Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Friday, July 24, 1998

4 PM. Yesterday at this time Teresa’s mother called from Mattituck and asked if I could go over to the nursing home. The doctors there had phoned and said that her mother was not doing well. They were planning to go after breakfast, but Teresa’s mother still had a bad stomach virus and wasn’t well enough to travel.

Grateful for the chance to be of use, I drove over to North Shore Hospital and saw Agnes. When they asked me what my relation to Agnes was, I said I was her nephew.

She looked like death to me. Actually, when I walked into her room at first I was afraid she had already died. Her mouth was open, so I could hear her breathing, but her appearance reminded me of a skeleton.

She was very agitated, trying to take off her bedclothes. She succeeded in part for a minute, and I saw that she no longer had any breasts left; she looked like the victims of concentration camps did in those horrible old photos.

Hooked up to an IV that was giving her some hydration (a sucrose and sodium solution), she kept holding her arm in a way that caused the machine to beep and trigger a red alarm and say “OCCLUSION.”

The aides at the station couldn’t hear it, so I got them to call a nurse to reinsert the IV, but it didn’t help much. When I saw the date on the IV, 11/29/98, I got confused and wondered what it meant – until I realized it was her birthdate in 1898.

The aides said I should tell her daughter to come tomorrow, and of course I said I was going to do that anyway. I sat with Agnes for about an hour, smoothing what little hair she had left and trying to hold her hand.

She didn’t talk, but at one point she startled me by reaching out and grabbing both sides of my face, drawing me near to her, almost mouth to mouth. For a minute it terrified me, as if Death was making me kiss her – but all she wanted to do, I now think, was to say something to me.

Only a couple of times did Agnes wink or make that shrugging gesture that was so familiar to me. It was a privilege to be so intimate with someone so close to death, someone 99 years old whose body and mind are – to be honest – decrepit. I’ve never seen somebody die, but this was pretty close.

The woman in the other bed in the room, who spent the whole time I was there watching TV (Eyewitness News), seemingly oblivious to Agnes’s state, asked me, “Does she talk? She never answers me.”

At a pay phone downstairs, I called Mom, who thanked me for the $100 check I’d sent, saying she was using it to pay off some of Marc’s creditors who keep hounding her by phone. I think Mom felt pleased that I turned to her for advice about Teresa’s grandmother.

Mom said they would probably transfer Agnes to the hospital if death were imminent and not let her die next to a roommate.

On Northern Boulevard, I stopped off and finally used my Macy’s credit card to buy a piece of luggage on a clearance sale for $29. I also went to the Barnes & Noble and to Häagen-Dazs before coming back here.

Paul was helpful to talk to, although he doesn’t go to the nursing home because of a bad experience with his own dying grandmother. He complained about Teresa, and when I spoke to Teresa on the phone, she complained about him.

I am in an awkward position and try to avoid taking sides, but there’s a lot of tension over Teresa’s Fire Island catering work and a lot of friction between Teresa and Paul’s kids, particularly P.J.

Paul said he told his son, “I understand that you can barely tolerate Teresa,” but P.J. said that wasn’t so. Still, Teresa’s bombastic personality and attitude that she knows what’s best for everyone – including, of course, Cat, P.J. and Jade – makes life difficult.

I didn’t want to be drawn into the “problem” of Cat’s taking her final 12 credits of college at C.W. Post rather than the cheaper Empire State College, as Teresa believes is best.

However, after spending time with her grandmother at the nursing home yesterday, I did go to sleep last night feeling a little more useful around here. I slept okay and was up pretty early again.

This morning I spoke to Alice and agreed to meet her at 1 PM on Sunday, so I can get to see her before I go back to Florida.

A call to the Florida Unemployment hotline let me know that my $550 check was issued yesterday, so I don’t have to do a job search verification and hopefully can get the next two checks before going back to work.

Today I stayed close to home. I bought baguettes and grapes and other stuff for Paul to take to Fire Island tomorrow, and I bought roast beef for Jade’s lunch sandwiches. I do pay for some of the food around here, and of course I fill up Teresa’s gas tank, and this morning I found a recipe for saffron-pine nuts orzo that she needed.

Josh had emailed me some lame list forwarded by people who thought it was funny, so I called him and left a message on his machine. Scott called from Albany, where he was in court, to invite me to a barbecue at his house on Saturday for some of M.J.’s business associates – and I hope to go.

Sat Darshan emailed that Marc called her last night. I didn’t realize Marc gets off work at 7 PM, which is why I never get him in. She told him I usually go to bed before 10 PM (7 PM in Phoenix), but I’ll try to stay up and get him tonight before he goes to Prescott for the weekend.

Sat Darshan says that Marc feels hesitant about his job with AirTouch, that he doesn’t know enough – even though his bosses keep assuring him that it will take three months to learn everything and that they seem to be grooming him to run his own store.

But Marc feels it’s more of a service business than it is sales, which is where his expertise lies. Marc misses me, Sat Darshan says. I miss him – and Phoenix, too. I also miss Los Angeles and Libby, Grant, Lindsay and Wyatt, and I regret that I haven’t spoken to Kevin lately.

It’s funny how I can simultaneously have lives in New York, Florida, Arizona and California – but I like the feeling that I do.

At 3 PM, I went to Starbucks, where Jade’s friend Marie told me my iced tea was free, so of course I put the money in the tip box for Marie and the other Starbucks employees.

My face has broken out because of the humidity, and after all those months of living in dry climates, now I again have to put on athlete’s foot medication every morning.

Sometimes I feel so enormously lucky to have experienced my life.

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Saturday, July 25, 1998

9 PM. I just got home from Westchester. It was a beautiful day, and it’s a cool, dry evening. Last night I stayed up till 10:30 PM so I could call Marc when he got home from work.

We spoke for about an hour. Basically they think he’s doing a great job and he’s got a meeting on Monday with Tripp, the whiz who hired him and who had previously worked for Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.

But Marc says he’s not used to the corporate bullshit: the bureaucratic procedures, constant evaluations, and ridiculously onerous paperwork. Because pagers are malfunctioning regularly and customers are upset about their bills, he’s not so much selling as dealing with irate people all day. So that’s unpleasant.

Also, everyone at AirTouch is very new, and they seem to be “throwing shit against the wall haphazardly to see what sticks.” Marc is astute enough to know that there are a lot of things they’re trying out that are irrelevant or unworkable.

He’s got his own desk and cubicle, where he’s constantly swamped with paperwork. Their computers’ hardware is on ancient systems not compatible even with those of AirTouch’s cellular phone company.

But he plans to stick it out and see what happens. However, he can see that this whole Phoenix retailing scheme may collapse. Still, it’s easier to get another job when one already has a job, and the woman from the check-cashing store told Marc to call her if he ever wants to work for them.

Marc works from 10 AM to 7 PM, so I can probably call him in the morning more easily than at night. He was going to Prescott today, saying he enjoyed the recent heavy monsoon rains because it was a change from constant sunshine.

Just before I called Marc, Teresa phoned from Fire Island, telling me to put on Channel 5, where Stewart Klein was back, reviewing Saving Private Ryan. He looked gaunt and ill, but pretty good for a man who was supposed to be dead by the Fourth of July.

After lunch at noon today, I left for Hartsdale. Taking the Whitestone Bridge and Bronx River Parkway, I made the 40-mile drive in about 45 minutes, and I was the first to arrive, so I helped Scott cook the burgers, hot dogs, corn and chicken on the barbecue.

M.J. started her company in March, and all the guests were her employees. Scott said he couldn’t relate to them because they were “so young,” but I’m used to hanging out with people in their twenties and don’t feel the generation gap that Scott kept harping on. Perhaps it’s because I look younger?

“You have no gray hair,” the all-gray Scott marveled, and he has a pot belly, and since a Club Med vacation with another couple who smoked, he’s begun smoking again, against doctor’s orders, because the nicotine patch gave him a rash and he was allergic to anti-nicotine drugs.

I did enjoy talking with Scott and telling him about old friends from college like Teresa, Sat Darshan, Mark, Ronna and Alice. (He confuses Ronna and Alice.)

Scott is working on some interesting cases, including one in federal court in which a grossly overweight applicant for a position as court officer is saying that his obesity is a disability under the ADA and that he needs extra time to take the test, which he failed the first time.

He’s also challenging a subpoena duces tecum in a labor dispute which orders him to produce his notes from contract negotiations.

The other guests included Beth, a woman our age from Brooklyn who’s a consultant to M.J., and M.J.’s employees: two young Asian women and one black woman and their boyfriends, and two white guys, one from Chicago and the other from Denmark, both of whom were gay and somewhat cute.

Brianna is now six years old, about to enter first grade at Horace Mann. She’s a cute kid with an off-the-charts IQ who Scott swears can read on high school level. She was teaching Beth how to play chess although she herself just learned a couple of months ago.

Of course, I ate sparingly, just fruit and some corn and Diet Cokes, but I did help serve the food and clean up afterwards. To me, it’s invigorating being around young professionals, and I asked them a lot of questions about interior design and their corporate clients.

Scott played Dylan and other music from the ’60s and ’70s and put on a klezmer CD that had all the young people nonplussed – they thought it was German beer-hall music – and he showed off his old soda jerk talents by making egg creams with Fox’s U-Bet Syrup.

Privately, Scott told me he has no money because of Brianna’s expenses and the upkeep of the house and starting M.J.’s business – but of course, they live pretty well. Still, I know what he means.

Scott may have a Mercedes, but he insists it’s not conspicuous consumption. I agreed that it’s not, though I suspect his anti-materialist values from college have shifted a bit more than Scott admits. Whose haven’t?

Scott still likes a good joke and told some funny stories. I like M.J., who’s warm and friendly. I was the last person to leave, hugging Scott and M.J. and saying goodbye to their two dogs.

(Why is it that as I’ve gotten older, other people’s dogs seem to take to me? I never used to get licked so much when I was younger.)

Radio reports said there were long delays on the Whitestone and Throgs Neck, so I took the Triborough – Teresa’s EZ-Pass helped me get through the toll booth – and then rode leisurely along Northern Boulevard, stopping at Wendy’s in Bayside.

I couldn’t get the Sunday Times on Main Street in Flushing, although there were plenty of Chinese and Korean newspapers on sale there.

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Sunday, July 26, 1998

6 PM. I’m tired because I woke up at 2 AM and never could get back to sleep. My mind raced all night – with good stuff, not bad stuff, but I’m just so sleep-deprived now.

Leaving the house at 8:30 AM, I was in Manhattan by 9:45 AM, parking across from Cardozo Law School at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, halfway between Alice’s and Josh’s.

After hanging out a little in Josh’s apartment, we went to an outdoor café on Third Avenue for breakfast.

Gabrielle is pregnant. It happened on her last visit, of course; Josh had told her to give up her IUD because he felt it was causing her recurrent carcinomas in the area, but she didn’t replace it with any other form of birth control.

“It’s untimely,” Josh said, although he’d been planning to get a bigger apartment so she could move in with him after studying for and passing the test to become an R.N. (Her German license is similar but not transferable.) There was never any question of an abortion although she’s had pain and bleeding and so may have already had a miscarriage.

Josh wants to marry Gabrielle and he wants the child to be Jewish (I told him it seemed a matter of a simple mikvah) and of course he still won’t set foot in Germany – which I view as another of his bizarre affectations.

He laughed derisively when I said I could relate because I won’t set foot in Israel until there’s also a Palestinian state.

Gabrielle’s stepfather – the only father she’s known – is a millionaire, currently in Abu Dhabi on business, and her mother, Josh said, is this uncaring Danish woman who left Gabrielle in the care of her own parents until she married when Gabrielle was seven.

Gabrielle won’t work for at least a year after the baby is born, and if her pregnancy is as difficult as she expects, she may not even travel here till she’s in her sixth month and feels it’s safe.

Josh says he has no money and doesn’t know how he’s going to afford this now. Of course, if the child is born here, it would be a citizen. Gabrielle, as a German citizen, will get a decent stipend to take care of the child even if she’s living abroad – but she’ll lose her disability payments if she travels to the U.S. during a difficult pregnancy.

I don’t know how this will resolve itself, but I think – though I didn’t say – that Gabrielle planned to get pregnant.

It’s also odd that someone with such an animus against Germans would end up with a German woman as the mother of his child. Well, Josh is crazy, and we all know that except for him and Gabrielle.

I went with him to see an apartment advertised on the Internet, but it was a small one-bedroom and a five-story walk-up that would be impossible for them to deal with if they have a baby.

Josh and I walked around the East Village and went to get iced tea and coffee and sit at an outside table at the Starbucks on Astor Place until 1 PM, when I went to see Alice.

She and I ate, also outside, at the Zen Palace. Alice said Madrid “was very hot, but my sister-in-law was cold” and missing most of the time whenever she and Andreas – who was there for the first few days – spent time with her brother and his kids, who are now seven and three. (Alice says they are blond and blue-eyed and “don’t look Jewish.”)

From Madrid, Alice went to Lisbon, but the World’s Fair was a terrible disappointment because there were no rides and “it was like a big boring science fair.”

Alice said the owner of the Richard Simmons Newsletter sold it to a publisher in Virginia after lying to her that he was only bringing in a venture capitalist to infuse some money. She had planned to ask for a raise, and while she’s nervous about what’s going on, she hired a lawyer to negotiate with the new owner.

Alice feels she’s in a strong position because basically her editing is responsible for the high renewal rate, and the new owner will probably want to avoid any disruption during the transition.

My manuscript is still with Little, Brown, though naturally she assumes they’re not going to take it. My own hunch is that they lost it somewhere in the office.

Back at her apartment, I showed Alice how to delete files on Microsoft Word and I showed her how to access the Internet, use a search engine, and bookmark some Web sites she’ll want to see regularly. I’ve never met someone my age who is otherwise savvy who’s also so dim-witted about computers as is Alice.

Leaving Manhattan before 4 PM, I got home a little over an hour later. Teresa was annoyed that I didn’t want to accompany her to the nursing home, but I’m exhausted. I never exercised today and I have yet to open the Sunday New York Times.

I wish I were going to Philadelphia tomorrow instead of the next day. Maybe I’ll feel better once I get some sleep.

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Wednesday, July 29, 1998

11 PM. I’m not used to such a late-night household as Ronna and Matthew’s, but he comes home from the hospital after 8 PM, and even four-year-old Chelsea doesn’t go to sleep until at least 10 PM.

Last night I slept well but hardly enough, because I was up at 5:30 AM. I listened to Morning Edition on WHYY, had some oatmeal, and shaved. At 7 AM, I set up my portable TV to exercise with Body Electric on a PBS channel, 35.

It was a little embarrassing when Matthew and Chelsea came down and saw me working out, but I’m sure everyone realizes that I’m bizarre and eccentric.

After Matthew left for work – clearly, Chelsea hates for him to leave the house – Chelsea watched a kids’ show on some channel with me while Ronna diapered Abigail and took a shower before taking Chelsea to camp.

Before she left, Ronna showed me I could take a shower in Chelsea’s bedroom, and we agreed that we’d be back from our separate trips at 11 AM.

I didn’t go anywhere far, just to the Barnes & Noble on Old York Road, where I read today’s New York Times as I drank raspberry-quince iced tea.

Then I went to the Kinko’s near the Turnpike to check on email (notes from Alice and Sat Darshan) and Lexis/Nexis online. There were no articles on the Florida Arts Council yet.

After Ronna took care of Abigail, we went to Genuardi’s, a really nice supermarket in Huntingdon Valley, where I got two bags of groceries for myself and shopped with Ronna.

But after we had lunch at home, I discovered that I didn’t have my wallet and a terrible feeling came over me. Ronna called the store and they had my wallet at the customer service desk, so I was able to retrieve it after we picked up Chelsea at the synagogue where she attends camp (as well as Hebrew school).

All my money was in the wallet; I’d left it when I went back to pay for a salad bar. Because there’s a hole in my right pants pocket, I’ve been putting coins and pens in my left pocket, where I usually keep my wallet, which I’d carried the past two days in my right pocket.

Oh well, another of what Teresa calls “senior moments” – like on Sunday at Alice’s when I first rang the bell at apartment 1817 instead of 1718.

Chelsea took a nap on the couch I sleep on, so I played with and watched over Abigail while Ronna made phone calls soliciting for a recipe book being put out by the Jenkintown Newcomers Club.

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Thursday, July 30, 1998

10 PM. Today was a long but pleasant day. This morning, without waiting for Body Electric to come on TV, I exercised by improvising. While I was moving about in my corner of the front room, Ronna came down with Abigail, and soon Chelsea was also up.

At 9 AM, I was able to leave the house on my own after Ronna returned from taking Chelsea to camp. At Barnes & Noble, I read the paper for an hour as I listened to conversations around me.

Then I headed down Route 611 (Old York Road here), which soon after the Philadelphia city limits becomes Broad Street, what Ronna calls the equivalent of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue.

I’ve always preferred just riding around a city rather than going to tourist sites because it gives me a better idea of the way people live their daily lives. I also enjoy seeing the distinctive styles of urban architecture and seeing if I can tell the difference between houses in, say, a neighborhood in Chicago and one in Baltimore.

Obviously, Philadelphia is a largely black city, and going down Broad Street, I could see people’s routines as they got on the subway to work, shopped in local stores or were just hanging out somewhere.

By the main Temple University campus, I got stuck in terrible traffic, so I turned around and headed east on another inner city street, eventually driving through a large Hispanic neighborhood and a smaller mostly-Asian one.

Somehow I got back on Broad Street and decided to drive down to Center City in the direction of William Penn’s statue, which I could see from miles away.

Going around the statue and its City Hall building base (Penn Square), the downtown skyscrapers were to my right. Down Broad Street, I passed old historic-looking theaters and newer ones, office workers going in and out of buildings, and the site where the giant new Regional Performing Arts Center will be built.

Turning on Passyunk Avenue, I went through what seemed like a mostly Italian neighborhood with lots of small businesses.

After driving around a while, I began needing a bathroom, and I ended up so desperate that I paid $5 parking and $8.50 admission to get into the Philadelphia Zoo just to pee.

After relieving myself, I spent an hour walking through the zoo amid lots of camp kids (including a group of Mennonite girls in their traditional plain dresses) and looked at lemurs, white lions, camels, elephants, marmosets and eagles.

Back in the car, I drove through Fairmount Park. Despite making some wrong turns, I eventually got back on Broad Street and took it north back to Jenkintown, getting here in time to have my lunch before Ronna, her mother, Abigail and I went out at 2 PM.

After picking up Chelsea at her friend’s house, we went to the Farmers Market, where Ronna went out alone. Later I realized that she wanted me to stay in the car to act as a buffer between her mother and Chelsea, who were not getting along.

When we were alone yesterday, Ronna showed me the dent she made in her car when her mother and her daughter were heatedly arguing a mile a minute. She sighed and said, “The sandwich generation.”

Beatrice feels that Chelsea treats her disrespectfully, and while Chelsea can be a brat, she is only 4½. I don’t know how Ronna has the patience to deal with all the competing cries for her attention, including the literal ones from Abigail.

We went over to the Elkins Park home of Ronna’s friend Amanda, whom she met at a “Mommy and Me” class, and who has two boys, a nine-year-old and a baby Abigail’s age.

In the backyard, the kids played while the adults had iced tea. Amanda, who’s a writer, and I talked about her magazine work.

(One of the cats has just come by and is brushing up against the diary.)

At 5 PM, we went to the Willow Grove Mall so that Chelsea could get frozen yogurt and French fries and Beatrice could buy her some Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh books at B. Dalton.

I got to go off on my own for a little while, so I went to Strawbridge & Clothier, to get another department store credit card application.

We didn’t get home till 6:30 PM, and oddly, Matthew had been home for hours, taking a nap.

Dinner didn’t begin till 8 PM, so I had chance to catch up on the New York Times for the week even while I played with Chelsea and watched Abigail, who slides along the kitchen floor on her tush.

Matthew continues to seem a bit standoffish with me; I haven’t had a real conversation with him alone, and I guess I’m both awed and intimidated by him. Ronna says he never loses it and explodes, and I know he must be under terrible stress from what’s happening with his job.

Next week he’s got an interview at Maimonides in Brooklyn, and he’s got another at Robert Wood Johnson in New Brunswick. The latter job he could take without leaving Jenkintown immediately: he could commute to Jersey for a while to see if it worked out.

Following dinner, Ronna and Matthew took the kids upstairs while I helped Beatrice clean up the kitchen. After being part of various households, I think I appreciate my own family a little more.

It’s funny: Ronna’s parents’ marriage ended for many reasons, but both her father and mother (most recently on Tuesday) have said that one reason was that Beatrice’s mother was always nearby.

But now Beatrice, as mother-in-law, is living with Ronna and Matthew although she confided in me that her problems with Chelsea – which she attributes to Matthew’s spoiling her when she was a baby – have made her rethink staying until late October.

Sometimes I think there’s something to be said for the admittedly odd way my own family lives. We are not at all involved with other relatives, and I feel detached from my parents and brothers even while living with them. Mom and Dad always gave me lots of time to be alone and let me go where my instincts and interests took me.

When I spoke to Mom briefly today, she said that the AirTouch people seem to want Marc to manage a retail store in a certain part of Phoenix but that he doesn’t believe one in that neighborhood can succeed.