Strawberry Fields

bingo

I found him sitting with other residents at a long table in the multipurpose room of the skilled care nursing home playing a game of bingo. I pulled up a chair and sat alongside him, reminding him to look at his card, sometimes pointing to the correct column and repeating the number, pleased when he went to the right one and slid the little red plastic tab across it. There was a music CD playing in the background...a mix of catchy pop tunes of the sixties, songs that were played on radios so incessantly over the years that even now they slipped easily into my head. I was surprised at how quickly and thoroughly I still remembered lyrics, even to songs I disliked, and I wasn't the only one. Several residents, at least those over 60, were singing and swaying back and forth as they tended to their bingo cards.

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen. Give me down to there, shoulder length or longer...long as God can grow, my hair!

Directly across from us an older lady with blushing cheeks and white hair appeared to have dropped off into a nap. Her lipsticked mouth was open slightly and now and then she puckered her lips as though kissing the air. A young blonde assistant gently nudged her, and after trying unsuccessfully to generate any interest in the bingo card,  she held up a bottle of dark purplish nail polish, almost black, and began to paint the woman's nails. I would have pegged this lady as more of a frosty pink type, but she let her hands hang limply and acquiesced to this more dramatic spin on beautification.  

Meanwhile the bingo caller, another young girl, Hispanic and pretty, continued to chirp the numbers and write them on a board, and I rooted for my nephew and guided him gently when needed, and the music in the background filled the air like weather, a snowstorm of sugar. 

Drop your silver in my tambourine. Help a poor man fill his pretty dream...

When a Dionne Warwick song came on, I started singing too, rather close to the kid's ear.

"Sorry about that, Ryan," I said. "I know I'm not much of a singer."

He grinned. His fingers found their way to a few more called numbers, and he slid the red tabs over, getting very close to bingo in at least two different rows. On my right was the fellow I'd seen here before who is always writing tidy columns of numbers and sums in a notebook; now he was listening attentively, filling his card, numerically at ease. On his right, a large woman adorned with hair bows and a sparkly necklace was clearly on a winning streak, racking up bingos and gaily singing along: 

The moment I wake up, before I put on my make-up, I say a little prayer for you...

Eventually, almost everybody had won a game or two, including Ryan. I motioned excitedly to his card. "Can you say bingo, Ryan?" asked the bingo-calling girl. "No," he said, smiling.  No is his word.  It's a short and limiting one, but a word nonetheless, and a voice. It's good to hear a voice after months of silence, even just a syllable. I think of where he was a few months ago, comatose, on life support, and after emerging from that, a state of suspended animation, a non-responsive staring into space. One doctor called it end of life. Others made more allowances for hope. It's humbling now to see him transfer from bed to wheelchair, walk a few steps with a cane, respond to humor, give a high five.

Incense and peppermints, the color of time...He's 22 and shouldn't be in a place like this, but it's poisonous to think about all the should-haves and wish-he-hadn'ts. All that is given is this unexpected present and whatever ambiguous outcome it may yield.  I keep thinking of Humpty Dumpty's tumble from the wall, but the human brain is a vast and complex mystery, a universe that is only beginning to be explored. The young are resilient, we are told, and no two brains, or brain injuries, are alike, so who knows how much can be recovered?

And why give more credence to ominous-sounding commentators than to evidence for potential? It is impossible to imagine his experience of the world right now or what meaning he can construct, but he is responsive, he is rewiring the pathways somehow, and even if his improvement is not linear or consistent, it is remarkable nonetheless. As for me, I have not been able to comprehend any of this since the tragedy first unfolded, and although it is not my problem, it has taken a huge emotional toll on me. I'm connected by blood and history and despite divergent paths and inscrutable decisions, I'm just not callous enough to ignore it.  So I visit when I can and I find ways to help, and in a more cosmic and spiritual sense, I try to figure out what I believe in and how to pray, and when my heart grows too heavy I turn away and return to my own life because I have the luxury of doing so, and I finally understand, thank goodness, that this is okay.  

Hello, lamp post, whatcha knowin'? I've come to watch your flowers growing...

Maybe we were at "life I love you, all is groovy" when an officious young administrator called me over for a quick conference in a corner of the multipurpose room.  "I'm not telling you anything I haven't told your sister," she said, "but she needs to give me a discharge plan for him."

Actually, she said a lot of things, but that was the essence of it.  She was smaller than me even in her high-heeled shoes, and her black hair was pulled back tightly from her forehead, and she reminded me of a student who doesn't know the answer to a question and is going to bluff her way through. I told her the truth, which is that my sister is doing everything humanly possible to figure this out. I asked if there was someone who could advise and help her.

"We've told her what she needs to do," she said, which didn't sound the same as helping.  She was trying to be business-like, I know, but she was the kind of person who wouldn't look you straight in the eye. She was very young but she had a deflating effect on me, and I felt that there were lessons in gentleness and heart that life had not yet taught her. 

Hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better...I walked back to Ryan, who had been presented with a basket of bingo prizes from which to choose...mostly ties and toiletries. The girls were trying to sell him on a bright shiny bicycle bell for his wheelchair and I completely understood his refusal. I urged him to choose something for his mom instead, and he selected a tiny aerosol atomizer of fragrance...musk, I think. I arrayed others in front of him but he kept going back to that one. It was powder blue in color and small and light. I told him I would leave it in the room for her, and that I had to go.  

Then I handed him a magazine to look at while he waited for lunch. It was an animal magazine, a good one with some excellent pictures of cats, and he immediately began to turn the pages and look at the images. It hurt to say good-bye to him, and I had to turn away quickly so he wouldn't see my tears.  

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields...nothing is real...and nothing to get hung about.