18 August 2010
 
Mnemosyne’s Gift

(Potemkin Village Senior Living Center, little Bay City, Michigan. Photo PV.)

This Titaness of beautiful hair discovered the uses of the power of reason, and gave a designation to every object, which is of the utmost importance, since without names very little could be expressed, and mortals would not be able to hold conversations with each other. But above all, she made available to them the power to remember, a great faculty upon which rest many others. Carlos Parada

Gentle Readers,
 
It is raining in Washington, and supposed to stay that way until tomorrow. Flooding on the coastal plains is inevitable and my phone has been going off with alarming regularity with updates. This is not, they say, like Pakistan, but there are free sandbags for the needy.
 
I checked the calendar. The credit card billing cycle for the month is over. There is a project due to the three-letter agency with which I interact uneasily this afternoon. I have to be in the Pentagon in an hour or two, and to avoid being drenched, I will have to add time and take the Metro.
 
Oh, and my folks will leave their house and move into assisted living.
 
The Big Deal is finally at hand. The long overdue tectonic shift is happening.
 
My pal Mac lives at The Madison here in town. It is a similar arrangement to Potemkin Village, with fine dining and laundry services for the residents. It is based on a high-rise design like the fancy condo towers due to the price of the real estate. There are floors with more or less help available, some with doors that do not open. Mac doesn’t need any help. His Jaguar sleeps in the garage when he is not driving it, and the Willow restaurant is across the street when he chooses to hold court with his many admirers.
 
This is not the end of anything, only a beginning. I tell myself that after I get off the phone with Mom, who told me with wonder the other day that she was surprised to discover that she lived in Bay City. The town had apparently snuck up and surrounded the house in the night.
 
She asked me if I knew that, and I mentioned that I had been aware of it vaguely for the last thirty or forty years. She had the grace to laugh about it, but was genuinely astonished. This from the woman who used to be the smartest and most aware person in the room, even if she did not lord the fact about.
 
My sister says it is Groundhog Day up there, like the movie, or the Greek Myth of the Mother Titan who gave us all the precious gift of knowing. That has been progressively stolen from Dad, and now Mom sees cities moving in the night.
 
Each day is the same for them in Bay City, trapped in the eternal now. It has been driving my sister a little nuts, since some days things are rational and good and others Mom comes out again, having recalled only a fragment of the decisions made the days and weeks before.
 
My sister has orchestrated a miracle this long strange summer. She abandoned her life in Alaska to be with them. She has commanded the ominous gigantic barren tree to be felled; commissioned the restoration of the precariously falling deck on the back of the house; purchased and outfitted the new apartment at Potemkin Village on the sly; found the subtle rot and rodents that have infested the house as memory and sight has faded.
 
Car keys have been summarily confiscated. Medicine administrated without mercy. Food provided at regular hours.
 
We have been spending their money like drunken sailors- no offense intended to either drunks or sailors.
 
There has been much necessary work long deferred at the house as the folks have made the long retreat into the confines of the back bedroom.
 
The fumigation of the house will preclude Mom and Dad staying in the place, or at least that is the cover story. My sister has moved the precious books and photos that will make Potemkin Village seem like home. The big bed is new; the painting of Manhattan where Mom and Dad met is over the headboard.
 
The picture of them recreating their wedding day sixty years later is on the shelf in the nook by the door to great them on return from the dining room or the activity center.
 
It is finally The Day up there in Michigan. God bless my sister. She has given Mnemosyn’s gift each day, as though the world was newly minted.


(Mom and Dad on their Deck, 2010. Photo Socotra).


Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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