New Year’s Eve Blues

By Catherine Tarleton

We are approaching a New Year 2010. As we prepare for this new year, we must always see the future from living in the present because we are supported by the past. Our kupuna is always with us in everything we do, because where we walk and what we do sets the future. ~ Keala Ching

New Year’s Eve Blues ~ The rental car had satellite radio, and during the hour drive south from Richmond Airport, I found the blues channel and was digging it. After the long flight from Kona, a tall 7-11 coffee in the cup holder, heater on high, I was doing Drivin’ to Mama’s House Blues, with December gray skies sliding by on the back roads.

This would be a tough one. Long-procrastinated but finally time. After the excuses, after the Hotel reopening and my hula debut, after deep-fried turkey dinner and our 20th wedding anniversary, the excuse bucket was empty. It was time. Mom, 80, had the Fallin’ Down Blues. Fell on my ass, badadadahump. Layin’ down in the grass. Like Samuel L. Jackson in “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” the blues would help my two brothers and me do what we had to do in the next few days.

Mike had been there three weeks GodBlessHim, all through the holidays. Chuck lived close by, GodBlessHimandhisWife, and had taken care of everything for years. Together, we did the Get Her Out of Bed Blues, the Take Your Medicine Blues, the Potty Time Blues. I’m changing a diaper, badadadahump. Cause it’s my turn to wipe her.

We made coffee, cooked soup, brought in Wendy’s baked potatoes. We fetched peppermints and paper napkins, vanilla ice cream, whatever she asked for. We laughed at the same old stories again and agreed that we were the funniest kids and the grandchildren were the cutest ever.

The three of us would sneak out and do the Go Down Nursing Home Blues in the rental car with the radio cranked up. The Sign Over Your Money Blues at the bank. The Lyin’ Children Blues, as we got our story straight in Starbucks. After the alibis, after the paperwork and the doctor’s approval, after the phone calls to her sisters and all the other blues we had to sing, the date of admission was set at December 31st. The New Year’s Eve Blues.

The house was quiet. Not even blues when Chuck told her, as rehearsed, that we were going out. We were going to get some help for her sore back. He, as gently as placing a lei around her neck, removed the electronic Lifeline device.
“What’s that thing?” she said. She’d been wearing it for three years.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You don’t need it anymore.”
“Oh,” she said, “Whatever.”

Get Her in the Car Blues. Goin’ down the front stairs, badadadahump. Who knows why and who cares. She had on clean clothes. Fresh diaper. All the medications in a paper bag. The nursing home was only one block away. They greeted us with a wheelchair. It was not that cold that day. Blue Sky Blues. Everyone was very friendly, like they were so happy to see her. And Mom played along like she was at somebody’s tea party.

They wheeled her down to the room we’d picked out, with the view of the tree hung with birdhouses. Then we had to step out while she was examined. The Turnin’ Her Over Blues, Naked Mama Blues, Bruise-Huntin’ Blues.

“You’re fine,” I said when she asked what was going on, wide-eyed, as if asking me if she should be scared.
“Did I have another stroke?”
“You had a fall,” I said. “They are going to help your back.”
“Oh,” she said. “Whatever.” She didn’t seem concerned; she didn’t ask about going home, just when we would be back and it better be tonight.
“You hear me?” she said.

I’d like to say I went back at midnight with a bottle of champagne because that would have been a thoughtful thing to do. But I did not. Whatever.

Over the next few days, we gradually changed the semi-private space into hers. We hung her favorite photos of the grandchildren. We put out Wal-Mart flowers, brought a phone and the radio. It didn’t matter. The Mom we knew would have hated everything about it.

I stayed in her house and started cleaning it out, getting it ready for sale. The Creepy Closet Blues, the Kitchen Cabinet Blues. The pot without a handle for as long as I could remember, burned off by Dad by accident and never replaced. The vases and bowls glued back together in a thousand pieces. Spices from the last century. A room full of books. Then stuff started to happen.

First, I lost the blues-playing rental car to a flat tire, a slashed tire. And, when I called the Guaranteed 24-Hour Roadside Service, I learned the word “free” was not included in that benefit. Long story short, I got another rental car, a Lincoln as a matter of fact. But no satellite radio.

During the day, I hauled out bags and boxes in the Lincoln. On the way back, I’d stop by the liquor store for more empty boxes: Johnny Walker, Smirnoff, Jim Beam. If it wasn’t raining, I’d walk to the nursing home, and stop for a coffee on the way. If it was cold, I wore her jacket, stolen out of the closet like I used to do in high school. Sometimes I took a beer and drank it with her in the semi-darkness, listening to classical music on the little radio that played 24/7.

One day the toilet overflowed. I called the plumber who called the city who made a swamp in the front yard and sang the Roto-Rooter Blues. Bad news: the main pipe run was going to have to be replaced. Sooner would be better than later. Oh, and by the way, it looks like the chimney is sinking.

At night, with the TV on and a beer, I went through the boxes of things a mother saves. Boxes and boxes, some with our names. Me, Mike, Chuck, our sister Beth who left the planet in 2001. Life in a box. First grade finger paintings next to college letters and wedding photos, concert programs, Hawaii stuff, baby books.

I found the box of secret letters—the ones from Dad to her, from him to his mother in West Virginia and Mom to hers in Texas—the back story of what I remembered about our life. So many apologies, so many variations on the We Can’t Come This Time Blues. I went through all of it, sitting in her blue chair with the matching footstool, wrapped in one of the prayer shawls from the First Presbyterian Church.

Then I got sick. First with a weird rash on my hands, and then legs. Then a cough turned into bronchitis and I went to the clinic for prescriptions. The pharmacy called Hawaii; Hawaii called back. It made their day. And I ended up with a tube of weird-smelling cream and a bunch of pills. Whatever.

Gradually, kitchen cabinets emptied; dressers and desk drawers, closets, bookshelves lost their contents to boxes from the liquor store, found their way into the Lincoln or on the back patio. I would go visit Mom in between things, always armed with somewhere else to go after about an hour. I would take in something else from the staging area by the front door: the red Tele-tubby, new underwear, the box of Big Island Candies shortbread cookies.

Then one night, asleep in the chair, I woke up to a sound I thought was fire. I ran to the noise. Water heater freaking out. Steam-filled laundry room. Hot water everywhere. No time for blues. Barefoot, glasses fogged, frantic, I looked for a shutoff. No luck. And no floor drain. I got a pot to catch the worst leak, for a while and called Chuck. He was asleep and could not help. But Dwight, my husband, was awake in Hawaii, and he said what I wanted to hear: it will not blow up. Following his instructions, I was able to turn the breaker off, find the valve and dam up the threshold with bed linens and old towels I was throwing out anyway.

The water heater put it over the top. The water heater, and the fact that the answers came from back home in Hawaii. Something was going on in this unhappy house, and it had got my attention.

See, it finally, finally occurred to me that stuff was happening here on different levels, physical, mental, emotional, past-present-future, all that. And spirit. And maybe I didn’t know how it worked or was supposed to work, but it was happening anyway.

At the Hotel, when stuff like this happened—too many accidents, too much upset all around—we would call Kahu Abraham Akaka, Kaniela’s uncle, who would come and bless the property and things would start getting better. The next morning, I decided to try that myself.

I only knew one oli, written by Keala Ching. It had something to do with ancestors, so that would do, and I chanted it walking all around my mother’s house, inside and out. I thanked the spirits of the place for taking care of my mother and I let them know she was right over there and I asked them to help us get the house ready for the next people who would live there, and to bless them too, and bless Mom in the nursing home and let her be at peace there with everything she needs. The peppermints, the paper napkins, the classical music on the radio.

It wasn’t a blues riff, but I sang it out over and over. Every room, every window and door, every step of the yard’s perimeter. I didn’t care what the neighbors thought.

Hō mai ka ‘ike, ‘ike pāpālua e
Hō mai ka ‘i‘ini, ‘i‘ini papalua e
Hō mai ka mana, mana papalua e
E hō mai, e hō mai, e hō mai
Ka pāpālua e
E ola

And the stuff stopped.

And some good things started to happen. Mike came back two more times. We patched the cracks in the living room and we painted. He brought his good dog Catey to the nursing home, and once he put her in Mom’s bed and we sat there for a long time, not really talking, just watching Catey breathe. We checked emails at the coffee shop and ran around with Chuck and watched football down at his house on the river.

One weekend, the whole youth group showed up in the church van and we hauled load after load of crap to the dump. The last to go were the books, packed in boxes from the liquor store: Johnny Walker, Smirnoff, Jim Beam. We filled the van with them and headed to the library. They gave us a space in the store room and each kid grabbed a box, paraded in.

One lady watched them come, full of questions. What kind of books are they and were there any James Michener or murder mysteries and when could she check one out and where did they all come from?
“We’re cleaning out my mother’s house,” I said. “She loved to read.”
“And drink,” she said.
Mom stayed in the nursing home eight months. She left in September and the preacher told that story at her funeral.

Much later, back home in Hawaii, looking again through the box of letters, I read her forgiveness to me, in a letter to her own mother, in an apology for once again not coming home, for being so far away in such a different life from the one she left back in that little Texas town. I had only done what she had done and what she had faulted me for she had only faulted herself. And there it was. Mama Loves You Blues. Forever Aloha Blues.

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