Story Telling

Today he tells the nurse he is in a Sigma Chi dorm room in Fayetteville.

The white columned fraternity house bears little resemblance to the

Flat, brick exterior of the building where he lays on a twin bed that folds in the middle.

Yesterday, he was in an army barrack at the end of WWII.

He never answers the nurse’s question, “Mr. Robertson, where are you?”

By reading the letters stenciled on the sign over the clock –

The Presbyterian nursing home.

There is always an association made in his mind

With something familiar from the distant past.

The present doesn’t exist for him anymore.

To him, I have stopped ageing, on the days he remembers my name,

And other times I am a visitor he squints at in veiled concentration

As he asks me about the weather in Excelsior Springs, Missouri

He wears a plastic wrist band like a concert goer waiting on

mixed drinks at the seedy bar of a smoke filled venue.

But this band sets off alarms at the end of either hall way.

There is no risk of him escaping to walk naked down the side of the highway.

If nothing else has killed my grandmother yet, that would.

He does not know why he is here.

The stroke that left him with a bloody chin that dripped

Down his worn, white t-shirt beneath

the bathroom sink is not an event

That registers in his available memory.

There is only the day before, when he spent the night in the pleather chair

Beside his daughter’s hospital bed in a cold cancer wing,

And today – finding himself in a room with an echoing air conditioner

And a shower outfitted with metal handles and emergency call button,

Wondering, perhaps, why a fraternity house has so many walkers and wheel chairs

Parked in the hallway.

If I visit him, he does not know I was here an hour later.

Often I use this as an excuse not to go and watch him

Diminish with the age he had kept an arm’s length away for years.

His black hair turned ashen over night,

and his cheeks have since sunk into the bones of his face,

A collapse that coincides with the confusion of loss of memory.

He does remember when my grandmother’s waist

Would have spanned the length of my forearm

If laid out flat, and the dog named Charlie Beagle

That bit people and frequently peed on the avocado green living room rug.

And he remembers my mother as still alive and occasionally

Looks to me and asks how Susan is doing.

Once, my grandmother took his hand and told him, calmly,

“Bob, Susan is gone,” and he stared at her, expressionless, and answered “Oh,”

As though that explained why she never left the hospital

And why he could not spend the night beside her anymore.

The next day, he asked her how Susan was, and my grandmother answered, “fine.”

My memories of my grandfather as he was mix with the man

Who stares at the TV and rubs his hands together, agitated.

I want to remember him as the man

That drove a white Buick as big as a house boat

With automatic, adjustable seats I could slide forward and backward

Even when in drive and he never scolded me for distracting him,

Just hummed songs I had never heard

And complained that my grandmother drove too slow.

He would take me to McDonalds to get the Disney toy and then

Let me spend an hour in blockbuster choosing three new releases
I would take and watch all in a row,

And he would watch My Girl with me and take his glasses off

To wipe tears out of his eyes when McCauly Culkin died of bee stings.

These are the things I find worth remembering.

Now, at 25, he asks me the same questions every time I visit:

What year am I in school and who am I dating.

He is able to calculate his conversation to convince visitors

That he understands who they are and what day it is.

And we want to believe him – that the seizures he has three times a year

And deliver him to the hospital in an ambulance

Are diminishing. That his brain is healing.

When weeks go by without seeing him I chastise myself

Wondering how I would feel were he already dead.

My grandmother visits him everyday but still harbors the resentment that he

Never had to deal with the death of their daughter by

Mentally checking out of the reality we deal with and that frustrates like

The line at the DMV or a jar of pickles with an untwistable lid.

My grandfather left two weeks before the morning she passed away

In the hospital room.

And it makes me question the amount of stress a human body can handle,

And if I’ve inherited the blood clots sitting like bombs in my brain,

If my memory is slowly waiting to abandon me the way

His abandoned the present and the way my grandmother feels

Abandoned by him.

I hope that when my memory goes, I can live like he does,

Preserved in the belief that everyone I love is still alive

And waiting down the street for a phone call.

The possibility looms before me with the promise of a life that can be started over,

A blank slate every morning where I will never again have the wherewithal to question

Why a nurse comes in to my dorm room to tell me it’s dinner time at 5 o’clock every day.