June
June came and went by more quickly than any month since this journal began. The saying, used to be, "Beware, the Ides of March", but I would replace that with "Beware, the End of the Fiscal Year."
It began with a great deal of fanfare. Anthony's brother was in town with another challenging production that would draw all of their friends and relatives to another Broadway preview. This time, I managed to get Norah to come along and act as a buffer between me and all of Anthony's lace curtain Irish relatives. It was a wonderful Spring evening with the merest threat of a rain shower in the air (it actually waited until I made back to my subway stop before it broke.)
The play itself, "Medieval Play" was a limited engagement at the Playwright's Horizon, one of the newer, more experimental Broadway houses, close to Ninth Avenue. At nearly three hours long, it is an example of one of those things you can get away with once you become a successful writer since no matter how non-commercial your latest work is - and even Anthony's Mom said, it was "a bomb" -- you can always find someone willing to stage it for a few weeks.
For the record, I enjoyed virtually every minute of it. Anthony's brother was on stage nearly the entire length of the play with lots of clever dialogue wrapped in Elizabethan prose but almost always with some contemporary winking and nodding. I think the author, Kenneth Lonergan, was trying to use the tale of two knights errant, wandering the countryside of France and Italy, in search of worthy causes to fight for as a kind of metaphor for today's political malaise.
And, like all the other similar occasions, he joined us for drinks afterward, this time at the Playwright's Horizon bar. I managed to speak with just about everyone, some thirty friends of Anthony's family, including some I had not seen in ten years. One of them was Marty Lain, the scion of one of the last family-owned dairy farms New York State. There is always so much going on with Marty, yet he is one of the most laconic people I have ever met. In fact, I would love nothing better than to just spend a day in silence with him sometime. But, those occasions aren't easy to conjure up.
It is easy, looking back, to recognize that first day of June as really the last of those cool days when you had to decide how thick a jacket you needed to take with you for the rest of the day. The temperature on the side of the bank building in Flushing would hover around the seventy degree mark for about another week, a little brisk for Mom's complete liking, but wonderful when you could catch just the right pool of light beneath a canopy of pin oak and Japanese honey locust.
Beginning with Mother's Day and virtually every week thereafter, I would scoot over to the nursing home whenever the temperature pushed past the magic number. More often than not, it meant taking time off from work: a half day here, a "sick day" there. On May 20th, Mom actually spoke for the first time in months. She repeated Big Brother's name several times, as if asking for help. And, when he didn't answer she started calling for Aunt Nannie.
I think it was Mom's way of deciphering where she was; she knew that if Big Brother answered, it meant she was someplace in New York. But, if Aunt Nannie answered, it meant that more than likely, she had been taken (against her will) Down South. Knowing where she is and making sure that it is still New York City seems to be a preoccupation of her's.
On June 9th, after spending a couple of hours with her in the court yard, I told her it was time for me to go and she looked at me with those unseeing milky-colored eyes and asked me who I was. When I replied, "Ronnie", she seemed pretty unimpressed.
A week or more began to go by between those visits. Not only did I have to be on the look-out for the coolest possible weather before I could even think about taking her outdoors, but increasingly they had to be charged to my annual leave at work in order to make them worthwhile. Once, after I had taken a half day off in order to get there by three o'clock, one of the new PAs came in (interrupting a "Make Room for Daddy" episode) and announced that she would have to put Mom to bed by four.
It all has to do with the grim business of her feeding tube. It seems that in order for Mom to completely drain one day's worth of liquid nutrients, she has to be connected to it for almost eighteen hours, leaving her barely any time outside her own room or, indeed, any time out of bed.
It's very strange. For the last two years (the second anniversary of that first ambulance ride to the nursing home was Memorial Day weekend) I have been mourning the Mom in all the Kodak camera photos, the stout little fire plug of a woman who seemed not to age over the space of about thirty years. Now, quite suddenly, I am mourning the loss of that tragic figure who no longer resembled the woman in the Kodak photos, but who nevertheless seemed to know who I was fully capable of surprising me by repying, "I love you, too" whenever I would say, goodnight. Who knew that those would be our halcyon days?
Time was slipping by in other ways, too. The John the Seminarian "Countdown" is over. As the days and weeks of his departure grew closer I found myself dreading the final goodbyes, the final St. Michael's hug and pat on the back of those sharp shoulder blades. So, I just stopped going to Mass.
I'm not cut out to be a Catholic, even a watered down one, and never was it brought home to me more clearly than during those last few meetings of my EFM class. The class is divided up three ways (more, if you count all the other different ways that we are different from each other) which has had the strange result of delivering even more power over the conduct of the class into he hands of the one person I never thought should have been leading it in the first place -- a seventy year-old prep school teacher nearing the end of his career, with a voice that sounds like he has swallowed a mouthful of green pond water and can't find a place to spit it out.
I tried everything possible to decouple my participation in class from my dislike of its leader, but very little of it worked. Finally, on the penultimate evening, I lost my cool. Everyone was talking at once, with the leader trying very hard to get everyone's attention so that he could tell a joke. I'd had my hand up for several minutes, trying to ask a serious question. We dueled over who would get to speak next until I had jusgt had it and slammed both hands on the table in front of us. Everyone looked at me like I had lost my mind.
And, maybe I had. It is clear whatever manic phase I have been in these many months is now over, replaced by a slow-burning desire to quit the human race.
One of my last Sunday Masses was Youth Sunday, the 10th of June. As always, the Sunday Schools had complete control of the program. Everything went well until the homily which was delivered in divided parts by the three remaining graduating seniors to make it al the way through all twelve years. One of them was Hope, Jr.
He spoke calmly and eloquently about his experiences growing up as the youngest son of a beloved choirmaster. He paid his respects to his late mother in a way that I think would have done her proud. But, it wasn't until hours later, in one of those late at night as you're opening the refrigerator moments, that I realized that the rest of his homily amounted to a great big "f**k you" to the rest of the congregation. Apparently, nothing that happened outside the sphere of his close-knit family and the world of the Choir, had made the slightest impression on him -- and, he seemed sort of proud of it.
I was sitting next to Trino for most of it, but when I looked up he had gone. He left a Bulletin next to my seat with a note written on it:
"I have to head out now. Enjoy the rest of your day! I'm thinking of your Mom and I'm sending her well wishes.
[Big Happy Face] Trino"
It began with a great deal of fanfare. Anthony's brother was in town with another challenging production that would draw all of their friends and relatives to another Broadway preview. This time, I managed to get Norah to come along and act as a buffer between me and all of Anthony's lace curtain Irish relatives. It was a wonderful Spring evening with the merest threat of a rain shower in the air (it actually waited until I made back to my subway stop before it broke.)
The play itself, "Medieval Play" was a limited engagement at the Playwright's Horizon, one of the newer, more experimental Broadway houses, close to Ninth Avenue. At nearly three hours long, it is an example of one of those things you can get away with once you become a successful writer since no matter how non-commercial your latest work is - and even Anthony's Mom said, it was "a bomb" -- you can always find someone willing to stage it for a few weeks.
For the record, I enjoyed virtually every minute of it. Anthony's brother was on stage nearly the entire length of the play with lots of clever dialogue wrapped in Elizabethan prose but almost always with some contemporary winking and nodding. I think the author, Kenneth Lonergan, was trying to use the tale of two knights errant, wandering the countryside of France and Italy, in search of worthy causes to fight for as a kind of metaphor for today's political malaise.
And, like all the other similar occasions, he joined us for drinks afterward, this time at the Playwright's Horizon bar. I managed to speak with just about everyone, some thirty friends of Anthony's family, including some I had not seen in ten years. One of them was Marty Lain, the scion of one of the last family-owned dairy farms New York State. There is always so much going on with Marty, yet he is one of the most laconic people I have ever met. In fact, I would love nothing better than to just spend a day in silence with him sometime. But, those occasions aren't easy to conjure up.
It is easy, looking back, to recognize that first day of June as really the last of those cool days when you had to decide how thick a jacket you needed to take with you for the rest of the day. The temperature on the side of the bank building in Flushing would hover around the seventy degree mark for about another week, a little brisk for Mom's complete liking, but wonderful when you could catch just the right pool of light beneath a canopy of pin oak and Japanese honey locust.
Beginning with Mother's Day and virtually every week thereafter, I would scoot over to the nursing home whenever the temperature pushed past the magic number. More often than not, it meant taking time off from work: a half day here, a "sick day" there. On May 20th, Mom actually spoke for the first time in months. She repeated Big Brother's name several times, as if asking for help. And, when he didn't answer she started calling for Aunt Nannie.
I think it was Mom's way of deciphering where she was; she knew that if Big Brother answered, it meant she was someplace in New York. But, if Aunt Nannie answered, it meant that more than likely, she had been taken (against her will) Down South. Knowing where she is and making sure that it is still New York City seems to be a preoccupation of her's.
On June 9th, after spending a couple of hours with her in the court yard, I told her it was time for me to go and she looked at me with those unseeing milky-colored eyes and asked me who I was. When I replied, "Ronnie", she seemed pretty unimpressed.
A week or more began to go by between those visits. Not only did I have to be on the look-out for the coolest possible weather before I could even think about taking her outdoors, but increasingly they had to be charged to my annual leave at work in order to make them worthwhile. Once, after I had taken a half day off in order to get there by three o'clock, one of the new PAs came in (interrupting a "Make Room for Daddy" episode) and announced that she would have to put Mom to bed by four.
It all has to do with the grim business of her feeding tube. It seems that in order for Mom to completely drain one day's worth of liquid nutrients, she has to be connected to it for almost eighteen hours, leaving her barely any time outside her own room or, indeed, any time out of bed.
It's very strange. For the last two years (the second anniversary of that first ambulance ride to the nursing home was Memorial Day weekend) I have been mourning the Mom in all the Kodak camera photos, the stout little fire plug of a woman who seemed not to age over the space of about thirty years. Now, quite suddenly, I am mourning the loss of that tragic figure who no longer resembled the woman in the Kodak photos, but who nevertheless seemed to know who I was fully capable of surprising me by repying, "I love you, too" whenever I would say, goodnight. Who knew that those would be our halcyon days?
Time was slipping by in other ways, too. The John the Seminarian "Countdown" is over. As the days and weeks of his departure grew closer I found myself dreading the final goodbyes, the final St. Michael's hug and pat on the back of those sharp shoulder blades. So, I just stopped going to Mass.
I'm not cut out to be a Catholic, even a watered down one, and never was it brought home to me more clearly than during those last few meetings of my EFM class. The class is divided up three ways (more, if you count all the other different ways that we are different from each other) which has had the strange result of delivering even more power over the conduct of the class into he hands of the one person I never thought should have been leading it in the first place -- a seventy year-old prep school teacher nearing the end of his career, with a voice that sounds like he has swallowed a mouthful of green pond water and can't find a place to spit it out.
I tried everything possible to decouple my participation in class from my dislike of its leader, but very little of it worked. Finally, on the penultimate evening, I lost my cool. Everyone was talking at once, with the leader trying very hard to get everyone's attention so that he could tell a joke. I'd had my hand up for several minutes, trying to ask a serious question. We dueled over who would get to speak next until I had jusgt had it and slammed both hands on the table in front of us. Everyone looked at me like I had lost my mind.
And, maybe I had. It is clear whatever manic phase I have been in these many months is now over, replaced by a slow-burning desire to quit the human race.
One of my last Sunday Masses was Youth Sunday, the 10th of June. As always, the Sunday Schools had complete control of the program. Everything went well until the homily which was delivered in divided parts by the three remaining graduating seniors to make it al the way through all twelve years. One of them was Hope, Jr.
He spoke calmly and eloquently about his experiences growing up as the youngest son of a beloved choirmaster. He paid his respects to his late mother in a way that I think would have done her proud. But, it wasn't until hours later, in one of those late at night as you're opening the refrigerator moments, that I realized that the rest of his homily amounted to a great big "f**k you" to the rest of the congregation. Apparently, nothing that happened outside the sphere of his close-knit family and the world of the Choir, had made the slightest impression on him -- and, he seemed sort of proud of it.
I was sitting next to Trino for most of it, but when I looked up he had gone. He left a Bulletin next to my seat with a note written on it:
"I have to head out now. Enjoy the rest of your day! I'm thinking of your Mom and I'm sending her well wishes.
[Big Happy Face] Trino"