martes tuesday 2 marzo march 2010
73 winter 17 moon 53 space/age

1.

GOT TO TAKE a sentimental journey.

Drive south with Mom into Chula Vista to collect an old family friend. Her husband is in the hospital, and she, with her almost complete loss of memory, is momently in the watch of one family member or another. Mom asked her son yesterday what we could do to help and he suggested maybe we could take her out to lunch today? At first she was sadly declining because I have a standing date with Brandon every Tuesday for a month but I called across the kitchen no, no, we have to do this for her. She is almost family.

So we go south into Chula Vista and collect her at the ****** Manor retirement home.

— It’s been a retirement home since I was a little girl, Mom says, I remember it was one of the first of the breed.

We turn off one of the main residential boulevards of Chula Vista and move west to a small street that enters the land of little cottages wrapped around a giant, towering apartment highrise.

I, too, have heard of this all my life. One of the titans of the industry of American old age.

The birthplace of a million “Sun City” ilk and breed.

2.

We pick her up and I drive us off along Bonita Road, east through the backlands of the Sweetwater River.

This used to be country farms and horse ranches. Now it is sprawling pockets of development laced with open space and parks and golf courses. Open space preserved because of the flood danger from the Sweetwater River.

When I was a child it was still open land. Fortunately, much has been preserved. No one was fool enough to build on top of the river floodplain.

Or, at least, not much of it.

3.

Ellen babbles and jabbers at the birds on the wires, the trees rushing by, the blue and white cloudy sky overhead. My mother sinks deeper and deeper into a crushing sadness.

— Tell me again how I know you? she asks Mom over and over and over again.

I spend almost forty minutes avoiding all freeways, sticking to old country roads that merge back into rushing suburban boulevards. We drive up Sweetwater Road past Mount Miguel high school. My mother used to have students from there, in time to time when she taught home study for the high school district. She would go to the homes of students who were too sick to go to school for several months. Mononucleosis. Severe accident victims. Valley Fever (a rare, almost unknown parisite (or fungus?) caused by breathing in the dust from ancient, infected earth (usually unknowingly). Pregnancy.

Eventually we make our way through Spring Valley and up Bancroft Drive into La Mesa.

Then we eat lunch at a local and luxurious fish joint overlooking the Grossmont pond where the old San Diego flume used to first deposit its water from the mountains, before sending it a bit further west into Lake Murray.

Those were the days.

My mother went to high school long ago in San Diego with the founder of these famous restaurants.

And for me, an even weirder deja vu small world moment. I notice the name on the maitre D's name tag. Ask him if. And he is. Related. His cousin was the husband of my landlady in Tijuana.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where we all are dying, ever so slowly, Ellen spends the hour and a half eating (she has not forgotten how to do that) and babbling about how beautiful the ducks are in the pond. Over and over she asks us how it is she knows us and why are we doing this for her now?

And where is her husband. Then she remembers.

He checked himself into the hospital with thoughts of suicide last week.