Day 2 June 15th, Cambridge City, Indiana

Day 2 June 15^th, Cambridge City, Indiana (my home town)

Wanda always gets up earlier than Ted. She reads the paper and has coffee. I join her and we talk and read and drink. There is the old and pleasant ritual of looking at all the sales notices and reading the local news and talking about local events and people. When Ted joins us, we eat and continue talking. Afterwards, I get cleaned up and head out for Greenfield, Indiana where the nursing home is located. It is about a 40-minute drive. I use to plan what I would say to my mother during these miles, but that is no longer necessary. Her memory has dimmed and her awareness of world outside her nursing home is so limited that we really do not have a conversation any more.

I arrive about 30 minutes before lunchtime so that I can go to her room and wheel her down to the dining room. I sign in at the front desk and get a lunch ticket charged to my mother's account. It is the one of the few things she can give now. Today, she is already in the dining room, so I go over and greet her. We have to reorganize the table so that I have a chair along with the other two women she always eats her meals with. She asks me if I have used her account to pay for lunch. I say “yes”. I start talking to her about my upcoming hike and the details about the next 3 days as I travel and make arrangements with my friends in Ithaca, New York who will be supporting me throughout the hike. She smiles and says, “that's nice”. I am not really sure how much she comprehends, but there is no to evaluate her memory. I already know its limitations. I stay a little longer than usual at the lunch table with her. Then I wheeler down to the bedroom. When we get there, her room mate waves at me and says “hi”. I give my mother a map of the trail and my planned itinerary so that my sister can mark off my progress and my mother will have some idea of where I am. My mother says to put them in the closet on the shelf for my sister to look at on her next visit. I go through the ritual of signing into my mother's logbook for visitors. Then I leave with what has become my usual sense of sadness after these visits. I use to reflect on past memories of my mother and the world we shared when she was younger and able to be more engaged mentally with the world around her. Although memory and communication can be unpredictable, the last time I visited, she related that before she married my dad there had been 5 other men who proposed to her.

I get into my car and drive away. I stop at the White Castle and get some sliders. I have memories of White Castle that goes back to high school. There was once when Ted, his twin brother, Jack Smith and I took a trip and bought a dozens of “burgers” to eat that night. The trip back to CC is the usual 40 minutes and while watching the familiar scenery, the sadness fades away. On the way back to Ted and Wanda's, I decide to drive through Cambridge. I often do this. I have said to others that there is a memory on each street corner. I drive by the filling station where the funeral home I grew up living in until I was 17 once stood. The old 1920's house was torn down after my dad sold the property to the Shell Oil Company. He then built a completely new funeral where we lived on the side of the funeral home rather than above the funeral business. Ted, his brothers Tom and Allen along with their dad built the new funeral home.

Ted, Wanda, and I go to the Mexican restaurant for dinner. Never in my wildest dreams as a kid would I have imagined a Mexican resurgent in the old filling station on Main Street. Then back then there I can remember only two restaurants in town, the Green Chicken and the Family Restaurant. To go to them was a real treat since we always ate our 3 meals at day at home – we ate punctually i.e. Breakfast was at 7:30 am, lunch was at 12 noon, and dinner at 5:30 pm, and heaven help you if you were 4 minutes late. Back at their house we have a beer and watch TV for a while before going to bed. Tomorrow I drive to Ithaca, N.Y. Where Gina and Patrick live. I worked, as a Ridgerunner, with them on NJ's 75 miles of the Appalachian Trail 6 years ago.