There's a guy in The Gummer's Parkinson's group who plays guitar after the meetings. It's some kind of.. I don't know... jazzy folky pling-plingy stuff. The "Parkers" struggle to talk over it and his musical non-selections are annoying, but you gotta give the guy an E for effort. Good guitarist, bad genre.
The Gummer likes the Parkinson's group. I think she sees it as a chance to feel normal and be like her old social self again. I think she sees it as a room full of people who have also forgotten the words, who have misplaced something but don't remember what it was, who struggle like she does. When I watch her mingling with people, I can see how much she has been hiding. She stops faking it here.
["Fakin' It" was the title of a play I was in my senior year of high school It was a John Hughes knock-off. I played an angry punk girl. She came to see me mumble my angsty little lines with my hair gelled into a mohawk, black mini, batiked and burnt Cure t-shirt, the remnants of which now live in a plastic bag because I guess at some point, I decided the concrete lion on the driveway needed a shirt.
I just looked at what I've written. That play was not called "Fakin' It". It was called "Makin' It". That realization sort of knocked the wind out of me for a second.
Fuck. Stupid passage of time. Stupid 15 year block of living in the moment. Stupid, stupid fucking graduate degrees and student loans. Stupid fun. And why, WHY, did I not go to Cyprus when I had the opportunity? Fucking CYPRUS. Youth is wasted on the young.... over and over and over. (So maybe that realization is actually just part of the process.)
At 40, I spend a good amount of time thinking about how full of shit I am. I'm Marcy Playground. That song, which I thought was about being 25, is about being a 40 year old jackass sitting in a cafe. You don't smell sex and candy. Dude, you smell xhamster-dot-com-virus-free-porn and packet of Super Orange Emergen-C. No one is lounging in your chair, and your abs are taking a tragic turn.
"Can I get a little less "Fakin' It" in the monitors, please? I can't hear the "Makin' It"... and please turn up the pedal steel. It gets right into the sweet spot where I'm broken and perfect at the same time."]
The thing about her feeling comfortable in the Parkinson's meeting, the thing that fucks it up, is that everyone in the group has PARKINSON'S. Not that the people are fucked up. I don't mean that. I mean that I think The Gummer has decided that dementia is a characteristic of Parkinson's. It isn't. She has an Extra Bonus Super kind of Parkinson's. Dementia is a side order. Even here, where she thinks she is okay, she isn't.
But maybe she, too, is faking it.
On the way out, The Gummer puts her hand on the guitar guy's shoulder. She thanks him for playing. She is smiling too much and she's too exuberant like she's mistakenly had that third whiskey sour. (She hasn't. There has to be one sober person in the family to drive the rest of us around.)
She tells him that she used to play the piano and the accordion and that she loved it. She said loved. The German expressed a passion for something.
Fucking stupid passage of time. These two assholes (my parents) play their goddamn Old Country cards close to their chests my entire life and I keep mumbling variations of my angsty lines and then those fuckers have the audacity to get old and drop their guard. They become real... and then they die. It's a bunch of Velveteen Rabbit fucking bullshit.
The Gummer tells the guitar guy that she has some sheet music (OCD... compulsive editing of possessions), but "...it's for piano and accordion, not...
Time stops. She is looking at the guitar on the table in front of him. She has forgotten again. I can feel my heart roll over. She is just looking at that damn jazzy, folky, pling plingy guitar. Nothing happens/ She concedes. She does not know what that is.
"Whatever that is, " she says.
Time starts moving again. I blink hard and shove the moment out of the way. We get in the car and I drive home.
She will not remember that this happened. "Guitar." Preschool words are floating out of her head. I will avoid her most of the evening. She will ask me a a few helpless questions, ask if there are clothes in the dryer. I will use the boy as a buffer. We will make her smile a little bit. We can do that.
"Whatever that is" will get to me later. It's the small things that fuck you up sometimes. The small things will needle in under the walls and really get to you. It's the small things that make you realize what you've lost.
But then I thought "Maybe she meant 'I don't know what that is' like 'Ugh. Jazzy, folky, pling-plingy guitar? Jesus, get a banjo.'" It is stupid things like that, like the way my weirdo brain has learned to lean in and say something that puts the broken and perfect back together, that reaffirms what I haven't lost.
Tomorrow is a snow day. Before the storm starts, I am going to buy some games that The Gummer can still play. Preschool games. I am going to go buy preschool games for my mother. My son has passed my mother.
Fucking circle of life.
Pedal steel, banjo, Uncle Tupelo...
Pray for us, Jeff Tweedy:
"Everything's just alright as of now."
"Not forever, but just for now."
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