What Is Up With Mark?

 Just A Little Monkey

On an unusually warm and bright November afternoon, I took the day off and drove down to pick up Raad and his mother at their outpost in the backwoods of Athens County. Of course, when you take an infant anywhere, its like moving day. So while she was loading up my car with various baby paraphernalia and provisions for the weekend, it was my job to keep the little one happy. These days, happy means anything that doesn’t involve the abject despair of contorted, red-faced wailing. Its really quite amazing the way he can instantaneously metamorphosize from calm, phlegmatic indifference into a cataclysmic eruption of anguish and suffering without the slightest change of observable circumstance. There must be a fine line in a baby’s mind between existential terror and oblivious tranquility. Locked in a marathon dance with a schizophrenic partner, the adult is continually trying out moves to keep swinging the child back from the abyss until victoriously delivered across the finish line to angelic slumbers. When sucking on something no longer suffices, the most successful choreography involves embracing the child while orbiting the hallways of your home, or perambulating outdoors, moving with a rhythmic gait that lightly jostles your fellow traveler. This day, we found ourselves deep in the untamed fields of a peaceful countryside, following wildlife paths through a maze of tall grasses, adhesive weeds and thorny branches. I accompanied the percussive crunch of my footsteps on the dry hay with the mesmerizing repetition of a simple song that seemed to spontaneously combust from a desire to soothe a fragile temperament, sparked by the joy of sharing a sunny, intimate moment with an innocent perched in my arms.

You’re just a little monkey
You’re just a little monkey
You’re just a little monkey climbing up a tree
You’re just a little monkey
You’re just a little monkey
You’re just a little monkey climbing up a tree

mark

What Is Up With Mark?

I Didn’t Think I Had It In Me

Today was Dad’s birthday. So was yesterday. I always enjoy telling the story about when he was applying for social security he had to find his birth certificate, at which point he discovered that not only had he been celebrating his birthday a day late for 65 years, it turned out his name was actually Elliot not Elmer. This was blamed on his mother’s faulty memory. As unfortunate as the mix-up in names might have been, he kept Elmer but we did start marking his birthday on the corrected date. This annual occasion also marks the end of my summer vacation from card making. I tried to slip by one year without making a birthday card for Dad figuring he really didn’t care and I incurred the withering wrath of Mom. Coming up with original ideas to put in a birthday card for my parents year after year is one of my toughest assignments. This year there was inspiration in the events of his life but it wasn’t happy.

He was hospitalized recently with pneumonia and spent a lot of time in intensive care. He’s been through hospitalizations before but this one left him a frail shell of his former self so he transferred to the Wexner Heritage Village for rehabilitation therapy. He suddenly seemed to age about 10 years and for the first time, I saw him as a helpless old person. Our large family rallied around him and his room looked like Grand Central Station at times. At his meals, there are usually at least two people there watching and helping him eat. All the attention doesn’t seem to do much for his spirits. He feels like he is wasting away and he has little appetite for the effort required to make it through another day of indignities. When I tried to find words of wisdom to give him to put this final period of his life in a serene perspective, the best I could come up with were the typical platitudes about being thankful for the simple things like the love of his family.

I attempted to transpose that cliche through my idiosyncratic imagination in the birthday card with a childlike drawing of one large daisy on the face of the card headed by the caption “When you get to be 89” and continuing on the inside with “All the people you helped  Get to lend you a hand.” illustrated by a group of hands each grasping the stem of their own daisy. Maybe that was a little too metaphoric for Dad. At the birthday party, when I gave it to him, he looked at it for a long time and his face slowly twisted into a painful smile that either indicated he was emotionally moved or hopelessly confused. He simply said “Thanks Mark.’ in his high-pitched, weak voice and I apologized for making it so weird.

Mom brought a beautifully decorated chocolate cake and I stuck two candles in it. Dad’s old sense of humor surfaced in a proud smile when he said there wasn’t any way he could blow them out and that he would just have to throw his cup of water on them. I lit the candles, we sang “Happy Birthday” and I pushed the cake near him to encourage him to  give the candles a try. Despite his previous protestation, he took a shallow breath, leaned into it and blew. I was still hovering over the cake and surreptitiously puffed just enough to make sure they went out. He happily exclaimed, “I didn’t think I had it in me”.

mark