Category: Carolyn
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You Can’t Chop Your Mother Up In Massachusetts
It was the fall of 2014. I had returned from a delirious trip to my first writer’s retreat in North Carolina, not knowing that my mother, Carolyn, had dementia. I had clues, two of her siblings had already died from it, but denial being the stock and trade of the human race, I gallantly did […]
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Carolyn Just Died and Now We’re Short 86 Billion Neurons
Carolyn Poplett died on May 18, 2022. This is the eulogy I gave for her at First United Church in Oak Park on July 23rd, 2022. Years ago, driving my parents out to O’Hare, suffering the critical presence of my father, who for some obnoxious reason had decided to sit in the back, positioned to […]
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Having a Cow: Carolyn Poplett and the Figurative Imagination
It was in the seventies. Bart Simpson was not yet a sparkle in Matt Groening’s creative eye. I was on a landing at the front of a large house, a landmark Prairie School architecture home in Oak Park, Illinois, restored by my parents, a few stair rungs below my mother who had come charging down […]
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Grace, Gratitude, and a Wonderful Life
I can take you down to Goldy’s a neighborhood pub that hasn’t changed since Mike took over the business in 1986, famous for its Goldyburger, where on Fridays they serve deep fried perch, and there introduce you to Una the handsome Irish barkeep with the handsome Irish lilt. I can show you the barstools where […]
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The Mystery of Carolyn’s Daring Escape from Incarceration
“This is my son, John. He’s the one who incarcerated me.” Imagine that the person making this introduction was your mother in an assisted-living home. Imagine you were standing next to her, and this is how she chose to introduce you to her fellow inmates—very cheerfully and void of foul intent, venom, rage, or any […]
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Inveigling and The Kung Fu Mind of Carolyn Poplett
Time and time again, Carolyn has proven—thirty years beyond the death of her spouse, through a stroke, day in and day out after the onset of dementia, right up to last evening—that now no matter how many times the disease shaves off another thin slice of her mind, all it succeeds in doing is to […]
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Long Day’s Journey into a Mind Going Dark
Returning from a road-trip that kept me away for two weeks, I knew to expect that my mother, Carolyn, who is fast approaching her 92nd birthday, would impress me with how dementia had robbed another tiny piece of her mind. It’s hard to go away without some dread of the return, knowing how she depends […]
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Mrs. Leonard Schools Punk: You’re Not That Important
My first best friend, Tim Leonard, a boy wedged in the middle of a pack of ten siblings, grew up a Catholic in a big, rambling house that teemed with life and always felt more crowded than any scene in a Bruegel painting. My parents, then youthful and aspirational white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs!), moved in […]
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How to Spot a Liar in Eighteen Seconds or Less
When you get the chance, treat yourself to Bo-Diddley’s heart-thumping rock ‘n roll rendition of the Willy Dixon song, You Can’t Judge a Book by The Cover. Enjoy Willy’s lyrics. George Eliot originated the expression in her 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss. I don’t know where or when or how I got it […]