Out of the past

The Cranberry dining room

Been a busy week, with my sisters and I buzzing emails back and forth full of Mom matters large and small. People emerge from her past and we have trouble fitting them into the larger picture and knowing how to play them. Mom, in this recent case, showed a flash of the decisiveness that has guided her through this last decade, and said she would call. The fact that she had only a brief conversation was less important than that she took the reins.

I went over last night and she was bright-eyed and energetic. She even looked up from her brownie and mint ice cream dessert -- her most favorite thing -- to comment on some small item, and said it loud enough to be heard.

I talked with Jim, who always makes sense. He was a photographer -- did annual reports and other corporate work. He remembered a client, a CEO, who didn't like to have his picture taken, so after Jim got one relatively good portrait out of him, in subsequent years he would just place in a different-colored tie, and people would say, "My he looks good."

I said I work with photographers, and that photo specialists in journalism -- who don't write too -- are a dying breed. Any Joe Reporter can take a photo -- not a good one, maybe, but still -- and of all the photographers I've ever known, only a few could recognize the elements of a sentence. I said all photography now is digital, and Jim derided it, and said he was happy to have retired before he had to use it.

Mom turned to me, in the middle of conversation, and said, "I feel the need of a plan. I've told you this before -- or maybe you're just going to tell me 'you're just going to live here.'"

"Do you like living here?"

"Yeah, I do, in a way."

Is this progress? A mood?

I know this much: she'd exercised that morning, and then she'd gone to a Lenten service at the Episcopal chapel on the first floor, and then the group of them went to Taylor's for lunch. Right there -- right there -- more engagement, more activity, by 1 p.m. than she'd have had in a week back in Ann Arbor. So, what is the plan she seeks?

We went to her room and did our little rituals -- went through the mail (very little lately), and checked on her finances. For a few months now I've been sitting down on the couch after the rituals and just chatting with her. We talk about the people in her world -- her children, her grandchildren, my dad.

She's also a consumer of local gossip, and returns to certain themes regularly. There's the story about the older married man in the place who had an affair with a young employee, and his wife promptly moved out and of course was furious and told everybody. I'm not sure that this is true, but it's a pretty good story.