This is Getting Old (13 page)

I was moved by this group of women—all of them lively and warm-hearted, all of them dealing with the ruinations of old age. Betty, the oldest of the group, was in her nineties. The others were all in their eighties. Betty was robust and always laughing. A few years before, she and my mother had ridden the trans-Siberian railroad together, but after that she had begun to suffer
from dizzy spells and had had to give up traveling. One of the guests couldn't hear a thing, and another, whether she was sitting or standing, was bent into the letter C.

Jane, who had been my mother's friend since childhood, had advanced mouth cancer. She had lost her teeth and had an artificial palate. She didn't go down to the dining room for dinner because, as she told my mother, she was afraid it would spoil her tablemates' appetites to see her eating. It even hurt to talk, and her speech was slightly impaired, but she was a woman of remarkable fortitude, and she still joined in the conversation. When it turned to the popular topic of visits from adult children, she remarked wryly, “A son is a son till he gets him a wife, but a daughter's a daughter the rest of her life.”

All of these women were widows, including my mother. I couldn't know how hard it was to become a widow after sharing your life with another person for fifty years. Nor could I know what a relief it might be, after the last long years of caretaking.

When you look at old women from the outside, not identifying with them, you don't think how lonely they might be, or how much patience it takes to get the walker in and out of the elevator. You forget that they didn't used to be like that, that they used to go canoeing in the Minnesota woods or waltz until the wee hours, that they knew another kind of life outside this building. You think they came into the world wrinkled and deaf.

I passed the crackers, like a good daughter. I offered wine, red or white, in my mother's pretty blue Mexican glasses. Her youthful cat, Sigo (for “Significant Other”: my mother adopted her after my stepfather died), lay on her back and pawed the air, wanting to be played with. My mother held a wire with a fluff ball on the end and dangled it in front of Sigo, who hunkered down, moving nothing but the tip of her tail, and then leapt straight up so suddenly that we all laughed.

Betty said to me, “I hear you were just on a long Zen meditation retreat. Did it make you calm?”

As a Buddhist convert, I was slightly exotic there. That afternoon my mother had introduced me to two of her fellow residents in the elevator, where a lot of her social interactions took place. “This is my Buddhist daughter from California!” she had said proudly. They wanted to know all about Buddhism, and whether or not I believed in reincarnation, but I didn't really have time to explain between the sixth floor and the first.

Now I responded to Betty's question. “You're not supposed to try to accomplish anything at all, not even calmness,” I said. “The idea is to let go of gaining mind. Let go of your attachments.”

“Well, I can see that
I
don't need Zen meditation,” said Betty. “Getting old forces you to let go of one damn thing after another!” The others laughed in agreement.

“I like Zen,” my mother said, “because it says you should be in the present. That's important in old age. I'm losing interest in my past—it was so long ago! And it's pointless to think about the future—what future? But the present! There's plenty going on right now, I tell myself.”

I offered more wine, but there was only one taker, and I wondered if they had always practiced such moderation. The conversation moved on to the new cook in the kitchen downstairs and a dangerously creamy mushroom sauce he had used on the chicken. As the women talked and laughed, as they passed around the bowl of crackers with shaky hands, I studied them. I saw how they paid attention to each other. They were accomplished people: scholars, artists, social workers, poets, raisers of families. Now in old age, they were accomplishing friendship, accomplishing community.

My mother was only twenty years ahead of me, and at the rate things were going, I would be her age in no time. She was scouting the territory for me, and it behooved me to observe carefully.

It was 5:30
P.M.
—time, in that establishment, to go down to dinner. After I fetched the two walkers from the corner of the room, the seven mothers of daughters and the one daughter—me—started down the long hall to the elevator.

My mother rode in her wheelchair, making it go by walking her feet along the floor in front of her, like a toddler on a riding toy. This was how she liked to do it when she was on her home turf. She said she got her best exercise in her wheelchair. People assumed she was in a wheelchair because her legs didn't work, but it was her back that hurt if she walked more than about fifty paces.

Sometimes, on a good back day, she walked to the elevator with a cane. Her cane had a handle that flipped down sideways and became a tiny seat, allowing her to stop and rest. She ordered those canes from England. If you were looking at her from the front and she was sitting on her cane, it was startling, because you couldn't see the cane and she appeared to be doing a strenuous yoga posture—her knees partly bent, pretending to sit in a chair that wasn't there. But today was a wheelchair day.

Our ragtag band moved down the corridor, and I had to make a conscious effort to go slow. Betty, walking beside me, said, “You have such beautiful hair, Susan.” My mother looked up at me from her wheelchair and we grinned at each other.

Grandmother Mind

W
HEN MY SON
N
OAH
was about four and I was a harried single mother, he told me he wasn't going to have children. It was time for me to take him to nursery school, and he refused to wear anything but his Superman costume, which was in the washing machine, clean but wet. I exploded in irritation, and he announced, “I'm
never
going to have kids. It's too much trouble!”

I was chastened. “It's worth it, sweetie,” I said. “It's definitely worth it!”

As he grew up, I watched him cuddle pets and babies, but he held to the plan of not having children into adulthood. My younger son, Sandy, likes kids but is presently single, and I was beginning to fear I might never become a grandmother. A person can take certain actions to make it more likely that she'll become a parent, but there's not much a person can do to produce grandchildren. So even when Noah got married, I tried to keep my mouth shut. I reminded myself that he didn't come into the world for the express purpose of giving me grandchildren. It was his and Arcelia's business. They had their careers to think of, along with the economic challenge of parenting, and concerns about the imperiled planet. Still, I did mention that I would be glad to babysit.

I was well loved by both of my grandmothers, in their different ways. “Grandma” took me to Quaker meeting, wrote out her favorite prayers for me in a little notebook, and took me down the lane to her sculpture studio, where she gave me clay to play with while she sculpted. I was her first grandchild, and when I climbed into bed with her in the morning, she'd take off the strange black sleep mask that made her look like the Lone Ranger and hang it on the bedpost. She'd reach out to me and I'd curl up beside her, loving the feel of the cool soft flesh that hung from her upper arms, and she'd say, “Good morning, my number one grandchild!”

My other grandmother, known as “Ma,” kept lemon drops in a white glass chicken on her dresser, and if you wanted one all you had to do was cough a little fake cough and she'd say, “My dear, you must have something for your throat.” Whenever we children visited, there were fresh-baked chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting on a blue tin plate in the kitchen, and you were allowed to help yourself whenever you wanted to. She always smelled delicious, of a certain perfume that nobody else ever smelled of, and she wore a gold chain bracelet with a tiny gold airplane dangling from it. I asked her why, and she told me it was a replica of the air force plane her youngest son, my uncle Morton, was piloting when he was shot down over Japan, and she wore it so she would never forget his courage. It had the exact serial number engraved on the wing, so small you couldn't even read it.

I learned from my grandparents the amazing truth that my own parents had been children long ago—I was stunned to learn, for example, that my father had been shy, that my mother had been mischievous. They weren't that way with me! I learned that sad things happen in people's lives, and they keep going. I learned of the turning of the generations: children turn into parents, and parents grow old and turn into grandparents. Grandparents change a still shot into a movie.

I was at home in Berkeley when Noah called me on a Sunday afternoon, from San Antonio, Texas, to tell me that his daughter had arrived. His voice was like a bowl of water he was trying not to spill. Paloma was twenty minutes old at the time, and they were still in the delivery room. Everybody was doing well. “Are you happy to be a grandma?” he asked eagerly, even though he knew the answer.

“Are you kidding?! Nothing could make me happier!” Then I heard Paloma crying in the background. She wasn't exactly crying for joy, as I was; she was crying, Noah said, because they were sticking a needle in her heel to get some blood for a bilirubin test, and she didn't like it.

Driving around Berkeley that afternoon, doing errands, alone in the car, I kept shouting out, “Paloma! Paloma!”

I thought of all the other babies born that day, all over the world, so many of them born into war, or crushing poverty. I have since learned, from Google, that there are about 353,000 births a day on Planet Earth. I guess you could say that all the babies born on the day I became a grandmother are my grandchildren.

On that particular day, the front page of the
New York Times
told of civilian casualties in Beirut resulting from Israel's bombing of Hezbollah. I found myself wanting to propitiate the gods, God, the Universe, whatever—to thank them for Paloma's safe arrival and ask them to keep her and all babies safe. What offering could I make, and to whom? Checking my e-mail that birthday afternoon, I found a request for help from the Middle East Children's Alliance, and I made a donation in Paloma's name. A small gesture, standing for the juxtaposition it was part of my job, as a grandmother, to keep in mind: Paloma and all the others.

When I arrived in San Antonio, Paloma was two weeks old. She was asleep on her back when Noah brought me into the house from the airport, so I could see her whole face. (Nowadays
they tell parents always to put babies down to sleep on their backs, because of SIDS. This was new to me.) Right away I saw how much Paloma looks like Noah when he was a baby—defined, not blobby, her whole self already present in her face. And I saw that she has her mother's huge eyes. Soon she woke, and Arcelia nursed her, and then I held her against my chest.

I stayed for a week, in the hot Texas summer, leaving the house only twice to go to the grocery store in the mall. I did a lot of cooking while the family napped. I danced around the living room with Paloma, trying to soothe her when she was fussy by swinging her in my arms and singing to her. The more vigorously I jiggled her, the better she liked it, and she didn't care when I couldn't remember all the words to the songs I dragged up from the basement of my mind—Christmas carols and old Beatles songs. When she fell asleep in my arms, I lay down on my back on the couch, holding her carefully against my chest, and I let her sleep on top of my heart for as long as she cared to. In that time out of time, in that air-conditioned suburban living room, I smelled her sweet head and watched the oak leaves shifting in the hot breeze out the window.

I learned new things about taking care of babies—unfamiliar to me, but based on ancient wisdom. I learned about the five S's for soothing fussy babies: swaddling, swinging, letting them suck, holding them sideways, and making shushing noises. Noah was particularly good at the swaddling, and would coo to Paloma in a deep voice—“There, there, Pumpkin Head, now you're all cozy”—as he tucked the blanket corners around her arms and wrapped her into a snug little package. During the course of my visit I also heard her addressed, by both parents, in torrents of affection, as Petunia, Little Miss Piglet, Florecita, Sweet Pea, Calabacita, and even Bunion Cake.

As for me, to my great delight, Arcelia called me “Abuelita.”

Sometimes I carried Paloma out into the back yard, even though it was 102 degrees. She instantly quieted. She looked up
at the trees and the big space of sky, and I could see her feeling the
un
conditioned air on her cheeks. I could see she knew things were different here, in the big outdoors. Noah, too, had loved to look at leaves when he was a baby.

Zen Master Dogen, founder of the Soto School of Zen in Japan, had a student who was a sincere and disciplined monk, but he had one weakness—he did not have “grandmother mind.” Dogen told him, “You can understand all of Buddhism, but you cannot go beyond your abilities and your intelligence unless you have
robai-shin
, grandmother mind, the mind of great compassion. This compassion must help all of humanity. You should not think only of yourself.”