Posted 12 April 2004

Michael Verde

Michael Verde teaches English and and co-directs the Alzheimer’s and Multiculturalism Initiative at Lake Forest Academy with Gloria Harper in Lake Forest, Illinois. He has a M.A. in literary studies from University of Iowa, and a M.A. in theology from University of Durham, England. In 1985, Michael won first prize in Guideposts magazine’s National Youth Writing Contest with a story about his grandfather, who at that time had not been diagnosed with AD. He has an article appearing this November in Illness in the Academy: A Collection of Pathographies by Academics.

My name is Charlie Leonard. The Lord took away my mind. I went to the doctor for indigestion and he gave me a pill-a white pill about this big-and it worked. Cured my indigestion. But it wiped my mind clean. Used to I could remember names like nobody's business. Maybe I met you twenty years ago, say, at a football game. And we talked about your kids. Twenty years later if I saw you at the post office, I'd remember you no problem. "Hello, Bob," I'd say. "How you been getting along?" I might not remember your kids' names, but I'd remember where they went to school, and if they played sports. I might even remember what position they played. I had a good memory, boy. But the Lord wiped it all away.

I was born in Oklahoma. My mother's people came from Kansas. They had to. My grandmother killed a woman there, a Polock. The woman made her sister cry. In those days people used to wash their clothes at the crick—we call it a creek now, but back then they called it a crick. All the women had a certain day that they did their washing, and my Aunt Ruthie's day was on Thursday. So one Thursday Ruthie goes down to the crick and a Polock woman is there washing her clothes. Ruthie explains to the woman, very politely, that Thursday is her day and that she really needs to get her clothes clean because there is a barn-building and quilting-party coming up that weekend. The Polock woman—and she was a big, stocky woman—tells Ruthie that she doesn't care about any barn-building and quilting-parties. She's going to wash her clothes if it takes all night and half the next. By the time Ruthie got back to the house she had worked herself all up; she was crying and carrying on. "What happened?" my grandmother asked. Ruthie tells her what the Polock woman said. "Is that right?" my grandmother asks. That was all she said: "Is that right?" Then she turns her apron inside out, goes over to the basin and gets my grandfather's razor and slips into her pocket. She walks down to the crick. When she gets there, the Polock is bent over by the shore putting Blue-in in a bucket. Back then people put Blue-in in a bucket of water and that was about all the washing machine they had. My grandmother says to the woman, "Excuse me, but I believe today is my sister's day to wash." Well the Polock woman got smart with her-she told my grandmother something like, "I don't see your sister's name anywhere on this crick?" She was a good Christian woman, my grandmother, but she didn't tolerate foolishness. "Is that right?" my grandmother said. Then she walked up behind the Polock woman and pushed her head down into that bucket of Blue-in and gave her two good whacks with her razor, one on each side of her neck-cut the muscles clean through. Then she slipped the razor back in her apron and walked back to the house and told Ruthie, "Ruthie, better go get the men out of the fields. We're gonna have to move." They packed everything they owned in the wagon and left Kansas for Oklahoma that day.

I was twenty-two years old before I asked my grandfather a single thing about his life. At twenty-two, I was lucky to have a grandfather still alive and of healthy mind, but at that age who fathoms the value in a blessing like that? I was a student at the University of Texas at the time, preoccupied with finding myself, as my parents' generation called it. The intellectual breakthroughs that I imagined in high school would be my daily college fare—the cathartic all-night confessionals, the romantic whirlwind, the revolution in religious and political sensibility—none of these rites of undergraduate passage were materializing for me. Mainly it was memorizing photosynthesis, paying rent, and avoiding parking tickets. One day, while in the Student Union on an errand to drop one class and add another, the kind of sub-intellectual task that seemed to constitute nine-tenths of my "higher education," I stumbled across a book by Milan Kundera called Life is Elsewhere. Hitting so thoroughly home in that instant, the title seemed to lift off the cover; I took it as my summons—from elsewhere no less.

Ever heard of Old Timer's disease? That's what you get when the Lord decides you've taken up too much time at the crick and He soaks your mind in a bucket of Blue-in till everything in it-everything you ever were, every state and territory you ever passed through, all the stories-come out, wiped from your memory. After that, let me tell you something: you don't know diddley-squat about nothing. You'll be lucky if you know your own wife. I understand they're looking for a cure for Old Timer's, going to cure it like indigestion. I hope they do. If they don't, you ought to go in the bucket-making business, because, boy, this country is going to need millions of 'em.

Show me the face you wore before your mother and father were born. Six months of sitting quietly in a candle-lit studio for forty-five minutes a day trying to get my mind around how a person can even have a face before his mother or father are born yielded no epiphanies. For a while I reasoned that the answer to my koan hinged on reincarnation, an idea which my Southern Baptist upbringing strongly suggested was sinfully superstitious. I spent many meditative hours trying to get over my now instinctive resistance to that idea, finding unsuspected visual support, funny enough, in a coffee stain.

My daddy was a prize fighter. He wore Florsheim shoes and drove an Asperson Jackrabbit. He was half Indian, a Blackfoot. In 1926 the World Champion lightweight of the country came to Hartshorne Oklahoma to train in the mountains. He wanted to build up his strength by running the hills in a place where the sun shone all day. And my daddy fought him in an exhibition fight that the governor of the state attended. All the miners came out to pull for my daddy. They had a newspaper man there who asked my daddy what it was like growing up in the rural south where there was so much racial strife. My daddy couldn't read and he didn't know what the word "rural" or "strife" meant. He figured, though, that the man was saying something about black people and what it was like living with them. My daddy told the man, "Mister, the man I came to knock out today is white. If a Negro jumps in the ring I'll worry about color."

Finally, after eight months of growing increasingly frustrated with the whole interiorized proceedings, the answer surfaced: my grandparents. If my intent was to find myself, I had come a long way in the wrong direction. I wasn't in Paris. I was in east Texas, in the memories of the people in whose past my present was forged. Their history, of which I knew next to nothing, was the face I wore before my mother and father were born. Yes, I once again conceded, life is elsewhere. Three weeks later-which is how long it took to book a flight of reasonable expense—I returned to Houston. On the way to my parents' house from the airport, I asked to stop at Wal-Mart and, culture shock notwithstanding, I purchased a tape recorder and three packs of six 90-minute cassettes. The next morning I called my Grandpa Leonard in Barber's Hill, Texas. "How's the coffee, Old Timer?" I asked. "Good for your spondulicks," he said. "How about I come see you," I suggested. Over the next two weeks my grandfather and I drank a lot of coffee, I on the couch and he in his orange recliner. Between us, next to a paper towel-stuffed Folgers coffee can, his spittoon, a tape recorder whirred.

I never shall forget (that's how my grandfather always began his stories) the time I heard somebody holler "Dude"—that's what they called me back then, Dude—and I came running around from the back of my grandparent's house where I was playing soldiers with my granddaddy's sharecropper's son, Haywood Johnson, and found my mother and father standing on the running-boards of two different cars facing opposite directions. He had his leg up on an Aspersen Jackrabbit and she had hers on a Dodge Touring Convertible. "Dude," my mother said, "your daddy and I are going to get a divorce. I'm going to Texas and he's staying here in Oklahoma. We've decided it is your choice who you live with." I thought about that for a second, then I said to my mother, "If it's my choice, then I choose for you not to get a divorce." "Now, Dude," my mother said, "there ain't no changing that. Your daddy and I aren't living together anymore. But where you live and who you live with-that part is up to you." Well about that time I looked up and saw my grandfather and grandmother sitting on the porch, watching what was going on from their swing, and it was like the Lord gave me my answer. "If I can't live with you both," I said to my mother, "then my choice is to live here with my grandmother and grandfather." That turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my life.

And that's how it went, story after story, tape after tape. I listened, and when I thought I heard a thread that might lead my grandfather to a new set of memories, a new trail of tales, I asked a question. I kept them simple, and for the most part open-ended. "How did you meet grandma?" "What was my mama like when she was a little girl?" "What was your first paying job?" When I began the project I feared the tape recorder might distract my grandfather, freeze his tongue by putting him on the spot. It didn't. He got good at pausing when he heard the recorder click at the end of the tape. If he was saying something like, "We came up on the bridge" and the tape ran out, he would pause and while I flipped the tape he'd contribute to the spittoon. Then when I was ready, I would hit play, nod, and he would pick up right where he left off: ". . . and we crossed it." No one knew at the time that my grandfather had Alzheimer's. It is not a disease that hits you like a stroke or a heart attack. It happens to you after it has already happened to you, like growing up, but in the wrong direction. It started with names; it ended with faces. The last face to go was his own. It is a fact about Alzheimer's that seldom gets mentioned, maybe because when it happens so many other, more functionally relevant debilities have assumed center stage, but one of the signature symptoms of having advanced to the final stages of the disease is that one's face assumes a conspicuous absence. The term plasticity is often used to describe the change. Another way of expressing it might be: it gets harder and harder to tell if the person before you is still there.

I took my grandfather's stories and wove them together into a novella that I entitled, "Over and Under and Back from Whence You Came." That was the diddy my grandfather's father used to teach him how to tie a tie: you take one end of the tie and go over and under then back from whence you came. You do that twice and knot it. There was a time in my grandfather's illness when he had enough memory to read his novella—or, as he preferred, to have my grandmother read it to him—but not enough memory to know how each story ended. He understood that they were about him because he remembered that his name was Dude-he remembered that even after he forgot it was Charlie. When you have Alzheimer's, life is elsewhere. The world behind you moves forward, and the world around you disappears.

The last time I saw my grandfather I had come home from Wisconsin where I was working at a college prep school. It had been over a year since he had given any indication of recognizing anyone in the family but my grandmother. He was sitting in his orange recliner. His eyes were bleary; his facial features collapsed into their skeletal frame. He was wearing one of the jumpsuits that had served him as attire, in and out of the oil fields where he worked for seventy-three years. Except now, tied loosely around his neck, was a terrycloth bib. Alzheimer's is sometimes described as an existential disease. People who have it, it is said, slowly lose their connection to both the past and the future and live increasingly in the moment. Space, likewise, loses all contiguity. Thus unmoored, an exile of the familiar and the recollected, one's absence is finally all that feels present. When I arrived, my grandfather's around-the-clock aide was trying to feed him a cracker. I sat beside him on the couch; there was neither a spittoon nor a tape recorder between us now. "Hey, Old Timer," I said, "how about I tell you a story."