Weekend Notes

Yesterday I spent the day mostly with my older brother, who, as I have written before, is wheelchair bound and without language after a stroke three year ago, although he does communicate fluently in other ways: gestures, facial expressions, and sounds that are not quite words. We went for a longish walk, because the weather was nice--picked up movies at the local emporium, then met my 85-year-old father at the donut place where he often spends time because it is close to where he lives and he can walk there. After a little while in the donut place my brother got restless and indicated he wanted to leave. Outside I asked him which way he wanted to go, and he pointed. We walked, me pushing the wheelchair, for another block or so, and then my brother indicated that we should stop at the corner with the big playground, and go in. I wheeled him to a spot in the shade and asked him which way he wanted to face, and he showed me.

There were some little kids on the swings in front of us, and we watched them. The swings were the soft ones, the kind you sink into. Two or three of the kids were there with their father, who pushed each of them in turn. Then another little kid at the end couldn't get going, wanted someone to push him. "Help!" he kept yelling. "Someone push me!" I kept wondering why the other kids' dad didn't go over and give him a push. It seemed mean of him not to. I almost got up but then I didn't want to leave my brother alone. And then I thought, maybe that's the playground rules now, you don't get mixed up with other people's kids. Finally the kid got his brother or a friend who was barely bigger than him to come and push him and he got going. He pumped his legs in and out to go higher and higher. I thought about how my mother had showed me how to do that when I was little.

There was lots of other activity--kids climbing up and down one of those big bright colored multi-level structures with curving slides (what we used to call, for some reason, the "sliding pond"). There was also a sprinkler going, and kids were wearing bathing suits, running in and out of the water. In what seemed an almost heartbreakingly innocent ritual of flirtation, the boys were tearing after the girls with cups of water and throwing the water on the girls' hair. A group of mothers with toddlers and babies in strollers sat along one side of the park, in the sun. It was a hot day but where we were sitting, in the shade, it was cool. The light was sparkling, reflecting off the leaves of the trees, the metal surfaces of the climbing structure and the swings, and of course the water spraying up from the sprinkler. I started to feel immensely content as I was sitting there, with my brother, amidst all the activity, and I said to him, "Well, if you can't get to the Hamptons, there's always the playground," kind of meaning the people all around us, but also us. He nodded.

After a while we left and starting going back toward the nursing home. We stopped at the drugstore and bought body lotion, shampoo, and cigarettes (for him) and contact lens solution (for me). When we got to the nursing home, the smoking hour in the front was in full swing. The rule now is that patients who want to smoke can only do it under supervision from one of the recreation directors, who sits with them at specified times (a half-hour every two hours or so), dispenses their cigarettes and makes sure they are wearing their red flameproof cloth aprons. My brother and I joined the group, and he let the recreation person put the apron on him. It was a motley group, with people of various ages and hearing, speaking, and limb capacities, but I was glad to see that my brother's buddy, a foul-mouthed, spirited old lady whom I will call Sheila was there. Sheila likes to say to my brother, "How was lunch today? Shit, right?" My brother will say a resounding, "Yeah!" which is one of his few words. Yesterday, they had an exchange of this sort and then the recreation director, Lisa, went up to Sheila (who is hard of hearing) and bellowed affectionately in her ear, "Sheila, you have the mouth of a truck driver"! Sheila responded, wickedly, and loudly, "I was a truck driver."

After some more of this banter (including a dirty joke from Sheila, which I had already heard my father's rendition of--he loves Sheila too, and has adopted her jokes as his own), I went upstairs with my brother to his room. We decided to watch one of the movies we had rented, which turned out be a kind of lame horror flick of the things-are-not-all-they-seem-in-suburbia genre. It was fun, though, watching it with him. We exchanged knowing glances at all the melodramatic turnings of the plot. At one point I had a coughing fit and said to my brother, "Could you reach me that bottle of water over there?" In order to do that, he had to actually move himself over to where the bottle was, which he can usually do pretty easily by propelling himself with his good foot. But I had forgotten that his other foot was off of its footrest, so he had to get the good foot under that foot so he could push himself over--not so easy, in fact. I realized that, for a moment, I had actually forgotten about his disability--just asked him to get me something as if it were no big deal. I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked you to get that for me." But I think he was happy to be asked, and to do it.

That was the moment I actually wanted to write this post about, but it took a while to get to it! There's more on this--on the day, and my thoughts on it, and other things, but I think this a long enough post for right now.

More soon.