Coming Around the Mountain
I will never give up on Norma. There are too many surprises left.
Her illness enlarged so gradually that I can't put a finger on the moment we had to admit that something bad—and probably irreversible—was happening. But it must have been at least four or five years back. The slowness was a gift because there's never been a day when grief has overwhelmed me. That's because there's still so much brightness inside her.
Today was basically pure fun. It began when I heard her ritual “Hello?” from her bedroom. I had already been up for a couple of hours. So I didn't feel like I had to talk her back to bed to snag a couple more hours of sleep. I was in the dining room, sipping alternately from a cup of coffee and a screwdriver when she called out to me.
I walked down the hall, and there she stood behind the expandable dog door that keeps her mutt Cooper out of her room. Radiant, she was not. “Jesus Christ!” I said, “You look like you dried your hair in a blender.” That struck her as funny and she chuckled all the way into the living room, where Cooper danced around at her feet in what was clearly simulated enthusiasm. Dogs are devious and will go to any length to get treats.
Norma's a little shaky when it comes to reciting the alphabet, but she is quick to detect a punchline or comic exaggeration. And just as quick to laugh at it.
It being a Saturday, we didn't have our usual TV programs to nibble away our day. Last night, we had watched Hitchcock's “The Birds.” I reminded her of the time we took our granddaughter Sean and grandson Greg to Ralph Stanley's bluegrass festival and I had regaled them with stories of how shocking and scary “The Birds'' was. When they went back home and watched it, they thought the graphics were so primitive it was a laugh riot.
Keeping things morbid, we watched a DVD of “Deliverance” today, and, just as I thought, Norma was enchanted by the movies “Dueling Banjos” theme. She hummed along with it happily whenever it surfaced, no matter how grim the proceedings on stage were. I had never seen more than snippets of the movie and was surprised at how much its storyline paralleled the theme of Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat.” This revelation I didn't bother Norma with (so please indulge me while I bother you).
This evening we turned our attention to the PBS re-airing of the Hank Williams segment of the Ken Burns country music series. As I've mentioned before, Norma has trouble finding enough words to complete a sentence. But when she was watching a clip of Flatt & Scruggs performing, she turned to me and said, “They know how to work it.” What have we here? I thought. Later she hummed happily throughout Hank singing “I Saw the Light.”
Although she was quite good at it, the very proper Miss Norma has never found humor in the sex act—which is the precise reason I resort to it now and then in an attempt to break her up. Tonight, she asked me to take her to bed, which I pretend to mistake as an invitation to romp. Taking her by the shoulders and staring into her eyes, I said, “Norma, I've had a very rich sex life. I only wish I'd had someone to share it with.” That does it. She giggles all the way into the boudoir.
Now here's the best part. As she was sitting in her bathroom waiting for me to help her into her pajamas, she said—as she has so often before—” I want to go home.” I don't know what brought it to my mind, but determined that the day musn't end on a wistful note, I began singing, “She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes.”
Norma's eyes light up, and I swear to god, she holds her hands up in the manner of a flamenco dancer and begins snapping her fingers. Hell, she didn't do that when she was “well.” I am still beaming.