There is no picture for this kind of sound.

The scream from the office down the hall filled us like a tsunami of words strung together painting horror a son a son a son found dead.

We all ran through fluorescent light down the linoleum hallway to grab hold tight the body trying to push her way into another reality where the voice snapping from her cell phone was making a big mistake a big mistake calling the wrong number someone else with the same name and same son but not her not hers.

Waiting

Until the lease runs out and they're evicted so that a fancy something-or-other can move in, it's a thin, narrow bare bones waiting room that, past a crammed nurses-bill paying-file-getting corner, trickles into a small labyrinth of tiny rooms where patients pee into cups, bleed into tubes and whisper common complaints.

The old Italian lady, one tooth on the bottom, hobbles out of the trickle into the waiting room, her Dominican home attendant behind her. The Italian lady is from the old neighborhood that doesn't exist anymore. You can tell from her accent. And the comfortable way she bosses the home attendant around like she was a baby chicklet needing protection and guidance. "Sit here, no, not there, here, put the bag there..."

They get settled. W, a young Black man sits down. The Italian lady knows him from the waiting room and starts telling him about her current situation.

"I'm waiting for the ambulance, don't feel well. We're going to St. Vincent's."

The home attendant slips into a nap.

W nods concerned. The Italian lady continues.

"Since Easter."

W asks, "Did you have Easter Dinner?"

"Yeah. With Rosie. It's good company."

A tall White guy walks in. There are no more chairs. The nurse calls my name, asks, "You ready?"

The White guy looks at my chair, says. "You're on."

I gather up all my stuff, but not neatly. "I'm ready."

Sunday Memories - Breaking Braking

There are things you just can’t take back and as it pours out of you, your wails of NO don't reverse the seconds it took to make a decision...

... that night in 1993 to throw that shoe across the room, sobbing mad at the suicidal prison built from family misery but then watching the shoe shatter the only present you loved from your father a ceramic owl penny bank, a gift of beauty and care and poetry from a far away country bought at Macy's in 1967 a rare expression of his delight in you being his little girl your sobbing now howls trying to make time run backwards so that maybe like in the movies the owl would rise up from tiny pieces and bloom back into whole, you’d throw the shoe to another part of the room you promised…

... or that day in 1972 seconds after your friend got you to stop looking out the window of the front car of the F train, the decision that woman made, the train brakes screaming and her screaming the two of them screaming like an orchestra blasting the final notes of a really big symphony, did she as she watched herself unfurl her body into the tracks wish suddenly desperately her cries would become the wind that turns back time and brings her safely to the platform and another decision?

V.'s Last Day Here

15 years Dictaphone Operator
11 years Regular Secretary
2 years Legal Secretary
6 years Medical Secretary



Going to Disneyland and then the Price is Right in California, Oprah in Chicago and Rachel Ray back in New York. Want to see what these TV shows are all about.

And after that, the college is right down the block. Learn PowerPoint and Excel. Mostly Excel. Get another job.

keeping kosher, eating babe

...and the swine... he is unclean unto you - Leviticus

It wasn't that we had to wear skirts during the High Holy Days even if we were on our way to music school and it was Shabbos to boot. For a brief time it was the special every-once-in-a-while treat of crispy bacon - the whole package - all mine that Florence would make me never on a Saturday, but always on a Sunday with the windows open. I loved it more than the once a week Hostess cupcake I got to have at my gramma's house.

"Hoy Hong makes the best pork buns in the city," my father would announce as we walked on Mott toward another once-in-a-while treat. I never questioned him how he knew that. He was all knowing and he knew Hoy Hong made the best pork buns. A steamed white cloud with something delectable inside. Almost like a Christmas present.

Stuffed into a paper wine bottle bag and dragged to JHS 56 on Henry Street a reluctant lunch was much too often a ham sandwich on dry Arnold white bread with an unappetizing apple lurking about for dessert, but I looked longingly at my classmates' exotic and (to me) rich people's food of peanut and jelly sandwiches on Wonder bread and extra stuff like pudding and cake and things that came already made from the supermarket. And soon after that I moved to a place where chocolate donuts were the norm and I got to eat as many peanut and jelly sandwiches as I wanted and soon after that I got a job and could order anything at any place I wanted.

But when the movie BABE came out and confirmed that pigs were smarter than dogs, all I wanted after watching it was bacon and sausage and then even more bacon.

Sunday Memories - I Shot The Sheriff But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy

It was a bad week, that week in 1965. In a rare moment of having the brief upper hand I had taken my sister's head and banged it quite hard against the baseboard of our sturdy couch. I was six. She was nine and a half. In a hour she was in bed crying differently than ever before and in a week she was in Beth Israel Hospital with spinal meningitis.

I knew it was my fault. I believe I tried to tell my parents that in fact I was the cause of my sister being at death's door with thousands of needles stuck in her spine. But Florence and our father, being destroyed human beings incapable of experiencing any more trauma than what they carried in their bones and souls and hearts let alone hear the anguished fears of a little kid may not have understood what I was trying to say.

During this time, an amazing invention heralding great luxury entered our home facing the Williamsburg Bridge. A dimmer for the living room "chandelier." It was not the ordinary light switch that went on for the piano students from the neighborhood and off when we were not in the room. It, like silk gowns in the movies we watched, ushered in light with elegance and grace.

I was given strict instructions by my father to never touch it. However, in a not so rare moment of refusing to follow orders I stood before that new knob one evening and decided to know the power of the dimming. My sister in the hospital, my father somewhere in the mysterious travel between work and home, and my mother, oddly enough, not in the living room at her piano, a place she spent more time in than in the embrace of anyone who loved her. I was alone and I was ready to go on tippy toes to fulfill my mission and satisfy my desire.

I gently turns the knob and the lights glowed. I gently turned it back and they faded and turned again and they glowed. It was better than music. It was magic and I glowed them again and then suddenly the room went black. Frozen in terror, I looked at the living room light. Not working. Then beyond the light, out the window, I saw worse. The bridge and the entire Lower East Side had gone black as well.

Florence came stomping back from where ever she had been and went to the building's hallway. Neighbors' voices filled the stairs. There were no lights anywhere and with this being November, our entire world became very, very quickly very, very dark. The horrifying truth faced me. My act of disobeying my father had broken the lights of New York City.

All the Shabbas candles came pouring out of all the apartments and lit the stair banisters into a magic fairyland, my father found his way home from some darken subway station or did he walk over the bridge that night? I can't remember. All I remember was being so scared of the dark, I clutched Florence's skirt and refused to let go until, needing to pee, she refused to let me into the bathroom with her. So I stood outside the bathroom door, in the pitch black, and slowly died inside from the knowledge that this was the fate of a destroyer - unloved and in the dark.

The next day or so my parents and I walked up to 15th Street and 2nd Avenue and waved up to my sister on the 9th or 17th floor of the hospital. She merrily waved back. Beth Israel had its own generator and she had been spared the dark.

Of course it was just a bunch of rats in some power station somewhere, my sister returned home well enough to continue being my sister, and nine months later a whole bunch of babies appeared on the street. And years after that I understood that my dimming and glowing the lights was just bad timing on my part and made for a great dinner story to friends who didn't grow up in New York City and were easily impressed.

But a few years after that, the internet was invented and someone introduced me to Google. The first thing I looked up was causes of spinal meningitis. And there, in very clear language, after bacterial and viral, were these words: "a traumatic injury to the head or spine."

stupid hope in stupid cement

Every corner, every block like being run over back and forth by a truck made with 32 years in this neighborhood of heartbreak and brilliantly stupid hope here is where he kissed me there is where she cursed at me here is where I ran away there is where we argued here is where I wept there is where I thought things were going to get better here is where in 1976 I bought the cheap high heels with borrowed money from Florence so I could look for office work because X. had just gotten stabbed to death and I didn't think I could go back to babysitting or bike messengering just needed a place to sit during the day and was willing to do it in nice clothes today trudging back from yet another attempt at brilliant stupid hope and hating each and every moment of cement.

What We Did On Our Night Off

The fake purple flowers, the soft gray tones, the rose accents pillows, the comfortable couches, a lovely meeting room, big flat screens, expensive stackable chairs, the best fluorescent lights money and funding can buy…

It's the Alzheimer Chapter's Tuesday night “How to Bath your Batty Mother-Father-Husband-Wife-Aunt-Sister” workshop!  How to bath them without them freaking out, screaming, crying, wailing and punching the shit out of you.

The workshop facilitators start the workshop with a video. I never saw anyone like my mother before but here she is, appearing as a frightened and bewildered ancient skinny bald white guy with boney sticks for legs, a not-as-ancient-but-pretty old Black woman who is very Christian judging from the prayers she is crying out, a middle-aged plump, blond with a southern accent clutching a dolly begging to be left alone…

I see and hear Florence in their crying and screaming and flying fists and shouted fears, yelling they are being hurt and it’s cold and it’s wet and they don’t want to fall and…

I look around. The room is packed with lots of people who suddenly finds themselves not in the relationship they started out in years before.  The faces are fierce and tired and the questions loaded and desperate.

**She took him on an expensive cruise he wouldn't shave should she try to shave him?

**Why did he stop playing the piano?

**He lies about bathing but won't let anyone in the bathroom with him.

**She is hiding soiled underwear and…

We are all clutching the remnants of someone as they slip out of our grasp and begin a plummet into insanity that only comes when something inside the head starts eating the brain for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

"Lower your standards," the facilitators tell us.

Florence, once crisp in her chic pants she got for $2 at the flea market at Coney Island, a bit of silk flare around her neck, a jaunty man's jacket that made Hepburn look dull, her old Stride-Rite snappy heels… now in diapers and cheap $10 sweatpants that pill after only one wash.

 I turn to the wall and bury myself in my workshop notes so no one sees me cry.

After tonight there will be no more baths. The baby wipes will do just fine.

Sunday Memories -Return To The Promised Land

There was a cat clock that wagged its tail and rolled its eyes to each ticking second. Very exotic compared to our bare-bones kitchen clock.  The almost leather seats were burgundy-something. The so-called carpet was dusty and the lights were, of course, florescent. Only uptown stores where rich people shopped had real lights.

Kaplan's Shoes - on Clinton between Rivington and Stanton.

We went there for our once-a-year-(ugly)-pair-of-oxfords that wouldn't become hip and fashionable for another twenty years. In the interim, the meaner girls at P.S. 110 in their white go-go boots called me "baby shoes" which is devastating if you're only 8 and suddenly in the 4th grade with the bigger kids.

Florence's rule was whatever ugly oxford you picked at Kaplan's you had to wear out of the store. This showed commitment to the shoe you'd be with all year. And, since that and the sneakers from Sears & Roebucks were the only things we bought new, you had to really know if the shoe fit.

The pressure was tough. But those ugly oxfords were made so good and Mr. Kaplan's measurements were so precise, somehow everything worked out.  Except for the part of looking like a dork from a-turn-of-the-century picture by Jacob Reis.

I spend the next forty years wearing shit that looks hot while avoiding any shoes stores that sold anything that was comfortable and good for your feet.

But there is a God and She does wear lots of shoes because ugly came back into style and was even hipper than hip, especially if the jeans were tight.  It was perfect timing. My feet were old and unhappy.  It was time to find a place where the oxfords were made so good and the measurements were so precise.

And when I walked into the dusty shoe store on 39th Street, it was just like being back home.

My Mama Done Told Me

Florence is refusing to do much but lie in bed.

I say, "Fine. You don't want to get out of bed, then go lay down and die."

She yells, "Lie down! Lie down!"

I say, "You can't get out of bed, but you can still correct my grammar?"

She yells, "Yes! It matters!"

I yell, "THEN GET OUT OF BED!"

She doesn't.

The Jonathan Schwartz show starts.

We settle in to listen.

I look at her butchered hair. That's because the week before I took the household scissors and chopped off big chunks of it. I did that because it was a huge halo of wildness, so thick and silver sparkling. Now it was a huge halo of wildness that got caught in a buzz saw.

Sinatra comes on. She sings along.

"My mama done told me... a woman is two faced... cry in the night..."

Knowing something of her dating history, I ask her if that's true.

She says, "I didn't make it up. That's what's written.

I start laughing. She asks why.

"You're singing with heart.”

Shrugs, "I'm just trying to get the words."

And then she - who broke many hearts of many old girls and garnered many angry love letters and hurtful looks across crowded dances put on by the local gay senior citizen group - she looks up and asks, "Is it true? A woman is two faced?"

Kindred Spirit

This is how I feel about shoes.

Sunday Memories-Grand Street: Aladdin's Cave

Right past the ice cream sign. In a corner nobody can see in the new luncheonette now painted nice and white and cheerful. A splotch of brown.

That's what's left of the first luncheonette. Brown walls and moldings and red-brown stools...Aladdin's Cave, safe and dark, a passage way in to something rare and beautiful and dazzling.

We were allowed ice cream sodas once a year, sometimes twice if we performed at some big music school concert. But for the most part, once a year. Last day of school an ice cream soda. A celebration of surviving earnest young teachers with ideals and bitter old ones with rage and rulers, quizzes I could never study for, school projects I attempted to finish last minute in a midnight bathroom, classmates with newer clothes and meaner dispositions, and tougher kids in other classes really pissed off about things none of us ever decided for them but somehow ended up being responsible for.

I don't remember who was behind the counter or what flavors I picked. Or why it was an ice cream soda, not a sundae or even just a dish. Perhaps it was the lack of daily sodas in our lives. And a sundae was as foreign to my parents as the Episcopal church. I don't even remember liking my yearly soda or not. I just remembered entering, entering that soft safe brown and visiting briefly a place of utter beautiful dazzling, rare richness.

The Bar

The guy says the place smells like cat pee. 

But like a lover or a family I hold tight all I smell is home.

One Day on the BMT

Like the 2006 photograph of Britney Spears’s labia, the woman’s wallet peeked out of her jacket pocket.

I leaned over and said, "Miss, your wallet is going to get stolen."

She gave me that thank-fuck-you look, the favorite glare of all those who just moved here and thought they had street cred because they went into the neighborhood’s last remaining bodega down the street from their luxury condo.

I shrugged, went back to watching the subway fly by local stops.

But inside, I cursed Florence and the day she caught me stealing a stick of penny gum from the newspaper-candy store on Delancey Street, had me apologize to the owner and then made me promise never to steal again.

Sunday Memories-Grand Street: Dialing A Wrong Number Just To Get An Answer

Everybody called her the Phone Lady
.
She had regular rounds up and down Grand Street. Going from public phone to public phone, she’d pick up the receiver and start screaming into it.

Screaming, like the Flood but no ark.  Nobody stopped her or asked her why.  Or anything. We all just stood there and watched or walked by and watched.

After screaming for about five minutes, she'd take the receiver and repeatedly slammed it down.

Bang
Bash Bash Bash
Bang

Like a parent raining down a billion fists rained upon an errant child because they didn’t give the right answer.

Bang
Bash Bash Bash
Bang

Then she'd walk to the next public pay phone.  And the next and the next and the next…

A day or so later, the Ma Bell guy would quietly retrace her footsteps and, like a social worker, gently fix each phone.

A day or a week or a couple of hours later the Phone Lady would return and it would all begin again.

We Fall in Four Language

Rush hour, everybody rushing home.

Except for the nicely dressed lady lying on the ground by Greeley Square.  Between the serious men's clothing store and the Dunkin Donut.

There are a lot of people over her making sure her shopping bags and her purse are O.K. There is a cup of something by her and the security guy or police chief or whatever he is is talking into a walkie-talkie.

Me and two guys hang out on the curb by the flower pots and watch a skinny homeless guy shout at the crowd. He looks like the guy who kicked me in the ass when I bumped into him on a rainy day. Wouldn't be surprised if it were. This is his neighborhood.

The two guys said that she began to fall and the homeless guy caught her and was shouting GET HELP GET HELP and once non-homeless guys showed up and shooed him away he got upset. After all, he was there first and just because he was homeless didn't mean he was less of a hero.

The daily convoy of twenty-five blaring police cars roar up Sixth Avenue. None stop.

"She fell. Her heart, her blood pressure or diabetic. They give her an orange juice with some sugar. Look, she is fine."

A third man joins us. His patter sounds like poems made of rain on a roof. When I ask if it is Arabic, his friend nods. "I speak Danish too. And Spanish and English and Arabic."

We look across the street at the woman again. Two ambulances come as she sits up and talks on her cell phone.

One of the guys says to me, "We are nothing. A heart or something and we fall... we are nothing."

The ER Visit - Part Three: Welcome to His ER California

His accent still thick with the lower east side, he is no longer an anomaly in this senior restricted condominium. We saw many non-blond people at both malls.

Still, during his brief confinement, the hospital staff all spoke in Disney sing-song melodies to comfort and beguile his misery made worse by a mind beginning to leave real time.

While wondering how one could beg for sex passionately in such a Snow White voice, I marveled at the private room and the computer networks and the wireless equipment and the very polite sick people, quietly waiting their turn. There were no screaming addicts in his ER world.

Sunday Memories-Home: Schneller and Her Boys

Schneller lived on the sixth floor. She still had her German accent but not her lips. Those she painted on like a Jackson Pollack. Which she did every day before taking her post in the late afternoon on a wobbly folding chair outside the building. Warm days only.

Her hair was thinning and dyed something like inhuman red and she no longer had the shape of a person – it was more like a toad with tiny legs sticking out. The only rumor I ever heard about her was that the building had been in her family’s and that her lover had died in World War II.  Clearly she had never gotten over it.

She rented several of the grand old apartments out as SROs, weekly linens included, to a gaggle of old men.

Tommy looked like Popeye - tough, butch, muscled and toothless, a cigarette always dangling from his lips.  He guarded the building at night, hanging out on the stoop, making sure the heroin addicts didn’t steal the lobby’s chandlers again. The ones we had were the crappy replacements of the real ones worth a lot more than the couple of bags they had gotten selling them.

Jimmy was Sinatra in a snappy fedora - if Sinatra couldn’t sing, was old, short and a fourth-rate bookie. He coughed a lot. That’s when smoking was only a nasty habit.

Mr. Martinez studiously collected stamps, was very, very short and very, very gentle. He got beat up and ripped off a lot but we weren’t sure by who. He put a padlock on his room. But he said it didn’t help.

None of us spoke to Mr. Lee unless we had to. One year he left the shower running.

We all put out our garbage in the hallway every night to get picked up by Otis, a stooped six-foot dark Black man who lived in the basement and socialized with the middle-aged overweight blond hooker from 11th Street who couldn't decide if she was Ukrainian or Puerto Rican. She kept changing her name, accent and hair color each week.

With a good deal of cheap booze, Otis had reduced his life to a tiny moment of feeling no pain. There were many many walls of congeniality and smiling dumb.  Even that night at 3 a.m. when I ran into him with his hooker friend. He gave me the exact same smile he gave me when I bumped into him picking the nightly garbage.

Walter also lived in the basement with Otis.  He was a light skinned Black man and handsome chiseled to beat the band but crippled into a bonsai of his former self.  He rarely smiled. His face reminded me of a scholar who had seen too much and understood how little he knew. On all the major holidays, he’d don his best suit and hat and, leaning on his cane, wait in the lobby for his daughter to pick him up. She rarely did.

One summer day the elevator broke after Schneller had taken her post outside. Everyone in building, coming from work going to dinner, had to make our way around Otis and Walter with his cane pushing Schneller up the stairs by her butt as she clung to the banister.

The Hotel's Ladies Room

All day the Bathroom Attendant listened to other people go to the bathroom.  I know because for a couple of months I hung out by the makeup mirrors in between therapy sessions and job interviews.
She wore a quasi maid’s uniform, repeatedly offering paper towels in broken English that belied a sharpness and insight that only comes with starting life over at the age of 40 or 50 or 60.

Rather than deal with intelligence that could hear them in their most intimate moments, I watched her be summarily dismissed by the thousands of perkily dressed Mid-Western mid-management women snappily wearing their versions of the power suit with a Fortune 500 smugness at their New York conference before returning home to bland garden apartments or studios temporarily furnished for a pre-marital life.

One even demanded to know what that smell was and, at the risk of being complained about, the Bathroom Attendant shrugged a fuck-you-lady shrug and said “It’s a bathroom.”

The ER Visit - Part Two: The Walls of Jericho

Many, many hours later we finally get a stall.

And I begin: ”She is not being checked into the hospital I'm in charge of my mother's care we are going home so I'm not putting her in a gown she is not being checked into the hospital I'm in charge of my mother's care we are going home so I'm not putting her in a gown she is not being checked into the hospital I'm in charge of my mother's care we are going home so I'm not putting her in a gown…”

Even when the supervisor of Dr. Hottie R warns me that they can’t be responsible if I refuse to do what they say I should do which really means if something goes wrong with your mother we’re going to make sure you go to jail.

I’ve heard it before.  I also know if she stays in the hospital, things will go more downhill than they already have and right now things are so downhill we’re digging a tunnel.

All the tests come back fine – her heart, her lungs, her pressure, her blood. I do not say “told you!”  I just pretend to look relieved.

Dr. Hottie then wonders maybe she has a urinary tract infection. “Can you get her to pee? If not, we can easily catheterize her.”  He seems very excited about that.

Questions that separates the men from the boys:

* How many times have you seen your mother’s vagina and urethra and asshole?
* How intimate are you with the smells of those places you now wipe clean on a regular basis?
* How often do you make decisions about those places?

“No catheters.  It will be too upsetting. Let’s try the bedpan.”

For a frail old lady, Florence is dense heavy bones to move and it takes the new night nurse Ms. Nurse Dee and me to slip the metal bedpan under her. An hour later a hopeful check only finds the empty pan suctioned tight to Florence’s bottom. In between her shouting “Ow Ow that hurts,” Ms. Nurse Deeand I both pry the bedpan off her shrunken butt and a small plastic one is quickly slipped under her instead.

Then we shove as many little apple juice boxes as we can into her hands and she slurps away happily.  Soon she is sleeping.

Dr. Hottie pops his head into the stall. “Anything?!” Man, this guy is so excited about the possibility of pee.

“Don’t worry! It will happen!” His shift ends in a few minutes and what he really wants is to find out if his hunch was right.

Suddenly things get quiet and empty. As if New York decided to take a break from car accidents and deranged homeless people and sidewalk falls and life-threatening illness.

And suddenly I am tired.  About to hit  50, heartbroken, and exhausted from being Shirley Temple, always marching along with a chirpy little song and a happy little tap. Before I can stop  myself I start crying silently

Out of nowhere, I hear Florence’s voice. “Laughing or crying?”

I look up.  She is completely alert and sharp and curious.

“Crying.”

“I want you to feel better,” she states.  “I had to change in later years. Working.”

I sit up.  “Working? Like teaching piano working?”

“No,” she says. “Working on myself. Becoming equal to what I had wanted to do.”  And then she looks at me… she looks at me and…

A few hours ago she didn’t know my name or that I was her daughter. I was just the person she knew would always take care of her, rub her back, sing her songs, help her feel better - love her like a mommy loves her little girl.

But suddenly in this quiet and empty ER, after 50 years of knocking on closed doors, waiting patiently under the grand piano and walking silently next to her as she stomped through the city battling her demons, someone else is looking at me.

And although I only met her a couple of times in my life, I’d recognize her anywhere.

For, here, in a stall with shower curtains drawn around us like a shawl, from the midst of her disintegrating into wisps of childlike desperate need, I suddenly see my mother again.

“I’m going to give you a drink!” she declares.

“Of what? Scotch?” It was what we drank together at an old bar in the east village, never mind that I was still underage.

“No!”  We are now both grinning at each other.

Out of nowhere a herd of doctors stomp into the next stall and wake up the addict there.

“We’re going to give you Narcon.”
“No! No! I don’t want Narcon.”
“Well did you take anything?”
“NO! NO! I just fell asleep on the bench.”
“Then why won’t you take Narcon?”
“No! No!”

Florence and I look at each other like WOW. What was that?

We rest.  I can’t take my eyes off of her and she keeps looking at me.

She finally says, “Is there anything I can give you?”

“You’re giving me something right now. You’re listening to me.”

“Well,” she says with strength from decades ago, “I’m listening!”

I say, “I think this was one of our best visits ever.”

But she dismisses me. “Oh, I like the other one where you put all the….

“Music?”

“Yeah.”

And I hear myself speak like the daughter I never got to be. “I’m just sad.”

“When you say the word SAD, I can feel it. You always say you’re O.K. Makes me think it’s….” Another word gone…

“A facade?”

“Yeah.”

“I am OK. But I’m sad.”

“Why don’t you go to a shrink? Get a minor….”

“What? Key?”

Shakes head.

“Start changing. Start changing the change of the different changes of the…”

I lean in, hoping my body acts like magnet for her words but she is fading…

“… and then start out with what you have with starting with a different…”

“What? Job? Attitude? Approach?”

“No. What I can think of it…that way is better…”

And then she starts to count.

“123. 456. 123. 456.”

We look at each other.  

 “A different time signature?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

My childhood as her pupil, spent learning notes and keys and rhythms.

And time signatures. The beats between two bars. The measure of each note. The pulse within the walls of a home.

My cousin once told me it was not the trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho. It was the tears of the women.

And I weep.  Out loud.  And I weep out loud, not from a broken heart, but from a heart that has broken open.

“You look awful,” Florence says.

The addict, furious at the treatment he was offered but refused to take because it didn’t include the pain killers he wanted, screams at the doctor who has told him to leave the ER, “I HOPE YOUR CHILDREN ARE ALL FAGGOTS AND THEY DIE OF AIDS.”

It is now eleven hours since we’ve arrived at the ER. Ms. Nurse Dee comes in and we find that all the apple juice we plied on Florence was happily peed out - not into the little plastic tub, but all over the sheets, the pads the blanket, the bed. There is nothing left to do but catheterize her.

I hold Florence’s hand and sing her songs from musicals.

“Door Chimes! Phone Rings! In Comes Companeeee!”

And somehow there’s still some pee left inside her and the filled plastic bag is whisked away and we all find out she has a urinary tract infection which is one reason she couldn’t get out of bed for the last couple of months.

A prescription is called in to the 24-hour pharmacy, a private ambulance is summoned to take us home and two Amazons, with no effort whatsoever, move Florence from bed to stretcher and whoosh into the ambulance.

I quickly kill the roach running around the back but Florence somehow sees it. "Was that a roach?!"

At 10:50 pm we finally roll into her home lobby.  Now all we have to do is get Florence from the stretcher to the wheelchair.

One of the Amazons scoops Florence into her arms.  Florence, utterly befuddled, stares up at the Amazon in childlike wonder. Without thinking I blurt out, “Florence! It’s your dream come true! You're in the arms of a beautiful woman.”

And with that she is gently plopped into the wheelchair.

We can’t all fit in the tiny elevator. “They are going to take you up in the elevator and I'm going to take the stairs and meet you up on the 5th floor.”

Florence’s face crumbles. “But I want to go with you …”

Both Amazons go “AAAAWWWWWWW….”

I run up five flights of stairs and all four of us, the two Amazon, Penny who has waited up for us and me manage to get Florence out of sheets and wheelchair and confusion to face her bed.

When Florence sees it for the first time, her face lights up like a child opening a present. “OH!”

One of the Amazon scoops up Florence in her arms like a prince to his princess or a lover to her lover. Or a really strong woman to a frail old lady and she gently places Florence in bed. Penny and I cover her up.

Florence is finally home.

I haven’t seen my mother since.