Fezziwig Press & Photography by Stu Jenks

Christmas Haiku #24

Christmas Haiku #24 (c) December 2009 Stu Jenks

Two Kings & One Queen:

Caspar, Balthazar & Blanche,

Bring Gold & Pink Pearls.

"Mary 4.0"

“Mary 4.0” (c) Stu Jenks, December, 2009

    Mom has rebooted again, but without the Microsoft updates. More like a hard reinstall of all the old softwares. All the past sweetness of the past few months is gone. All her attentiveness and compassion for her housemates has left. All of her kind motherly love for me is no more. It’s like the Good Mother I’ve had for the past three months never existed. We’re back to the selfish, self-centered woman I’ve been dealing with for the past 55 years. Only major difference is she can’t remember what happened three minutes ago. But her angry pronouncements that ‘Nobody ever visits me’, ‘I hate this room’, ‘The people here are awful’, and ‘I thought you would never come to see’ are now mixed with continuous chatter, most of it unbelievably hard to follow, yet clearly spoken:
    “I went out on the town and then they dropped something.”
    “He was here but then he left.”
    “He just drove by. That was him.”
    “We sure had a something, I tell you.”
    “Mom I can’t understand a thing you are saying,” I say.
    “I’ll try harder.”
    “Trying not going to help, Mom.”
    “I went out this morning and we drove to someplace.”
    “Mom, you haven’t left this house for six months and that was when you were in the hospital.”
    “Abcdefghijklmnop”
    That’s new.   
    “Will I ever buy a new car?” she asks.
    “No, you won’t. You haven’t driven a car in 14 months.”
    “I haven’t?”
    “No, Mom, you haven’t”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I’m positive.”
    “I want to....That woman is terrible,” responding to the voice of one of the caretakers in the hall.
    “Mom, everyone here loves you.” [They really do. Every other resident in the house is either mute or brain-impaired. Mary at least talks.]
    “Why is it this way?” she asks.
    I tell her for the 100th time. I don’t mind telling her the truth. She used to like the truth, demanded it the past few months, and felt happy to hear it. Hell if I know now.
    “Mom, you are dying of dementia. It’s that Brain Thing. Your body’s deteriorating because of your Brain Thing. You can’t drive, walk, write or go to the bathroom by yourself. The feeling on your right side is almost completely gone. You can’t remember things. And none of it is your fault. It’s not your fault.”
    “I can try harder to remember.”
    “It won’t matter, Mom. You don’t have to remember. The staff and I are taking care of you and all the remembering. I know you aren’t happy...”
    “I’m not at all!”
    “...I know, but I think if you can just accept what is happening to you a little, rather than fighting it, you might be a little happier.”
    “Puhh,” she scoffs.
    “You need to hear what I’m saying,” she continues. “1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. Now you’re upset.”
    “I am a little irritated.”
    “Well, I just won’t say anything,” and she clams up like a petulant child.
    I might have, in the past, filled this space with small talk. Not this afternoon. I let it hang. For a very long while. Close to a minute. I’m being petulant too. Two grownups acting like kids. She breaks the silence to ask the time.
    “Quarter to Four. Dinner will be soon.”
    “Hummph.”
    I can’t be around this any more today.
    “Mom, I got some work to do. Do you want to go back into the living room or stay here, in your bedroom?”
    “I can’t stay in the house anymore!”
    “You going to have to, Mom.”
    “It’s wrong!”
    “Just accept it as best as you can.”
    I wheel Mary out to the rest of the house. It’s dinner time. All the other residents but two are sitting at the table. One woman, new to me, inches herself in her walker, ever so slowly toward her chair. I give her a hand and pull out the chair for her.
    “Thank you,” she says.
    “You’re welcome.”
    I return to Mary’s wheelchair.
    “Time to put you at the head of the table,” I say.
    “Good,” she says.
    Then she proclaims loudly to the everyone sitting around the table:
    “This is my husband, Stuart!”
    “No, Mom. I’m your son, Stu.”
    “We know that,” says one of the resident, looking at me.
    Mary give me a look that says: ‘Don’t you correct me. I know what I’m talking about.”
    I give her a kiss on the forehead and make my exit from Crossroads Adult Care Center.

    Driving away, I call Annie and give her the rundown of Mary’s condition, and warn her what to possibly expect when she visits on Saturday.
    “Oh, Jeez,” she says.
    “I know.”

    I’ve got to come up with my own whole new level of acceptance to this new situation with Mary. Accept that Sweet Mom is perhaps gone forever. And I’m pretty clear on this one thing. I won’t be visiting Mary everyday for a while. Four, five times a week tops, to protect my own sanity. Mary is already perpetually disappointed in me, whether I come everyday, or never again. The compromise of every-other-day seems to be the way to go, at least for now.
    Yet as Scarlett O’Hara said: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
    Then again, Scarlett stated that after Rhett had walked out on her.
    So who knows what part of Mary’s brain will be with us tomorrow.
    Mary 5.0? Or perhaps a whole new operating system.
   
     

"Stuart Jenks, Dia de los Muertos, Nogales, Arizona"

“Stuart Jenks, Dia de los Muertos, Nogales, Arizona”(c) November, December, 2009 Stu Jenks

    “It was just terrible that they didn’t tell me that Stuart was dead until just yesterday, “ she says. “It was just two months ago that he died, they said.”
    Welcome back from Chicago.
    “I thought you were dead too.”
    “No, Mom, I’m alive and kicking. And Dad’s been dead since 2001. You were there when he died.” [This is probably the 30th time I’ve told her this. Won’t be the last. I really don’t mind.] “But I need you to make a phone call with me. You see, for some reason, The Marine Corps thinks YOU are dead. I got a letter while I was gone that said ‘We heard that Mary Jenks is dead. So, can you send a death certificate?’ Well, Mom, I talked with a nice lady and she said that if you can have your mother talk with us on the phone and answer a few questions, that that will do, so we will reinstate Dad’s military retirement payments. Do you think you can do that?”
    “Sure,” she says.
    “Well, let’s go over a few questions they might ask. What is your social security number?
    She rattles that off with ease. She’ll know her Social twenty minutes after she is dead. Very good.
    “When were you born?”
    “Yesterday.”
    Oh boy.
    “No, it wasn’t yesterday.”
    “It wasn’t?”
    “Nope. You were born on Halloween, 1922, I mean, 1926.”
    “That’s right. 1926,” she says.
    She knows that. Okey Dokey.
    “Well, let’s give it a try.”
    I take my RAZR cellphone from the watch-pocket in my jeans and begin to dial. Might as well see if this works. What I’m not telling Mary is if she can’t verify on the phone, who she is with the Vets, it’ll be a very long drawn-out process to get her benefits reinstated. I dial, get connected, go through a tons of menus and finally get a live human being on the other end. I explain to her the situation and that I talked with someone earlier in the day. She seems like a very nice civil servant too. She says, ‘Let me talk with your mother.’ I place my cell next to my mother’s ear, still holding it. Mom puts her hand over mine. I can hear what the woman is saying on the other end. The volume’s up.
    “Hello, Mrs. Jenks?”
    “Yes. How are you?
    “I’m fine. I need to ask you a few questions.”
    “OK.”
    “When were you born?
    “I was born...now, when was it...oh yes...it was October 31st,... 1926.”
    Great. Now go for the social.
    “Mrs. Jenks, when did you husband die?”
    Oh crap. Sometimes she thinks Stuart died last week. Sometimes she thinks he’s still alive. Sometimes she thinks I’m Stuart.
    “Now, let me see...I can’t really....say...”
    “Your son can help you. He can write it down, for you to read,” says the civil servant.
    Great. I hastily write down on the back of an envelope: “Sept. 4th, 2001.” I hand the paper over to Mary. She looks at it.
    “Well, I don’t know. I can’t read this! What does that say? I can’t read...”
    Fuck. My crappy handwriting. Thanks an f-ing lot, Miss Riano, for changing me from left handed to right handed in the first grade. I scratch out what I had written and wrote in large block letters: ‘9  4  2001.’
    “Nine, Four, 2004”
    I put up one finger and mouth the word ‘One.’
    “One. 2001,” says Mom.
    “Thanks very much,” say the kind woman. “May I now talk with your son?”
    “Why certainly!”
    I take the phone back. The civil servant and I talk for a while. She faxes me some things. I fax them back and my Power of Attorney too. Seems Mom hasn’t been getting her usually $781 a month for the past two months. We don’t play it that tight financially, but I didn’t notice that they weren’t coming in. Really glad I called. Really glad Mary and I fixed it. Really glad I talked with a real live caring human being on the other end of the phone.    
    “All fixed,” I tell Mom a half hour later.
    “That’s good,” she says.
   
    The next day, It’s the New Old Mary this time. Mom: 3.0. Still pretty sweet and kind but with just a bit of manipulativeness, more than a bit unhappy, complains loudly but then she lets it go pretty quickly, or rather her mind focuses on something completely different. Fuck, I’d complain too, if I knew I was losing my mind, and that only God knows when I will die, even though I’ve been praying for death to come for months.

    This following morning, I bring by some more pics of people that she cares about, to add to the photos tacked to the wall of her bedroom, of her son, and of a close woman friend of mine. Today’s pics are of an ex-girlfriend who is very active in Mary’s life. And of one of her cats. Mary likes one image of her, but not the second one with the cat. First image it is. One thing I’ve learned is you shouldn’t argue with a dying person. Give them what they want. Even though I think image number two is better, Mary likes the out-of-focus second image. Within reason (and sometimes, without), Mary gets to have what she wants. Hopefully she’ll get a visit of Death soon.
    After pinning the photos to her bedroom wall, I come into the living room where Mary sits on the leather sofa, watching something on the Cartoon Channel.
    “That girl just said Bat Shit. I’ve never heard such a thing.”
    Judging from the kid’s show that’s on at ten in the morning, I doubt the character said ‘Bat Shit’ but I let it go.
    Mary tends to ramble on now, or at least she has for the past two weeks. Sometimes it makes sense. Most times it doesn’t, but it doesn’t take too long for me to figure out she thinks I’m Stuart. At least she not calling me Courtney, her pain-in-the-neck brother. She’s been calling me Courtney for the past five years. I’m Dad today, it seems.
    “I’m Stu, Mom.”
    “I know, but let me tell you, Stuart...,” and she continues with a story about me at age five.
    “You had so much fun with Stu that day...You remember it, right?”
    Something about a ‘Big Thing’ and something we were chasing. I have not a clue.
    “No, Mom. I don’t remember.”
    “I remember everything.”
    “You’re good at things long ago. Not so good with what happened yesterday.”
    “That’s true,” she says, with just a tad of acceptance to that fact.
    “It’s OK. You have me and the staff to remember what you need for today.”
    She smiles.
    I smile too. It’s OK that she thinks I’m Dad sometimes. She loved Stuart. She loves me. It’s all good, as the kids say.
    “Time for me to go. I got a bunch of things to do,” I say.
    “OK. I miss you all the time.”
    “I know you do.”
    I bend down and kiss her forehead, and she kisses my cheek.
    “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.
    As I open the front door, Mary yells over.
    “Are you getting dressed tonight for dinner?”
    “No. Love you, Mom.”
    I walk toward my car. It’s a beautiful overcast Fall day in the high desert. A big snow storm roars up North. Maybe some rain today. Maybe tonight. I give a weak smile, and sigh like I always do, when I leave Mary’s place.

"Hoop Dancing" is here!!!

My long-awaited (at least to me) book "Hoop Dancing: More Journeys Through Nocturnal Photography" is now available. Simply click on the above link and it will take you to my website, where there are instructions on how to purchase it. I'm very proud of the book and very happy with the quality of the lithography. And many, many thanks to Gail Cross, master book designer, for her beautiful work, for her guidance on the bumpy road of publishing, and for her continued encouragement, as we prepare to print more good books at the newly formed Fezziwig Press publishing house. And of course, thanks to all of the supporters of my art, my photography, my writing and my life. Both well-known and virtually anonymous; both those with money and hope, and those who only have the gift of Love and Song to give. I thank you.

Love, Light, and Luck,

Stu

P.S. All books will be shipped Priority Mail, now and forever, so needless to say, I can get copies to you before Christmas. And a Happy New Decade to everyone as well.

[Image: "Hoop Dancing at Studio BR-549, Tucson, Arizona" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks]

"And then I began to see..."

"And then I began to see...", A press check of a signature of "Hoop Dancing", at Arizona Lithography, Tucson, Arizona (c) Fall 2009 Stu Jenks.

["Hoop Dancing", the book, should be available for shipment upon my return from Chicago. Go to my website at www.stujenks.com to order the book. And may all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving.]

(Meditation for the day: "It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't")

Geoff Notkin on the 2009 Tucson Open Studio Tour

    Goeff wrote a very nice piece about last weekend's Open Studio Tour. For me, it was the best experience I've had in the eight years I've been participating. Everyone (and I mean everyone) who visited my studio was smart, funny, interested and interesting, and downright great to be around, old friends and new visitors alike. Very different from the horrors of a couple years ago. It might just be me, but I don't think so. With Mary's dementia and all, I'm pretty stressed these days, so the joy (and cash in some cases) that the patrons brought was very welcome. Thank you all, and hope to see you all soon, either in person, online or through my books. Here's a link to Geoff's Article on the blog he writes for the Tucson Citizen.

[Photos of Elizabeth Frank's work and of me in my studio by Geoff Notkin. I didn't even know he took that shot of me. Very sneaky, Geoff]

"Infrared Bozo at 'I Love Teryyake & Sushi' "

 

"Infrared Bozo at 'I Love Teryyaki & Sushi', San Francisco, California" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks

"Mom, I saw U2"

"Mom, I saw U2 with Cathy the other night in Phoenix. We had a wonderful time."

"I'm so glad," she says. It's after dinner. Mary's in bed. She's in good spirits in spite of the scary-waking-visions she's having these days. Today is a day when the dementia makes her feel special rather than cursed. She mentioned to me earlier to make sure I go downstairs and get the $50 in an envelope that is on a chair. There is no downstairs, no $50, no chair. I told her I would get the envelope on my way out tonight.

"They sang this song called 'Walk On.'"

"I know that song," she says. She begins to sing a song. I think it's a Roger Miller song. After a bit, I stop her, to finish my story.

"It's a different 'Walk On," I say, regretting immediately that I had cut her off.

"Oh," she says, but looks at me intently without any shame. Just with love and great interest.

"It's a wonderful song," I say, "About those who have died and have gone before us to the Other Side. I thought about Dad and how I miss him, and I thought about you and how I'm going to miss you when you die."

"I hope so," she says.

I don't tell her that I cried though most of the song, not because I feel any shame about that. I just don't want to break down in front of her, right now.

"I'll miss you a lot, Mom."

She then gets this faraway look in her eye. I know the look. She's getting ready to say sometime very loving, very sweet. If she can get it out.

"I know ...it's selfish of me,... but I told someone today,... that I don't know... what I would do... without Stu."

"You don't need to do anything, Mom. I'll be here for you. Always."

"Thank you, Stu."

I let the Love hang in the air. I don't speak. I don't mess it up. I just let the Circle of Love spin between us. Through us. Through all of us.

"...You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been

A place that has to be believed to be seen

You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly for freedom

Walk on, walk on
What you've got they can't deny it
Can't sell it, can't buy it
Walk on, walk on
Stay safe tonight

And I know it aches
And your heart it breaks
And you can only take so much

Walk on, walk on" - U2

[Photos of U2 were taken from their website.]

"Six Extra Bones"

"Six Extra Bones" (c) 2009 Dr. Elaine Shapiro and Stu Jenks

[I hurt my right foot six weeks ago, jumping over a pool fence barefoot. It's been quite a bother for I couldn't put on my hiking boots, nor my cowboy boots. But I visited a great pediatrist the other day. It seems that some inflamed soft tissue is playing havok with a nerve bundle in one of my metatarsals. She gave me a miracle shot. She'll give me that same shot, twice a month, until the tissue is well. My foot feels better already.

But here's the cool thing.

I have extra bones in my feet. Three per foot. Seems that 10% of the population has extra bones in their feet. I have six all together. For a man who is more at home in hiking boots and on the high trail than anywhere else, this seems so appropriate. Thank You, God, for the extra bones.

I took a picture of the x-ray of my right foot. You can see two of the extra bones in it.

And thank you, Dr. Elaine Shapiro, for helping heal my foot.]

"Cross for Uncle Teddy"

"Cross for Uncle Teddy, Old Sonoita Highway, Arizona" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks

[Watched part of Uncle Teddy's funeral this morning. I will miss him very much. A great man who grew into his greatness. A man who understood that friendship was about loving people for who they are, not for what they believe. And today, he has inspired me to be more loving and caring toward people. All people; the difficult to love and the easy to love, the giving and the selfish, the Flush and the Needy. And to be, personally, an even better man, to let go of more of my addictions, like Nicotine, so I can live longer, so I can love longer, so I can give more. And to let go of old prejudices, and old angers and old sadness, and old ways of doing things. And to be more open to The Big Mysteries. And Finally, that we need to carry on, in spite of the grief we carry. We owe it to ourselves, our friends, our families. It's a good debt to own. It's what makes me a good man in the Human Community. So thank you, Teddy. We shall carry on.]