alms and the eleemosynary

It’s a beautiful spring evening in New York after three days of rain, and I am scoping out two small goldfish ponds on top of a parking garage. It is probably 6pm, the sun is making its way behind me and I’m all by myself in a keyed eden on the upper west side, cell phone plastered to the side of my head. My mother is telling me about the latest driving mishap of my grandmother, where she was yet again pulled over by the cops, this time in a grocery store parking lot, and yet again somehow managed to avoid a ticket. In fact, the policeman wound up going into the grocery store and bought my grandmother flowers.

I’m getting this tale while pacing up and down these little pathways paved with bark and on each pass I notice something that I failed to notice the first five times I walked past - a plastic toy cat planted squarely next to the daffodils - Mardi Gras beads wrapped around the neck of angel statuary – three hunks of quartz Gooch will no doubt admire during her visit in three weeks – and then it comes out about how my mother has (finally!) laid down the law with my grandmother and given her marching orders: the house in Roswell will be sold by July, TaTa will make her home at an assisted living community in El Paso, and the car is going bye-bye.

I know this is hard for my grandmother, just as it is extremely painful for my mother. My mother is afraid that all of this will leave my grandmother feeling stripped of her independence and I know my grandmother fears this change for the same reason. I don’t think that’s the case, though: a life style that ceased to be productive a long time ago (living alone, being disoriented and trying to drive, living in a house she can’t clean, trying to survive on frozen dinners, living four hours away from family with hardly any friends left in town and no social life to speak of) is going to be replaced with something functional, something that ultimately will be better for all parties concerned. But change is new, change is scary. Especially, I suspect, when change comes quickly and you’re 80 years old.

The major challenge will be trying to get TaTa to understand that this isn’t the end of the world or her life. Her quality of life is going to be a lot better if she’ll just open herself to the possibility. Hell, she could meet the love of her life at some senior center thing and get married again at 90. That is, if she’ll just allow herself to get over this aversion to old people. I don’t want to be around all those old people, she says. My mother told her They all feel just like you inside. It’s a second chance in the 4th quarter. It’s reinvention, not all that unlike why I moved to New York.

So after a good hour on the phone (very unlike me), I hang up with my mother, make my way down the stairs, lock up the garden, and head north on Broadway. I pause briefly in front of this Turkish restaurant to see what vegetarian options they may have on the menu (and specifically whether or not it sounds vegan-friendly, as my sister is now harder to feed than ever). I am giddy with power knowing my Gooch will be here in three weeks. Sometimes you need a reality check, a dose of who you really are at whatever cost, so I said fuck it, opened up the wallet, logged onto JetBlue and threw down the plastic. She needs a vacation, anyway; the last time she visited NYC was 9 years ago. She has already requested a stop at The Museum of Natural History, and for a few minutes one day in mid-May I’m certain unsuspecting tourists in from Iowa just trying to find the dinosaurs will pause briefly to scratch their heads over an overheard conversation only dogs and dolphins could make sense of:

ME: I read the other day that they think the universe is finite and shaped like a dodecahedron.
GOOCH: A toedecahedron.
ME: Like a soccer ball.
GOOCH: A toedecahedron smells like toes.
ME: A dodecahedron smells like your liver.
GOOCH: Liver head!
ME: The universe is shaped like your head!
GOOCH: But is the universe covered in liver like your head?
ME: I don’t have liver on my head; you have liver on your french fry toes.
GOOCH: My toes are perfect. Your toes have weiner flavorum.
ME: NO!
GOOCH: YAH!!! Oh! Oh ho ho ho! Look, look.
ME: Yep. That’s, like, a really big rock.
GOOCH: It is not a rock. It is a crinoid. The skeletal plates are still in tact.
ME: Mmmm. Crinoids. Are those vegan?

Oh yes, we are going to geek out - in secret sibling language, even - and HARD.

All of this has got me thinking about what we each bring to each other. You know, the little offerings we make to one another daily. I was thinking about my most precious relationships, how they are very much give and take. It’s never about what anyone brings to the table for me but my most heartfelt, most irreplaceable friendships are filled with sharing: I want you to have this of myself, followed by Thank you, and this is what I want you to have of me. It’s not a big production and it's not like it's thought out or even planned. It’s not This is what I can do for you; I can scratch your back and wash your dog. It’s just it is what it is. It’s I miss you, get on a plane, here’s a ticket followed by Okay, and we will have lots of fun. It’s I like you, I wrote a poem about hanging out with you, don’t get weird on me followed by I like this line best, I’m weird anyway and by the way I wrote a song about you. It’s I need a drink, girlfriend followed by Let’s get tanked and have our palms read in Chinatown but let’s eat first so we don’t pay for a past life regression and then not remember anything we’re told about it.

It’s a phone call to your mother, a fistful of daisies from a cop who should write your ass a ticket. It’s what keeps us going, what keeps us believing, an action figure poised to jump into a birdbath finally spied on the fifth pass of a well-worn path. It's a direct, open line of two-way communication between us and our dodecahedron. It’s what reminds us life is funny, life is hopeful, that which whispers to us that we are not alone.