Blue Cat Tree

A triptych of tangled memories

November

As I rummage through boxes of random things I emptied from my parent’s house last year, I come across a dusty folder overflowing with papers. The green embossed label says, “Tommy,” and from the looks of the faded fragments of construction paper messily protruding from its manila shape, it’s evident the contents date back to when I was in preschool or kindergarten. The mid-70s.

I’m tempted to toss the entire packet in the trash—I’m exhausted by nostalgia and sentimental objects. Also, I know, without a doubt, there’s nothing in this heap of ephemera I’ll ever need. But curiosity gets the best of me and I open the folder to reveal what’s inside.

The smell of the pages—stale paint and glue, perhaps—immediately transports me back to Mary’s Nursery School in Livermore, California. I’m reminded of marble box and pudding art projects. Of cardboard marionettes and messy sponge paintings. Of tall easels with paper sheets bigger than my body. Of glued macaroni and melted crayon masterpieces.

Seems my parents—or more accurately, my mom—curated a proper portfolio exhibiting some representative works from each dabbled medium. She threw it all in this crisp folder that was surely pilfered from the auditor wing at my dad’s Xerox office. She then had him slap a label on it. My dad had an obsessive knack for tagging things with his or the thing’s name. The standing joke is that he’d label the labeling machine. Which he did.

One piece at a time, I throw the lot of it into a garbage can. All except a purple, yarn-bound book filled with chicken-scratched dittos. In black ballpoint on the cover’s top center, three words are written in adult penmanship—I am special. Just below is a pasted photo of a toothy me giving a big thumbs up. Just like The Fonz.

As a boy I was enthralled by Happy Days’ Arthur Fonzarelli. Even at my young age, Fonzi's rebellious mystique captivated me. His white tee and black leather, his shiny motorcycle and overall aplomb. His dance-slow-to-fast-music resonated strongly (Why? Who knows). All of this plus his ability to snap his fingers and magically make happen whatever he wanted to happen. SNAP—the lights come on! SNAP—the jukebox plays a different song! SNAP—adoring women come running! Who wouldn’t want such charisma? Such magic? Who wouldn’t want The Fonz’s aura?

To me, The Fonz was the living definition of mysterious cool. And I wanted, so badly, to be both. So I mirrored his aesthetic as best I could with the limited items in my preadolescent closet. I copied his posture, his walk. I matched his tonality. I memorized words to popular hits from the 50s. I snapped my fingers at babysitters—which never worked like the Fonz, but it sure felt good to wonder about how it would feel if it did.

I even echoed Fonzie’s trademark—an upright thumb and resounding Aaaaaaaaaa to announce my moments of pleasure or agreement. “How’s a PBJ sound, Tommy?” A thumbs up or a drawn out Aaaaaaaaaa made clear my desires.

This booklet—this dumb little assortment of scribbled papers, sits me down. I mentally distance myself from the details of the moment capitulating my discovery. I stop worrying about my dry business. Stop fretting my mom’s precarious ambulation. I even, albeit briefly, stop messing with the upper molar that lately has been smarting. I simply allow the memory dominoes to fall. This one artifact, rich with the energies of my mom and dad, remind me of who I was way back when. Which helps me better understand who I am now.

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December

For the first time all week, the sky is clear. The sunset glow on the west-facing side of the old Xerox Tower, now Innovation Square, briefly turns its wall of black windows and aggregate into a monolith of molten steel. Compared to big city skyscrapers, it’s not ominous. But here in Rochester, the nearby structures simply can’t compete. Its color, size, and placement force all eyes to zero in. The dark building in the center of the Flower City demands attention.

From where I’m sitting in a hipster cafe on the corner of South Clinton and Alexander, this building that I, as a kid, knew only as “dad’s building,” dominates my vantage point. Even as a child I could sense its cold weight. Its desolate quietude. I have forever associated it with winter. But truth be told, I associate most everything in this town with winter. And not just any winter, but the unsympathetic sort. A bitter breathing. Numb and severe.

This evening, and frankly any time the old Xerox building is in view, I can’t look away. The ensuing mental slideshow is a portal to a long-ago time when a local kid's social status was largely dependent on whether their dad worked at Xerox, Kodak, or neither. Kodak kids, in this town, were the victors.

My dad’s building triggers memories of his wrinkled slacks and pocket protectors. The sour smell of stressful sweat and a day’s worth of hair grease. My dad’s beaming face on the ID tag he had to show to access the secrets and yearnings that manifested behind the building’s heavy doors.

Then his car pulling up. Him retrieving his hulking American Tourister briefcase from the gaping trunk of his Ford Grenada. His quick run to the bathroom and us kids fighting to tell him things under its locked door. Then my mom removing dinner from the oven. Then our hands in our laps as we take assigned seats. Then the hand-holding prayer we say every night that starts with, Thank you for the world so sweet, and ends with everyone stating, I love you, one at a time, to each person around the table. “Say it or don’t eat,” my parents would threaten.

Everywhere I go in this icy town there are whispers of what once was. My dad’s building soars alone, an unmissable monument to memory. A beacon of his successes and failures. Of my family. A headstone for the long gone details that inspired who I’ve become. Details that make me questions whether that long ago me is the same me as now. Both answers make perfect sense.

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January

I’m pretty sure it was someone in the ER who gently slipped the word, dementia, into one of the disorienting, one-sided conversations we had during my mom’s six-day stay in the hospital’s windowless bowels.

Then, upon her arrival at rehab, Mike the social worker gave my mom three words—blue, cat, and tree—and asked her to repeat them back. “Blue, cat, tree,” she said with ease as she glanced proudly at me. “Very good,” he said. “In a couple minutes I’m going to ask you to repeat them back to me, OK?” She nodded, then squinted and bit her lip as she committed the three words to memory.

Mike then asked my mom where she was. She paused, then spoke her answer like a question. “St. Ann’s?” she said. “Good,” Mike replied. His affirmation gave her noticeable relief.

He then asked what month it was. What year it was. Her answers: “2026,” and, “almost January.” He didn’t correct her.

His final question was about how she came to be at St. Ann’s in the first place. My mom thought for a moment, then started in about the train trip she took in October. “My husband recently passed, and he always wanted to travel cross country on a train,” she reminisced. I’d heard this telling a thousand times, and I knew where she was going with it. “He would, have loved it,” she said. “But gosh it was so bumpy! I had to be careful not to fall.”

And though her narrative quickly created an obvious distance from Mike’s question, her answer wasn’t wrong. That train trip was, in fact, a detail that led up to this very point in time. But so was everything else in her life. If Mike let her go on, he was in for a circuitous account wrought with loose ends. I wondered how long he’d endure her incompressible account before jumping in.

Under any other circumstances, I would have offered some redirection. “But why are you here, mom?” I might say. Which would likely prompt her closer to the present. But I knew that Mike’s question was an abbreviated cognitive assessment. And since how she thinks about things is likely a culprit for the three falls that let to another hospital, and now rehab admission, I clammed up and listened as my mom recounted a cumbersome and erroneous retelling of her train trip to Montana. She was trying hard to remember. To give Mike what he had asked for. But his questions got buried in her avalanche of memories—and all she could ponder, or perhaps all she wanted to ponder, was how much she missed my dad.

Mike patiently awaited a pause, then continued with his intake. He explained what she could expect—and that because the next day was the weekend, she’d likely not begin proper therapies until the following Monday. Though she listened intently, I could tell she was distracted by the view out her window. And who could blame her? She’d been in a windowless room for more than a week, never knowing what day or time of day it was. Her recent whitewashed landscape of beeps and screams was enough to compromise anyone’s ability to keep their head on straight.

When she couldn’t contain herself any longer, my mom blurted out, “It’s snowing!” We all three then turned to witness at the city’s expanse from the eighth story. Thick flurries filled the dark sky and blurred the distant and familiar skyline. “I’m so happy I can see downtown,” my mom said. “Now I know where I am.”

Mike handed me his card and some paperwork. And just before he left, he turned back toward my mom and asked if she remembered the the three things. For the life of me, I could not. And I caught myself making excuses—all the minutiae I am trying to balance for my mom’s next steps, navigating insurances, seeking neutral resources to help me learn the ropes of assisted living. I had a lot on my mind. Plus, I wasn’t paying good attention to Mike’s three words as much as I was paying attention to my mom as she absorbed them. “Yep!” she said with certainty. “I sure do remember them.” She then rattled them off correctly. Blue, cat, tree. Mike made a notation on his notepad, told my mom she was going to be alright, and left.

“You see, Tom,” she said smugly. “I can still remember things after all.” She then looked out the window again. Locked her view onto Rochester in the distance and started to say something. “What was that, mom?” I said. She waved off my question and shook her head. I wanted to ask what she was thinking about, but I also didn’t want to interrupt.