SEPTEMBER 30, 2023 – As UB approached 90 after Mother had officially reached 89, the two of them seemed to be holding their own—physically, anyway: UB still attended the weekly seniors exercise class offered at the Kip Community Center in Rutherford (he was the only male and the oldest participant). Though Mother was slowing down, her plodding pace seemed to be more a matter of the mind than of her true walking ability. She surprised me once by hiking un-aided from the ground floor to the last available seats in the upper balcony at the University’s Ted Mann Concert Hall.
Her hearing was quite good (as was UB’s), but her sight gave her trouble. My sisters and I weren’t sure, however, that it wasn’t in her mind’s eye, not her actual eye-eyes. She took to wearing dark glasses inside and blamed her need on “bright lights,” but that didn’t explain the times when she was fine without the sunglasses in a brightly lit room and put them on when she entered a darker room—and kept taking them off and putting them back on. A stronger correlation seemed to exist between the sunglasses and the angle of her mental keel than between the glasses and bright lighting.
If UB and Mother weren’t exactly “losing their marbles” in the classic manner of old-age dementia, their mental disorders grew more eventful in old age. In Mother’s case it was raging psychosis (See 8/4/23 post). With UB the problem was that his marbles were in a constant state of collision with how you’d expect any halfway normal person to behave.
At least Mother was no longer driving. She’d given that up without protest, and it wasn’t because she’d become a danger to herself or others. Once we moved her into assisted living, she expressed no need or desire to drive and that was the end of her days behind the wheel of a car. Before that I’d never seen her make any dumb moves while driving, and I’m not aware that she’d ever been involved in a car accident or even a car incident . . . except two amusing occasions in her late 70s.
In the tradition of Grandpa in his prime and even past his prime, Mother attended an evening meeting of some sort at least once or twice a week between Labor Day and Memorial Day. In Grandpa’s case it was the Masons, Rutherford council meetings, the Bergen County Republicans, and special board meetings of Boiling Springs Savings & Loan. For Mother, it was the Eastern Star, the Red Cross, the League of Women Voters, Junior Great Books leadership training, school board meetings, and church, but as the years passed, it was almost exclusively church. She was a permanent member, it seemed, of the vestry, and chaired or was an active participant in various committees. In addition, she was the church organist and member of Bible study groups.
One Monday evening she drove across town for a church meeting and parked in front of a light post anchored to a large concrete base. As usual, after the meeting Mother was the last person talking. (She had great difficulty pulling herself away until all post-meeting chatter was exhausted and the next-to-the-last person said, “I have to go,” or more diplomatically, “I’ll have to let you go.”) With her pocketbook handles hanging over one arm and a pile of folders and papers cradled in her other arm, she finally left the church and walked to her car. I can’t quite picture how she was parked such that she’d be backing into a light post, but that’s exactly what she did—“with a sharp bang,” as she later described it. She got out and walked around to the rear of the car to inspect the damage. “My first thought was . . .” she later said as she recounted the scene, “Dad’s not going to like this.”
She was right of course. Except for the time he “forgot his glasses[1]” or the time he walked out of the local K-mart with his visor cap on backwards[2], Dad never did anything dumb, at least that any of us heard about or could imagine. Backing into a light post would’ve been so contrary to his nature and DNA as to have been a statistically impossible.
As a perfectionist Dad didn’t suffer fools patiently. He was quick to criticize Mother who was often doing “foolish things,” such as . . . burning the Birds Eye frozen string beans on the stove while she was on the telephone or . . . on their honeymoon at Björnholm grabbing the single bucket of water on hand when the kerosene lamp started a fire (it was before indoor plumbing and electrical wiring had been installed), threw the water at the flames and missed! . . . or using the pedal when she shouldn’t while playing through a Mozart piano sonata just for the fun of it. By his standards, backing into a light post would be right down there with burning supper—or the cabin or Mozart—because Mother’s wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Yet Dad could be surprisingly forgiving. When Mother recounted the first part of the “light post” story, Dad was chuckling right along with Mother. I got to hear it while we were sitting together at the dining room table in Anoka one Saturday, sharing a lunch of ham sandwiches and Mother’s homemade bean soup.
“I drove home and told your father,” she said. “He took a look at the dents in the bumper and trunk lid and said he’d have them taken care of. ‘Those things happen,’ he said nonchalantly. I was shocked he wasn’t more upset.”
“So I took the car to the collision place up there on Seventh Avenue,” Dad said, dipping his spoon back into his soup as he continued the story. “They did a beautiful job, and it took them only two days to fix it as good as new. But then . . . I’ll let your mother continue the story.”
“Well,” said Mother, enjoying the laughter riding her breath. “That very evening—Thursday—I had another meeting over at church. I parked the car, went to the meeting, came out, got back into the car, and guess what I did?”
Dad smiled wide enough to fill the room as he shook his head in replication of his disbelief.
“I backed into the same doggone light post,” said Mother, “and it dented the car in exactly the same places as it had on Monday.”
Dad’s smile turned into a hearty laugh with his head thrown back. Mother laughed too, and for the precious moments that followed, I reveled in their mirthful reactions.
“She came home and told me,” Dad said, still chuckling. “I took a look at it and told your mother, ‘You know, we’re just gonna let it go this time. I don’t want to have to explain it to the people at the repair shop and there’s nowhere else that will do as good a job of fixing it.”
Anyway, except for the run-ins with the light post, Mother had a sterling driving record. Perhaps part of the reason was that for most of years my sisters and I were growing up, Mother had been stuck hauling us around in a “junker,” while Dad got to drive the “nice” car, which for most of the day sat idly in the courthouse parking lot. Mother’s secondhand cars weren’t the most driver-friendly, and Mother had to stay focused and cautious to keep them from running into anything.
She was assigned the gray ’39 Plymouth until 1960, when it was replaced by an ancient Studebaker, followed by an equally sketchy De Soto. Her main complaint about the De Soto wasn’t that it looked as outdated as the 16th century Spanish conquistador but that the steering wheel was the size of a garbage can cover and almost impossible for Mother to turn. Unlike Dad’s cars, which were equipped with power steering, the Conquist-a-car required power arms. Dad added a turning knob for Mother, but she never got used to it.
UB was a good driver too, except that he had the annoying habit of pumping the gas pedal when driving on a freeway. He couldn’t hold it steady but had to press it, let up, press it, let up. Unlike Mother, who despite her nervous tic could maintain even pressure on the accelerator, UB wasn’t about to give up his keys, even after . . . the accident.
I learned about it soon after Tom Sullivan had entered the picture and begun to strategize about a grand plan to gain control of the UB horror in Rutherford. Cliff called me on an especially busy day at work.
“What’s happenin’?” he said, when I answered.
“Eyeballs to alligators,” I said.
“Wanna hear the latest from 42 Baghdad Street?”
“I can only imagine.”
“I got Dr. Palimento to agree to make a house call.”
“Wow, that’s progress. Maybe he can be our witness for whatever hearing ensues from what Tom is working on.”
“You mean we’re going to court finally?”
“We’re a long way from that, Cliff. There’s quite a bit of groundwork that needs to be laid.”
“Such as . . .?”
“We need to run title work on all the parcels, reinstate Holman Holding Company, LLC, and get some answers to what’s been done and what needs to be done regarding tax and probate filings.”
“Huh. So you’ve got Tom working on all that?”
“Yeah, but it’s a process. It’s going to take some time and effort.”
“Just remember, Uncle Bruce turns 90 in August,” said Cliff. “And that’s when we were going to make his carriage turn into a pumpkin, right?”
“We should be right on schedule.”
“Speaking of carriages, that’s the main reason I called. He had an accident and totaled his car.”
“What?! Is he okay?”
“Beep-beep!” said Cliff. “He’s fine, but I think maybe it’s another sign—as if we needed one—that it’s time to stop all the other bullshit in his life.”
“What happened exactly?”
“He pulled out in front of a delivery truck on his way back from Fischer’s and got T-boned.”
“And he didn’t get hurt?”
“No. He walked away from it and called me. When I picked him up he looked a little disheveled but what am I talking about. He’s always disheveled, and if he can fool everyone else with his BOO-ray, clip-on tie, and K-mart trench coat over his grimy sport jacket, he’s never going to fool us.”
“Beep-beep!”
“Too funny,” said Cliff. “Ya just can’t make this stuff up.”
“Important question, Cliff.”
“What’s that?”
“Did the accident knock his toupee out of place?”
“Ever hear of duct tape?” Cliff’s laugh burst into my ear, as my own laughter did the same to his. “You know what I like about our calls?” he said. “They always make me laugh. No matter what kind of an outlandish day I’m having, no matter how bad things get with Uncle Bruce and all his bullshit, no matter what’s going on with my business, with demanding clients constantly changing their minds and wanting this and wanting that, I know that all I have to do is pick up the phone and talk to you and we wind up laughing. The world according to Bruce. What would have to laugh about it we didn’t have him?”
When Mother found out about the accident, she responded casually. “I guess he’ll have to get a new car,” she said. “Either that or he’ll have to hire a driver. Maybe Angelo can take him to the grocery store.” And to the bank, I thought; meanwhile, good thing Dr. Palimento has agreed to make a house call.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1]He once told me how he’d been attending a day-long conference on proposed legislation affecting his work in court administration. The session was held in a large meeting room at a downtown St. Paul hotel and ran well past dinner time. Unlike Mother, Dad was usually one of the first people out the door after any kind of gathering. On that occasion he was also very hungry. To his consternation, however, when he reached his car in the ramp he realized he’d forgotten his eyeglasses. He checked his suit coat and overcoat pockets but without luck. He placed his briefcase on the seat of his car and rifled through his papers. Still no glasses. Figuring he must have left them on the table in the meeting room, he took the elevator back up to the hotel. As he exited, he encountered one of his colleagues who was among the last remaining conferees. The gentleman asked why Dad was returning, whereupon Dad said, “I think I forgot my . . .” But at the very sound of “my” a cosmically-timed synapsis caused a reflex lifting Dad’s right hand to his face as if to adjust his . . . glasses . . . which, surprise-surprise, had been there all along. Like a hockey goalie making an impossible save at the buzzer, Dad, at the split second his utterance of “my” intersected with the touch of his fingers to his glasses frame, deftly substituted “billfold” for “glasses.” —”Huh. Good luck in finding it,” the guy said, none the wiser. Dad laughed hard when he told me the story, so I laughed just as hard.
[2]Dad never went out in public without wearing decent clothes. One day he needed to buy a small tarp so he changed out of his yardwork clothes, donned a proper shirt and trousers, put on a nice jacket and University of Minnesota baseball cap and drove to the local K-Mart. He found the tarp department but had to search several shelves for the desired size. As he leaned into the shelves to sift through the inventory, the bill of his cap kept striking the outer edges of the shelving. Annoyed, he turned the cap around and resumed his search. It took a while, but he finally found what he’d wanted and marched off to the checkout counter. “While standing in line,” he later told me, “I was getting strange looks, but I didn’t have the foggiest idea why. Even the clerk gave me an odd look when she rang up the tarp. Anyway, I took the tarp and the receipt and walked out to my car. As I went to unlock the door, I saw my reflection in the window, and that’s when I realized why people were giving me, an old geezer, funny looks. I was wearing my cap on backwards as if that’s the way I always paraded myself around in public!”
