The Pub

We Are All Antiques

Cora Mills

We are taking a walk, three generations long.  Every Saturday, my grandmother, aunt, father, and I make our weekly trip along the rocky path that circles 1.63 miles around our local YMCA.  It has become one of those outings that none of us seems to notice anymore, a sojourn that we make, habitual and necessary.

Another Saturday. We have just picked up my grandma and are rolling into the Y parking lot.  Aunt Shelley drives up in her lime green car; the vehicle that lets the rest of the Midwestern world know she is “not from around these parts.”  Last year my aunt turned, as she puts it, “fashionably fifty” and celebrated with a manicure and spa package deal. She is always trying to isolate her age and, as a senior consultant at Mary Kay cosmetics, she has become well trained in fusing vogue and vintage.

“Hey guys! Glad I’m not late, but you wouldn’t believe the traffic on Dupont,” she yells in greeting as Dad helps my grandma out of the car.

“It’s always like this on Saturdays.  Evening entertainment rush,” Dad responds as the four of us start down the path.

“Midwestern drivers, slow as my last husband. You know, I swear, I’d like to take the driving exam here just to see how some of you all are allowed on the road to begin with.  I swear, I would.”

My aunt moved from Utah back to Fort Wayne when we found out my grandma was sick, a U-turn from her teenage days when her life’s dream was to escape Indiana.  Grandma Mills has frontal lobe dementia, a disease that strips her of short-term memory as well as other social inhibitions that would be desirable in a woman whose mind is crowded with a lifetime of long-term memories shrouded by bipolar disorder.  My grandma’s personality shifts in polar extremes.  At one end, she is a woman who loves her children and whose mind records, biased by contentedness, only scrapbook-worthy memories.  At the other, she deteriorates into a woman whose past wounds of divorce, attempted-suicide, and the estrangement of her children are still bleeding.  My grandma’s navigation through the gaps in her memory is like driving over potholes while trying to read a map; she always loses her place at the next bump and never quite recognizes where she is or if she missed that last turn.

Grandma Mills points to a small shrine of forget-me-not flowers that flank the entirety of the path. “Look at those flowers! Just beautiful. Scott, how’d you find this place? I’ve never been to a spot like this before. Gorgeous.”

My grandma cannot function by herself anymore.  Although she is in spectacular physical shape for seventy-two—even now she’s running up the path ahead of us—her mental capacities are unreliable, coming and going as they please like transients in a library.  Her fragmented mind has rendered my grandmother incapable of living on her own.  One would never realize this, though, upon first meeting her.  Under initial observation, she seems the same as any grandmother—smiling, laughing, engaging—but listen a little longer and you’ll hear the duplication in her speech like a voiceover in a museum exhibit that repeats every three minutes.

The decision to place my grandma in an institution was primarily my dad’s, but his brother and sister were in full support.  Now, Grandma Mills lives in a nursing home, although my parents refuse to call it by that name. Dad chides, “It’s not a nursing home, it’s a memory care residence,” the way people call dumps “waste disposal facilities” when everyone knows they’re still where you store your junk.

We walk together along the graveled patch, pebbles crunching under us like Styrofoam peanuts.  Grandma Mills is out of breath after only a short distance now.  We catch up to her and Dad puts his arm around her shoulder, a comforting and simultaneously patronizing gesture.

“I almost made it to that curb, see? Right…whew…right there. Almost made it.” Grandma Mills clutches her chest now, heaving for breath.

“You sure did, Mom. You’re still in great shape for being fifty-two.”

“Oh, shush you,” my grandma gently feign-punches Dad’s shoulder as his comment wipes twenty years away from her.

“This gettin’ older is sure not for sissies,” my grandma laments.

Same every Saturday. Habitual as always, my aunt begins to talk about the past.  She recalls a time thirty years ago to when she and my father were teenagers and she turns to Dad to ask him whether they share similar memories.

“Scott, do you remember going on those road trips out West?”

My dad laughs, showing he remembers.

“I don’t remember much about where we went—just those endless hours in the car.  We stocked up on piles of junk food.  Mom always had two bags: one of ho-hos and twinkies and the other of comic books.  She was great, weren’t you mom?”

My grandmother looks up at this now, wondering if she has heard her son right as he mentions her name with praise. She laughs; my father has evoked pleasant memories.

“I used to absolutely love those trips. I’ve got some photos back home in a box by the front door closet. You’ll get those down when we go back to my house, won’t you, Scott?”

My father changes the subject.  Grandma Mills no longer has a house; it was sold a year ago.

We  now pass the blue flowers as the gravel path curves, and my grandma, as if on cue for the scene she has rehearsed a hundred times, remarks about how beautiful they are, the way she does every Saturday.  Neither my father nor my aunt listen, their attention is impervious to the comment my grandma has made so many times

“You know how we used to read those Archie books?” my father continues on, “Well, now I see them in antique shops and on eBay. They’re going for nearly $50 a book.” Dad is addicted to eBay.  Ten years ago when the commemorative state quarters were released, he began collecting them, claiming them as an investment to my college education.

At this my aunt throws back her dyed cherry-red hair and lets out a whoop as only my aunt can.  Aunt Shelley is a woman who can flaunt cheetah fur.

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope, check it out for yourself.  I should see how much those Batman comics I had are going for.  We’ve still got them stashed away, somewhere.”

“My gosh, I wish I would have saved mine. It seems like all the junk from our day is getting bought up and sold off at auction.  I can’t believe—I just can’t believe it. Well, I guess we are all antiques now.”

In the basement of my house there is a room we call the “junk room” because it houses everything that we have cast aside from the present, but cannot bring ourselves to throw away.  It is a graveyard full of papers, cards, 7^th grade homework, Christmas decorations, photos, broken furniture, and other memorials to the dead past.  This is where Dad’s comics will be; this is where Grandma Mills’ photos will be, boxed and forgotten in a morgue of sentimentality.

“Look at those flowers! They’re absolutely gorgeous. Scott, how’d you find this spot?”

I look at the silver ring on my pointer finger.  I bought it at a retro shop last summer where it had been preserved for nearly forty years under glass- still as silver as it had been when it was crafted.  But now, after two months of wear, it has begun to fade, discoloring to a rusty copper, erasing four decades of preservation. I look from the ring to Grandma Mills. .

“Where are we, Scott? I’ve never been here before and I want to make sure I remember to come back.”

We are circling around back to the parking lot.  Aunt Shelley and my father have quickened their pace, eager to return to the cars now in sight.  They walk immersed in each other’s company, laughing about some joke my father has told.  Grandma Mills has trailed back, bending down to pluck a blue flower.

“Just beautiful,” I hear her murmur, but I am as unresponsive  as my father and aunt, wondering what antiques I have collected and if the blue flowers will be one of them.  I  wonder what item in the basement will iron out the wrinkles in my memory.

The gravel path blends into pavement as we reach the car, cloaked in copper twilight. The blue night seeps over the horizon as one generation after another climbs into the same car to sit for a moment together.  My grandma clutches the blue flower in her weathered hand, her veins root-like as she clenches the stem, as though  to make sure it stays real a little while longer.  Another Saturday.  Another souvenir.

“Shelley, did you see those flowers? The blue ones. Beautiful.”

“I sure did, Mom,” my aunt says, wrapping her arm around her mother’s shoulder and giving it a tight squeeze.

We are all antiques, my aunt says.  Some of us fade with time, becoming junk stuffed in a basement room; yet, others appreciate with value, clutched tightly in the hands of future collectors.