Tag: Carolyn Poplett

  • An Oversharer’s Cautionary Tale

    John Poplett @ March for Justice Chicago 2020

    In 2019 I decided I was ready to pitch my first novel, Schopenhauer in Love, to literary agents for the first time. I taught myself how to write a query letter, researched agents for those most likely to have an interest in a work of historical fiction about a 19th century German philosopher[1], read the best novels these agents had brought to light, wrote personalized letters only to those most likely to get excited by a book like mine, and tracked the letters I issued in an Excel spreadsheet.

    I wrote to seven top-flight agents, managing to convince three of them to read the manuscript. Nicole Aragi, the rock-star agent of rock star authors Junot Diaz, Rebecca Makkai, and Colson Whitehead, was among them. Three out of seven was an extraordinary result.

    But the rejections suggested I was a better writer of query letters than author of a novel. I needed a makeover, to shake things up. I needed either to become a better writer, a more interesting person, or both.

    I concentrated on reading mostly women authors, authors of color, or authors outside of the United States. I tried writing poetry. I joined George Saunders online short-story course “Story Club”, drove around the country in a campervan, took up French, and read books on the theory of the novel and fiction writing. I purchased an Internet domain name, biketoenddivision.org, and chronicled an attempt to ride a bike around Lake Michigan, raising money for West Town Bikes, a bike shop dedicated to supporting youth on the West Side of Chicago.

    I fooled around with the idea of teaching after a few of my friends encouraged me to try. I had started putting more time and energy into helping other writers improve. My mother had been a teacher. My brother taught. I have many friends who are teachers. I felt like there was something to it that resonated with me innately.

    Carolyn Poplett, my moral compass, in pearls!

    At my mother’s memorial last June, one of her friends remembered a motto that epitomized my mother’s moral foundation. It was:

    To lift yourself up, lift up those around you.

    Though mom ‘s sturdy example ingrained the principal of this motto deep within me, this artful expression of it made it brand new. I already knew the value of the idea. With mom gone, I was that much more eager to put it to use. Soon after a non-profit group that helps kids in the city discover their ability as writers put out a call for volunteers willing to work in their booth at Chicago’s 2022 Printer’s Row Literary Festival. I had taken their training a year earlier, passed a background test, and had been waiting for an assignment ever since. I wanted to establish myself with the org and parlay it into a gig teaching writing and running one of their workshops.

    Another great Carolyn motto is:

    Whenever somebody asks you to do something, always say yes. You never know where it will take you.

    This idea too had worked its way into my being.

    I signed up. It was a beautiful day in late spring in downtown Chicago. The festival had its own buzz and energy. It was great to be in the throes of so many books, book lovers, and authors. I bumped into a cherished novelist friend, hawking copies of her first publishing success, The Fourteenth of September, as I had hoped.

    I had a brief few moments to learn the pitch for the program, what they expected out of me on that day, and to acquaint myself with my peers who had also committed to the first shift on opening day.

    I was soon standing side-by-side with another more experienced person, either a volunteer or a staffer, getting people to sign up for our mailing list or to purchase a book of student poetry and art. As an unpublished author, it was easy to imagine and describe the thrill that young kids would get from reading their own words from the pages of a published book in front of a live audience.

    The booth work energized me. I was chatting it up with everybody, the people who approached the booth and the persons I worked with. It seemed like my partner and I were racking up good numbers in book sales and signups. We high fived each other a couple of times. I put my arm around her to get our picture taken together. By the end of our stint, I was happy and satisfied for what we had accomplished.

    I felt like I had inched closer to my goal of teaching.

    At Goldy’s bar in Forest Park, having a beer with my brother, I failed to choke down a goofy impulse to blurt out how he must be glad that our mother had died. I regretted it immediately not because it was crass but because it reinforced an old script of how he was put upon by his mother.

    We were in our cups. I doubled down on my stupidity, warning him “don’t be a victim, bro”, giving him an unsolicited lecture on why he shouldn’t go on blaming mom forever. The evening ended badly. I went home fearing permanently ruptured my relationship with my only brother.

    Soon after, the volunteer coordinator sent out a group email looking to recruit a crew to assist in running the annual fall fundraiser charity event. I again want to help, check coats, distribute paddles for the paddle raise, do whatever was called for. I wrote to tell them that I was interested and ready to go.

    When I didn’t hear back, I wrote a second email. The coordinator responded saying something vague about background checks which surprised me. They had the results of my original check on file. I found the results on my computer and posted a fresh copy of them to the coordinator. She wrote back to explain that they had already met their quota for volunteers.

    Maybe they didn’t need me. Although it was starting to smell fishy, I bought two tickets to the event and proudly invited a new friend to join me, not suspecting there was anything really wrong and wanting at least to support them as a donor and have a fresh chance of getting to meet some of the staff and chat with fellow boosters.

    Then, on a Friday, I got an email from the executive director disinviting me from the charity event. He explained that he was rescinding my tickets, having received a report from staff and volunteers of “significant inappropriate behavior”.

    It was a rude shock. As accusations go, or quasi-accusations, I had never experienced anything so damning. I was confused, embarrassed, and humiliated. I wondered what people would think I had done to warrant such an extravagant reaction. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. I jumped on the director’s offer to reserve half an hour on his electronic calendar for a one-on-one discussion. I picked a time for the coming Monday.

    Over the long weekend, I called friends and family on the phone, confessed my circumstance, and appealed to them for moral support. I called my new friend and suffered the compound embarrassment of having to give her the whole background to the story as a prelude to the explanation of why I had to disinvite her.

    The last person I called was my brother. Likely I was more hesitant to tell him my story. He was sympathetic, thoughtful and supporting. He heard me out. But before the call was over, he found a moment to admonish me without a smirk “don’t be a victim, bro.”

    Now here was change of the most exquisite kind. The kid brother schooling his know-it-all elder on the finer points of life. The kid brother outsmarting him with a dare to sample his own medicine. The kid brother showing the older brother how to listen.

    I woke the next morning, still thinking about that comeback, laughing my head off at this unexpected reversal. Who was doling out advice now? If this was a game of chess, my brother had just taken my queen.

    The next day the director confirmed that putting my arm around my booth partner was the crux of the complaint against me. I offered to write a note of apology to that person and entrust it to the director for delivery.

    I also offered to write another note to the rest of the volunteers and staff in case some aspect of my behavior had caused them to suffer in some way as well.

    We spoke of a future day, in a following month, when we might deem it appropriate to reevaluate my volunteer status.

    I wrote a formal apology, addressed to my erstwhile booth partner in an email, asking for her forgiveness for my affront. I did my best to put myself in her shoes. I sent the result to the director the next day and felt good about it.

    A few days after that, in a final spasm of agony, I wrote a brief follow-up email to the director thanking him for hearing me out and telling him I felt demoralized and we could drop the idea of reevaluating my volunteer status.

    I did not hear from him after that.

    The only other complaint leveled against me was an accusation of oversharing. People who know me would readily believe this charge. I don’t deny that I am in the eyes of many an over-sharer. Hell, a lot of people I know are under-sharers and I don’t hold that against them. I just don’t feel oversharing should be a source of shame. If somebody accuses me of oversharing and what they’re really doing is euphemistically telling me, I’m a bore… fine. Go ahead and shoot me. But if not, then it might mean that all I’ve really done is lead a longer and more interesting life than most folks.

    Coda

    This story was developed and presented at the first Voice Box performance of 2023 at Fitzgerald’s Nightclub in Berwyn, II. Our theme for the evening was “changes”, as inspired by the David Bowie song.

    Promo for an evening of storytelling

    A special thanks to Maureen Muldoon and Cathy Richardson for encouragement and a riotous, fun setting for “getting real”.

    1. They exist. ↑

  • Grace, Gratitude, and a Wonderful Life

    Carolyn's Got Game!
    Still Got Game 02/17/2022

    I can take you over to Goldy’s, a neighborhood pub in Forest Park, which 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 my brother Jim and I most often sit, where he is most prone to bust out an imitation of the banter of two stalwarts of Chicago sports, the late, legendary Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray, and his still-living color man, now announcing on the South Side for the White Sox, Steve Stone.

    The two provided running commentary from an open-air booth at Wrigley field to Cub fans over radio and television for fourteen years. My mimic brother does both parts, the slurred speech of Harry, masking a stroke that didn’t keep him out of the booth and Stone’s more nasally intonations.

    Certainly, they announced the game in 1983 on a day when the New York Mets came to town. Frank Howard was coach and the starting pitcher for the Mets, Walt Terrell, hit back-to-back home runs. It was a phenomenal feat, as any baseball aficionado can assure you, based on the stats alone. I was there with Arthur Russell to witness the whole thing. Ferguson Jenkins, starting pitcher for the Cubs, lost the game. Wait a minute, back up, Fergie Jenkins lost the game? His consolation for the loss was his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown eight years later in 1991.

    The point is my brother is an excellent mime, especially when he’s relaxed, among good people, and drinking Harps from a glass served by a handsome Irish lass. Under those circumstances, his pitch is perfect. The dial is set to ten.

    On Christmas Eve, Jim, our mother, Carolyn, my daughter, Allison, and mom’s caregiver, Mariya, crowded into the den to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.  I’ve heard Jim imitate Jimmy Stewart many times over many years. The way he enunciates George Bailey’s words in that line “You’re nothing but a scurvy spider, Mr. Potter” captures Stewart’s signature voice, which sounds like his jaw is still mending after somebody busted it open.

    If you know the movie, the person who almost busts George Bailey’s jaw open is the misanthropic bar owner, Gus, who appears in a dystopian Bedford Falls, a doppelganger for the happier-go-luckier bartender, Gus, who appears in the everyday “real” Bedford Falls, where George Bailey already has a wonderful life but is far too stubbornly willful and confused by a mind fogged up with vague “worldly” ambitions to see the wonderful life that God has already granted him.

    Instead, his awe-shucks boyish dreams can’t quite contain a cauldron of contempt from gushing from his pores. At great peril, he does not realize that the world of Bedford Falls is utterly complete. All George Bailey ever has to do is see it that way. It’s like Dorothy and her shoes.

    Like his Caray / Stone voices my brother’s Stewart can be pitch perfect. Only on this night, he did not settle for ten. He pushed it up that tiny little bit, all that’s required, to beam a masterful performance into the thick weeds of cornpone. He maxed out the dial all the way to eleven.

    Carolyn had the prime spot, seated in her wheelchair directly in front of the television. Jim was off to her right. She leaned to the left, with a comic’s instinct for breaking the fourth wall, to whisper to an imagined audience, “How’d I get mixed up with him?”

    I was on the left side of mom ideally situated to pick up her aside, ideally situated as her other son to think how ridiculous that sounded, the mother pretending she wasn’t on hand when Jim was just a twinkle in the eye or ever changed his diapers.

    It’s a Wonderful Life is my all-time favorite movie. I marvel how it folds in the mood and imagery of film noir into a perennial candidate for feel good movie of the year. I marvel at its durability. How it continues to teach me things. The premise that people routinely, tragically underestimate their influence on others, disparage or are blind to the good they dole out and that this failure might cause them to give up in one way or another has held me in its thrall for most of my life.

    Our capacity for blindness is immense. Here’s George Bailey itching to get out to see the world, his idea of heaven, when right around him, right under his nose, is all the world, all the heaven he can handle. It’s literally there at his feet. And he can’t see it. Who is sent to point this out to him? Clarence, a goofy second-class angel.

    Only George to the credit of his stubbornness doesn’t go down without a fight. He is brought down to his knees on that icy bridge where, on the brink of despair, he has returned to the scene where he tried to kill himself, for a second time.

    Carolyn bowling 02/17/2022

    As illustrated in this parable, unless you have a profound sense of your connectedness to others in your community, your life is literally hell. Hell on earth. You don’t have to wait for the afterlife. You can start that gig right away.

    As George prays on the bridge, a miracle happens. His prayer is answered. And the astonishing thing about this is that the miracle was always present in himself, his spirit, and his mind. It happens perhaps only when the human spirit intersects with divine will when divine will comes from within.

    This wondrously cheerful movie gleefully takes on the wondrously Quixotic chore of demonstrating to a theoretically very thick-headed audience exactly how thick in the head a human being can be. We’re all running around with logs in our eyes, it tries to tell us.

    No wonder I missed some of the other things that movie wants to convey. But for this viewing I was seated next to Carolyn, the woman who uses grace in its most simplistic form, the most commonplace, daily expression we use to express gratitude, the words “thank you”. With a zest for candor that comes from grace, Carolyn Poplett is weaponized for love. These days she delivers “thank yous” rapid-fire until you are riddled with them, powerless, forced to relent, and love her back.

    Jim and I choose caregivers for competence but mostly for how quickly they surrender to an infectious barrage of love bombs. This explains exactly why Mariya. Suzie, and Lyn have remained in her employ for so long. Carolyn and these amazing women love each other.

    If the good people of Bedford Falls were more like my mother (or Mariya or Lyn or Suzie), you wouldn’t have had time to finish your popcorn. If everybody in Bedford Falls had thanked George Bailey with a measure of her grace, George Bailey would not have gotten anywhere near that bridge and Clarence would have to go elsewhere to get his wings. Carolyn is a woman who at the age of ninety-two, a woman deep into her dotage, is still powerful, more powerful than a baby who can coax grandpa to play on the carpet, because her innocence is recovered innocence and brings with it a deep-seated wisdom that not even dementia can uproot.

    Well, something must have rubbed off. Before Carolyn got too far down that slippery slope, I started to ask her for advice. I figured that fierce instinct of maternal love would reel her back to a lucid state. With back-to-back failures in love and marriage, I wasn’t done with the old girl yet. I had plenty to talk with her about. I appealed to her for advice.

    That it could almost instantly yank her out of the fog was astonishing to behold despite my confidence in the theory. When I tried it again and witnessed her mind snap back a second time, this tapping into the bond of mother and son, astonished me more. It seemed we were tapping into something close to the center of life itself.

    This is the meaning of that Barbara Streisand lyric in the song “People” which asserts that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. I never understood that. Never. Not even when I started writing this article. I get it now. It only took me 57 viewings of that movie and 64 years of my mother’s sturdy example to reach this point. God spare us all if any of you out there are thicker than me.

    Acknowledging need of others is as simple as saying “thank you”. The rest you leave up to sincerity and intonation. Then, join the luckiest people.

    Now finally at long last I have a useful clue to my failures in marriage and love. I was unlucky. I was unlucky because I didn’t acknowledge how much I needed another person in my life. And a world class, George Bailey worthy stubbornness kept me from seeing how subtly the quality of independence shifts from a virtue to a corrosive, slow-acting poison. This slow-acting property makes it worse, crueler and more difficult to detect. It is insidious like neuropathy or diabetes. Only it attacks relationships instead of the body. I explained this all to my mother this evening. I called her by phone and gave her a condensed version of my theory on need and my failures in relationships.

    “That’s right,” she said.

    “So, I need to explain this to my friend,” I said. “Even if it doesn’t bring us close. For the sake of doing what’s right.”

    In my excitement, I exclaimed, “See, mom, I still need you as my mother? I just called because I had to tell you that,” I said.

    “Thank you. Thank you very much,” she said. Then she told me her body was exercising inside and that it was full of joy.

  • The Mystery of Carolyn’s Daring Escape from Incarceration

    Ray E., Patt Oppenheim, and Carolyn

    “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 other more moderate form of ill-feeling. Just, you know, cheerful.

    Now imagine that her words, despite the hyperbole—a classic Southern trait—were almost entirely true. Well, not almost true. Actually true. In that moment, she introduced only me though she could have indicted David Strom, her attorney, had he been present. But David had the good sense not to be present.

    The truth is David Strom and I did put her in prison, then known as Holley-Court, an assisted-living high-rise here in Oak Park, Il., about two and a half blocks from her longtime townhome residence on Kenilworth Ave., the same street she lived on for 40 years, the same address I came home to from college on Christmas break, the same street upon which my father’s ashes are buried, etc. But David and I only did it because she had fallen several times and I was frightened and concerned that I might lose my mother and my fiercest ally and David was frightened and concerned that he might lose a client and one of his fiercest friends. How fierce? Ask my brother.

    Carolyn was and remains fierce, despite dementia, though she cloaks it in beguiling and innocent sounding expressions like “This is my son, John. He’s the one who incarcerated me.”

    The truth is I endured more than one of those withering introductions. And if you were in my shoes, like me, you would have wanted to crawl down into them. No! You would have wanted to collapse into them and vanish completely, as when a crew sends a spark to a sufficient charge of dynamite, placed at the foot of a vacant high-rise building, so that the explosion causes the building to implode and crash inward, down in on itself, and fall into a cloud of cinder and ash, its own pulver, its final violent state. This, I hope, affords a tiny sense of how that felt. Did I mention that Carolyn is fierce?

    So, the greater truth was that David and I together conspired to incarcerate Carolyn, guilty as charged, on the pretext of concern for her safety and well-being but the ugly truth is that decisions such as these are always a little self-serving. She had every right to call me out. How David emerged unscathed I cannot say.

    Somehow and to this day not all the details have come to light, for the guile of a Southern woman is as deep as it needs to be, she engineered her escape in the classic style of a flamboyant felon given to panache: entirely within the confines of her cell.  It’s a safe bet that she required only two ingredients, guile and smile, and mixed those together in the proportions required by alchemy and dark science.

    But the one other ingredient that has come to light was “girl power”. Carolyn wanted to bust loose, and she quickly conceived that men, her own son among them, were her enemies. She therefore rallied forces—the only forces she could trust—viz., other women.

    Somehow, with her private army and sleeper cells, she located a condominium, entirely situated on a single floor to remove the greatest dread, the consequences of a fall down a staircase, and ordered David to assist her in its purchase. She forthwith made David promise, fiercely I imagine, never to move her again, a promise that he, and I by proxy, have so far upheld.

    The condo she purchased was a rebuke to another totem of the patriarchy, this time her late husband, Ray E. Poplett, who fifty years ago had vetoed a chance to purchase a unit in the same building[1].

    Diana Ostreko combined forces with her and figured out a way to get every carpet, a baby grand piano, and precious curios out of a three-story townhouse and into her new home. The only complaint of her many doting nieces and nephews is that, in the transfer, the vinyl record of that Christmas classic, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, went missing.

    They outfitted it exactly to her wishes as a place for hospitality and where great parties were likely to erupt. I do not think it was entirely an accident that her new home became the birthplace for a new cocktail, the “Moonhattan”, which uses all the same ingredients as a conventional Manhattan, except that bourbon is tossed fittingly in favor of moonshine.

    The moral of this story is that two Yankee men can’t outwit a Southern woman. In fact, three can’t do it and, if you’re going to try, I advise you as a friend to start out with somebody other than my mother.

    [1] I am sure that if we could have him back, Carolyn would restore him his veto power, albeit with a few Ts and Cs freshly amended.

  • Inveigling and The Kung Fu Mind of Carolyn Poplett

    Early Photo of Outsmarted Son Sulking Next to Carolyn

    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 expose another vein of precious ore that it might shimmer in the light.

    I have followed the Chicago Bulls since Jerry Sloan, Chet Walker, Bob Love, Tom Boerwinkle, and Norm “Stormin’ Norman” Van Lier were starters in the early seventies. I have seen the Bulls put together many entertaining teams, yet the team has never been more charming than in this 2021-2022 NBA season. We’ve had characters and “greats” but never a team so inspired by love.

    With this team, the shop-worn metaphor of chemistry catalyzes into magic. The players do not always succeed in hiding the joy and delight that wells up inside them from the chance to exercise and display their God-given talents, believing in the brotherhood of their team, and seizing on the potential for love in what—as former Bull player and current Bull announcer, Stacey King, routinely asserts on air—is “a simple game”. It seems like when they’re out on the floor they’re always smiling.

    Carolyn played ball in high school and college. She coached ball in her first years of teaching in Scales Mound, Illinois, after graduating across the Big River in Dubuque.

    At ninety-two, Carolyn enjoys watching the sport not a little but a lot, almost too much. Her eyesight is preternaturally acute. To this day, I believe, she could count the veins on a dragonfly’s wing.  I imagine it makes it extra tiresome to see things that keenly. And people who know my mother, knows she does not get half-way involved in anything.

    Earlier this year, DeMar DeRozan, the Bulls’ leading scorer, treated Carolyn, me, and other fans to two back-to-back buzzer beaters where he won both games in dramatic fashion in the closing seconds. Two of them! Each behind the three-point arc! Fully engaging in the drama from tipoff to dramatic or disappointing finale, as Carolyn does, no matter how old you are, is going to wear you down. That she has the stamina and is even eager to watch—after four high scoring quarters, half-time, and 1,400 Geico commercials—the post-game show amazes me. Sure, the analysts, Kendall Gill and Will Perdue, have stepped up their game but, they could walk on balls while juggling bowling pins, it’s still a post-game show. I don’t get it. Maybe Carolyn needs it as a diver needs a hyperbaric chamber to decompress and stave off the bends.

    And this happens regularly even after her sons and her caregivers cruelly, surreptitiously like cowardly thieves switched the grounds used to brew her late-night cup from regular to decaffeinated.

    Last night I dialed to ask her permission to visit and watch the game. Usually, I don’t dial. I just drop in, often bringing soup from Panera or rice and fish from home. I take my laundry with me and then I attempt to inveigle Carolyn into watching a game.

    (should have looked this up years ago)

    “Inveigle” is mom’s word, not mine.  The word amuses or charms her in some way that I don’t completely understand though I have observed its effect on her many times. It is perfectly apt for my purpose. To say, “Mom, can I inveigle you into watching a Bulls game with me?” is the quickest way to “yes” or “sure that would be fine”.

    Most doting mothers, I imagine, don’t need inducement or any inveigling. Whatever the reason when I called, I didn’t resort to using the mantra word, inveigle. Maybe I thought unleashing it between mother and son was dirty pool, in violation of the Geneva Convention, or merely a sad example of unsportsmanlike conduct.

    I asked her meekly instead “if it would be alright to come over and watch the game”.

     “Oh, son, it cheers my heart to hear your voice and receive your call. Nothing in the world makes me happier to be with you and my other son, Jim. And I’ll look forward to hearing from you again tomorrow when you call,” she said.

    “Yes, mom. I love you too,” I said.

    “Oh, how I love you!” she said.

    “Good night, mom,” I said.

    “Bye,” she said cheerfully on a rising Southern note.

    That’s how Carolyn Poplett blows off her son. She’s been doing it for decades.

  • Long Day’s Journey into a Mind Going Dark

    Carolyn Poplett

    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 on the society of her two sons.

    If nothing else, our company and a steady stream of visits retard somewhat her decline. My brother, Jim, and I will swap turns watching Gunsmoke with her, the longest running show in television history, co-created by John Meston, a screenwriter who authored 379 Gunsmoke episodes himself some time after riding broncos in Colorado and attending Dartmouth, Harvard, and the Sorbonne in Paris. If you want to know why that show is deep, John Meston and an envious liberal arts education had something to do with it. It’s a good thing since Carolyn has undoubtedly looped through 379 episodes more than once, while the rest of us, her caregivers, Mariya and Lyn, and two sons could only claim the half.

    I’ve watched all six interviews of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers, a TV series called The Power of Myth (which you can buy on Amazon Prime for the princely sum of twelve bucks). Campbell was caught up with mythology early as a boy when he saw a live performance of Buffalo Bill at Madison Square Garden. It sealed his fate. He dove into Native American mythology, rites, and religious customs and didn’t stop until he had canvased the globe.

    Carolyn and I have viewed each episode in that series together at least once, some two or three times. Even when she can’t remember my name, a narrative as profound and abstruse as Campbell’s survey of world cultures, religions, and archetypes and myth which, he argues, ground all of human experience, inching us closer to the edge of what is humanly knowable and therefore to God, and Moyer’s dogged persistence in fully animating Campbell’s explanations and replies, grips her mind and reaches deep down inside her to find a place where her intellect remains vibrant and intact. I’ve seen this reawakening many times. To experience it feels akin to a miracle like a flower unfolding before your eyes with the trick of time lapse photography.

    Emerging from the bathroom one evening at the one of these episodes, after a change into her pajamas, adorable in her stockinged feet planted on the foot rests of a wheelchair, Mariya paused briefly to give Carolyn a chance to bid me good night.

    “You know that man on the show we were watching?”

    “I sure do, mom.”

    “What he’s been saying is important. You need to tell other people about him.”

    “Yes, mom. I agree. Believe me. I’m trying.”

    I needed to make that trip though. I had friends to visit and the honor of an all-expenses-paid artist residency at Wildacres in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. My fears of how I might find my mother were soon realized.

    I gave her the briefest of rundowns on where I had been and a few of the places I had visited. It was difficult for her to understand what her Yankee son was doing galumphing about her beloved childhood state. It must have been confusing. Why was I there and not her?

    Carolyn no matter how much difficulty she’s having in the moment with her memory, refuses to come up short in conversation. I am utterly charmed by her strength of will. This time she decided to co-opt my story and turn it into her own.

    I explained how, on the way down, I passed through the area around Boone, NC and saw some friends in Deep Gap.

    “Guess where I went on the return trip?”

    “Burnsville?” [Burnsville is one of the many towns in Western North Carolina where Carolyn and her siblings shared a home as children.]

    “Not this time, mom. But I do go there a lot. I grabbed a bite of dinner next to The Boone Tavern Inn and Berea College where your sister Ginny went to school. I always like to go there. It feels like I am saluting your sisters. Didn’t Aunt Mary Lib and Sally go there too? You always liked to talk about how Ginny had one of her paintings on display for years in one of the campus buildings.”

    [And here’s where the conversation went slightly off the rails.]

    “Well, I think your mother would be proud of you,” she said.

    “You do? Mom, I thought you were my mother. Who do you think I am?”

    “Well, I think you live in a lot of people’s minds.”

    “I see. I love that thought, mom. I love that idea. I believe it is true and I have similar thoughts all the time. [And here again was yet another time where I got a hard glimpse into how much she had informed my being. It was like opening a closet and seeing a ghost.].

    “How about if we talk about going out for a little supper?”

    “Well, I just got back from… uhm, Boone and then I went to Berea after that,” she said.

    “Mom, we don’t have to talk about our travels. What I’m trying to talk about is super banal. We’re just discussing where we should go to get some supper.”

    [Hell will freeze over two or three times before she will concede her part in a conversation or come up short without a repartee.]

    “Oh, well, I think that’s very important. I like that idea. Let’s think about that instead. I don’t know any of the places around here like you do, George,” she said. [George was one of Carolyn’s beloved brothers].”

    Then, with hilarious cunning, “Where would you like to go?”

    [Leaving me to wonder, how many times she had pulled a like ruse on me before, a Southern gal trumping her dim-witted Yankee son, feigning to graciously relinquish the prerogative to me, in this case, the choice of restaurant, though at this stage I could see clear through her deception: that she couldn’t think of a dining spot, not even her long-running favorites, Citrine or Hemmingways, in our hometown of Oak Park, to save her soul.]

    “Well, we we could go to Citrines. You might not remember. We went there the week they first opened. You liked it so much you wanted to go back the next night.”

    “Did I really?”

    “Yes, I reminded you, at the time, that we had just gone there but we decided to go back anyway. That’s how much you like it there. And we always share the beet salad.”

    “Mom, I want to watch a baseball game when we get back from dinner but I don’t want to watch it if you don’t want to watch it. All I can tell you is that playoff baseball is like nothing else. It’s operatic. A slow-paced drama only there are charges of dynamite hidden all over the field. You never know when one of those charges is going to go off. A game can lull you while the pitchers engage in a subtle duel for innings and then, out of nowhere, kaboom! One of them goes off. It could be a play at the plate, a double play, a home run, a stupendous catch to keep the ball from going over the fence, stolen bases. Playoff baseball is unpredictable in every way except that it is predictably amazing. And the camerawork nowadays is better than ever.”

    “How do you know so much?”

    “Mom, I don’t. My knowledge is about half a centimeter deep. It’s your other son, Jim, who knows baseball. How could he not? He’s a Cubs fan.”

    “Is he really?”

    “Yes, trust me, mom. When we watch a game with Jim, you’ll see. It’s a lot of fun. Wait till he mimics Harry Caray and Steven Stone. You know what a good mimic he is.”

    “Is he?”

    “Yes, mom.”

    “Can I pay the check now?”

    “It’s already paid. You can hold your head up high. You don’t have to worry about your son going home malnourished or fainting on his way to the car.”

    “Oh, that’s good. We wouldn’t want that.”

    “Right, mom.”

    At home, that evening, Carolyn had a conniption, a series of rapid fire angry, almost rageful outbursts of an intensity that hasn’t visited her in years, maybe even since she faced the humiliation of having to use a walker for the first time (it’s a wonder she didn’t hurl that thing through one or many walls). She refused to join my brother and me in the den (highly unusual) and instead inexplicably insisted on returning to the bathroom. Popping out of the bathroom a little later, there was nothing left for her to do in there, she avoided the den, more strangely than the first dodge, going to the kitchen to avoid us. She was—to use her own expression—”so mad she could spit bullets”; those that she did spit were aimed at Mariya.

    I went in to back her up. “Mom, this is not like you. What’s the matter? This isn’t you. What’s bothering you, mom? Do you know?”

    She didn’t. I couldn’t figure it out either1Jim later figured out that a reduction in strength of a medication triggered the upset. She’s back on a full-dose now.. I didn’t expect her to. I just wanted to jog her out of her upset. She calmed down. People who know her know her know that she cannot stray to far from grace. The instant she started to recover. She apologized to Mariya, the ease and naturalness of it utterly familiar and yet at the same time a display of character to excite wonder. It happens quite often—albeit with less drama—and I’m always quite amazed. A moment or two later, after Mariya moved away, she looked at me and said, “I love you and Jim more than anything in the world. You mean so much to me.”. It was sweet and sincere but also was here apology and way of saying “I know I kind of lost it; please don’t runaway.”

    As if, my brother or I could ever entertain such a thought.

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      Jim later figured out that a reduction in strength of a medication triggered the upset. She’s back on a full-dose now.