by Greg O'Brien
Conscious thought is survival; loss of reason is demise. In Alzheimer’s, one fights against the drifts, those vacant staring moments when the mind floats, and you can’t control it. And then there are the visual misperceptions—the polite phrase for hallucinations. They started several years ago. One night watching ESPN Sports Center, after nothing stronger than coffee with milk, I noticed some insect-like creatures, with stringy, hairy legs crawling along the top of the ceiling toward me. It wasn’t the sports scores. I watched in horror as they inched closer. It was like the bar scene in Star Wars; they crept from wall to wall, then began to float toward me in packs. I remembered my mother telling me about them. So, I brushed them away. They vanished, though I was in a cold sweat. They kept returning at different times of day, about once every few weeks. They still come. Sometimes in packs, sometimes alone, often appearing as a spider or some other distorted vision. Sometimes they come in an army, like the time I was in Phoenix two years ago at the house of my old friend, Ray Artigue, a communications analyst and former vice president with the Phoenix Suns. I was awake in a guest room at about 8 am, and a phalanx of the imagined approached me. I swiped at them; they disappeared.
The hallucinations don’t frighten me any more; Mom taught me that they will come, and they will go. An artist herself, she often counseled about fear: turn the tapestry over. Don’t look at the threads beneath it, just look at the art, and don’t be afraid to move on.
So I do, and keep evoking an anecdote of the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther, a man of incredible faith, who in the 1500s was frequently terrorized by his personal demons. One morning, as the anecdote goes, Luther awoke to Satan in full horror sitting at the bottom of his bed. Luther, at first, was terrified, then realized he had the faith to press on.
“Oh, it’s just you again,” he said to the apparition.
Then turned over and went back to sleep, like a rock.
****
Rocks have always held my attention, ever since I was a kid vacationing on Cape Cod. Leaving the Cape at the end of summer was always a sad experience for me. I can remember the empty feelings as I filled my duffel bag—the sneakers with the holes in the tips, my jeans with sand in the pockets, a surfing jam bleached by the sun, my wrinkled baseball cap—and carted it out to the station wagon. It always seemed to rain that day.
About a half hour before the family was ready to leave, all ten of us, I would take one final walk from the cottage off Herring Brook Road in Eastham to nearby Thumpertown Beach on Cape Cod Bay. Along the way, I’d relive the summer—days fishing on Salt Pond, the time we hiked to the old Coast Guard station, the bicycle rides along the back roads to Orleans, the soothing pounding of the ocean, the sweet smell of beach plums. Each memory was precious as time was slipping away.
When I reached the bluffs of the beach, I paused for one last look with the hope that I could freeze the moment in my mind. I then walked down the wooden steps to the beach—each of the 32 planks creaking from summer wear and tear; the gray paint peeling back; many of the nails rusted from the sea air. I could see the charred remains of Labor Day campfires that had blazed the night before. Once on the beach, I ceremoniously walked, as I did each year, to the surf.
There is something about a Cape Cod summer that no other summer place can match: The sky is brighter, the sun more radiant, the sand softer, the air more pure, the mood more peaceful. Like many before me, I sought some tangible connection to this fragile, narrow sliver of land—something, a part of me, which I could leave behind. And so, each year at this time, I would walk the beach looking for a special rock, a memory to file deep within. It had to be perfect in every detail—symmetric, polished, and about the size of my fist. It had to have just the right feel. It had to feel a part of me.
I usually picked up about three-dozen rocks until I found the right one—my selected memory of that Cape Cod summer. The rejects were tossed into the bay for more polishing. I then walked back to the staircase and buried my treasure about 12 inches from the foot of the stairs.
All winter long in New York, I’d think of my rock; the summer memories it conjured helped me through the dreary days.
Then, each summer when we returned to the Cape, the first thing I’d do, after unpacking the duffel bag, was to race to the beach to retrieve the rock. I always found it, of course. I had convinced myself—and tried to persuade my mother—that any rock of similar size was the one I had stored. I collected these rocks in the back yard of the cottage we always rented, walking over them barefoot, at times, like a cobblestone path to a paradise.
I’d like to think they’re still there.
9
AMERICAN PIE
WESTCHESTER COUNTY WAS AMERICAN PIE IN THE ’60S. You could drink whiskey in Rye when I was young. Growing up here, just four exits up Route 95 from the Bronx, yet time zones away in culture, one could order the best brand of Bushmills on an 18th birthday. I did, and paid the price at the Five Points on Midland Avenue, now Kelly’s Sea Level bar, owned today by a childhood buddy, Jerry Maguire, and his family—hardly the alter ego of Tom Cruise.
By all measure, Rye is more than a bar stop. It’s a storied place on Long Island Sound at the mouth of New York Harbor, the locus of Rye Beach and Playland where movies scenes from Fatal Attraction with Glen Close and Big with Tom Hanks were filmed. I will always remember the scene in Big with Zoltar the Magnificent, the fortune telling machine that transported a young Hanks, the character of Josh Baskin, from childhood to adulthood and back. Where is Zoltar when I need him?
Rye is a place of long-term memories for me, a shoring up of a past that can never be forgotten—memories that offer great solace at tangents of a change in life. In Alzheimer’s, brain cells in charge of short-term memory are losing the war. But long-term memory is still safely tucked away in a relatively peaceful neighborhood. Those memories are like a loyal, trustworthy friend, an ally to spend time with, at least for now. The significance and yet illusiveness of memory for those with Alzheimer’s is edifying. We all need memories; they define us. Saul Bellow, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, once observed, “They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”
Rye, in so many ways, defines my mother and me, and a legion of ethnic transplants, in its simplicity, idealism, and in the everyday ordinary that delineated a time and space, silhouetted by the demographics of a generation—long-term memories to hold tight. Rye was everyone’s town. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was a Norman Rockwell community from central casting, a mix of Stockbridge and Mayberry R.F.D.—bleached, white picket fences, flannel shirts and faded jeans, Oxford button downs from the Prep Shop on Purchase Street, and some Sax Fifth Avenue suits for the city folk. Rye, in those days, defined idealism and the everyday ordinary that delineated a time and space, silhouetted by the demographics of a generation.
I’ve never left my childhood; I exist there today, to every extent possible, moments frozen in time of great joy, peace, security, immaturity, and potty talk at times. On some days, it’s the only peace I know. Alzheimer’s brings one home to long-term memory—in my case, to a time when doctors made house calls, nuns wore black sweaty wool 19th century habits, baseball was king, and a McDonald’s hamburger, fries, and a Coke cost just 25 cents. The memories keep me whole, and serve to stitch a patchwork quilt of experiences that leave indelible images of a life that cannot be forgotten.
Rye was the quintessence of American Pie. The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens were icons in my town, and the night a single engine Beechcraft Bonanza, model 35, serial #D-1019, wing number N3794N, crashed in a Clear Lake, Iowa cornfield on February 3, 1959 was the day the music died here. I was in the third grade when the plane went down, and even Sister Timothy, a plump, stern, but benevolent Sister of Charity, took note of the loss. We called her the “Big Bopper.”
The day the music died was the first communal tragedy Boomers experienced, a shared loss of innocence to be followed in four years by the assassination of John F. Kenne
dy, and three decades later by the death of Mickey Mantle, the “last boy.” No doubt, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of a generation took the last train to the coast. But we Baby Boomers survived, a bit tougher, more cerebral, and always idealistic. Perhaps we should have seen a flood of disasters and dementias coming, like the rise of high tide on a foggy Long Island Sound. But instead, we chose to clip priceless Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Willie Mays baseball cards with wooden clothespins to the spokes of our bicycles to mimic the roar of a motorcycle. Made us feel childishly reckless. In street value today, we shredded the collective investment of college tuitions and retirement. And we think we’re so smart.
Rye—a place where George Washington slept, Ogden Nash and Amelia Earhart lived, and once the seaside retreat of the Manhattan elite—was inhabited decades ago by ethnic, first-generation working stiffs. Today, some of the wealthiest, most successful in the nation live here. But to me, Rye simply is home, a place to remember, a patchwork quilt of hometowns across the country. Everyone needs a memory of home, real or imagined; mine is more real than imagined. Innocence, as it was elsewhere, was the coin of Rye in the ’50s and ’60s—a town where first-, second-, and third-generation Irish and Italian Americans bonded with Jews, connecting on ball fields and sandlots here and in neighboring Port Chester. Young Italians from “the Port,” as we called it in button-down Rye, often cruised Milton Road on Friday nights, beating the shit out of us Irish guys in madras shorts, pink shirts, and deck shoes. I don’t blame them now. I grew up with an ethnic mix in Rye and Port Chester, regular guys like Tommy Casey, Jimmy Fitzpatrick, Vinny Dempsey, Jimmy Dianni, Billy St. John, Tony Keating, Ritchie O’Connell, Al Wilson, Brian Keefe, Chuck Drago, Dino Garr, Carlo Castallano, Rocco LaFaro, Tancredi Abnavoli, Dante Salvate, Ronald Carducci, Ritchie Breese, Micky DiCarlo, and yes, Ricky Blank, one of the most gifted Jewish shortstops I’ve ever known.
Many of us played organized baseball on the same teams together after we realized that an infield rundown was more fun than a slap down—later communally on a hold-your-breath, mix-and-match Rye/Port Chester All-Star Team that twice won the New York State Senior Babe Ruth League Championship with two trips to the Senior Babe Ruth League World Series regional tournament—a non sequitur of young jocks if there ever was one. In time, we all became best of friends. Six of our starters signed major league contracts. I was among those who didn’t, but as a catcher, faithfully wore the tools of ignorance, first presented in the third grade at a Pony League practice.
Rye was a melting pot, boiled to perfection by the nuns. The town was predominately WASP—a hornet’s nest, in fact, with three Presbyterian churches and one Catholic church, as well as a synagogue. But you could have fooled us fraternal Catholics, who reproduced like rabbits. We were tokens, often looked down upon in social circles, at the country clubs, and in line for groceries at the A&P, but we thought we owned the damn place. And in spirit, we did.
At Resurrection Grammar School, sandwiched between Milton Road and the Boston Post Road, and in the shadows of the Church of the Resurrection, a Gothic stone cathedral, one hardly messed with the nuns whose names sounded like the guest list of 1st century saints in Jerusalem. Sisters Timothy, Syra, Turibius, Aloysius, Monica, and Joseph, along with a convent full of accomplices had your back, your front, your top, and your bottom. But don’t screw with them. You moved only on command. Our parents exceedingly impressed this dictum on us. It seems so wildly anachronistic, looking back. My parents, as most of the day, sung in this choir of didactic discipline. Church was second to family, first at times. Discipline was the order of the day. My dad, with oak-like roots in County Clare, was the first-born son of Edmund and Helen (Clancy) O’Brien; He was raised with his brother Larry by his mother’s sister, Annette, and her husband, Bob O’Dell (who never missed one of my baseball games), on gritty Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx in the shadows of the “House that Ruth Built,” where he played his sandlot baseball on a diamond whose pitcher’s mound today is second base in the new Yankee Stadium. His parents died of tuberculosis, the quick consumption, when he was a young boy.
My father was schooled at St. Nicholas of Tolentine and Fordham University, was one of the youngest Naval LST captains in World War II. A cerebral type, he read four newspapers a day in his professional years for a balance of news and opinion: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, and the New York Post.
He was a “layman reader” at Resurrection, one of the first ever in the church when Mass in 1969, at the decree of Pope Paul VI, was transformed from Latin to the vernacular. When Dad, an everlasting Yankee fan, was named to head up this new order of laymen, we in the family thought of him as Moses with hair dye. In a papal order from Rome, “Ad Déum qui laetíficat juventútem méam,” was rendered “to God who giveth joy to my youth.” Not the same ring of high-church elegance to it, and besides, the English translation extended the length of a Mass. One could always burble through the Latin: Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa! Our pastor, Monsignor John D. McGowan, an arthritic pastor in his 80s, still holds the record for saying Mass from start to finish in 12 minutes, including the homily. As a plebe altar boy, I served Mass that day and clocked him, as fellow altar boys looked on with pride. The aging McGowan genuflected as quickly as a wideout making a cut for the end zone.
I couldn’t wait to race home to tell my mother, a beautiful woman, barely five-feet tall and a hundred pounds with platinum blond hair. “A lean horse for a long race,” my dad would always say. Mom was all about the church and was impressed with such records. Raised in the shadows of the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium in New York, she played hopscotch on the sidewalk at a time when milk was delivered in a horse-drawn carriage. Mom was educated at a French convent school and later at the College of New Rochelle in the Ursuline tradition, the first Catholic college for women in New York. Few women in the day went to college; most stayed home to have babies. A teacher later in life, she first worked as a banker, far ahead of a long awaited shattering of the glass ceiling for women, and then she became a devoted mother, deeply involved in Resurrection as a Cub Scout and Brownie leader. Life for us at the time was the epitome of the 1950s sitcom “Leave It to Beaver,” exemplifying the idealized suburban family of the mid-20th century. My mother—God bless you, Eddie Haskell—frequently wore a lovely red dress.
Both parents, respectively, were members in good standing of the parish Mothers’ and Fathers’ Clubs. They also taught CCD, “The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine,” established in Rome in 1562 for the purpose of giving religious education to the heathens. In later days, the nuns defined heathens as the children of Catholic parents who weren’t sent to Catholic School. Faithful parishioners taught CCD on Wednesday nights; the nuns instructed the heathens on Thursdays at 1:30 pm, as if caring for lepers. We were dismissed early on those days. Officially, it was called “Released Time,” and we were told to clear the playground as quickly as possible. The collective body language suggested that we scatter swiftly from the heathens and Huns. Run home to the bosom of your mothers, the nuns admonished us!
And God help us, Jesus, if we ever looked at a Protestant! We were warned never to gape at the spiral of the nearby Gothic Rye Presbyterian Church, designed in the 1860s by Richard Up-john, the renowned church architect who built Trinity Church on Wall Street. If we even stared at this magnificent edifice, we feared, it would be akin to looking back at Sodom. We’d be turned to pillars of salt.
The mile walk from pastoral Brookdale Place to Resurrection was problematic for me. I had to pass the towers of Babel, careful not to glance up, just look down at my scuffed Buster Browns. My sisters, brothers, and I walked to school every day—the girls were dressed in the uniform of plaid skirts white blouses, blue jackets, and black patent leather shoes; the boys were required to wear a white-collared dress shirt with a blue tie, gray flannel pants, a blue blazer, and dark socks; we all looked like Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen.
The only exception to the socks rule was gym day. On gym days, guys wore white socks with running shorts underneath their trousers for a quick change in the basement for a stinging game of dodgeball or stickball in the playground. To this day, one can detect someone who was educated in the metropolitan New York Catholic school system; they will often quip at work to a friend or colleague wearing white socks: “Got gym today?”
Once at school, regardless of the temperature, five below or pushing 90, we gathered in the playground behind the red brick schoolhouse before the start of class. We were sorted in grades by cracks in the pavement. It was a blueprint to avoid chaos, the equivalent today of those invisible electronic dog fences. If you crossed the line, you’d be zapped by the nuns, unless you were queued up at the convent steps to carry the bags—the nuns’ briefcases, not the old battle-axes themselves. “Brown nosers” like me waited as hungry puppy dogs outside the convent to carry a black bag; I often wondered later if they contained the nuclear code in case Khrushchev stepped out of line. At the back door of the school about 200 feet away, the exchange was made: a pat on the head, a passing of the bag, a return to the playground. We then waited within our assigned cracks, engaged in kickball, punchball, flipping cards, or just yapping. Minutes later with great thunder, an oversized glass window in the principal’s office opened—an ancient kind that moved on string cords, not tracks, and made a noise like the trumpeting of angels in the Book of Revelations. The hairy, muscular arm of the Mother Superior then reached out with a cowbell the size of a boxcar. She flushed three times: