I had what I guess was a rude awakening today.
My mother had a dental appointment scheduled at 2 and my
cousin Niecie was going to come up from the Bay Area and give her a mani/pedi
in the morning.
Among the things I found during the big Office
Reorganization was a box of old, old black and white snapshots of my
mother's family that had been torn out of someone's photo album (the black
page still sticking to the back). Many of these photos are duplicates
of ones I already have and in any case, I have a ton of photos here to go
through "some day" and definitely don't need to add these to the four big
boxes I already have. As Niecie has become, with Peach's death, the
family historian, I thought she would like to have the photos.
Every time I post one of the old photos in the private
family group on Facebook, Niecie is the one who gets all excited and happy
to see the old photos, so I told her about this big box of photos and she
said she definitely wanted them.
So when I knew she would be at Atria, I took the box and
went there early, an hour before the dental appointment. Niecie was
delighted and suggested that we go out to the lobby and look at them there,
since there was a table and better light.
My mother was pretty much OK, though when I was going to get
coffee for the 3 of us and asked if she wanted cream in her coffee, she
threw her hands in the air and said "you guys figure it out. I don't
even know what you're talking about."
So we settled in at the table and Niecie started looking at
the photos, asking with almost every photo "now who is this?"
Sometimes my mother knew, almost always I did because I've been seeing them
all of my life. As I answered her questions and corrected her guesses
it occurred to me that with Peach and Kathy gone, I am the only one in
the family who knows all this stuff!!!!
I do have a couple of cousins older than I am, but they have
always lived at a distance and I don't have a clue how much they know about
our grandparents when they lived in Inverness and the people who visited
them, or what Peach and I looked like as little kids, or how to tell the
babies one from another based on the date of the photo.
I can. And I think I am the only one in the family who
can. (I call Niecie my cousin, but in reality she's is the daughter of my
cousin Shirley, who would have been able to identify all of these photos,
had she not died of cancer several years ago).
That's a pretty heady responsibility. When I die, the
IDs of all these photos dies with me. I don't know that anybody cares,
but if this family is typical of many other families, the people who really
are interested and care, won't realize they care until everybody who can
answer their questions is gone.
That's certainly what happened with my father's side of the
family. I inherited the scrapbooks of my godfather, my grandfather and
my father and I don't have a clue who is in the photos and what is
happening. This is particularly sad in the case of my grandparents'
vaudeville scrapbook, filled with many of the stars of the company they were
members of, but I don't have a clue who they are or, in the case of informal
photos of this group, what was the occasion for the photos. That is
all lost to history now.
But it seems I am now the only one who can keep the memories
of my mother's family alive, through the remaining photos. She can
remember some of them, but not all of them. I can figure out most of
them.
It just feels weird to realize that.
As for the dental appointment, it went very well.
To my surprise there was no resistance. Maybe her
defenses were down after a morning with Niecie and then our session with the
photographs. I just said "it's time to go" and she followed me.
It was kind of endearing, though, that even though she
didn't know what was happening, she still had the dental nervousness.
"I'm very nervous and I don't know why," she told me. When I asked her
about it, she said "I don't know where I'm going and what's going to happen
to me."
As for the appointment itself, it was a perfect example of
why I love Cindy so much. I remember when I first went to her after
>20 years of not seeing a dentist and fearing that my teeth were about to
fall out. She had been a friend for years, but not my dentist.
She scheduled me for the last appointment of the day so there would be
nobody in the office except me. Years later she told me that she
should have taken a picture of my teeth because she had never seen such a
thick piece of plaque behind my front teeth and was sure a photo could be
published in a dental magazine, but she didn't want to make me feel
uncomfortable. She truly changed my life and I now brush, floss, and
see my dentist 3 times a year. She also took care of me herself until
she felt I would be comfortable seeing a hygienist.
So she took my mother to the back of the office, where
dental procedures are done, and she was very gentle with her, examining all
of her teeth, then asking if she would mind if they cleaned them. My
mother agreed and Debbie, the hygienist cleaned. Then Cindy came back
in and asked if my mother would feel comfortable having her teeth x-rayed,
which she agreed to. A full mouth x-ray was done. Debbie told me
she would be taking 18 x-rays, which would not have to be repeated for 5
years, which I told her meant it probably would not have to be done again.
While the x-rays were being done, Cindy talked with me and
said she'd like to study the x-rays and then meet with me about the
condition of my mother's mouth. She asked if I thought my mother
should be at that meeting and I said no, so we have that ahead of us.
I listened while Cindy tested the gum pockets and most were
3 or 4, but a couple were 7 and I think I heard her say one was 10.
She's also lost 2 teeth, Cindy says. So
I'm sure she would like to do some work, but the question is, I
think, how much dental work you do on someone who is 97. I'll find out
when we have our meeting.
So she's had her annual exam, she's had a CT scan and she's
had a dental appointment and, depending on what my meeting with Cindy
reveals, she may be free of medical interference for awhile.
Next
two moms came in, each with a toddler (one mother told me her daughter was
13 months old. Both little girls wore sundresses and both were so cute
as they toddled around the store. One was more friendly than the
other, who didn't want anything to do with me. The friendly one was
very interested in the portrait of an egret drawn by our current artist in
residence, Richard Barry. The group bought two cardboard baby proof
books.
In
the afternoon we went to see Florence Foster Jenkins, the second
movie we have seen in 2016. What a wonderful film. We learned of
Florence Foster Jenkins a couple of decades ago, when our friend Stephen
Peithman told us about "the worst singer in the world," a rich socialite in
New York who loved opera and thought she could sing. She gave concerts
around New York, made a record, and even sang at Carnegie Hall. We
bought one of her recordings just to hear her and yes, she was the worst
singer in the world. But this movie with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant
makes her human and shows how her husband protected her and helped her
achieve her dreams. It's a very sweet story, It's Meryl Streep as you
have never seen her....and Hugh Grant as you have never seen him and
both are excellent.
Today
we were having lunch to say goodbye to our friend Grainne, who was about to
return to Ireland. Grainne is here so often, I sometimes forget that
she has returned to Ireland because within a few months she will be back.
She comes and house sits for friends when they go on vacation.
We
talked about the upcomng "Nifty Fifty" party the Pinata Group is having
on Saturday (celebrating the 5 Pinata kids who turn 50 this year). 
