Wait Until Tomorrow Part 17

As soon as we cross the Florida border, Emmy slams the R.E.M. CD into the CD player and we stick our hands outside to feel the silk sheets of air running through our fingers.

Thursday night we pull into the driveway behind Jim and Dale's house. The back door opens and my lean, handsome, seventy-four-year-old G.o.dfather comes out to greet us. If my own father represents everything dark and heedless in the masculine, my G.o.dfather represents all that is bright and good. He is the quintessential white knight-gentle, strong, funny, and wise. Like my father, he once succ.u.mbed to his generation's penchant for three-martini lunches and after-work c.o.c.ktails. My father continued to drink and bl.u.s.ter in his egomaniacal manner until that fine mind of which he was so proud was drained and all that was left was a jumble of fears and odd compulsions. Jim, however, turned in humility to the Twelve Steps long before he destroyed the lives of the ones he loved. A die-hard liberal, a baritone in the church choir, a banker who helped small businesses get loans, he became my G.o.dfather when I was six years old and realized that I had not been baptized as a baby. After all, the church was our second home, and if I wasn't baptized, I couldn't get confirmed with everyone else and go to communion and have the priest deliver the bitter-tasting wine onto my young tongue to wash down the papery wafer that was poor Jesus's desiccated body.

So my mother said I could choose my own G.o.dparents. I chose wisely at the age of six. My two G.o.dparents took their roles quite seriously. While my G.o.dmother Elise loved me and fawned over me while I was young, my G.o.dfather Jim was the stalwart figure in the background of my life who emerged in my later years as the salve to heal my father issues once and for all. Every time he said that he loved me or spoke admiringly of some accomplishment of mine, an old hurt disappeared. Though he is not technically my father and there are four people who can lay legitimate claim to him, in my head and heart he has replaced that bitter old man who ignored my existence, who belittled my mother, and who picked fistfights with my brothers.

So Thursday night we are in the Florida room of Jim and Dale's house, Jim sitting in a chair by the stereo system, Dale at the other end of the small room, and Emmy and I on the couch in the middle, scarfing down potato chips and clam dip. I mention to Jim that my mother has said several times that she wants to hear the church organ again.

"Do you think it would be possible," I ask, hesitantly, "for someone to do her requiem again?"

I can see the thought registering. His clear blue eyes light up. Soon we are figuring out whom to contact. Jim digs through his old ca.s.settes. He finds the original recording of the requiem when it was performed back in 1982. After some fast-forwarding and rewinding, he manages to get it to play. I am stunned. First of all, I recognize it. But what I didn't realize until now is just how wonderful a piece of music it really is. Powerful and strange and haunting.

"The times have caught up with it," Jim says with a gentle smile playing on his lips.

"You're right," I say.

An American Requiem's time has come.

In late July, my brothers Jo and David arrive like a couple of Viking warriors. Jo shows up Tuesday around midnight with his drum and his flutes. We spend the next day with Mom, and then on Thursday we all pile into my car to go to the airport to retrieve David. But Thursday is not a good day for me. These days happen. I wake up tired and cranky, off-kilter. I don't know what it is. It's like having bipolar energy levels, though not so extreme. How do I explain myself on these days? Usually I don't. Usually, I hunker down and wait it out. It only takes a day and then I'm okay again, but for that day I can't think, can't pretend to be friendly, outgoing, or happy.

When we get to Mom's place, David tells me he hasn't brought the movie.

"What?" I wheel around, my cranky shrew level ratcheted up ten knots. Mostly I'm annoyed with myself for not reminding him to bring it. There is much buzz at the Sanctuary about the movie event: David is going to be showing Knights of the South Bronx, an A&E movie starring Ted Danson that is actually about David's work teaching chess to children at a school in the poorest congressional district in the country. The activities director has been asking for a copy for months and I've provided something better-David in person. But now we don't have a movie.

"Where are we going to get it?" I ask in full-tilt whine.

"Netflix?" David asks.

I decide to calm down. Getting upset is taking way too much energy, and it turns out they have the movie at Blockbuster.

The three of us eat dinner with Mother at the Sanctuary. The food isn't bad. In fact, she never complains about it. Then we go upstairs to the media room. Not for David's movie. That's not until Friday night. But Jo has brought a copy of a video recording from the 1980s of a performance of An American Requiem by the Lost Colony choir. I've told him about my plan to resurrect the requiem, and he's all for it. In fact, somewhere he's got the orchestration for it, and he promises to find it.

The four of us commandeer the media room and Charlene helps us figure out how to get the video started. She stays to watch with us for a while. I close the curtains to shut out the light and on the large screen comes a picture of a choir as they begin to sing "Requiem." Rest. My mother's requiem uses the Latin words and mixes them with English. It begins, "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine." Meaning "Grant them eternal rest, O Lord." Is that what death is? Eternal rest?

My two brothers are riveted. Here it is, our mother's masterwork. Mom falls asleep. She doesn't really care that much anymore. I gaze over at the three of them in profile. Jo's head punctuates the musical score. He is, after all, conducting the piece in the video. David holds his chin and thoughtfully gazes at the screen. Mother's chin rests on her chest. Three pairs of eyegla.s.ses reflect the flickering light of the screen. And I am watching them, as always. They are the musicians. I'm the one trying to tell the story.

Before we leave the Sanctuary, David and Jo want to hear Mom play the piano. No one else is around. The place is like a mausoleum at night. So we have the parlor to ourselves. I am still wanting a little requiem myself so I stretch out on the couch and shut my eyes. Mother plays the Moonlight Sonata. G.o.d, it's beautiful. She doesn't finish it. I don't think she remembers the whole thing. She tries to play other pieces with that amazing manual dexterity she once had, but the speed is gone.

"Slow down," David says. "You don't have to play it fast. You know that skater Peggy Fleming? She never had the technique of other skaters, but she had so much grace that they couldn't hold a candle to her."

David convinces Mother to play one of Bach's inventions very slowly, and the effect, I must say, is haunting. David and Jo fawn over Mother in a way I never do. But they understand music better than I do. They talk about her musicality. She has something that not many people have. And I'm remembering someone once saying they knew the instant when my mother took over from another accompanist. Suddenly the beat was exactly there, where it was supposed to be. But to me her piano playing is like air-just always there, always a part of my world. I'm afraid that, after she dies, there are certain pieces of music I'll never be able to listen to again. Goodbye, Moonlight Sonata.

Afterward, we leave mother with promises to return the next day before lunch. We have to see about getting her $3,500 bed that David bought three years ago fixed. You'd think a bed that cost that much would hold up longer than three years, but it has gotten stuck in the head-up position and won't move, so it is useless. The staff at the Sanctuary is worried that Mother will get open wounds from the constant pressure on her back and b.u.t.tocks from always sitting. Mother, on the other hand, doesn't even want to sleep on the bed. Her recliner feels more secure. But we have no choice. The bed must be fixed or gotten rid of.

(I know a woman who works for an HMO. She didn't really want to take the job because an HMO's reputation is about as good as the CIA's when it comes to people's rights. But she has been able to do good there. She told me one story of an elderly woman who had no family and nowhere to go. The woman was in a nursing home where she developed open wounds that simply couldn't be healed. My friend signed lifelong hospitalization for the woman. "We had to. I insisted. She had no family. This was the only way she'd be taken care of." Well, there was one answer to my nagging question-what happens to people with no money and no family. They wind up with open wounds in a hospital bed or nursing home for the rest of their lives.) My brothers and I go back to my house where we stay up late into the night and talk about spiritual experiences we've had. This is a conversation I've never had with David, who is so rational he makes Mr. Spock look giddy. But it seems almost everyone has had some experience that involves something more than our five meager senses. Jo talks about the experiences he's had with sweat lodges, and the time it got so hot he became like a crazed animal and rushed outside, followed by about nine other people. David mentions a Reiki session he had and visions that seemed to have come from past lives, visions of being killed and then morphing into the killer. I talk about those moments I've had of perfect awareness, like the time we were playing dodgeball at my first Isha workshop and no one could hit me.

Friday night we show Knights of the South Bronx in the media room at the Sanctuary. By the time the movie starts, we have a full house including two of my colleagues from school, Darryl and Bill. Everyone in the room is transfixed by the movie. Tears slowly leak from my eyes somewhere near the beginning and continue to flow all the way to the end. I remember when they held the premiere for the movie in New York at the Fas.h.i.+on Inst.i.tute of Technology. David flew Mom, Emmy, and me up to see it. This was in December 2005, and Mom was a little more mobile and a lot more awake than she is these days. David also got us a hotel room, since the one other time I'd brought her up to New York for a Thanksgiving visit she went berserk with claustrophobia in his apartment. But this trip would be a triumph for my mother. Ted Danson may have been the star of the movie, but David's star was s.h.i.+ning just as bright that night. It was his success and the success of the children he worked with that we were all celebrating. After eight years of long hard work, paying for tournaments out of his own pocket, buying the kids food and clothes when they didn't have any, he saw his kids earn the national champions.h.i.+p and a trip to the White House. The movie is a fictional doc.u.mentation of that feat, and David has a cameo role.

Unfortunately, the theater was down a long set of winding steps and I didn't know how I'd get Mother down them. Someone who worked there volunteered to take her by wheelchair down the elevator and through the kitchen. I reluctantly let the person take the wheelchair from me, and Emmy and I went downstairs where a huge crowd of people milled around. Ted Danson was there. People from the chess world were there. David's ex-wife and current girlfriend were there along with his two kids. I kept looking around for my mother, who had vanished. I waited. I looked. I went back upstairs. I found the elevator. I took the elevator. I wandered through the kitchen. I went back into the party area. My mother was not anywhere. Panic set in. Was she freaking out somewhere? Alone in a hallway, screaming right about now? I clawed my way through the crowd and finally got my hands on my brother.

"I can't find Mom," I said breathlessly.

David swiveled his head in all directions before being seized upon by someone else and dragged off to make another speech. I began my search once again. And then, finally, she just showed up, smiling and thrilled to be here, basking in the attention. David's mother. "Yes, he was always wonderful," she told everyone. I wiped the sweat from my brow and proceeded to enjoy the rest of the evening.

Tonight I am crying as I watch the movie again, but Mom doesn't watch it. Her head drifts down toward her chest. At one point in the movie, she screams. I suppose she dreams she is falling when that happens. She jolts awake and has no idea where she is. Jo reaches over and rea.s.sures her. The rest of us continue to watch the movie.

Afterward, David, Jo, my mother, Jacqueline (the eighty-fiveyear-old French woman), Bill, Darryl, and I sit in a circle and talk politics. We can't believe the W years are finally over.

"I refuse to remember them," I say. "It's like they never happened."

Mother then pipes up. "I went to Yale, you know," she begins, and I'm thinking, here she goes again with the Yale thing, which didn't matter so much in the old days but now it's her claim to former greatness. But then she cracks everyone up when she adds, "But after Bush became president, I thought about returning the degree."

At the Sanctuary the next day Jo performs a concert of Native American flute music. He explains that he got interested in the Native American flute when our mother needed some authentic music for The Lost Colony. When he couldn't find a performer, he learned the instrument and recorded the music for the show himself. Ever since then he's been hooked on it. Jo intersperses his music with stories from Native American lore and from his own life. I'm sure these people have never heard of a sweat lodge and cannot imagine anyone playing a song on a flute for "Brother Rock," but Jo's music casts a spell over them.

We spend the rest of the day with my mother, but she has become sour and unhappy. I think it's been too much for her. Too much stimulation. Too much attention, for once. Instead of eating at the Sanctuary, David and I go get Thai food and bring it back. But Mom hates the seafood salad we get for her and frowns and acts like she is being tortured, until the cook sends over some chocolate cream pie that the rest of us find inedible and she gobbles up. Then Jo fixes her some coffee and ice cream and she gets happier. But the pain in her leg has become her main focus, and so we take her upstairs, where I put down some hot soapy water to soak her feet. Then finally the night comes to an end. And we leave. The whirlwind tour is almost over.

I wheel Mom outside to the parking lot, following my two brothers. Jo is a big guy, his feet damaged by the chemo treatments of nearly twenty years ago. David is lithe and quick-moving, as if he's always trying to catch the subway. His vertigo is hidden in the ca.n.a.l of his inner ear. They are both still handsome to me-Jo with his nicely trimmed beard, bushy eyebrows, hair in a ponytail. He looks like a happy Buddha, but you'd never mistake that happiness for simplicity. He'll raise an eyebrow and shoot you with his green eyes. David, the cool and collected chess player, is not one to show anger except on rare occasions and then, don't f.u.c.k with him.

I push Mom into the shade of a truck, and we watch as Jo checks the oil in his Honda. There is always the sound of conversation when my brothers are present. They are not laconic in the least. They are full of jokes and stories. This time Jo is talking about this car: how he bought it for a thousand bucks from a friend of his, and how it still runs like a dream even as it edges up to the three-hundred-thousand-mile mark. He never drives it over sixtythree miles per hour.

Before they leave, each one of them leans over to hug Mom in her wheelchair, and although I've already hugged them goodbye, I insist on one more embrace from each of them. David, who was born under the sign of Leo, makes a little growling purr when he hugs. Jo's hug is all bear.

But as they pull out of the parking lot, and we roll over to the rocking chairs in the shade, I realize that this is an old familiar feeling: my brothers leaving to go on an adventure while my mother and I stay behind. It occurs to me that this moment's sorrow is a replica of the sorrow we felt forty years ago. And now that I've felt the grief of my own child leaving, I can only imagine how it was for my mother when her two boys became men and packed up their instruments-Jo with his tuba off to Eastman School of Music, and David with his trombone to the Navy Band.

I have always been aware of how deeply I missed them, how I longed for each return visit, greedy for every minute I could spend with them. But I've never really considered how that must have been for my mother to lose these two laughing, joking, story-telling heroes. Not only sons but fellow musicians. It seems a shadow swept across our lives at that time, and although we eventually grew used to their absence, that lonely darkness would return now and again. Sometimes back in Edenton and even at the Landings, I couldn't wait to flee her presence and the oppressive sense of misery that engulfed me. Here at the Sanctuary, surrounded by other people, it can't seem to get to us. Until today, as we sit together in the shade while birds zoom around us. I don't want to go home. And I realize that the worst thing about her life must be the empty days. There is nothing she has to do. No errands to run. No projects to finish. The enormity of that vast emptiness swallows me.

I am despondent for days, but my new obsession eventually drives out the despondency. I take one of the old battered copies of An American Requiem over to Kinko's, make a fresh new copy, and put it in a bright red folder. Then I mail it to Mom's friend Karen in Jacksonville. Jim has enlisted her help in getting the production underway. So far we've had no luck finding a choir, but Karen has a hot lead; an old friend of Mom's happens to direct the choir at a college in Jacksonville, and he's excited by the idea. I'm not sure this is really going to happen, but maybe it will, and maybe this way I can fulfill that promise I made to my mother to keep the requiem alive.

Emmy comes home from New York, and the rain is falling just like it did on the day when she was born, ending the long drought that had gripped Florida for months.

"Tell me about your workshop," I say. I want to hear everything. I was disappointed I hadn't been able to go up and see her performance of Antigone. Antigone is another of my favorite Greek plays. I admire the way she defies Creon when he orders her not to bury her brother. And, of course, it resonates with our situation.

For Emmy's production, the actors each began by describing how they wanted their own deaths to be recognized.

"I said that I wanted my life to be celebrated and that I wanted my ashes to be scattered on the beach in Florida, because that is where your friends all made their wishes for me."

The wishes! She remembered the story of the wishes, and remembered my telling her about that evening in the summer of 1990 when she was a tiny infant. Four of my women friends and I took her to the beach, and in the light of the moon we sprinkled ocean water on her forehead and spoke aloud our wishes for her future. I don't even remember what we wished, but I have a feeling all the wishes have come true.

Then on August 3, 2009, with Emmy at her new house in Chapel Hill, getting ready for her new college, I realize my nineteen-year project is complete. I'll always be Emmy's mother. I will be around for advice and to help pay the rent. But my parental goal has been accomplished. She has gotten into a great college; found a house and negotiated with roommates, realtors, and landlords; registered for cla.s.ses; and found a job-all without any help from me. That was the aim-for her to become a self-sufficient adult, able to make her own decisions and manage her own life. My job is effectively over.

I go to my mother's place to play a long game of Scrabble.

SIX.

AUGUST 2009.

My heart has been a lonely hunter, searching for something this long, empty summer. When Emmy is with me, we are a couple of merry pranksters, but when she's gone I might as well be on the moon. It's cold and barren. Should I get another dog? I wonder. A bird? Or a hobby? I need to learn a musical instrument, the cello maybe. I tried pottery earlier in the year. That was good for a while, but it's not enough. Visiting my mother occupies me, but there's only so much time I can spend with the old folks. I walk. A lot. And sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it isn't. Hank and I are no longer screaming at each other on the phone. Silence stretches between us like the desert.

Then one day an email pops up. A desperate plea: "Help. I'm losing my apartment. I'm going to have to live in a shelter or in my truck. I'm disabled and I lost my job, but I can pet sit. Please, if you need someone to take care of your pets, let me know."

"Who are you?" I typed.

"Lorri. A friend of Colin's."

My friend Colin had forwarded the email to everyone on his list, and I was the one who responded. Darryl is going to Paris and needs someone to look after his German shepherd, so I set them up. Three weeks later, Lorri moves in with me. During the day we sit outside on my front porch with our laptops and work. Lorri, it turns out, can make websites, and I happen to need a new website. We like the same TV shows. We make salads every day and drink smoothies. I decide not to get a bird right now. The cello can also wait.

I want to get away. Mom seems to be fairly stable. School doesn't start for a couple of weeks. Emmy is happy and working at a bookstore, waiting for the semester to begin. As far as I can tell, Hank has no intention of returning, and I don't know what to do about the back of the house where he ripped off the rotted siding but didn't replace it. The master bathroom now has no shower and a hole in the ceiling. I don't have the money to fix it. Now seems like a good time to get out of town. Lorri can take care of the cat while I'm gone and even go check on my mother once in a while.

So I head down to Tallaha.s.see, where I fill my time drinking decaf at the Black Dog Cafe, eating lunch at Cabo's, hanging out with friends, catching up on stories. I visit Theo, eat French cheese at Pam's, and buy Emmy some fabric from an imported clothing store.

Thursday afternoon I need to go see Dean, the hermit. I love the beach house where he used to live with Wendy. It's still a shrine to her, with her books and pictures of the two of them displayed on the living-room shelves. Dean and I walk the beach, talking of sea turtles, guitars, old friends.

"Tell me the name of those again," I say, pointing to tiny clams that disappear bottoms up in the brown wet sand.

"Donax," he says.

"That's right," I say, and laugh. "I always want to say 'gonads.'" I'm sure that Wendy once wrote a poem about them.

Returning to the thin arm of sand stretched before the low beach house, Dean sits on the towel while I wade into warm water, my joy meter ticking upwards as the waves canter toward me. And I dive into the murky Gulf, thick with salt and seaweed. Far across the water, the horizon stretches in a long flat line.

"It always changes," Dean had said. And he's right. It used to be you had to walk miles for the water to reach your shoulders. And now I'm just twenty or so yards out and it's plenty deep enough. And yet it's always the same, too, I think, laying my body on the surface as waves jostle and knead and tease me like a cat with a toy mouse.

Yes, this is why I came, for this. And a voice in my head says, this would make a nice poem. Not my voice, of course. It is Wendy whispering, not wondering why I turn up like a bad penny. She never scolded me when she was alive, just gave me that look sometimes that said, "Simmer down." Now she exhorts me to clutch the seaweed, the long water gra.s.s, to breathe in the pungent, ancient scent, to stop simmering now, and live life at a full boil.

Feeling refreshed and happy, I am driving back to Tallaha.s.see when my cell phone rings. It's a nurse from the Sanctuary. She's afraid my mother has had a stroke, and she's called the paramedics to come get her. I begin to calculate the hours it will take me to get back home.

"No morphine," I tell the emergency room doctor who calls me as I'm driving that night on the Interstate toward Atlanta. I sleep for a few hours at a friend's house in Atlanta and then get up early in the morning and drive straight through to the hospital.

Once I get there, I tell them again: "No morphine. I know she says she's in pain. But no morphine."

I tell the doctor about the last time she was in the hospital, when they loaded her up on Sister M and she got so loopy we thought she'd had a stroke. She couldn't complete a sentence. Thoughts were amorphous things floating like clouds far above her grasp. Sentences fell apart in her head. Words got stuck on repeat. It lasted for months.

The doctor promises he won't give her any morphine, but that night someone gives her morphine anyway.

The next day I am sitting in the green chair in my mother's hospital room and she's methodically examining her cover sheet; the effects of the earlier drugs have not worn off. She has a pen in one hand and a partially completed crossword, but she is not doing the puzzle. Instead she runs the edge of that sheet through her fingers. When I ask her what she is doing, she has no idea. Finally, she drifts off.

When I tell the doctor what happened, he writes on her chart that she is allergic to morphine. Maybe that will stop the dope pushers.

Later my mother is sitting staring blankly out at nothing, wearing a green hospital robe, a purple DNR wrist band, and a heart monitor. She has expressly stated that no rescue attempts should be made in the event she gives out. But she's not really that sick. She's ninety-one. She's in constant pain. She's often confused, but there is nothing drastically wrong with her, nothing a few months of blood thinner and ten or so other pills a day can't cure.

In addition to a blood clot, she has a tiny fracture in her ankle, and the orthopedic surgeon wants her to wear a big plastic boot when she leaves.

My friend Patti says, "So many of my women friends have been taking care of their mothers longer than their mothers took care of them."

Good G.o.d, I think. Decades.

Emmy is entering another year of college. I hope she remembers the instructions I give her on my cell phone as I sit in the parking lot of the hospital: "Honey, if they want to give me blood thinner, antibiotics, anything, just say no to drugs. Let nature have its way. Do you hear me?"

She says that she does, but who knows what it will be like when we're there. Nightmare scenarios of nanotechnology prolonging our lives for centuries haunt me.

My mother says to me in the hospital, "When my time comes, I don't want you to be sad. I want you to be happy for me. My life as me is effectively over."

"I will miss you terribly," I answer. "But I will be happy for you."

The third day: she's sleeping fitfully. You think of hospitals as busy places with doctors and nurses and med techs running around in the thrall of beeps and signals, doing important life-saving work. But hospitals are often more like holding pens for patients who are waiting for some number, some blood count, to rise or fall.

We've been here before. A ninety-one-year-old body needs a lot of repair work. During those other excursions, I planted myself in the room like a lodger. Today as well. But this time I won't stay here all day and half the night. This time they're not giving her morphine, and she doesn't have an infection. We're gonna make it outta here okay.

When my mother wakes up, it's as if she's catching herself. She looks around, confused. Then falls back to sleep. I wonder why I'm here, sitting in a little room with a sleeping woman.

A few days later my mother is sent back to rehab-another familiar place.

On Monday I leave work early to see about getting my mother recertified for Medicaid. She's in the rehab center while her broken ankle heals. Medicare covers twenty days in rehab but she's on some insurance HMO plan that sucks out the Medicare money and doles it out the way they want to. For some things it's better than Medicare. But for others it's not. This, for instance. Instead of covering twenty days in rehab, it covers ten. She's on day seven. After that I have to start sh.e.l.ling out one hundred bucks a day to keep my mother there. That's why I'm driving to the Medicaid office instead of sitting in yet another meeting at my school.

During my lunch break I called the SSI office. A message told me I was "caller number twenty in queue." I finally got to a human, but he managed to cut me off. So I dialed again and in only fifteen minutes I had another human.

"Please don't cut me off," I said to him. "It takes way too long to get to a human." He promised he wouldn't.

I told him my story: my mom had been on Medicaid eighteen months ago, the last time she was in the rehab center. I explained that when she got better we put her in a private pay facility because there were no long-term Medicaid beds available. But now she was back in rehab and we needed the Medicaid again.

He transferred me to someone else and I got a voice mail. She didn't call me back. So a few hours later I leave work and call her again. Lo and behold, she answers. In my utter naivete I was sure that this was something that could be done by phone or online. Wrong. I am required to go to the office and fill out an application in person.

As I drive to the office, I wonder how this would get done if I were not here to do it-or if I had the kind of job where I couldn't leave to go take care of my mother's medical problems. Or what if I were sick myself, or disabled? This is how people's lives spiral out of control, how they go bankrupt, how they die forgotten and alone.

The Social Security Administration building in Charlotte is an imposing brick structure not far from uptown. As you approach the entrance, you join the huddled ma.s.ses yearning for health care. Most of the people milling about are minorities. According to a health care forum I went to recently, 35 percent of African Americans are without health insurance. I don't know what the figures are for Hispanics. For whites, it's 6 percent. I've been part of that 6 percent. I know what it feels like to simply decide you can't get sick. Many of the people here are women. They have children or they are pregnant or both. I wonder why so many Americans are so poor.

I go inside and a woman at the information desk gives me some form to fill out. No pen, but I've got my own. I find a little desk and fill out the form, then I go stand in a line. When I get to the front of the line I have to sign a piece of paper. Then go sit in another area and wait. Okay, maybe this is what the crazy "keep your government hands off my health care" screamers are picturing. I know it doesn't have to be this way. Government manages to do a lot of things pretty d.a.m.n well. Education, road building, libraries, policing, fire fighting. But maybe this sucks because it's for poor people. Maybe if it was for everybody they'd get more efficient. (I'm still angry over a video I recently saw of a jet plane for insurance company executives with gold-plated dinnerware.) This place has a kind of festive air about it. I watch a preteen girl herding her younger siblings; a dad and his severely disabled son; a lean, athletic young black man in a wheelchair with his hands in bandages. Everyone has a story. After an hour of sitting I'm still wondering why this process couldn't be done online or by phone. A couple of minutes before five, just before the place closes, a caseworker leads me back into the warren of cubicles for an interview. The cubicles are small; the walls brown. I sit down in a plastic chair and stare at a line of screws sticking out of the wall.

The caseworker, a strapping bald man, seems like a really nice guy, but I'm remembering a guy I knew who worked for Social Security in another town and who had a predilection for smoking pot and exposing himself to teenage girls. Whatever this particular guy does in his spare time, he seems perfectly willing to approve my mother's application.

There's just one problem. I'd forgotten that when you get on Medicaid, they take your Social Security check and leave you thirty bucks a month for spending money.

"But . . .but . . .how will we pay for her room at the a.s.sisted-living place?" I ask. "Her Social Security check pays for a good chunk of the rent. Then my brothers and I make up the difference."

"My hands are tied," he says with a shrug.

Tears start marching down my face. Words of doom and desperation swirl around my brain.

"But . . . but . . ." I begin again. "She's only supposed to need rehab for a couple of weeks and if she loses her place, then where will she go?"

"I understand," he says. "Some people have mortgages and they have to choose between their homes and their health care."