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22 An Afternoon Visiting My Mother in Assisted Living You likely know these hallways: doors closed, small nameplates next to each door, a cluster of dried flowers on some of the doors. You can hear the TV behind each door: the news, a game show, a soap opera, only once in a while the shopping channel. The air in the halls seems to sit, piled up on the carpet. You walk through it, you feel it’s been breathed in and breathed out day in and day out, recycled through lungs that had run the bases, walked the dogs, pushed generations of strollers, shopped aisles, climbed stairs to bed. My mother always laughs when I walk up. She waves. Out by Petey Bird the parakeet, a half-dozen women sit on sofas, one doing a crossword, the others overlapping their small words. Petey Bird hops down his little yellow ladder and pecks at his image in the blue-framed mirror hanging halfway up his cage. “Pretty bird!” he chirps, and I say back, “Pretty bird!” “Who are you?” two of the women ask. “Betty’s son,” I say. “She hit me,” one says, “but she’s funny.” “We like her,” says another and pulls the shoulder of her dress back up over her bra strap. “Yes, she is funny all right,” I say. In my mother’s room I sit on my mother’s bed. She sits in her chair. 23 We look at old photos she keeps in a flimsy box in the drawer in the table by her bed. “Nineteen twenty-one,” she says. “These are from 1921. Imagine. I didn’t think they had photos in 1921. This is my dad.” She hands me each photo. “The names are on the back,” she says. “Good thing,” she says. “Here’s your cousin Dixon with your Uncle Raymond.” She laughs. “I remember them,” I say. “You do?” she says. “I do,” I say. “Nineteen twenty-one,” she says. And she laughs. She laughs after she shows me each grainy, copper-faded photograph. She says, “Aunt Lil,” says, “Me and my mother. Uncle Alec and Aunt Sade. Albert on his pony.” Says, “Aunt Lil. Aunt Lil. Aunt Ede. Uncle Willis and his car. Cousin Cos. Aunt Lil. Dad. Me.” She is laughing when the nurse comes in. “This is my son,” she says and laughs. “He’s a poet!” The nurse nods to me, says to my mother, “Do you remember the rest of the joke you started to tell me yesterday?” “Which one?” my mother says. Says, “You mean the one about the two nudes who went into a bar?” “Yes, that’s the one.” “No,” says my mother and laughs. Can you tell me which part of this poem isn’t true? ...

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