California Dreamin' on a Winter's Day

As the year 2009 opens its arms to welcome us all, I'm heading out to my California home town to look for a place to live. I know, I know, I was going to Israel and what with a new war looming there a tempting place it is. But family and my conscience have convinced me to at least make a try at California. And anyway, if you want to huddle in the corner of your house, weeping, while rockets rain on your roof, you can do that just as well by living near your mother.


Los Altos, California is still a really pretty little town. In the hills, lot sizes cannot be smaller than an acre. And though I grew up in what I like to call "Baja Los Altos" (not the hills, that is, which I call "Alta Los Altos") the whole place has become pretty posh since I left. Little ranch style houses sell for $1.7 million and are immediately torn down. I suspect there will be a little less of that during these economically challenging times.

Los Altos was one of several beautiful little towns on the San Francisco peninsula founded by the Southern Pacific Railway. They had built a track between San Jose and San Francisco and they wanted people to ride on their train, so they founded a couple of cities and subdivided the lots for sale. In spite of their efforts, most of the Santa Clara Valley (now nicknamed Silicon Valley because of all the computer companies, but I like the old name better) continued to be largely agricultural until well into the 1970s. Apricots, cherries, and almonds all thrived in the mild Mediterranian climate.



The train, which we called the Daylight, actually still had a steam-powered engine when I was a child. It ran once in the morning from San Jose to San Francisco, and once in the evening back the other direction. If you got up high enough on our backyard swing, you could see the smoke from the engine against the foothills of the Coast Range as the train chugged down from downtown Los Altos to the next stop at Rancho, and then on to the stop at Loyola Corners. You can't see it anymore. They pulled up the tracks in the 1960s and built the Foothill Expressway, not nearly as nice.

If I could choose anywhere in the world to live, it would be at the very top of the Coast Range along Skyline Drive just above Los Altos. On a good day you can look down and see the whole of San Francisco Bay ranged below you on one side, and if visibility is really good (what my Dad and his pilot friends used to call a CAVU day--Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited), the Pacific Ocean way off in the distance down the other side of the range. It is just a few miles up Moody Road from Los Altos to the top of Skyline, though I used to think it was a long, long way. Of course that's because it wasn't somewhere I could ride on my bicycle: way too steep a grade. I say that, but the last time I was home I drove up to Skyline and all those people in those cycling uniforms on their expensive bicycles were going as fast as I was up the hill in the old family car. Everybody is very bloody healthy in California.

It will be a challenging time: living near challenging parents during a difficult time in their lives. Since I'm reading more now about Boderline Personality Disorder, it is helping me gain some insight into what triggers some of the angry behavior and how I can best deal with it.

But yesterday I got a letter from my Dad and that reminded me of why I want to go. It is so incredible to me that my father goes to the trouble he does to write these letters. First, he sits at the kitchen table and writes a rough draft on a yellow legal pad. Then, he hobbles into the back room with his walker to get his special lined letter paper. Then, he has my Mom proof his draft, and then he carefully copies it out on his letter paper before he sends it to me. It makes every letter so precious.

The letter I got yesterday is about a family clock that belonged to my Dad's father, Roy Chapman, whose initials are the same as mine. He writes:

"What I am really writing you about is the R.C. clock. It was Dad's hobby and he kept it going himself for many years and we have just had it serviced. As you know it is not a thing of beauty, but serves as a constant reminder of who we are." Dementia is a strange disease. It has damaged some of Dad's brain, but not all of it. Some things are not clear in his mind, and others, like the symbolism of his family clock, are very clear indeed. And he can still write about them.

He continues: "You know so well what it looks like. I would like for you to have it, but it is up to you. We would love to see you as soon as possible whatever you think about the clock. Love, Dad"

I will take temporary possession of the R.C. clock with pleasure, Dad, and I'll make sure it is secured to the table it sits on in my new Los Altos home--in case of earthquake, as all fine objects must be in California. (The R.C. clock flew across the room in the Loma Prieta 'quake in 1989, landing on its back and cracking the case. Fortunately, the glass door on the front and its folk art painting were undamaged.)

But more than that I want to be near you, Dad. You are much more valuable to me than an old Seth Thomas clock, and nowadays, much more fragile. Yes Dad, I'll be pleased to accept your gift of the family clock and I can't wait to see you and the R.C. clock again soon in sunny California.


The old R.C. clock, a Seth Thomas daily wind, with the folk art painting it acquired somewhere along the way.

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Weeping Over an Oil Change: Welcome to Alzheimer's Disease

My father, back when he kept his cars in perfect condition, and really was a car expert.
I try to make my father's battle with this horrible dementia disease as funny as I can because it is funny sometimes, and laughing about it helps to keep away the tears. Today, for example, he woke up with a paranoid obsession about his car. He told me there was a conspiracy of the "enlisted men" against the "officers" to not care for his car properly, and since my sister's husband was a Marine enlisted man, he was sure his son-in-law was in on the conspiracy along with "that other husband."

"But I don't have a husband," I told him.

"Well, you clearly know more about this than I do," he said and on that particular subject I have to say I am the sole expert.

But the car oil change-conspiracy-obsession ceased to be funny when we picked up my sister at the airport this morning and all he would talk about was how we had to have the oil changed. We looked for the service report and saw that it had been changed in October and since my parents drive about 10 miles a month (my father, thank goodness, no longer has a licesnse) it is clear the oil does not need to be changed. But he would not be denied and grew increasingly agitated, which caused Mom to yell at me (when I tried to distract him with a photo album) and my sister to threaten to put him in a nursing home. I put my computer in the basket of the three-speed Raleigh and headed out to the WiFi Bakery for some blogging relief.

It reminded me of a story I heard at a support group for Alzheimer's families I attend. One woman there wept and told us this month that she had had to put her husband in assisted living because he has been insisting on calling her by his first wife's name. He was married to his first wife only four years and he has been married to his present one for fifty, but he kept perusing his old divorce papers and crying and telling his present wife that he never loved "that woman he was married to for fifty years." His agitation grew each day and he just became too much for his wife to handle.

That's the way my Dad was this morning. My sister has come all the way from Colorado and I've come all the way from Florida so we can give him a birthday party tomorrow and right now I don't even want to see him. I know it isn't his fault, but I want my old Dad back. And like the lady at my support group, even though I know an oil change is no big deal, I weep.

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My Father’s Wisdom: Laughing Through the Tears

When you have a beloved parent with a disease like Alzheimer’s there are plenty of moments for tears, so you have to enjoy the laughter when it comes. My sister is out in California taking her turn at watching the old folks and her reports on her adventures always leave me laughing. She writes:

“I believe in using things up and being conservative, but a rubber band around the finger of a rubber glove? Yikes! Then there was the best dinner ever made—two pieces of toast: one with peanut butter and jam and the other spread with cold chicken soup. (We each could have two pieces of toast. It wasn’t two pieces for the four of us.)” At the age of 87, my mother is still very determined not to get fat, so she organizes these "light" dinners after they’ve all gone out to a big lunch. And about the rubber gloves? Her obsessive thrift means she isn’t contributing much to those landfills everybody is worried about.

Because my father is incapacitated now, my sister and I have had to play Sherlock Holmes and Watson to try and sort out our parents’ finances. My father was a wonderful planner for my parents’ future and he diversified his portfolio exceptionally well. He reckoned without my mother’s total lack of interest in finance. Their income is good and she’s still able to write the checks for the electric bill and other expenses, but she has no idea where Dad stashed the reserve funds nor how to get at them when she needs to, nor why she should care! So, as Sherlock Holmes, I sit and play my violin and think up ways for us to follow the treasure map and then I assign my Watson (my sister, the best snoop sister around) to sneak a look into a certain set of files in a certain room I designate back at the old homestead and off she goes, revolver in hand. Her first report from Baskerville Hall, I mean from 911 Echo Drive, was thus: “Mom is her Energizer Bunny self—I don’t know how much snooping I can do.”

In the end, tucked inside the cardboard lining of a blue binder, she did find the list Dad made, before he became ill, of his assets totaling his net worth. The assets are scattered throughout the San Francisco Bay Area (and the nation for that matter) in banks and insurance companies and investment firms—some of which have changed hands several times since he made his list in 2001. He was so smart: he also bought rental property, which will continue to support them even if his other investments tank along with the recent economic downturn. One insurance policy he bought turned into an annuity after a certain number of years transpired without his death. My Mom told my sister with some surprise that an insurance check had appeared all of a sudden in the mailbox this month and it turns out that his policy is the source. Now that we have the list of assets, Sherlock and Watson will have to spend some time going down the list, investment by investment, to find out what the money has been doing for the last seven years. At least we have a place to start.

Dad has changed a lot since the onset of his Alzheimer’s but one thing about him hasn’t changed: he hates to sit around. On my last visit I would take him on drives because I know he likes to get out and I myself love traveling the back roads of the Santa Clara Valley. One day we headed up Moody Road to Skyline Boulevard at the top of the Coast Range. For some reason, my Dad had it in his mind that we were going to the library, though I had told him several times we were just going for a drive. As we headed up into the hills he said, “This is a funny way to the library.” And later, “Oh, we must be going to the library at Foothill College. I didn’t know we had a library card to Foothill College Library.” And finally; “Well this is the darnedest way to the library I’ve ever seen!” He’s completely deaf, so I couldn’t write down where we were going until I could find a place to pull over, not an easy thing to do on a windy road in the foothills of the Coast Range. When I was able to stop and write to him he was pleased we were off on an adventure and began to complement me on my driving. It is something he was still doing a month later during my sister’s visit, though he couldn’t, at that moment, remember my name:

“Of course he spoke of that girl who drove so wonderfully in the mountains—turning smoothly, stopping gently on that dime and never getting lost—so impressive a driver that the policemen were impressed by her prowess behind the wheel. Wow!”

Dad also described to my sister something he called the Brown Chevrolet Brigade that guides drivers to their correct freeway exits. We’re not sure where this comes from, except that Dad and I and his caregiver drove the I-280 freeway to San Jose Airport on my last visit to return a rental car I had. We drove in tandem so I could have a ride back and from this his mind may have invented his Brown Chevrolet Brigade Roadside Assistance Program.

It can leave you in tears if you don’t laugh about it occasionally. Here is a man who all his life lived for others, who was intellectually curious, who was fit, who was principled, who went to church and tithed, who did his duty, who loved his family and his country and who now, at the end of his life is rewarded with this disease that steals away his mind. I would cry. But when I was small and found myself in tears, my father would pick me up and say, “Don’t cry Robin. Don’t you know that tears turn to water vapor?” And it is ever thus. We are all just here for a moment and then are gone. We are all just vapors in the midst of transmutation. My father knew it long ago.