Stories from Two Generations of Dementia
Carol Wassermans mother suffers from dementia –- just as Carols grandmother did. Carols grandmother imagined that she had drinks with Hemingway. Her mother thinks a senator came trick-or-treating at their house. Now, Carol wonders if perhaps she will have dementia in the future and imagine an encounter with a famous person, too.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
To understand this next item, you're going to have to know a little bit about Leverett Saltonstall, Senator Leverett Saltonstall. He was a Republican who represented the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the Senate from 1945 to 1967. During those years commentator Carol Wasserman was a child. To her, his place in the Senate seemed like one of the unchanging facts of Massachusetts' political and cultural life. Leverett Saltonstall died in 1979. As an adult, Carol Wasserman has been relatively certain that during his life, Senator Saltonstall never visited her childhood home, but she's starting to reconsider that.
CAROL WASSERMAN:
My mother looks up from her grilled cheese sandwich. She asks me if I remember the Halloween when we kids were little and Leverett Saltonstall came to the house trick-or-treating. Hard snow is slamming against the windows. My mother has forgotten many things; among them, how to make herself some lunch, and so the job has fallen to me. Halloween is long over, but she has come unloosed in time and space and has taken to surprising me with bits of autobiography that are startling and fresh and full of crisp detail.
`What do you mean, Leverett Saltonstall came to the house?' I ask foolishly. I have myself forgotten many things over the years, but I'm certain that I would remember seeing the senior senator from Massachusetts standing in the yard of our tiny, little house, bag in hand, begging for candy. Nothing I remember from my childhood Halloweens is particularly noteworthy. All I can call up are variations on a theme of being small and powerless and frightened for no particular reason. My childhood memories are entirely about the wind and darkness at the far edge of the woods.
`Wait. Wait, wait,' I say, smug and lawyerly. `How do you know it was really Leverett Saltonstall? How do you know it wasn't somebody dressed up to look like Leverett Saltonstall, somebody wearing a Leverett Saltonstall costume?' `Oh, silly,' my mother says, smiling fondly, `I could tell. Everybody could. Everybody knew Leverett Saltonstall when they saw him.'
Once upon a time it was my grandmother who became untethered, loosened from her moorings. Twenty years ago I watched her float away from us. The memories she recovered in the buoyancy of leaving was of a lost afternoon with Ernest Hemingway. She told me they'd spent hours together at a bar in Majorca getting drunk in a hurry before dinner. `Grandma, what were you doing in Majorca?' I asked. But it was already too late; her dream had dissolved, and the question made no sense.
So this is how it happens. There exists an arc of narrative and an arc of inevitability to which no shame attaches. From these, I derive the simple, unadorned fact that sometime soon enough someone will be spreading the peanut butter on my toast, and I will be telling them about the time I danced with Baryshnikov, who was in love with the fearlessness and ferocity of my tour jete. I will remember the pink leotard and tights I wore, the palest pink, the fragile color of a winter sunset.
NORRIS: Carol Wasserman lives in Wareham, Massachusetts.
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