Thursday, May 29, 2014

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow


One of my elderly family members is in the hospital, so I go to his apartment to pick up more comfortable clothing. He lives in a Jewish-run assisted living center in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood. As I sign in at the front desk, I notice a woman who has passed the time where guessing her age would be polite. She is petite, less than five feet tall, with short white hair swept away from her face. She wears a denim jacket and talks to the woman at the front desk about how much she enjoyed having breakfast in the garden with her daughters. Arthritis has reshaped her hands and she wears no wedding ring. I didn't know there was a garden in the back yard. I live three hundred miles away from my mother. We had been talking on the phone at breakfast time about her plans to celebrate Mother's Day when I received a text message saying yes, thank you for your offer to bring things to the hospital, please pick up a blue tee shirt and a pair of his eyeglasses but not the ones from the 1970s. This woman, with her warm presence and sparkling intelligence, reminds me of my mother. 

We meet again at the elevator. I move past the three elderly gentlemen on board, to the back. She commands the front, asking each gentleman for his floor. There are three more floors and someone calls out for each of them. A man with a thick head of silver hair and the chiseled cheekbones of a model wears aviator classes. His hands are elegant, unturned by arthritis and perfectly manicured. If not for the way he leaned on a walker, I would expect him to fly our plane or pose for the Banana Republic catalog. He walks into the elevator last, and does not turn around to face the door - the walker is too bulky to maneuver in such a small space. 

We reach the second floor, and he pulls out backward, followed by the other men. She calls out after them, "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow." 

They shuffle onward, and I wonder if they heard. 

The elevator doors close on her performance, and she turns to me and says, "No one ever knows the words of The Great Bard, Shakespeare." She has sized me up and deftly returns the conversation to her daughters' visit. I wish her a happy Mother's Day. She asks me if I am a mother, and in my pause she answers, "No." There is so much space between the second and third floor of this building. I pause a moment more and to meet her in this conversation I tell her, "I would like to be. I hope one day I get to adopt." 

The doors open.

Something shifts in her. She squares her shoulders. With a concise lift of her head she says, "That is very necessary." 

I am trying to make sense of the almost imperceptible shift in her, this woman who may have fled a place of pogroms, lived through a time of hiding, distributing, shipping children to safer shores. Or she might have lost one of her own children in the distribution of babies that flowed from our eastern seaboard during the early years of the Baby Boom. In the confines of polite conversation I have no way to turn these images around into appropriate questions. The moment has passed - ever agile, she is gone.