There was a nice Easter wooden thing at the door to the apartment in Potemkin Village Assisted Living when I arrived, and after knocking on the door, I saw the Mother’s Day flowers from the kids looked great. Magpie was delighted to see me: “We were so worried,” she exclaimed brightly. There was a flicker of interest in Raven’s rheumy eyes, and I saw, in addition to a two week growth of beard, that he is continuing to lose weight.

He is a tall man, still, and now probably weighs less than he did when the world was young and he was going into the Navy. “Lunch is in twenty minutes,” I said, “and why don’t we get Dad shaved so he looks fresh.”

It took a few minutes to find the electric razor and get him off the couch where he was curled up, legs crossed. I chatted with Magpie as I worked, telling her about the big excitement in the killing of Osama bin Laden, though it did not register. The War on Terror is gone, I guess, and that is fine. Maybe we all ought to get over it.

“The flowers look great, Mom. I see Anook sent candy with hers.”

“Oh, yes,” said Magpie. “Very good of her.” It was a plasticine bag of gourmet peanut brittle, more on that anon, and I told her that an old pal was coming up the next morning to go out to lunch with us. She did not recall who that was exactly, but she is still bright and happy and we sang some show-tunes as we went down to lunch.

Raven toyed with his food, and Carla the waitress took the initiative to spear some bites into his mouth. “I can’t stand to see them not eating,” she said, and smiled. “The food is decent. I eat one meal a day here in the winter and I am filling out, if you know what i mean.” She did a little pirouette with her coffee pot.

Raven was by turns vaguely interested and not. I tried to keep up the light banter with Magpie. She leaned forward, choked on her tuna-fish saad and confided something.

“We have to make up stories about the people here,” she said. “Don’t look now, but that attractive women by the window, sitting with those people? She says they are not her family. I think she looks good for eighty. Do you think she is eighty?”

I tried not to turn around and look, at least for a decent interval, and when I did I saw a woman who could have been eighty, and who obviously had been a great beauty in her day, though her blue eyes had an arrested fixed sort of look. Well, she would, I thought. This is the dining room for the Villagers like Raven who have issues. I shuffled through the stack of mail at the table to have something to do. Of the hundreds of letters there were precisely four that required action, and secure destruction of the dozens of pre-approved applications for new credit.

Neither of them liked the desert, which was a fruit cobbler of some sort, and eventually we found ourselves back in the unit, which was stiflingly hot. I turned on the television- the remote has disappeared again- and Raven nodded off. Magpie glanced at the paper and shuffled some of the mail with me.

“I am going to go take care of a couple things,” I said, after taking a large garbage bag of junk mail down to the trash room. “I will be back for happy hour and take you down to dinner.” Magpie nodded. “Remember, we are going to go to lunch tomorrow, off campus, and  then we are going to the Club for Mother’s Day lunch on Sunday.”

“Magpie nodded happily. “Remember to tell them at the desk we won’t be here,” she said, and scooping up the small stack of action mail, headed out the door to safety.

I came back at four to see them watching an episode of “Bonanza” and eating the peanut brittle. I got Magpie a glass of wine and Raven was enjoying the candy and a glass of mil with ice. They really liked the peanut brittle. “I canceled dinner,” said Magpie. “Where shall we go?”

Sigh. In the two hours I was doing the bills, Mom forgot that lunch was out tomorrow, not dinner last night. Sigh.

“Mom, it is lunch tomorrow we are going out to. Remember?” She looked at me with bright eyes and said: “No.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com