Standing in the bathroom, notes of classical music grating on my nerves, I brushed my teeth after a visit with my mother, swaying and humming to a different tune.
“I want the frim fram sauce with the Ausen fay /With chafafa on the side”
My niece emulated Pink. My son obsessed over the Chainsmokers and my daughter, Cheryl, stalked The Mountain Goats. Friends Nic and Em insisted on queuing up Neutral Milk Hotel. Even my husband had his favorites, the latest a pianist from the CSO, Jeffrey Kahane, and he cranked the classical music loud as ever while I took a shower, immersed in the sounds of an Olympic skating competition.
For me, I chose the Classics. The music of my mother.
But my route to the standards wasn’t straight. It was more like learning the steps to the chromatic scales.
I belonged the generation whose fingers were forced to march through the rigors of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms at the mercy of piano teachers who rapped knuckles with wooden rulers or lived alone in homes where broccoli burned on the stove.
And I did so at the beck and call of John W. Schaum piano books, beginning with the Pre-A Green Book.
Then, if luck or practice, or Mrs. Scutt or Mrs. Bacon had their way, I was invited to master the piano utilizing the lessons presented in the A – Red book.
I was a quick learner, mostly because I wanted to advance fast enough to be through with old John and my lessons. I tickled my way through the beginner books and soon was assigned the red book. And each week, I might receive a check or check-plus on my level of skill in mastering the masters and move on to the C – Purple Book or D – Orange.
I also bored easily.
One day, I discovered my older sister, Laura, had acquired a new piano book from the Driscoll Music Store down on Broadway in Lorain. The book was a combination of Broadway and jazz favorites from the 1950s and 60s. I seethed. Laura had been assigned more contemporary songs to conquer. Laura was a lefty and I would not deny she had been gifted with a bit more artistically than I had. Still, what my older sister possessed, I wanted for myself.
I picked up the book, As Time Goes By, with a rose centered on its cover, flipped it open, and plunked out the melodies to A Time for Us, The Impossible Dream, Moon River, Autumn Leaves, Jean, Jean. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and Misty. I memorized the words that accompanied the melodies. Because the lyrices were there to learn.
When my mother heard me play, she tossed her dust rag on the floor, joined me on the piano bench, and sang along. She would pop out a few notes, or the whole song if I let her. Nervous around Mom or anyone else, I fumbled over notes or apologized, saying, “Sorry, Mom. Let’s start over.” It was a maxim we shared, one that captured our relationship succinctly then, and now.
Mom rearranged the furniture often in our home on Lincoln Street. Over time, she had the piano wheeled from the sea-foam green, sunlit living room to the high-traffic family room. She assumed one of her children would play the piano more frequently.
I played less. I relished the feel of the vacant, sea-foam green living room, alone, with an audience only I could identify. And, I didn’t want my mother’s singing to remind me of my own mismatched voice and how I couldn’t reach the nuance of the lyrics she crooned.
I had grown up and moved on to other pursuits. After junior high, I allowed my skills to lapse.
The book lay crushed beneath the Schwaum collections, and flute and trumpet sheet music, in the bottom of the piano bench, untouched for years.
During my first marriage, I acquired a piano of my own from Aunt Lynne. I asked Mom’s permission to keep the piano book of standards. My fingers soon danced again over A Time for Us.
The piano was forced into storage when I moved to Oregon. I broke the piano out of storage when I moved back to Loveland and installed it, of all places, in the living room, where the bright sunlight of the early morning streamed into another green room, this one a warm khaki, and enticed me to play from that same classic book, rediscovered beneath other musical failings.
Twenty years later, I found myself at my mother’s dementia care home where extracurricular activities (everything is extracurricular after age 90) centered on popular music, movies, and books from my mother’s era.
Recently, I read a social media post predicting what genre of music will be playing, when baby boomers, or post-boomers, like myself, lived in community with others once more.
One commenter predicted Dylan. And I had to break the sad news. Dylan was already on the playlists. Not because of the onslaught of boomers, but because of a few early-age Alzheimer’s residents who deserved to hear their music.
During the most recent music event at Arden Courts, a group called Wild Honey was contracted to play. Several times, I noticed the base player watching me sing along while he plucked away at his strings. I retreated into myself, embarrassed. He probably wondered what kind of 50-year-old knew the lyrics to those songs, Our Love is Here to Stay, April in Paris, by heart and whispered them into her mother’s good ear? What kind of music life did she have?
I wanted to answer Kesha. Or some EDM superstar like Odesza. Or The National. They’re from Cincinnati. Yes, even Neutral Milk Hotel.
But the answer was, I had none. Other than that acoustic space inhabited by memories of my mother’s music.
My children know to fire up The Boss when my time comes. For now, I work my way through lengthy Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra discographies and sing a few Nina Simone songs with Helen, another resident.
I departed Arden Courts with a little earworm or two wiggling around in my head throughout the rest of the day.
Like a spy, my mother and her first loves somehow planted those notes.
They are the seeds of Mom’s life that I carry now, along with the frim fram sauce with the Ausen fay with chafafa on the side.
I don’t want fish cakes and rye bread
You heard what I said
Waiter, please serve mine fried
I want the frim fram sauce with the Ausen fay
With chafafa on the side
Now if you don’t have it just bring me a cheque for the water.
– Visit the Nat King Cole video.
Rubbing hands in the drafty Roh’s Café, my fellow writers scribbled across blank pages, responding to a prompt related to Connor Oberst’s Desert Island Questionnaire song.
I begin my duties at a small, crème cabinet, one that resided in Mom’s foyer. We had a foyer in the home on Lincoln Street. It was quite the step up from the screened breezeway of our youth on Ridgeland Drive. Mom taught us the word, foyer, and what its purpose was. Mostly, the cabinet held Mom’s dress purses. A matching mirror was perched above, positioned in an area where the girls could bound down the steps, fix an errant curl (and did we have lots of them), and head out, not the foyer, but the mudroom, which was also new concept in the home on Lincoln St.
Carefully, I rewrap her Christmas carolers and place them in a box in her closet, along with thinning numbers of Christmas decorations. The carolers are my favorite holiday decoration. The figures so represent a time and place only touched in my heart by the sight of these felt dolls. My mother treasured the dolls for the hope they exuded and the songs only she could hear sung.
I trudge over to the closet. I am delighted by my own brilliance as I rearrange Mom’s clothes from blacks to beiges, though I know they won’t stay color-coded for long. Yes, I am this bored, and this committed to observing each breath Mom is inhaling. I am taking no chances, and like any other day, will drag her kicking and screaming into her ninetieth birth day.
Only a few other photos populate the room, because, well. Because. Because my time is better spent in the moment with Mom. Or outside. Always, outside. And Mom rarely spends time in her room, other than to sleep. Though right now, I am wishing I would have spruced up the décor a bit more, if only to entertain myself.
I hovered behind Mom’s chair while she sat at a four-top kitchen table branded with grape juice fingerprints. She pleated a white nylon napkin and the napkin refused to hold its crease. Over and over, Mom dragged the side of her palm across the napkin as she had done for many years with tatted pillowcases and Dad’s dress shirts.
I entered Arden Courts, arms loaded with a 
“My eighty-nine-year-old mother was shoving furniture around yesterday, using her superhuman strength.”
His ears, large, elephant-like
In 24 hours time, I would be standing in my “last wish” place. The place I want someone to drive me to, and seriously just leave me there. It would be the last and only item on my bucket list. If I accomplished nothing else in this life, it would be that.
I can’t make John’s last wish come true, but I’ll keep asking. Maybe, I’ll conjure up a time for Mom when she could expect her children to act like “normal human beings”.
Arden is my mother’s home. Her care home. Mom has lived there for five years, just the past week. She lives amongst sixty-some residents who experience some form of dementia or memory altering condition. Mom has outlasted at least a third of the residents who succumbed to death, departed through lack of funds and or the need for a environment more suited to a particular condition. However, it is unlikely Mom will beat out Miss M., currently careening into her hundreds.
Mom finally acknowledged my presence – and that of the cookies. She waved her hands in the air. “Hey, hey.”
I have made a life out of my mother’s life. Not her past one, or ones, though I don’t know if she has nine or not. But the life I made has been created from her present one. It’s not the life I planned for either of us. My mother was the extraordinary organizer. She would have never tolerated an unorganized mind. But she tolerates me. And in the interim, I help others organize their mind and their love.
I missed the Luau Party date on Arden Courts’ activities calendar. So, I was surprised when at Mom’s on a Tuesday to find a luau was to occur later, complete with sweet and sour meatballs, tiki cups, hula dancing and steel drums. Sadly, I could not partake. I wished Arden would have hosted the event on a Saturday or Sunday, despite the fact I had been inconsistent in my attendance on weekends.
In those moments, time became seamless and nearly weightless, 
Mom shot daggers at me with her hazel eyes, as if accusing me of skipping church on Sunday and daring me to produce a church bulletin with the current date.