Memory #1

This is the first post. A serialized sequence of fictionalized reflections. In this segment, Ralph describes his "home". More to follow. If you prefer to listen, go to the audio link below the photo:

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“Welcome to Ralph’s Home”, a cheery sign proclaimed.  This sign hung on the door to a bare, institutional bedroom with a linoleum floor and blank walls off a busy corridor serving 23 similar rooms with identical signs.  This wasn’t Ralph’s home. This was where Ralph had been warehoused by his children when he turned 84. He is now 86. Creeping dementia made continuing to live alone in his real home unsafe. Or so they said.   

This isn’t Ralph’s home.  This is where he pisses away his morning tea in a bedpan. His ‘Harley’, a heavy-duty walker with large, over-inflated tires, sits parked, brake engaged, by his bed, ready for when he wants to shuffle down the hall to the common room to watch a hockey game or play cribbage with other residents, similarly incarcerated. His prowess at cribbage is notorious throughout the building. “Considering he is losing his mind, his pointing skills and scoring are amazing”, his Personal Support Workers say.  These PSWs are middle-aged women with strong backs and rough ways.  They help bathe Ralph, help dress him, bring him his meals on Styrofoam plates and clean him up whenever he forgets to call for a bedpan in time. They like Ralph the way some people like a feisty dog who always finds ways to terrify the neighbourhood cats. Ralph can’t stand these women with their gruff jokes, cheerless banter, cigarette breath and cheap jewelry.  They read his diffidence as defiance of sentimental ways of showing affection.

But he is in rapturous awe of Monique, the 30-year-old floor nurse with a spectacularly sculpted figure. Monique is a competitive cyclist.  Ralph used to be a cyclist.  He has a chronic fixation upon athletic women from his early days at a teachers’ college.  He took the classroom-teaching option, but he wishes he had taken Physical Education. Monique reminds him of those slender goddesses of his late teens, with noticeable muscle definition in their arms, tummies and legs. But all that is receding in his memory.   Now he tries to think of ways he can ask Monique questions or get her attention, or engage her in bike talk. She is a statuesque dirty blond, close to 6 feet tall with surprisingly low self-esteem, given her hypnotic attributes, Ralph concludes.  Mostly she ignores his weak overtures. So, Ralph sulks.

This isn’t Ralph’s home.  This is just the room where he has been left to make his last stand.   This is the room where he will die.  

As the light fades from the window in Ralph’s room, the gloom of another evening in his long-term care residence steals over his mood.  Another Saturday night alone in his dorm for the dying.  His children don’t visit in the evenings; seeing the Old Man is a daytime chore.  His ex-wife certainly won’t show up.  Ralph hasn’t seen her in 18 years and thankfully so.  His friends, men with whom he used to do long canoe trips, are dispersed across the country and around the globe.  Occasionally they call or Skype; Ralph dreads these reminders of what he used to be able to do.  Of his close friends, the ones who still bother to stay in touch, Ralph is the oldest by more than a decade.  These youngsters in their early 70s stay in contact with him out of an existential curiosity that is speculatively personal.  Ralph is their future. To a healthy 70-year-old, mortality is still an intriguing subject for abstract contemplation.  These friends still believe in vitamin pills. “What if?” has yet to transition to “when?”  

Dinner, a bland vegetable stew with chunks of under-cooked TVP served on a bed of tepid mashed potatoes, was served at 5 pm, so that kitchen staff could go home after their 8-hour shifts.  All the meals must fit into staggered 8-hour shifts.   Breakfast at 8, Lunch at 12 noon and Dinner at 5.  So goes every day.  Ralph doesn’t mind these long nights alone; he reads his novels or pokes around online on the common-room computer. Then he remembers. Ralph wonders if his hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens, play tonight. Yes, there is a game tonight! Ralph cannot wait until 7:00 p.m.  Faceoff time. 

The common room is empty when Ralph lurches in, hunched over his squeaking walker.  When the Habs play a road game against one of the nameless teams in cities with palm trees, Ralph often watches in bed on his scratched cell phone.  That way he can shut down his phone and fall asleep if the Habs fall behind by more than 2 goals; this has been a bleak season for his team, so Ralph has had a lot of early nights. But tonight, his Habs play the hated Boston Bruins live from the Bell Centre. 

The Montreal Canadiens were a childhood passion for him. A religion. Then, as unrequited lust for the ravishing 17-year-old girls who cart-wheeled at his high school football games overtook his imagination–Ralph played football, albeit very badly, throughout his four years at Montreal West High—his faith in the religion of hockey began to weaken, to be supplanted by fantasies of imagined erotic adventures with agile young women who didn’t know his name. 

In university, he seldom admitted that he was a devoted hockey fan.  Such a confession would have been akin to blurting out that he couldn’t wait for the next pro-wrestling Smackdown during a seminar on neo-platonic imagery in Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Imagine the chill silence.  How to lose all of one’s academic cred in 8 seconds.  Hockey, particularly in grad school, was seen as being very uncool.  Only the seedy regulars in dingy bars watched hockey.  Everyone else had better things to do on a winter evening.  

Then, sometime around the millennium, the constellations shifted.  Rule changes made the game faster.  More consistent refereeing reduced the tedious clutch-and-grab play.  And the pros, ever so sporadically, began playing beautiful hockey again.  Ralph couldn’t forget Canada 5, USA 2, at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. 

Ralph has not always followed his team, but now the Montreal Canadiens get him through the long winters.  Life in a long-term care home lacks exclamation marks; each week runs the risk of being a repeat of the last week, just another stultifying chain of commas.  There is a paucity of events to look forward to.  But a Habs game provides a flicker of light in the dark monotony. On those rare evenings when his team wins a game, his heart temporarily takes flight.  He brags to Monique; she chuckles at his bantering.  She hates pro hockey and all that it stands for, but she can’t bring herself to tell Ralph.