Reading History to My Mother

Reading History to My Mother Robin Hemley "Your silence will not protect you." Audre Lourde "T? verything's mixed up in those boxes, the past and the present," my A—i mother tells me. "Those movers made a mess ofeverything." I'm visiting her at the Leopold late on a Monday night after reading to my kids and being read to by my eldest, Olivia, who at six is rightfully proud ofher newfound reading ability. My mother and I have been readers for many years, but in some ways, she finds it more difficult than does Olivia. At eighty-two, my mother's eyesight has deteriorated. Glaucoma. Severe optic nerve damage to her left eye. Macular degeneration. Tomorrow, I'm taking her to the doctor for a second laser operation to "relieve the pressure."We have been told by the doctor that the surgery won't actually improve her eyesight, but, with luck, will stop it from deteriorating any more. After that there's another operation she'll probably undergo, eighty miles south in Seattle. Another operation that won't actually make her see any better. "I always had such good eyesight," she tells me. And then, "I wish there was something that could improve my eyesight." And then, "When are we going to go shopping for that new computer?" "Well, let's make sure you can see the screen first," I say, which sounds cruel, but she has complained to me tonight that she wasn't able to see any of the words on her screen, though I think this has less to do with her eyesight than the glasses she's wearing. Unnaturally thick and foggy. My mother looks foggy, too, almost drunk, disheveled in her dirty sweater, though she doesn't drink. It's probably the medicine she's been taking for her many conditions. My mother owns at least half a dozen glasses, and I know I should have sorted through them all by now (we tried once) but so many things have gone wrong in the last five months since my mother moved to Belhngham 36 Robin Hemley37 that sorting through her glasses is a side issue. I get up from the couch in the cramped living room ofher apartment, step over the coffee table—careful not to tip over the cup of peppermint tea I'm drinking out of a beer stein, careful not to bump into my mother—and cross to the bedroom crammed with wardrobe boxes and too much furniture, though much less than what she's used to. On her dresser there are parts ofvarious eyeglasses: maimed glasses, the corpses ofeyeglasses, a dark orphaned lens here, a frame there, an empty case, and one case with a pair that's whole. This is the one I grab and take out to my mother who is waiting patiently, always patient these days, or perhaps so unnerved and exhausted that it passes for patience. She takes the case from me and takes offthe old glasses, places them beside her beer mug oflicorice tea, and puts on the new pair. She rubs an eye, says, "This seems to be helping. Maybe these are my reading glasses." I should know, of course. I should have had them colorcoded by now, but I haven't yet. She bends down to the photo from the newsletter on the coffee table, and says, "Yes, that's William Carlos Williams." A little earlier she told me about the photo. "It's in one ofthose boxes," she told me. "I saw it the other day. I thought I'd told you about it before," but she hadn't, this photo of her with William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and other famous writers. So I spent fifteen minutes rifling through her boxes ofbills and old papers mixed up on the kitchen counter (a Cascade Gas Company bill, final payment requested for service at the apartment she moved into in December, when we still thought she could live on her own; a letter from the superintendent ofpublic schools of New York City, dated 1959, addressed to my grandmother, a teacher at the time, telling her how many sick days she was allowed...