Ted

Cathleen McNamara Callahan  bcallah@optonline.net  631-804-2348

Prompt: Someone with An Unreliable Memory

Ted

Ted had half-lost his once brilliant memory when we first met. His daughter Ann, who I knew from local tennis, had told me she was putting her dad in an assisted living home. He had been diagnosed with dementia.   Upset at having just started a new job that didn’t give her flexible hours, Ann wasn’t sure how she was going to juggle everything. 

“I’d be happy to visit your dad once a week,” I volunteered.   My own elderly father had just left for Florida for his six-months in the sun and I was a little lonely. I didn’t know then but it was the beginning of a five-year adventure.

Taking the cues of his love of history and sports as a way to connect, Ted and I became fast friends. Always in a navy blazer, button down shirt and creased khakis, his shoes were dark soft leather, smart and practical. Ted’s appearance was neat at first but like the whiskers on his face, over time, became more and more scruffy.

Each week for two hours we’d take a walk and then do a 20-piece puzzle together, with me edging the needed pieces toward him.  I’d read him the newspaper out loud, starting from the back sports section on forward. We’d drink decaf coffee and have a couple of chocolate chip cookies in the lounge.  Ted never had more than one, he was disciplined. And we talked.

 I’d ask simple questions hoping for answers and he’d fill me in on his life.  Favorite birthday present?  If you could choose your last meal? Butter pecan or mint chocolate chip? Dog’s name? Best friend growing up? Favorite movie? Anything to get him talking and bring him a moment of recollection, a glimmer of joy. That lasted about three years.

By the fourth year, the puzzle became too hard and so did the newspaper. I used my iPhone to bring up the music and lyrics of songs that he remembered by heart: “America the Beautiful,” My Country Tis of Thee” “God Bless America” and the” Marine Corps Hymn.” Ted had been a Captain in the Corps during World War II and was Sempe Fi through and through! We sat together in the lounge and sang all the songs, laughing at how off-key we both were, not caring who heard us or who else joined in.

 I bought balsa wood airplanes and plastic parachuting soldiers for a buck at a nearby five and dime store and we’d go out to a little patch of grass off the parking lot and try to launch them, both of us laughing like kids, hooting and hollering when we got the things to swoop and fly. I threw him a Frisbee and he’d throw it back best he could. We’d walk in the garden and I insisted we both literally stop and smell the flowers.

I’m not sure when I realized it, but I started to know more about Ted than he knew. And I understood I now had the privilege of gently reminding him who he was and had been, as he slipped further away. The first three years Ted told me his memories.  The last two years I gave them back to him.

Working as a general practice lawyer who did real estate closings and wrote wills on the second floor of a bank building in Northport New York, Ted looked out his office window down to the Sweet Shop across the street where he’d gone as a young boy. He had joined his dad’s law firm after graduating from Princeton on the GI Bill and NYU Law School.

His folks moved to this small town when Ted was a baby and his older brother John was a toddler. His parents lived in the same home until they died about twenty-five years earlier and John then became its sole occupant.  Ted had moved only a few blocks away to his own place after getting married but he considered his boyhood white clapboard three-story structure always as “my house”. Now sitting vacant on a hilly tree-lined street within walking distance to the Sweet Shop, the slightly dilapidated home seemed caught in-between time, filled with memories from one generation of a family, awaiting the next.   

Ted never forgot his way to this place, directing me on our drives down Main Street. “Take a right here,” he’d say with total conviction. “There up on that hill with the black shutters,” he’d point out. “We used to sled down the front lawn. And fly!”  

But Ted’s favorite stories were the ones about his playing varsity basketball, football and baseball for his high school team.  Ted and I took a “road trip” one day to Northport High School to have a look around.   When some kids came out a side door  I grabbed it, and with a coaxing, “C’mon Ted, let’s walk your old halls!” we took a tour.

We were passing the glass cabinets outside the principal’s office where trophies are displayed, when we noticed a tribute with pictures and news clips to an athlete who had earned 11 varsity letters while attending the school some 65 years earlier. It was a school record that still stood in 2015.  The athlete was Ted!   

Grinning from ear to ear, Ted started naming each of the kids in the photographs – his former teammates – as if the pictures were taken yesterday. “I would’ve had all 12 varsity letters but football required freshman to be 15 years old in order to play on Varsity,” he explained. “I was only 14.”

Ted’s other cherished memory was being recruited to play Major League Baseball soon after graduating high school. The Brooklyn Dodgers had signed him and even though he didn’t see any real playing time in the year or two he was with them, his eyes shone and his speech became animated as he rattled off the names of the greats he’d rubbed elbows with. 

“Ever heard of Pee Wee Reese?” he asked me one day. “He was one heck of an athlete.” Ted mentioned their arch-rivals, the N.Y. Yankees, and ticked names off their lineup including Phil Rizzuto and Joe DiMaggio. And he described the spring training practice game where he had gotten his first home run  

 A little melancholy would invade his story, though, and he’d hesitate. The military and then law school had gotten in the way of Ted's dream of playing in the majors.  It was as if he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere on his life’s road, turned right into a safe profession when he should’ve turned left into an exciting career as a first baseman.

 His memory of most things had dimmed by then but that memory had not. And it seemed in his recounting that the notion of his lost dream was just dawning on him.

 Things started changing in the fourth year of our visits -slowly at first, then quite rapidly. Ted had a few falls. His gate was getting choppier and more hesitant. There were a few hospitalizations, his heart was not good. Ted talked and smiled a bit less which made me try a little harder. I was up to two visits a week during the fourth and fifth years and whenever needed during what turned out to be his final six months.

Ann would call, he’d had a fall or an episode of some sort, she was on her way and could I get to the emergency room and help get him settled? I’d race over to the VA Hospital in Northport, the nurse would point out his cubicle and I’d round the corner with a smile.  “Hey Ted! Thought you’d have some excitement without me, huh?” He’d visibly relax. “I’m swell,” he’d say smiling ever so slightly, tired and confused at his failing body. 

When he passed away at the Veteran’s Hospital Hospice, I had just been with him a couple of hours earlier. He couldn’t really talk by then but I kept softly chatting away with him about the nurse, the weather, about his family who were coming in from out of town, his eyes half-closing and opening. When I said goodbye that day I thought it might be the last time I’d see him but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything final. I wouldn’t.

 “See you later, Ted” I told him. “Get some rest,” my last words to him.   

He’s been gone for about six years now and while I could never say goodbye then, in some ways I don’t think I ever have to. He left something important behind that I’ll always treasure: his old memories plus the new ones we’d made together as friends.