Blue Light

I remember her on her haunches in the upstairs hall banging her butt one hundred times on the cherry-planked floor, getting red in the face and not stopping her counting, even for a second, when my sister or I would interrupt to ask her a question. She also performed an exercise where, dressed in nothing but her bra and panties, she would clench her right fist and beat it against her right thigh; then she would take her left fist and beat it against her left thigh. Each fleshy thigh received fifty lashes. I never asked where she had learned these spot-reducing techniques—no doubt she picked them up at the Harry Conover Agency, where she worked as a model in the year before she married my dad.

“Have you checked your weight today?” a flat, computer-generated voice asked, interrupting the movie-in-my-head of my mother, circa 1965. I was passing directly in front of the General Nutrition Center storefront with its pyramids of vitamins at the Mountain View Mall. Most of the time I ignored the talking scale, but on that rainy July afternoon, chafing beneath my tightening waistband, I feared that I had put on a few pounds. (I had thrown out my bathroom scale years ago after having been advised to do so by FAT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.) I duly removed my cotton jacket, sneakers and shoes: such outerwear could add two to three pounds, and I wanted to keep the number as low as possible.

I mounted the scale, fed two quarters into the slot, punched in some data regarding my age, build, and height, held my breath, and stood very still as the screen instructed. In thirty seconds, a square slip of paper popped out, imprinted with various numbers and letters, including the date, my weight, and whether I was within my ideal weight range or not. (For another twenty-five cents, I could receive a diet/fat analysis as well as a biorhythm outlook, but having signed up for these less-than-useless extras some time ago, I passed.)

Reader, I don’t expect you to regard this as a tragedy, but I had gained seven pounds! Seven pounds since I last weighed myself two summers ago on this very scale. Seven pounds in two years is three and a half pounds per year, which is about what a middle-aged woman can expect to gain after she reaches 50. The metabolism of the middle-aged is as notoriously sluggish as a gunk-filled bathtub drain: if you don’t reduce your daily calorie intake by 300-500 calories or begin a vigorous exercise plan, you’re going to start looking like a Shaker barn before Obama comes up for re-election.

What was this fat-lady-to-be to do? I had long given up my morning-glory muffin habit, and I was already riding my bike several miles a day. I wasn’t about to start banging my butt on the floor.

Surfing the Internet the next day, I pulled up a web page giving information about a Blue DietLight Refrigerator Appliance Bulb. For the low price of $9.95 plus $6.95 for shipping and handling (Ohio residents must add sales tax), you can receive this magic blue bulb, screw it into your refrigerator, and “watch the munchies disappear.” (For $19.95, you can also receive the weight loss hypnosis compact disc.)

Apparently, the color blue works as a natural appetite suppressant, which is why restaurants used to offer low-cost Blue Plate specials. The most ancient hunter-gatherer part of the brain associates blue with moldy, spoiled food, and naturally recoils. With the exception of blueberries, mussels, and eggplants, there are actually very few naturally occurring blue foods, which may account for this ancient pairing of blue and inedibility. The blue-plate diner morphs into the proverbial picky-eater, and the crazed refrigerator-raider whose Blue DietLight bulb glows over that cheesecake will think twice about forking into it.

Five thousand years of color therapy culled from ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Tibetan, and Native American cultures has shown that the color blue is balm to the soul, explained the website. And lest you still think the Blue DietLight and Hypnosis CD is a scam, read on: the Harvard Business School-- and here the blue type was magnified into screaming 20-point font--reports that blue light promotes positive decision making, and strengthens resolve.

I didn't order the Blue DietLight: I know from exhaustive experience that diets and diet-related products don't work. When I was a teenager working at my first paid job of ski instructor, I was called “Rotunda,” by some of my jokey male co-workers. I didn’t find this funny, nor was I amused when they said: “You don’t have hips, you’ve got ships.” I cried all the way to the candy machines in the base lodge, where I becalmed myself with an Almond Joy, and vowed to start Atkins the next day.

On the Atkins diet, you can eat unlimited amounts of meat and bacon and cottage cheese, but you must stay away from bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, and, of course, candy. I lasted about a week, and moved on to the Scarsdale Diet even though I’ve never been crazy about grapefruits. But only a Trappist monk could stick to the 700-calorie-a-day regime. When Jean Harris gunned down the diet’s creator, Hy Tarnower, because he was two-timing her with his young nurse, I could never take the Scarsdale diet seriously again.

Several years later, I signed up for Weight Watchers, but I always felt exposed at the group weigh-ins, and it was way too much work to keep track of my food points, though I did develop a fondness for Weight Watcher’s two-point English Toffee Crunch bars. I briefly joined Overeaters Anonymous, which works on the same 12-step principles as Alcoholics Anonymous, but everyone in the group was about 100 pounds overweight and I felt a teeny bit self-conscious.

After my son was born, I managed to hover about ten or twenty pounds above my ideal weight, but the prospect of ballooning back into “Rotunda” lodged like a burnt-out bulb in the most ancient part of my brain.

My mother also tried various diets, but they were no match for her ever-enlarging shape. By the time she was sixty-five, she was forty to fifty pounds overweight (she was mortified about the actual number and would never reveal it to me). She had also developed adult onset Diabetes, which is a truly nasty disease. If untreated, it can lead to foot amputations, blindness and heart disease. She started taking Glucovance, but continued to sneak junk foods. Under her bed and in the glove compartment of her car, she hid bags of Fritos, potato chips, and cans of mixed nuts.

During the last three weeks of her life, in one of life’s stranger-than-fiction ironies, my mother became as slender as the girl she had been decades ago. She was admitted to the local hospital for a mysterious infection, which the doctor said was related to her Diabetes and which she had suffered from intermittently for the past several months. My mother had always hated hospitals, and had been fortunate never to spend much time in them. Other than the two weeks she passed in the maternity ward after giving birth to my sister and me, my mother had never been admitted to a hospital, not even to an emergency room.

In any event, being confined to a hospital meant being forced to eat hospital food, which she deplored. The overcooked packet-of-cards-sized pork chop went untouched, as did the puddles of mashed potatoes and creamed corn. She waved away the tiny servings of butterscotch and rice puddings, and sometimes I ended up eating them when I visited. This would prompt me to narrate my favorite Woody Allen joke about the two elderly ladies in the resort in the Catskills: “‘Boy, the food in this place is really terrible,’ one says. ‘Yeah, I know,’ the other says, ‘and such small portions.’”

My mother laughed, praised me for being such a card, then begged me to go out to the supermarket and bring her back a bag of Fritos. I refused, and pointed out that being deprived of 24/7 access to junk food would prove a blessing in disguise. She would get down to the weight she had always dreamed of, go off the Glucovance, and live to see 100.

It was not to be. She suffered a massive heart attack twenty-six hours later. She spent the next five days in intensive care and the following week she was shifted into the hospice ward. I gave her a back rub on the last day of her life, and I was shocked at how the ridges of her spinal column stood out against her pale, age-freckled flesh. She probably weighed less than she did when she was a tomboy of twelve, before the onset of the fleshy thighs and buttocks that would prove such a lifelong torment.

“We’re right here,” my sister and I whispered to her over and over in those last moments when we stood on either side of her bed, gripping her limp fingers and telling her that we loved her. The hospice worker had explained that even though she appeared to be unconscious, she could still hear our voices, still sense our presence. Over and over until it became a mantra that slowed the beating of our own hearts, we said, “Everything’s going to be O.K.”

If only she had been able to say this to herself, fifty times for the right ear, fifty times for the left ear, how different her life might have been: no Fritos, no Diabetes, nothing to dim her resolute blue light.

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What Color is the Sky?

I’m told that when you get really old, death doesn’t bother you anymore. You get accustomed to it, in the same way you get used to brushing off the dried wasps and blue bottle flies that gather on the windowsills in early fall. Death loses its power to hurt you, its sting leaving only the faintest swelling, the tiniest bull's-eye upon your age-spotted flesh.

I am far from such equanimity. Death still cuts me, even the death of my 93-year-old mother-in-law, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past decade, who had not recognized me, or her youngest son and grandson, in a very long time.

She was 76 when I first met her, still living on her own, still driving her own car, still working part-time in an antiques store on the coast of Maine. She lived in low-income housing for the elderly, directly off Route 1 in Wells, Maine, across from a Market Basket, a Wal-Mart and a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was a humble address for a direct descendant of a Mayflower ancestor, an engineer’s daughter who had grown up in a sea captain’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

But if she had fallen from upper-middle-class gentility, there was nothing sorry about her or her surroundings. She tended a small flower garden that snaked around the edges of her condo; hollyhocks, delphiniums, and bachelor buttons grew in well-watered profusion. Hydrangea and rhododendron bushes stood on either side of her small stone terrace; a marble cherub invited one to savor the delights of all things horticultural.

Inside the dusted and polished spaces of her tiny home, she made sure no one rucked the oriental scatter rugs layered like patchwork quilts in her living room. She invited callers to sit on the creaky-springed sofa bed that was covered with a hand-crocheted throw; or in one of the two wing chairs, whose arms and backs were protected with freshly laundered antimacassars. A glass-fronted grandmother clock in the corner kept time, tolling, to the agony of anyone who camped on that pullout sofa bed, the quarter, half and full hours. A tasseled Chinese porcelain lamp stood sentry on the flute-edged mahogany end table. Glossy magazines--Coastal Living, Smithsonian and National Geographic, a testament to her weakness for entering Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes—were stacked on her antique coffee table.

(A twin of that coffee table, with its brass fittings and foldable sides, stood before the sofa in our living room in my childhood home in western Massachusetts, which partly explained why my mother had nothing but praise for my mother-in-law. The two women, both conservative and proper, unskilled in the business of making money, loved elegant things.)

My mother-in-law was a still-handsome woman, with a broad forehead, distinguished Roman nose and dazzling smile. One could see that she had once been beautiful, and she carried herself with the sureness of someone accustomed to fielding compliments about her looks. She had been a dancer as a girl—the story was that she had been invited to join Martha Graham’s company in New York but that her father wouldn’t permit it; he needed her at home to help care for her three younger siblings during her mother’s protracted illness from cancer, a condition that, in the days before anyone had health insurance, drained the family’s fortunes.

Hemingway says that all of us are broken by life, but some are strong at the broken places. My mother-in-law was strong in many broken places. Her beloved first husband, Woodrow Wilson White, was killed in Italy in World War II, leaving behind an infant daughter. My mother-in-law, then a drop-dead gorgeous widow in her twenties, remarried an Army veteran who had survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The couple forgot about the evils of Nazis and Japs, and had two children.

The second husband, whom everyone called Smoky, was as humble as the first one was grand. Smoky, who repaired musical instruments for a living and played the trumpet in a band, doted on the fatherless little girl, and tried to be a good dad to his own two boys, though my mother-in-law once confided that she had never loved Smoky, and had only married him to provide a family for her little girl. My mother-in-law also claimed that Smoky was an indifferent father, and spent every family vacation at the beach shut up inside their rented cottage, working on his music. Like so many things she told me over the years, including why she later divorced Smokey (she was convinced he was having an affair), it was hard to know what was true and what was the ashy residue of her fury for all the men who had betrayed her.

The greatest tragedy of my mother-in-law’s life was something she never talked about. When she was still in high school, she had gotten pregnant; once she started showing, she was sent to upstate New York to a home for unwed mothers. She named the baby girl after her mother, and then gave the child up for adoption. Shortly before my husband and I married in 1993, this baby girl, now a sturdy woman in her fifties with two grown children, tracked her birth mother down. I can only imagine the relief, regret, guilt, and gladness my mother-in-law must have felt when she first embraced this lost girl, who had been blessed with her mother’s good looks and radiant smile. My mother-in-law confided many things to me, but she never discussed the details of how this child was conceived.

In her early eighties, my mother-in-law started behaving strangely—accusing neighbors of breaking into her condo and stealing her things, turning upon her family and friends (she called the child she had given up for adoption a “rat” and me, her mild-mannered daughter-in-law, a “mouse”). Her children moved her from Maine to New Hampshire, to another condo in the complex where her daughter lived, but the rages and midnight calls to the police continued. Something had to be done: her sons took her to court to become her legal guardian, upon which they placed her in an assisted living facility, and then, when the dementia worsened, into a nursing home.

Alois Alzheimer was the German doctor who treated the first patient who started showing symptoms of the disease after which he is named. The woman, referred to in patient records only as Auguste D., first entered Frankfurt Mental Institution on November 25, 1901. She was 51 years old, the mother of one daughter. Her husband, Carl, a railway clerk, had brought her there because he didn’t know where else to take her and because he could no longer endure her bizarre behavior —the delusions and night wanderings where she dragged her bed sheets across the apartment screaming.

Dr. Alzheimer conducted interviews over several weeks with Auguste D. (Her married name was Deter, but Dr. Alzheimer never recorded her maiden name in his otherwise meticulous notes.) Dr. Alzheimer asked her what year it was, and she said, “Eighteen hundred.” He picked up a pen from his desk, and asked her to identify it, and she said, “pencil.” He asked her what color the sky was, and she said blue. But when he asked her to write her name, she could only get out the first few letters of her first name. In a heartbreaking moment of lucidity, she cried, “Ich mich haben verloren (I have lost myself).”

Auguste D’s conditioned worsened; she had periods where she sat motionless for hours, where she could not eat. She never returned to her apartment on Waldenstraat, and five years later, she died. Dr. Alzheimer then performed an autopsy on her brain, and found, in her cortex, the telltale amyloidal plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that have become the signature of Alzheimer’s disease.

The blue cardboard file folder in which Alzheimer kept his 32 pages of notes was discovered in 1995 in a basement at the University of Frankfurt. The notes, recorded in the outdated German “Sutterlin” script, were remarkably intact, having survived the Allied bombings of 1944 and 1945, which destroyed much of Frankfurt Am Main, including the entire medieval city center, as well as the Municipal Library with its collection of Cairo Geniza documents, which included some 280,000 Jewish manuscripts found in 1895 in a Cairo synagogue.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, and though there are theories as to why some older people get it and others don’t—obesity is a risk factor, as is high blood pressure, Type II Diabetes, extreme sedentariness, intellectual incuriosity, and depression—these theories shed little light upon my mother-in-law’s condition. Although she was slightly overweight and didn’t exercise, she was otherwise risk-free. She took the drug, Aricept, but it did little more than retard the ravages of the disease.

The last time I saw her was on Mother’s Day. It had been a habit of ours to visit on this holiday. We would drive to Portsmouth, New Hampshire; my husband would go into the nursing home to fetch her, while my son and I stayed in the car, clearing out the front seat and making space in the back for her walker. We would drive to The Works Bagel Café on Congress Street, and get take-out: sandwiches for us and hot tea and a cookie for her because she had already eaten her lunch.

My husband would drive us to Sea Point beach in Kittery, not far from the Rachel Carson Nature Preserve and a favorite destination for dog owners. In the early years when she was in assisted living, she would climb out of the car and walk slowly along the beach. But as her condition worsened, she preferred to stay buckled into the passenger seat, watching from behind the windshield as Golden Retrievers, Poodles, and Portuguese Water Dogs leapt for Frisbees and tennis balls.

This past Mother’s Day, because of roadwork along Route 1, we never got to Kittery, but stayed in Portsmouth, driving to a park near the Wentworth–Coolidge Mansion which overlooked Little Harbor. Our destination was of no consequence to my mother-in-law; she wanted merely to sit in the car with us, to sip her milky tea and break off pieces of her chocolate chip cookie and smile that winning childlike smile, which was remarkably unchanged in all the seventeen years I had known her.

Our routine never varied: my son and I would get out to walk the dog, then return to the car, upon which my husband and son would head out to collect shells, and I would climb into the driver’s seat, keeping my mother-in-law company. I never knew what to say to her; the days were long gone when she railed against Smoky and his shortcomings. I filled up the silence with random musings; pointing out this or that wet dog; this or that freighter on the horizon. Whether I spoke or was silent didn’t matter; she smiled and nodded and made these rhythmic humming noises that came from deep inside her thorax and seemed almost like a cat purring.

Nothing seemed final about this last time we sat watching the water. The weather was warm, the sun was out; the tide was low. After she had finished her cookie, I offered her a square of shortbread that I had baked the day before. She took it, and murmured, "Thank you, Honey," and made a satisfied "Ummm," sound while she slowly, bird bite by bird bite, ate it. And though she could not have told you what year it was, though she could not have named the color of the sky or identified the snowy-haired man who presented her with a quahog clam shell when he returned to the car, she was happy, content simply to be.

And now she is gone, and the clamshell sky seems paler.

Birthday Blues

“I wanted to take you to a Blues concert for your birthday,” my friend e-mailed. “It’s on the 11th of June and would require a night away. It’s a terrific lineup—Johnny Winter, Ronnie Earl and Joe Lou Walker. Let me know if you think you can make it.”

I promptly manufactured several reasons why I couldn’t go (because, as Saint Paul wisely observed, "...I want to do what is right but I do not do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate"). It was my son’s last day of school, and I couldn’t get away. It was too expensive (she was footing the bill, not only for the Blues concert but for the overnight at The Holiday Inn). It would annoy my husband that I was birding off on this frivolous adventure, which my friend, whose own husband was on business in Korea, was billing as our “Thelma and Louise” night. It meant getting in the car and schlepping two hours each way: according to three printed pages from Mapquest, I would need to take ten routes and make fifteen turns, which was way too much work when you were about to turn 56—56!-- and preferred to crawl in a hole and perseverate upon your receding, bleeding gums.

(Did you know that according to recent studies, people are twenty percent more likely to suffer a heart attack on their birthday? No one knows why—it could be the stress of the number itself or the trauma of facing all those unlived dreams. Which meant that I could expire in my seat as I listened to aging rocker Johnny Winter. Yet another good reason to stay home.)

But, as one bumper sticker in our evolved Pioneer Valley proclaims, just because we have thoughts doesn’t mean we have to believe them. With prodding from my better self, I decided, in the words of another bumper sticker, to “encourage my hopes rather than my fears” and go.

“You’re on time!” my friend marveled when I tapped, at three minutes after 6, on the door of our room in the Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire. She was waiting with a chilled bottle of Prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine which I had never heard of (“you really don’t get out much,” she laughed) and which was tangy as a melon sorbet. I had brought a cooler full of cold chicken and pasta salad, but we were too jazzed to think about dinner. Instead, we snacked on hummus and rice cakes, scattering crumbs all over the carpet.

We left the hotel in plenty of time to arrive at the concert before it started at 7:30, walking several blocks up Main Street, a distance the front desk clerk suggested might be a tad too far (when we asked directions on the way back, several people also remarked upon the distance, which meant either that we looked really out of shape or that nobody in New Hampshire walked).

We reached our seats with time to spare for trips to the rest rooms, trips that, to judge by the to-ing and fro-ing of several concert goers in our row, we were not alone in needing to complete. I repeated a saying I had heard somewhere about Queen Elizabeth II, how she never passed a ladies room without stopping to use it, which the woman behind me overheard, causing her to joke that this crowd was as old as the queen and that plenty of us would be hot-footing it to the bathrooms, maybe even in the middle of a set.

It was Woodstock redux all right. Everyone to my left and right was old, fat, gray, lame, bald, and/or hearing-impaired. Many carried canes or tooled around in motorized carts. The handful of folks under forty were accompanied by their parents, one young woman behind me explaining that she had started going to blues concerts in her stroller.

A PR fellow from Family and Children’s Services appeared onstage, explaining that it was cool to have fun and do good, upon which there was much cheering. Then a disc jockey from the radio station, The River, bounced onstage, introducing Joe Lou Walker, who once played back-up with Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, et al. Upon which the blues legend, duded up in skullcap and shades, snaked onstage, his nimble fingers shimmying up and down the frets of his electric guitar. The guy had to be well over sixty, but he wore his years as lightly as Superman’s cape. As he urged the clapping, swaying crowd-- “Come on now, clap your hands together and say Yeah,” and we started clapping our hands and saying, “Yeah,”--it seemed that we were regaining years, possibly even brain cells, by the minute.

There was short break, during which people hightailed it to the lobby to use those overburdened rest rooms and suck down bottles of Bud Lite. Then we were back in the dark waiting for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, which my friend said she had been looking forward to all night. She had seen them at an arts center in her hometown of Concord, Massaschusetts and had been blown away. Earl, whose last name is really Horvath, the Earl, I learned from subsequent research on the Internet, being adopted when Muddy Waters kept mispronouncing Horvath’s name in the 1970s. (Earl was the first name of the blues giant Earl Hooker.) Louise whispered that Ronnie Earl suffered from depression, and only played gigs within a day’s drive of his hometown of Boston. He was also in recovery, and his latest album is called Living in the Light. The River D.J. explained that Ronnie Earl played like it was his last night on earth. Unlike Joe Lou Walker, Earl didn’t sing, not one note. He just caressed the strings of his long-necked guitar, sometimes with such painstaking deliberation that you swore he was going to stop and walk off the stage. There was one moment when he actually did walk off the stage. Then, amidst an audible collective exhaling, he returned, every chord like a prayer, answered at last.

By the time Johnny Winter came on, it was 9:30 and we were spent. It didn’t help that the sound system was turned up to ear-canal-destroying decibels and that we could barely hear ourselves shout. And to be honest, there was something about Johnny Winter, shuffling onstage like someone in the Alzheimer’s wing of my mother-in-law’s nursing home, settling himself down, round-shouldered, in a straight-backed chair because he was too feeble to stand, well, there was just something too creepy about the whole spectacle.

So we were outta there, and, as it turned out, a lot of other people had the same idea because when we found ourselves in the bricked courtyard, it was thick with folks shaking their heads, like swimmers getting rid of water in their ears. Surely one of the gifts of middle age is that you can leave before the party’s over; in fact, leaving when you’re still alert (and vertical) is the mark of the evolved soul.

Our evening ended tepidly. We didn’t pick up any guys and kiss them in parking lots; we didn’t jump into any teal blue convertibles and go careening over cliffs. We returned to our room on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn, ate our picnic supper, got into our jammies, brushed and flossed our teeth, and then tumbled into our beds, chatting in the dark about our teenagers until we drifted into snoring and sleep.