Hello Old Friend

Rome and New York share this in common: everyone wants to come for a visit. We have had a flurry of visitors from the United States these past few weeks. Some travelled alone and made good use of our guest room, while others were with family and just came by for lunch, a coffee, or met up with us in the city. My sister managed a 10-day visit before starting a new job, and we planned a beach getaway, but more on that in my next post. This time I want to write about one of my mother’s oldest and dearest friends from college.

My mother has often said that friendships formed in childhood and adolescence have a special kind of staying power, and her theory is that it is a time in life when intimate, secret thoughts are easily shared, and formative experiences together provide memories that last a lifetime. In the case of Irma, their experiences at Barnard College in New York City

Maureen and Irma
at a Barnard Reunion

went beyond their undergraduate education, because both continued to be very involved in the college and Irma’s career was in the administration. My mother’s older sister Helen was the Director of Admissions for most of her career, and so all three spent a great deal of time together on and off campus.

Irma played another important role in our family’s history. When my mother travelled to Europe for the first time in 1955 to assist a family with childcare

Maureen wore white gloves and a corsage in 1955

during their summer vacation, Irma provided her with family contacts in Rome, since she had a month to explore Italy on her own. Once she got to her pensione, she set out to find a place for a haircut. She wrote about this in her memoir, and even jotted “hair” in her travel diary which she still has.

The travel diary includes my father's name on June 9th

Irma’s aunt sent her son, Virgilio, to pick her up on his motorcycle and bring her over for dinner, and my mother described her time with Irma’s family in those early days as “the perfect beginning of a lifetime love of Italy.” After a few days visiting Naples, Capri, Amalfi and Sorrento, it was back to Rome.

This is how we often told the short story of how my mother met my father:

They met at the top of the Spanish Steps, in Piazza Trinita’ de’ Monti, and he invited her for dinner and then took her on his Lambretta to hear the crickets in a forest of pine trees. She was scared that she was in the middle of nowhere with a stranger but it all turned out okay.

That version persisted in family lore until after my father’s death, as my mother began working on a memoir, with original letters they had written to each other, and with letters she had written to her sister and mother. This rich archive had been unopened for decades. As we worked our way through our collective memory of important family history, I wrote a poem about their first meeting which said, in part:
    It starts out as a storybook romance.
    My parents,
    they met for the first time
    in the summer of 1955,
    at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome.
    There's a little piazza up there, Trinita' dei Monti,
    that looks down on the tumbling expanse of travertine steps
    and ends in the Bernini marble boat of a fountain;
    her pensione was nearby, so the group gathered there
    before going off to dinner somewhere.
    And even though he never told me this,
    I know (somehow) he must have really been smitten
    (was it her short dark hair, or the way she slightly tilted her head 
    back when she laughed in the photograph I have of her from that           summer?)
    because he invited her for a ride on his Lambretta
    (she swung her feet to one side and held on to his waist)
    to go listen to the crickets in the pine woods on the outskirts of 
    the city.
    She always said she was terrified,
    but in the end that's just what they did.

It turns out that my father told our friend Gabriele the story, and he remembers clearly that he took her along the Appia Antica to the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. If you look up images of this place you will see the ruins of a large round tower surrounded by an expanse of green fields. In her memoir, she recalled my father explaining, once they stopped driving along the Appia Antica, that it was one of his favorite spots in Rome.

“I come her alone often because it is so quiet and you can clearly hear the crickets.”
Hear the crickets? I thought. I’m a goner. No identification, no money (both carefully locked in the safe at my pensione), no one who would miss me because no one in the world knew where I was.

“Crickets?” I asked in a small somewhat terrified whisper.

“Rome is famous for its crickets. Here, let’s walk farther from the road so we don’t hear the traffic noise.”

We walked 50 meters into the field, stood silently for a few minutes until Silvio finally said, “Isn’t that an amazing sound, right here in a Roman field just on the outskirts of a huge city? Just think how the ancients must have felt hearing this music.”

He turned to lead the way back to the road and I thought I must have been dreaming. I wasn’t raped, or savaged or abandoned. We’d just been listening to the crickets and we drove back into the city without a word. The next day I discovered that Silvio had left a picture book, “Visioni di Roma,” at the pensione for me. Inside was a short note explaining that in case my camera didn’t do justice to the city he wanted me to have happy memories of Rome. I thought it was a sweet gesture, tucked it away at the bottom of my suitcase and promptly forgot about it and about him. Who could have guessed that our lives would be forever entangled! 

On the next page, she recounts the version of the meeting that was sent in a letter to her sister Helen:

I met Sergio’s friend Sandro. He brought Silvio and two other couples and we all went out for a short while. Then Silvio took me to dinner and for a moonlight drive along the Via Appia Antica. It was most romantic with a full moon and the ruins. He is very sweet and even came by today and brought me a book.

Later in the memoir, after sharing an important letter from my father, my mother got to the heart of the matter:

Memory plays tricks. It is selective, personal and often untruthful. Now, sorting out my emotions so many years later is difficult and dangerous. But I do know that I read his words over and over, perhaps hundreds of times…I wondered how Silvio could know me so well.

People often write about Alzheimer’s as a disease that “steals memories” but I don't think that's an accurate characterization. What I am noticing is it is certainly not a linear process of remembering less and less. My friend Anne Basting started an organization, Time Slips, that helps communities of elders with dementia to develop their imagination through storytelling without pressure to recall details of personal memories. In my experience, our brains, regardless of disease, are constantly processing our past experiences, rearranging the sense we make of them, especially when something happens to trigger a response, like a familiar image, or a visit with a friend. So it was when Irma and my mother spent a day together, reading portions of her memoir aloud to each other, laughing, sharing stories and enjoying each other’s company as they had so often in the past. They even figured out that Irma’s cousin Virgilio was not responsible for the fateful encounter with Silvio, that Sandro was a friend of someone my mother knew who taught at Princeton, and had brought Silvio along because he spoke good English.

My mother’s professor at Teachers College, Larry Cremin, used to say that history is the imaginative reconstruction of the past. I know the story of how my parents met and fell in love is still evolving. Now that we live in Rome, we can (and will) drive out along the Appia Antica to the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, perhaps even on a moonlit night, to hear crickets.

Virtues of Slow News

Our new life in Rome has brought many changes to our daily routine. For example, we have wine with meals, and at least two espresso coffee drinks a day (both of which a recent study says may contribute to living past the age of 90 by the way). But one habit has remained: watching the PBS Newshour.

Except now we watch it a day late. Avoiding real time network news means we have a bit more control over how we are affected by news, and for both of us this has been a good thing.

As educators, nothing gets us more upset than news of gun violence in schools, so when I first learned of the news from Florida about the dead and injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14^th, I shielded us from the first two days of television news coverage, reading only Reuters headlines and a few links on my Twitter feed. The sheer number of school shootings in the United States is incomprehensible, and like a grisly symptom of an incurable disease, the nation scrolls through the familiar details, resigned to an accepted truth that killers are armed and will go after the vulnerable and nothing will change. Two days later we watched the PBS Newshour tribute to those lives cut short in Parkland  and began to follow the responses of students from the school. In conversations over lunch, we cried, we processed our fear and grief for our country and our friends and family still living there, and we tried to believe that maybe this time there were good reasons to be hopeful. Emma Gonzalez’s speech, which you can watch in its entirety instead of the clips usually shown on the news, felt epic and historic, so it was amazing to watch the plans for the March 24^th protests and school walkouts unfold, the steam build up on social media, the corporations dumping their NRA connections, the shift in some political rhetoric, all due to pressure generated by the impassioned words of teenage survivors of this horror.

Yet beyond the benefits of a delayed filter on tragic news, watching the PBS Newshour lately has been inspiring for the news coverage not likely to turn up elsewhere. For example, take ten minutes to watch this incredible piece of reporting on the weekend Newshour about East Baltimore’s non-profit Turnaround Tuesday helping the formerly incarcerated find gainful employment. Not only was the story uplifting and interesting, I learned about the Economic Hardship Reporting Project founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, which partnered with PBS on the story. Another series on the Newshour that we love are the Brief but Spectacular portraits. My friend (and in my humble opinion national treasure) Bill Bowers was featured last year, and recently we discovered singer ZeshanB and his fabulous unique music.

The in-depth analysis and commentators on the Newshour help us to better understand the latest complex developments in Russian interference in the 2016 election and growing numbers of indictments. We can’t help but wonder what newsworthy means anymore when

George Lakoff's brilliant analysis of 45's tweets

45’s late night tweets about Oprah make headlines. Thankfully she knows how to stay away and just simply shared her response on Jimmy Kimmel’s show: “You don’t win by meeting negativity head on.”

There are good reasons to get a laugh from the comedians these days, and with Italy’s farcical election around the corner, here’s John Oliver offering to run for Prime Minister. 

Fear and Falling

Did you know that falls are the second leading cause of accidental deaths in the world? 

So you have good reasons to be afraid of falling. 

Maureen's hand showed no fractures.

Personally, I have a hard time standing on a short ladder to change a light bulb because I get vertigo, so I’ve never been the kind of person that likes rock climbing. Even when I studied dance, I was fine on the floor, but the minute my gym teacher wanted me to walk down a balance beam in gymnastics, I was frozen by fear. I am in awe of Olympian athletes who fall over and over again, practicing for perfection. In sports such as soccer, falling is as common as running. For the elderly, falling is a completely serious matter, and prevention is hardly a straightforward issue.

My mother has luckily learned to fall in a relaxed way, often taking advantage of a wall to slide down; so far she has been spared broken bones. Still, due to blood thinning medication she bruises easily, and the aches and pains after a fall take a long time to go away. We use arnica and other creams and gels, massage, hot showers, and gentle stretches to help the healing.

Even dancers need support.
Pablo Picasso
Two Dancers III, c. 1922

I taught her some basic posture secrets I have learned from my own yoga practice, and I remind her to take her time, to watch the path ahead as she takes careful steps, and to use railings or me for extra support. She has a tripod cane when she needs it. She always has on shoes or slippers with a rubber grip sole. We have eliminated rugs she can trip on, put a nightlight in the bathroom, and generally keep clear pathways throughout the apartment. But lately I have been wondering what else can be done besides these common sense preventions.

In a fascinating 2016 article by Robert Epstein, he elucidates the problems with the information processing metaphor of human intelligence. I think this is particularly informative reading for those interested in Alzheimer’s and memory shortcomings, because we tend to use that prevalent metaphor to describe the apparent wiping out of memories. Epstein explains:

Because neither ‘memory banks’ nor ‘representations’ of stimuli exist in the brain, and because all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience. 

What if the Alzheimer’s affected brain loses in part the capacity to “change in an orderly way” as a result of experience? Might certain kinds of experiences solidify knowledge that there are, for example, better and worse ways to respond during a fall? How can fear be kept in check so as not to morph into unreasonable phobia? The New York Times recently reported on a popular course in the Netherlands that teaches elderly about falling and prevention strategies. As in any learning situation, it seems that the social aspects of taking a course with others helps the experiences among instructors and participants bring in humor, lessening the paralyzing effects of irrational fear.

It may seem obvious, but many elderly people take medications that can cause dizziness, which is the third most common cause of falls for that population. Meds can make them feel faint or weak, and even slight dehydration can bring on those symptoms.

Mimi is a senior cat but she still can jump up on a lap.
When cats fall, they usually land on their feet.

This makes them even more vulnerable to falling or losing their balance. In my mother’s case, she is often reluctant to admit she needs assistance, so I have to be proactive and try to diminish the stigma she feels about being dependent on me. It helps to blame medication, so even though it may be hard to know precisely the cause of periodic lightheadedness, that’s my go to reason. Because of her memory issues due to Alzheimer’s she will often ask why this is happening to her, and she sometimes even forgets that she had a fall that presented some serious setbacks physically. Reminders that her medication may mean she needs my help to get up and moving seem to alleviate her despair in being less independent.

My goal is to get her back into the pool, as swimming has always been her favorite kind of exercise. Even walking in the water is good for the body, with water providing resistance and a safety cushion if you lose your balance. 

 

Some pools build a river with a current due to the popularity of water walking for exercise.