Surprise!

Margie to me, this morning: You have to come up to my place when you arrive! I have something amazing to show you. It just arrived. My children are so wonderful. They have bought me a miraculous picture frame….

Margie showed me the picture frame more than a month ago and I blipped it then. But for Margie it just arrived, a wonderful surprise, and she is eager to share it with me. I delight in it with her as if for the first time. 

For years I taught young actors: perform those words as if this is the first time you ever thought of them. Walk across the room as you say these words, but as if the notion to walk across the room only just occurred to you. Have a purpose in crossing the room. Search for your keys as if you have no idea where they are. Keep it fresh. 

Theatre is great training for being with people with memory loss.

After the excitement of the picture frame, I spotted a new book by her chair: a collection of poems by Irena Klepfisz she asked me to order for her weeks ago. 

“I wondered if you had something to do with that book being here.” She tells me regretfully that she feels no connection with Klepfisz. Both from the Bronx, both children of Yiddish-speaking parents, but Klepfisz is twenty years younger than Margie, and Margie says, “I don’t understand a lot of what she’s on about. I confess I find it boring, but maybe that’s just me. I’m bored with myself. I want this adventure to be over. Enough already.”

We took a walk around the neighborhood. “You can’t tell by looking,” Margie confides in me with a fresh ripple of excitement, “but I think Spring is coming. Can you feel it? The air is a little kinder. It doesn’t cut through you.” She rises to the thrill of it. “If I have to be here, I’m glad Spring is coming.”