August
She still has not gone digital. Bubs has had the same small gold watch since 1960 when my grandpa bought it for her at the Narita airport. The watch is unexpectedly elegant, given its elastic wristband. It has these bold rectangular beads that simulate the latch type of watch wristbands that satisfyingly snap shut. The watch has no battery and every five days or so, Bubs asks me the time on my computer screen. She’ll sit on the Rubbermaid stepstool in her room concentrating her worn, mildly plump hitchhiker thumb and index finger on tweaking the minute hand and then finish off the treatment with a couple vigorous twists to wind up the watch again for the upcoming week. She is not Miss Havisham – she makes sure time keeps moving.
Unlike me, Bubs is on a steady, healthy descent, rather than ascent. She is happy with her routine at home, excited by time going by. She’s eager to hear about my journeys as they move onward and upward, ready to help me back up when I trip and fall into a small valley. Yet, with every weekly watch wind, Bubs brings herself closer, asymptotically close to what we all know is the end, the intersection of her path and the ground again, until she dips under, happily smiling from below, always remembered. Bubs has been a widow for almost thirty years and is the last of her ten siblings to still be living. She embraces time, fully aware of its ineffable ability to build us all up, with the ultimate goal to merely set us back down. She smiles at us, and we smile right back, often with a tearful glimmer in our eyes, happy and proud of her, though also bracing ourselves for impact.
At night, she usually turns in after dinner, but only after insisting on doing the dishes. I’m used to the slightly cold touch of her moist raisin fingertips as she kisses me goodnight. She steadily walks up the stairs to brush her teeth in the dark of her bathroom, usually with door slightly ajar. She doesn’t need the light – for her it would just be a small waste of electricity. In the morning, she wakes up 9:00, or if it was a particularly busy the day before, 9:30, and is downstairs in one of her two cardigan sweaters, sitting on the wooden stool in the kitchen, waiting for her one and a half slices of toast. She likes coffee, but Dr. Gershengorn says caffeine is no good with her blood pressure, so she drinks decaf Lipton tea every morning, in the same mug from the Houston classical music radio station. She puts a light layer of marmalade on her toast and often sits in the kitchen, instead of at the dining room table, because the sun is hard on her eyes. The shade of the kitchen is nicer. She usually spends the rest of the morning reading the Wall Street Journal or maybe the Atlantic Monthly.
When we all have dinner together, she helps heat things in the microwave, carefully setting the power level and time, and then will scurry over to the TV to watch the Jeopardy 7 – 7:30 broadcast and laugh at one of Alex Trebek’s snide remarks. She’s Canadian too. She will often go over to the American Heritage Dictionary by her place at the dinner table and look up an unfamiliar word or author from final Jeopardy, adding further annotation with an intentionally dull pencil that no longer has an eraser. Whenever the commercials come on, she quickly mutes the TV but continues to watch. She walks back to the kitchen though whenever there is a pharmaceutical ad with animated platelets or blood clots. She keeps herself busy taking the zucchini out of the microwave.
Nanny has not gone digital either, and has a whole bunch of different watches. Recently, she has worn this small analog black watch that has no numbers around the edge. It’s powered by a battery. Whenever I talk to her, she is cheery, never sure of her own schedule, but curious about me. She fixates on the weather and tells me that she checks San Francisco and Boston every morning in the LA Times. She is not clear on certain things, but always remembers that I’m flying east next week. Then, she asks her caretaker, Mila, to take a peek at the thermometer outside. This thermometer is one of those fifteen dollar ones you can get at small hardware stores with a little spring coil that contracts and expands. A thick layer of green filmy moss covers most of the screen and the red cardinal in the background. ‘It is 82 right now, in Encino.’ I quickly glance down at my phone and see it’s 57 where I am and tell her ‘around 60.’
Nanny never really knows what time it is. On her watch is could be 5:25 or 5:27 and she wouldn’t know the difference. She probably wouldn’t even notice if her watch stopped, the lame battery acting as a place holder behind the small watch face. Nanny, though not an old troubled Victorian woman, is oddly like Miss Havisham and sometimes wishes time would stop. Instead of following the natural, inevitable curvature of her trajectory, in her head, she has reached a pleasant plateau, still living in the same house that my dad grew up in. Much to her chagrin, she no longer lives by herself, though her independence and youth are most important to her. If it’s the right time of the month, she may have an appointment at the beauty parlor to get a wash, or maybe get a set. Her hair color is as unpredictable as the weather, shifting gradually from different hues of brunette, and summery blonde. Everyone but her can see her sliding down the precarious slippery slope, her health and physical stamina wavering. It’s too steep and none of us have the ice picks to help her back up.
Recently, breakfast is not just a part of Nanny’s routine; it’s an activity in and of itself. She may slowly saunter to eat breakfast at 10:30, maybe 11:00, drink a couple cups of coffee while her cheerios sit in too much milk, losing their crunch. That’s how she likes it. She reads the paper and flips through the pages far to fast, glancing at some pictures and ads, until she finds the weather, at the back of the sports section. Nanny sits at the head of table, the rest of the table cluttered with mail in haphazard piles and her caretaker to her right, drinking her own cup of black coffee. Sometimes, breakfast will stretch into lunch, and Mila cuts some carrots and celery with a knife from the 1960’s, now dangerously dull.
If it looks like it’s the right temperature, Mila will carefully walk with Nanny down the precarious steps in her garage to her white Camry. My dad remembers walking down those stairs and still wishes his initials, not his brother’s, were in the cement on the bottom stair. Mila drives both of them down the manicured Encino hill to Havenhurst to walk. Nanny takes her pink visor from the glove compartment and adjusts it while glancing at the car mirror. Mila comes around to help Nanny up and out of the low clearance sedan and they walk together along a flat patch of lawns, magnolia trees and homes with Spanish tile roofs.
That evening, my dad sits with me while we watch some crime show on CBS and hands me the phone to talk to Nanny. We talk about the weather and I ask her about her day and her dinner. She’s had salmon. Again. She always says salmon, but we really never know. I mouth the word ‘salmon’ to my dad, who takes a deep breath, and lets out a resigned laugh. Mila has just sent us an email telling us she had cooked a whole chicken and had frozen the leftovers and the broth for later. She asks me about the weather again, and I gently remind her we’ve already talked about that, with a gentle verbal nudge: ‘Remember?’. Nanny is in front of her TV, watching the Lakers, munching on peanuts from a family sized container she keeps under the coffee table in her living room. She tells me to ‘sleep tight, wake up right’ and sends me a kiss. I send one back.
November
Thanksgiving is different than those of the past. Since I left, Bubs, usually stable, has had a small scare, fainted and was hospitalized for a couple days in October. Nanny is essentially done recovering from a fractured pelvis. Both now have a new accessory, a small emergency button that hangs around their necks. Both are a little ashamed and Bubs complains and jokes that it is uncomfortable. If either of them were to fall, they can press this button and there will be a voice on the other end, helping them and calling paramedics or whatever else. Yet with these new developments, Nanny, unlike Bubs, sadly sees the phrase ‘growing old’ as oxymoronic. Some things are comfortingly similar for my first visit home. Bubs still finds herself busy on her home turf, in our kitchen, sitting on the wooden stool peeling potato after potato, systematically in one clean coil, the wet washed potato skins slowly aging her hands into raisins. Nanny sits on the couch, as my dad’s sister laughs, as she re-teaches Nanny to fold napkins to help set the table. Nanny talks to Bubs again about how she used to host 35 people for Thanksgiving every year when my dad was little. Bubs as usual tells her how impressed she is. ‘Entertaining is a lot of work.’ Nanny is tangled in the traditions of the past, occasionally a little resistant to the idea of creating new ones with her expanded family. Everyone chuckles as we promise to bring out the old bingo game that she used to entertain when my dad was my age. Bubs still doesn’t feel too comfortable with all of the traditions of Thanksgiving. She’s Canadian. She grew up with Japanese immigrant parents in Vancouver. Thanksgiving is an American holiday. Bubs raised my mom in Houston, TX, but still has never voted in an US presidential election. She’s proud of her green card and the Commonwealth. Nanny takes a glance at the daikon Bubs chopped in the corner of the kitchen as her small new contribution to the American feast.
The turkey is good, could have been a little moister. This year, basting is not my mom’s only priority. The cranberries go fast and at the end of the meal, the small bowl of daikon just has a little pickly puddle at the bottom, no more radish to be seen. Most of us notice and appreciate Bubs’ new side dish, soon to join our Thanksgiving canon of food in the years to come. Bubs notices also, and seems quite happy with herself and her contribution, though she very well knows this could be one of her last Thanksgiving dinners. Nanny doesn’t notice at all. Nanny tries to help clear the table, but we all stop her. No need for her to walk unsteadily and hurt herself or drop those plates we like that we bought from an estate sale down the street. Bubs quietly brings over her dishes and smiles at me as she stacks mine under hers. After the last smear of gravy is wiped away and all that can be heard from the kitchen is the low hum of the dishwasher starting, Nanny and Bubs sit at the table, both smiling and little tired from eating and working. Bubs takes her normal sips from her trusty mug, this time just full of hot water; Nanny finishes off her second cup of decaf coffee. Both are ready to turn in, Nanny’s hands a little sticky from the apple pie, Bubs’ once again a little cold and wet from helping wash the dishes. I go over to Nanny to give her a hug and kiss good night. ‘See you in the morning.’
Nanny shakily sets her mug down on the coaster with an uneasy staccato clang. And with a serene satisfied smirk, as if her mug were her own skull of Yorick, she calmly replies ‘I hope so.’