Told them to ask you, cleaning products being your department, and got the pursed lips. One wanted to go into the soft talk but I wasn’t having any. Treating me as if I was demented, I won’t have it. Mutterings about Community Psychiatric Services again, which I ignored as per.
The other one sits down and starts making notes. Home care review, she says. Goals, paperwork, drives them all mad. The first one gets me back in my chair and pinned down and does the legs. She launches into a lecture. Polishing the floor may be “unadvisable” as combo of wax and ceramic tiles can be extremely slippery. And there is such a thing as overdoing housework and would I please heed earlier advice about resting with legs up, and bear in mind risk of breaking skin on shins and infecting the ulcers if I’m charging around the place. Obviously a waste of breath on my part to try and explain again about you and the housework, they just don’t want to hear the facts.
Pigheaded young woman, actually-she didn’t take kindly to being corrected. The word is INadvisable not UNadvisable, I took some pleasure in pointing out, and she gave me one of those “who’s a naughty boy” looks and said there was no need to shout. I wasn’t shouting, which I also pointed out.
Actually the IN not UN business is more your kind of remark than mine, though you generally saved that kind of thing for later instead of coming out with it at the time. But it felt like it was you in my brain, and you talking. Don’t recall you ever tripping anyone up on this particular example, but it was you, all right.
I’m glad you’re speaking to them. I suppose you have to do it through me, at least for now. I wish you’d speak to them more. I wish you’d speak to them about my legs. Wouldn’t you think in this day and age they’d be able to do something? Other than squeezing them into elastic bandages, I mean, and that gunk they smear on.
You could get them to understand. You could get them to see I can’t be doing with the discomfort 24 hours a day and if I take the bandages off it’s only because I need a respite. They should try it for themselves, they’d soon see what I’m talking about. And if I forget to put the bandages back on I can’t see that affects anyone but me so why the bullying. I don’t care for the tone they’re taking. Oh yes they’ve got a job to do but I’m more than twice their age.
They’ve no right using words like uncooperative and threatening me with hospital.
Arthur
OK-trying to obey orders of Bossyboots and Co. went to sleep at some point once they’d gone and after I woke I just lay there, still resting. Keeping legs up. Thinking and thinking thoughts of Overdale. I tried talking to you but I don’t think you were in the vicinity, quite. It was on the early side for you. Still light.
So instead I read some more of your story about Overdale. You take me right back there. I had some pictures fished out over the floor already, hadn’t looked at them in years.
And I found this, your poem with the photograph.
Overdale
I remember the white waterfall,
a liquid horsetail spilling over white rocks,
wires of spray silvering the white air,
making rainbows and wetting our faces.
I suppose you meant to finish it someday. Was that all you remembered, the waterfall?
I’ve taken the liberty and come up with a second verse. Here goes:
We ate lunch out of flapping paper bags.
We tried to open cheese triangles with gloves on
and the girls’ hair stuck to their noses.
One boy’s juice carton waltzed off with the wind
And you gave him hell about the environment.
Does that scan or whatever it’s meant to do? Della says poems don’t have to rhyme, just as well, I haven’t the talent, don’t claim to. In fact if it’s a poem at all, I don’t see why.
But A for effort?
Here’s the photograph. Taken by that lad mad about cameras, came two years running. Forget his name, was it Lee, he got us the prints, wouldn’t take the money, it was to say thank you, he said.
Now, not sure if I’m remembering the day from itself or from the photo. Or remembering a bundle of days like that. There were countless of them, those hiking days, the stiles and sheep gates and views and resting places and bogs and rocks. Different kids of course, give or take, but the same complaints: blisters, hunger, thirst, boredom, wet, cold. Same smiles, too, even if just for a photo. Same lunches in paper bags, wolfed down somewhere out of the wind if we were lucky-roll with luncheon meat or similar, choice of cheese triangle (see poem above) OR hardboiled egg, Yo-Yo OR KitKat, an apple, and a carton of orange squash. All litter including apple cores and eggshell to be carried home.
What became of luncheon meat? It wasn’t that bad if you were hungry and freezing. I have clearer recollection of the luncheon meat than of the waterfall. Has anybody ever put luncheon meat in a poem?
Bye for now
A.
In the end, only my grandmother’s smile proved inexhaustible. Her hips gave up and her hands also became arthritic but she continued to smile, working her knitting on her lap a little more slowly. She took painkillers smiling over the rim of her glass; when she got too crippled to get in and out of the bath I brought basins of water and washed her in her chair, and she would smile. Afterward I would take her compact and lipstick and dab her face and lips and leave her smiling in a sugary-scented haze. She found these washing rituals exhausting; almost at once she would doze off, vacating the smile that would somehow wait on her pink frosted mouth until she returned from sleep and re-entered it.
By then I was suspicious of it, that smile. It seemed to me implausibly rapturous. It could mean only that she had decided to see in her darkness certain things and not others. She talked about the view from a hill somewhere in the north one April day when she was young, and I could tell from her face that she had gone back in her mind to gaze at it again, seeing from her chair next to the sweating gas fire and the liverish wallpaper patterned with brown lozenges, skylarks’ wings brushing against the clouds over a sparkling reservoir half a mile away and stiff stripes of sun and shadow rippling deep violet water. I think she returned there easily, to this place whose name escaped her, to that bright cold day more than half her lifetime ago. Her mind was not so much failing, as obscuring the importance of knowing precisely where or when a thing occurred; she spoke of her gratitude at being able to remember it at all, and smiled.
As the walls between the years and decades came down, she began to think that life had a way of turning out all right in the end; there were ways back, after all, from disaster, and the old cruelties, even her husband’s, had seldom been deliberate and so perhaps had hardly been cruel. Just who had inflicted them anyway, and upon whom, exactly? The smell of alcohol, the sounds of someone falling against furniture and crying out, furious words, the swipe of a hand or a fist came out of darkness and at random whether from her husband or from anyone else. And it was either now, or it was all a long time ago, she didn’t remember. Time had lessened the sting; time reduced all wrongs because misdeeds died just as people did. Records faded and got muddled and generation melded into blurry generation the way photographs piled on a windowsill imprint shadows of themselves on the image below, one upon another. So my grandmother settled into her smiling contemplations and let her fragile and partial visions illustrate a whimsical philosophy of all things being for the best. Her memories, freed from sequentiality and filtered clean of bitterness, ceased to add up to her true history and so ceased to trouble her.