Travels With Gogs: Florida

From her post in the kitchen at Command Central, my mother grabs the phone. The surface of her desk is strewn with items like the small pink shell dish containing her daily pill regimen of krill oil, vitamin D, Alkazone (an alkaline booster) and PS ("the ultimate brain food.") Her address books are fanned out before her, plaid strands of Christmas ribbon serving as page markers. Her Florida friends are highlighted in yellow. There is a list of impending social events, dinners and bridge games written in red marker, columns of things to do. She's got piles of carefully scissored-out articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. There's a flyer from EarthingSecrets.com.

"Hello?" she says. "Who? No, this is her mother. It's Helene! And how's himself?"

"Mom," I interrupt, "Is that for me?"

Without meeting my eyes, she gesticulates in such a way that means can't you see I'm on the phone?

We go to hear Alan Mulally, President and CEO of the Ford Motor Company tell us the Ford Story during The Five O'Clock Hour. As we inch toward the lecture room over the checkerboard marble floor, I wonder why there isn't an assemblage of wheelchairs to speed elderly people along. 

"Big steps," I urge Mom. "Big steps. Keep walking."

"I am walking!" she retorts, leaning on her leopard spotted cane.  I hold her left arm in a steady grip.

I maneuver her to the front row of a side room where there is a large TV screen so she can see Mulally,  who is in a larger room nearby.

"How did we ever get to sit in the front row?" she asks. Even though her vision is spotty, she spies a little clipboard fitted with an index card and pencil on the seat where I am to sit. She goes for it.

"Oh," she asks, "Did you get one of these too?"

Mulally is an animated speaker and Mom takes notes. Then I feel her head on my shoulder. I nudge her.

"What?" she whispers.

"You were asleep," I tell her softly.

"I was not."

I am reminded of a time when she and my father were at the opera and there was a sudden loud and insistent snore in my mother's vicinity. My father, lost in the music, became the innocent recipient of a vicious pinch.

I nudge her again. And again.

As we creep back over the marble checkerboard floor, my mother stops to tell a few dozen people that her grandfather was a friend of Henry Ford, and that her family had one of the first convertibles ever made, a dreamy shade of blue.

"Everyone wanted to go for a ride in it," she says. "I was very popular."

Over dinner at the Lemon Tree with its complimentary glass of wine and bland food, I remember the earlier phone call.

"Who was that on the phone before?" I enquire.

My mother gives me a blank look.

"When?"

"You know, someone called before the lecture and asked for me and you started talking..."

"I have no idea," she says. "What did I say?"

After dinner, as my mother slowly turns herself around so she can lower herself into the front seat of the car, she pauses and straightens up, cocking an ear.

There is a small group of people clustered on the sidewalk, chatting and moving their arms in animated conversation.

Mom waves in their direction.

"What?" she calls. "Did someone say Helene?"