earlier stages of Alzheimers. He never remembers that I have called after the fact, but in the moment he is always happy to talk, or rather these days listen more than not.

In my ramblings about my life so far away in California, I mentioned that I had made inquiries about singing on a concert series at the Richard Nixon Library and Memorial. My father, who is reported to have once danced a gig in front of the television set at the news of Nixon's resignation, had forgotten that Nixon had died. When I reminded him that he passed away during the Clinton Presidency, he jovially said that he guessed he hadn't heard much from him in a while.

There is always a lot of talk in my extended family about Alzheimers, as my father is the fourth in the family to manifest these same symptoms. Many of my relatives have said that the losses in the earlier stages of Alzheimers often leave some fundamental essence of that person exposed. My great-aunt Mildred saw beauty in everything, and would tell you about it repeatedly since she could forget that she had already called your attention to the same thing 10 minutes before. My grandfather clung passionately to trying to remember certain facts, first the date of his wife's death and then the fact that she had died. Much later, he expressed a wish to find another woman, a wish that suggested there had been someone else in his heart as well.

Growing up, I always felt that my father's picture should be next to the word "inhibited" in the dictionary. We never talked about feelings, only politics or family gossip. The only passion he showed was for politics, but even that was tempered by his professor's mindset that compelled him to lecture more than converse or listen. As we were talking about the Nixon library last week, some thought came to his head and he started a sentence as we once had talked only to have the idea escape him after two or three words. I did my best to fill in the gaps. Although he no longer grasps the details in the issues of politics, he still enjoys the sport and his joy is evident in his laughter when hearing me talk about the latest antics of John Boehner or some recent fallen Republican.

In his inability to express his thoughts or even form them fully, he is able to share only his 'love of the game.' He also says 'I love you' to me more now than ever before. Although still the consummate partisan, he no longer seems so bothered that his wife is a Republican. (Long before he fell in love with this strong woman, I was raised to believe that Republicans were practically another species.) I hope that he is able to more freely share his love with her as well, especially as she is the one who's daily acts are a testament of love for him.

The hills are alive... with fire

From my home in Pasadena, I can stand in my back yard and look at the Eagle Rock. Over the past few days, I have watched the giant pyrocumulous clouds blossoming from behind the surrounding mountains. The air is thick with dust and ash, and this morning my car and basil plants were covered. After much hand wringing while listening to my favorite radio station personalities, it seems that Mount Wilson, the observatory and the broadcast towers for the majority of LA's radio stations will now be saved, where yesterday they were anticipating being off the air at any moment.

As I look at the ash and fear for my lungs, this situation reminds me of the ash and dust of another September eight years ago when I lived near and worked in New York. Then dust and ash coated everything and everyone. The day after, I could smell it where I lived an hour away in NJ. The mass of associations aroused from that time by these new fires overwhelms me in its scope, variety and quantity.

I am easily lost in these recollections. My boyfriend often bears the brunt of my ramblings and tends to go silent when I fall into stories and legends of that disaster. These memories are important to me and not something that I share lightly or with people I do not know well. Whatever degree or amount of truth I have retained are illustrative of my own history and perspective as well as the actual event.

For a while I hated to hear most other people talk about what happened in NYC. They seemed to me to fall into three categories: the opportunists, the justifiers and sentimental wallowers who wished to use the tragedy as a cloak to give their own actions some greater meaning.

The most prominent opportunists in my mind were at my place of work in lower Manhattan. They had been there and certainly knew what they were talking about. At first they had to talk about it. This was dealing with life, it was catharsis, it was a means of healing a community directly effected. As the one year anniversary passed and beyond, it seemed to me to become something else. The leadership so enjoyed the notoriety and status that came from their extreme proximity to the event that they seemed unable to let it go. Every sermon had some mention of the towers that were no more. The first "dust, dust, everywhere dust" text, became a mantra substituted for meaning. Their overall corporation seemed to profit by the disaster, and they were even accused of price gouging by the New York Times in the immediate aftermath.

The justifiers are those who sins are now recounted daily by the same news media that turned a blatant blind eye to their crimes when they began. The justifiers wrapped themselves in false cloaks of righteousness and patriotism with the ash of the towers as their own jet fuel to decimate and steal from populations on the other side of the globe who possessed what they desired.

In dealing with members of my third group through the years, the sentimental wallowers, I simply go silent. Maybe their gestures really are well meaning, but they always ring untrue in my ears. Examples include people, years later, dedicating bad pieces of music to the memory of those lost in hopes that such a dedication might win them favor or get their mediocre compositions a bit more attention. Most are people who seem to have no connection to New York, the east, or anyone who was lost or even there, people who sanctimoniously pay homage in public.

In thinking about my lover's silence, I wonder if he sees me as a number three; someone searching to make up for my own lack by piggybacking on a tragedy experienced primarily by others. I don't think that I belong to this group. Though thankfully I was not so affected as many people I knew were, I too have lists of stories and vivid things all tied into that time, things that have been brought to the surface eight years later by only a large quantity of pollutants in the air and waking up to find my plants lightly covered in ash.

Is a blog a place to let all of that out? All of the first hand experiences and stories of others, descriptions of sights and smells, feelings of failure when I might have better handled a young student who had just lost her father, other students taking a hiatus from music lessons to go to grief counseling, the sights on a Sunday morning in lower Manhattan before we were allowed back into our proper church, the smells, the view from the ferry, peoples faces on a silent train as most of us traveled back into the city for the first time since the loss of its tallest towers, battery park dwellers returning home on the subway with Siamese cats in boxes.

This is the tip of a personal iceberg of memory, an iceberg that these horribly destructive fires have inadvertently triggered in this misplaced east coast transplant.

Keeping My Light Under the Proverbial Bushel

I am a fence sitter, or at least that is a judgment of others that I have found to be true. Possessed of decent abilities in many areas, I have had a hard time making full commitments to many of my undertakings. Take, for instance, this blog. I have thought of writing a blog for a long time and now I am finally doing it, but I haven't told bloody anyone that it is here. (OK, one person, but he is an old friend, a writer and will probably forgive me if he finds time to read it and sees it as somehow offensive.)

My fear of telling anyone about this blog is a lot like my reasons for not doing many things. If I tell them, they might learn too much about me. (Ignoring the fact that such undertakings are fundamentally exhibitionistic to begin with.) My coworkers might see it and guess, or read blatantly, about my true feelings towards my work. (Although not necessarily bad, I fear that someone might try to use this information against me.) People might tell me I am a bad writer. (Fair enough, I attended conservatories rather than colleges of letters and sciences.) They might loose respect for me, but this of course assumes that there was some there to begin with. Maybe my ideas are good, but I don't want to broadcast them until they are perfected. (So they wait in solitude for perfection to magically rain down upon them.)

On and on it goes. Paralysis by analysis. Yet, in this pattern I see so much of my life and so many of my frustrations. A trained singer, I have more excuses than anyone for not doing certain auditions - and amazingly they resemble my reasons for telling no one about this blog. My years of sacrifice and work to become the performer that I now am are invalidated because I run backwards in fear towards what I had before, dreaming that it is somehow safer. Is it really safer to give up or endlessly defer my dreams? Safer to believe all of the bad things I've been told about my singing through the years but none of the good?

Somewhere inside me, slowly and deep down, action is beginning to stir and I think I will be trying for a few more auditions this Fall. The trick is to care about the preparation, the breath, the craft and form and to let the arrow land where it may, to let my small words land where they may and as they choose. And maybe I will tell a few more people about this blog as well.

Death certificates

Through a number of coincidences and lucky happenings, I came into possession of a number of digitized copies of documents pertaining to the history of my family. My maternal grandfather was the first of his siblings to be born in the United States, and his family is the closest link that I have to something of the realm of euro imagination and speculation.

The documents include such things that my mother had possessed in one form or another at some time, the death certificates of her great-grandparents and census records from 1920 and 1930. My acquisitions also include the passenger records from the ship that first brought my great-grandfather across and then from the ship that brought his wife and my grandfather's two older siblings.

Though the underlying story is hardly unusual, these documents lead me to marvel at the personal qualities of my forbears. My great-grandfather came across in 1904. My mother's oldest first cousin says that he had training as a carpenter in Holland before he returned to Hungary and met my great-grandmother, but in the new world he was a laborer. By 1910 he had saved enough money to send for his wife and two children in style by buying them a state room on a ship. What must it have taken for him to cross the ocean at the age of 26, leaving behind a wife with one child and another on the way? What was my great-grandmother like to have left her tiny village with two small children, ages 4 and 6 in tow, illiterate even in her own language? What type of steel did she posses to have gone first to Italy to get a boat and when turned away then traveled to Germany where they finally boarded the President Lincoln in Hamburg bound for this promised land so far away?

As I muse on their fortitude, my own struggles and demons seem so small in comparison. I think of how they came here so that I, and the other hundred or so of their great-grandchildren, might have my own struggles and opportunities, so unlike theirs.

In reading through the blanks of my great-grandfather's death certificate from 1926, I am also struck by the equanimity of death. Here was a man, as brave in my imagination as any fictional hero, dead at the age of 50 from a stomach cancer which had apparently plagued him for 10 years. "Occupation: Labor working in stone quarry." How did he continue working in a stone quarry for a decade with such an ailment? How did he buy a house and 4 acres of land for his family while working in such a lowly job?

There is a juxtaposition here I would like to make. Another great-grandfather of mine was a veterinarian in rural Indiana, another was a state senator and physician and another an English teacher and local politician. Despite their worldly status, each of their exits were marked by just such a document to be remembered by those succeeding generations who might take such scant clues to wonder about the character of each man. Though the others left far more written documentation of their lives and were shown far more worldly appreciation that this one, yet somehow my mind returns to this brave and mysterious man again and again. Bravery shown by scant facts, missing details with a world of color to be filled in by those who exist because of his choices.

Alzheimer's in the News - 7/25/09

Two summers ago I found out that my father had been classified as the fourth in my extended family to have Alzheimer’s Disease. My step-mother had been using the term “dementia” for some time, but once I heard my uncle use the “A Word” it seemed that everything had changed. Suddenly, I had a context for the changes I had been observing from a far. There was a history, a pattern to relate to, and suddenly the awful road ahead seemed clear. Twelve years of my childhood was spent watching my dad care for his father through his decline through the same disease.

Researchers always seem to be publishing new findings on the causes of Alzheimer’s Disease. One week they report a correlation with a lack of physical activity and the next week there is an article connecting it to a lack of brain exercise. Some make correlations with lower levels of education, unhealthy diets or alcohol consumption. Then there are studies saying that caffeine might slow the onset. The fact that aluminum deposits are consistently found in the brains of the Alzheimer’s afflicted, leads me to look askance at all of those cans I drink from and worry about all of the foil used in past roasts. Basically, everything and nothing has been reported as linked to Alzheimer’s Disease.

In reading all of the latest research, none of these theories has ever had very much resonance with me. My father was always very conscious about exercising and maintaining a healthy diet. He ran in local races and had a passion for oat bran muffins. Though he ate fish oils with gusto, for a large portion of his life he drank up to nine cups of coffee a day. But it turns out that this should have been beneficial! Although he sometimes seemed to be the archetypal absent minded professor, he was doing “all the right things.”

A few weeks ago, I read a BBC news article that linked his type of brain degeneration to elevated nitrate levels. Nitrates are found in fertilizers and insecticides. They are also elevated by the process of grilling or overcooking foods and are found in higher concentrations in processed foods. Ah-ha! Being of Midwestern extraction, processed foods and overcooking are ways of life! “Cooking” in my childhood was more often than not opening some package and adding something like water, oil and scallions. No meal was complete without meat, be it roasted in aluminum or barbequed in the summer. In the summers, farm run off in the water supply raised the nitrate levels in tap water past “acceptable” levels. As a child, I remember articles in the paper stating that the levels of nitrates in the water had now gone past an acceptable level, normally only some fraction of a percentage point, and that the populace should not drink the tap water. At this point we would charge out the store to buy bottled water only to discard this practice when the next newspaper article informed us that levels had returned to a “safe” range. For a shinning moment I thought I had found an explanation.

And then I thought that if all of the other articles had seemed so far apart from my experience, this was just another correlation rather than causation. If this is really a reason, why doesn’t everyone from my area of the country with similar habits have this problem? My easy answer slipped away as quickly as it had come.

On Politics and My Father - 11/4/08

Elections tend to produce a feeling of nostalgia in me. Growing up as the daughter of a political scientist, election season was exciting and election night always a holiday. I remember the overpowering joy of speeding on my bicycle through the array of Ohio fall colors and political signs mixed together. Also mixed together in my mind are memories of political booths at fairs and festivals, fundraisers, sausage and chicken paprikash dinners and Democratic Party Headquarters on the nights of Dukakis’s slaughter, Clinton’s first win and John Kerry’s convention speech.

Upon retirement, my dad went to work with vigor on many of the political causes he had championed all his life. He worked very hard for Kerry four years ago. In an email to me a week before that election, he told me that the excitement and ground game of the campaign was like nothing he had ever seen before and was hopeful that a high turnout would put them over the top.

At Christmas in 2006, my dad was still glowing over the results of the midterm elections. In his car, papered over in political bumper stickers (much to the mortification of my Republican stepmother), my dad regaled me with stories of Ohio’s new progressive Senator, Sherrod Brown and read aloud articles from the magazine the Progressive as I drove from Toledo to Columbus. At the time, I complained to my friends that it seemed I’d never been able to have a real conversation with my dad. All we had ever been able to talk about was politics.

Almost two years later, I would give anything to have that type of conversation with my father again, the kind of conversation where he could share with me his passions and his joy in what he holds dear in the world. Now I know that my father’s declining ability to remember things has finally been classified as Alzheimer’s, and the biggest wakeup call for me is that he has not been involved in this campaign. Given his assessment of the Kerry campaign, I wondered what he would say if he were involved for Obama. Last week, Obama HQ called him to see if he would make phone calls on Saturday. He was excited to be of use, and drove off that afternoon. About an hour after he should have been there, they called to see where he was. He arrived home about 2½ hours later. He said that he had made calls, but had nothing to say about the energy of a campaign ground game that appears to be unprecedented in modern politics. Soon it will be time to retire his politically papered Honda as well.

Although it is now me doing most of the reading and talking about issues, we are still able to talk and we are still able to share our joy in politics. I am fortunate that maybe tonight, we will be able to celebrate together by phone and share one more big and exciting win.