The Heduan Review
SUMMER 2023
Contents 4 Growing Pains
8 timor mortis
10 Mojave
12 Take Me Back
13 Dear Consciousness,
14 Sati
19 The Waiting Eyes
20 Let Me Remember For You
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Growing Pains Pierce E. Scranton Jr.
“I endured this because Dad was my hero, a quiet, confident presence.”
In 1959, the going rate for picking green beans on a truck farm was
fifty cents a bushel. Why endure the aching back, blistered hands, and palms cut by the basket’s wire handles? A used, three-speed Raleigh racer caught my eye at Neeley’s Bike Shop in Dayton, Ohio. Six bushels a day meant three dollars in crumpled bills⎯a fortune compared to my allowance. One more week, that bike would be mine! Each morning, I’d stash my Schwinn with bald tires and no rear fender in the farmer’s entryway shrubs. He’d gesture toward the untouched rows that glistened with morning dew. “Get after it, kid.” I knew this pastoral view was an illusion because, later in the day, the sun would turn this bean field into a furnace from hell. Ages later, the lonesome whistle at the distant Delco plant signaled lunchtime. I’d picked three bushels. Mom’s sack lunch consisted of an egg salad sandwich, an apple, and a chocolate brownie. I drank greedily from the water faucet before going back to work. It was clear that the mosquitoes orchestrated their attacks. The first wave dive-bombed my ears and ran up my nose, distracting me, while the third wave drew blood on my back. Foraging through the leafy rows disturbed all sorts of flying things. Daddy Long Legs spiders and sow bugs were brushed away as I sought the succulent green beans. Yesterday, the scaled body of a large black snake scared Be-Jesus out of me. My heart pounded in my ears, even after it slithered away. Shimmering waves of heat rose in the afternoon sun. My sweat-soaked tee shirt clung to my back, resisting efforts to reach beneath it to scratch a mosquito bite. I endured this because Dad was my hero, a quiet, confident presence. He’d go for long walk every Sunday. And if I accompanied
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him, he’d reminisce about his days in the Three C’s, telling tales about growing up during the Great Depression. “I would have killed for a job like you have today,” he said. “No one had money. Once, forty of us waited for hours outside a hardware store where a sign read, Three jobs, 50 cents a day. A man threw three shovels out, saying, ‘I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Whoever holds a shovel has a job.’ After a moment of silence, one man socked another in the jaw, grabbed a shovel, and started running.” “There’s no free lunch,” he told me. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I nodded as though I did. I didn’t realize this was what was coming. The next day, two brothers with bowl haircuts were waiting with the farmer. He’d picked them up from the trailer court in Sycamore Flats near the Miami River. One had a scrawny cornsilkcolored mustache that crawled down his lip. The other had ropy muscular arms, calloused hands, and an angular, hawk-like face. They stood to the side, quietly talking. A pack of Redman Tobacco protruded from the one’s back pocket. I remembered Sycamore Flats. During eighth grade, my school bus looped through the trailer court, populated by sun-bleached trailers, beat-up cars on blocks, and a rusty oil drum burn can with a thread of smoke drifting from it. A rough-looking lady in a thin flannel nightgown with her hair in curlers supervised an unruly brood of kids until they scrambled aboard. Sometimes, she’d wave goodbye. Sometimes, not. The truck farmer had ten acres ready for harvest. I guessed that my picking six bushels a day wasn’t going to cut it. Though I waved as I carried an empty basket past them, their eyes bored through me like buzzards eyeing dead meat. I prayed I’d grow bigger. The brothers went to work and never stopped picking. Their backs had to be like iron. One had a little transistor radio in his pocket, playing country western. They worked with the rhythm, singing along with Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, or Reba McEntire, picking six bushels each by noon. I tried to keep up. When the lunch whistle blew, I wolfed my sandwich down, saving the rest for later. But the brothers never stopped. By day’s end, I said to the farmer, “Picked eight bushels today.” I couldn’t wait to tell Dad. But the farmer never looked up. “Those brothers picked twenty-two bushels, kid.” The hawk-faced guy caught me next to my bike, slipping out of the shrubs and grabbing my arm. He spit a thick stream of tobacco The Heduan Review
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the shrubs and grabbing my arm. He spit a thick stream of tobacco juice on my sneaker. “Beat it, kid. G’wan . . . get outta here.” The bike’s rear tire flat had a fresh cut at the base of the valve. Hawk-face snickered. I ran back to the farmer, and he followed. “Could I use your phone, sir?” The punks hung, talking to the farmer and acting interested-like. Hawk-face looked my way, cracking his knuckles like he was bored. I could barely dial. “Son, you’ll need to walk home.” “Dad, it’s four miles.” “In that case, you’d better get going.” “Thanks for nothing!” I slammed the receiver down. An hour and a half later, I arrived home with the flat tire dragging in the dust. Tears of rage and frustration had been shed. I imagined punching out the two trailer-court hillbillies. Then I’d hold my fist up to my dad’s face. “You want some of this, too?” As I pushed the bike into our gravel driveway, fireflies flickered under our old oak tree. A tire swing hung from a branch, a lonely reminder of the times of innocent thrills and laughter. Dad would push me, and I’d swing back with cries of joy. The empty swing marked a hollow end to childhood. What would I say to a father who wouldn’t come get me? What could I say? I told Mom I wasn’t hungry and went straight to bed. Hawk-face haunted my dreams. The next day, I asked Mom to drive me to the bike shop with my Schwinn in the trunk. With my savings, I made a trade for that used Raleigh Racer. When Dad came home, I told him that me and some guys had picked the bean field clean, and I didn’t have to go back. He seemed surprised but said nothing. But he did tell me to be careful with the bike. It was in the front yard, where I was showing it off. Dad said that was like leaving an invitation. I didn’t get what he meant, and the next day it was gone. I was devastated. When Dad came home, I blamed my bad luck on him not picking me up. Why wouldn’t you come and get me?” He lifted my chin with a single finger and held my eye. “It’s time you started growing up.” I turned away from his eyes. He went on. “Two days ago, I decided to start teaching you about being self-reliant, never letting your guard down, watching for those who might trick you or try to take by force what you have. During the Great Depression, a man with a smile on his face and his arm around your shoulder probably had his other hand on your wallet. People do desperate things in desperate times. Sure, as God
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makes green apples, we’ll see hard times again. Be more careful.” “But what will I do without a bike?” I asked. “Where’s yours?” We entered the Bike Shop. Mr. Neeley sat behind the counter wearing the same soiled bib overalls he always wore, working on a For Sale sign on the counter. With a flourish, he taped it to my Schwinn. I saw a new rear tire. Dad whispered, “Negotiate. I’ll just browse. I might be able to help.” “So, what brings you here?” Neeley asked. “My bike got stolen.” His eyes grew wide. He fingered his chin but didn’t say anything. “For eight bucks, you could buy your old bike back. I’ve fixed the tire.” “You gave me three dollars on the trade-in. All I have is five. Otherwise . . . I’ll have to look elsewhere.” We shook hands. That summer, I picked beans for two weeks, endured mosquitoes and bug bites, bought a bike, and then lost it. I learned how to make a trade, how to look a man in the eye and strike a deal. I learned that life might not be fair. My efforts to earn money picking beans had been wasted. Yet, what happened and what Dad taught me became far more valuable. I couldn’t get over that he chose to be harder on me to teach me about life. Was this being compassionate? I didn’t know what lay ahead in life. But at least my dad was still there to teach me.
“ I didn’t know what lay ahead in life. But at least my dad was still there to teach me.”
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Su Kolsal
timor mortis “The state of man does change and vary, Now sound. now sick, now blyth, now sary, Now dansand mirry, now like to die: Timor Mortis conturbat me.” — from “Lament for the Makaris” by william dunbar (c. 1505)
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the first time you saw a dead butterfly—
keeping it (the death) out.
so, like a moth in its insectile rigor mortis, you felt like an intruder,
when it wriggled its way
peering into a world entombed
into the cryonic cocoon of your life
to keep you out.
your eyes, gelatinous imperfections,
lacking the words for death, rot, decay,
taking in tombstones days old,
unable to look away from
what you felt was:
what is now an obscure blur
humiliation.
of colorless wings and an unmoving body in your mind’s eye,
seeing rot everywhere was simple.
you took in the memory.
it meant
not of the-butterfly-looking-like-a-
rot was everywhere.
moth,
denying seeing rot everywhere was not
but of death looking like
simple. it meant
the-butterfly-looking-like-a-moth
you were a stubborn little girl
and filed it under:
turning down cotton candy
fear.
to avoid a sugar-sticky maw.
in time the dread settled into the pit of your
you will always be a witness to
stomach. each little reminder
rot burrowing its spores in
life can be taken away
more than some,
soured the soft peach flesh of your
most,
insides.
but not all.
your fear of butterflies peeled off
you don’t wish to remain
down to its exoskeleton
a girl afraid.
in the medicalese of thanatophobia, a
so these days,
distaste for any reminder of death—
you try to wipe the layer of dead epidermis
so that life became unbearable
off things yet living
except for in bite-sizes
and touch life anew
you cautioned yourself not to overindulge. the moratorium on life strictly adhered
in fruits made possible
with its fasts (longevity-boosting)
by atoms of livings of past
all-nighters (time-recovering)
and smiles cracked
cold of your hands (all-purifying)
at the moment of a thousand cellular
became your way of
deaths. The Heduan Review
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Mojave C. CAVANAUGH He gave up looking for a town, a gas station, or a house off a road or driveway. The desert unfolded further than his eyes could see. In the stillness, the ground spread in glare, broken only by shrubs now and then. A swell of dunes lay below a jut of mountain range bulking up from beneath the surface. They were told it could take hours to traverse this section, and that they should have a full tank, a functioning radiator, and plenty of liquids. No warning was offered about the middle hours of the day. Notions of night, coolness, and breeze were charred in the afternoon glare. They were not told their mouths would stop moving, their minds would stop seeking the right words, that their hearts would contract, twist, and burrow away from the blistering air, the closeness of the car, of each other. The road snaked a path past shoulders of rock. A ground squirrel foraged, and darted between weeds and creosote bushes. He kept his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the cut of the road. Driving on even though he could sense her wanting to stop. He knew she’d climb from the car, step away, wait. She’d identify creatures, absorb them, witness their edgy movement into and out of the earth. Not yet. It was a prayer. Not yet. Once they got through this part, they’d be okay, his mind promised. Just get through the jaws of the afternoon. They weren’t alone on the road. Not the way they were alone beside each other. The sporadic sight of another car or a truck jarred small blooms of hope inside him. They could do this. It could be done. They weren’t forsaken. Look - that couple is
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perfect, aren’t they? She’s laughing; his smile is huge. Windows down, faces wide to the day. He steered through the chemistry of metal, fuel, and the razored wills of fragile-skinned humans. They pressed through the brittle air, the stunned expanse of earth, the endless heave of a sluggish planet. He heard the tires beneath them, the hum of their dull frenzy. He wished now that they hadn’t been in such a rush to leave. Wished they had waited a few days, weeks, even hours. Waited for the heat to disintegrate into twilight. They could have eased through the morning, napped in the building temperature, and made off at dusk. They could have taken turns at the wheel, slept in shifts, found refuge under the star-punctured night. They could have stayed oblivious to the teeth of mid-day, missed the blast of mute terrain, slipped past the bully of stark beauty. They may have evaded the simmer of their silence, the taunting of their minds, the stunning of their chary hearts.
“ He steered through the chemistry of metal, fuel, and the razored wills of fragile-skinned humans. They pressed through the brittle air, the stunned expanse of earth, the endless heave of a sluggish planet.”
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Take Me Back OLA YACOUB
I stayed up that night waiting for your return. A desperate black rose. Rigged breathing tracing betrayed fog. Dusted eyes waiting for the image to clear up.
A distant nostalgic choir, the cries of the past. Feeling every thread of sorrow until it’s over. It’s done for. Take me back to when it was sunshine and roses.
Bottles of broken wine; red stains the satin sheets. Chipped fingernails; melted ice cream. Take me back to when it was moonlight and night drives.
Take me back to when it was you and I.
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Dear Conciousness, D. R. James and you are, you know. I know, I still curse you in the cynical night, in my stumbling through the numbing day, calling you out, indifferent hex on homo sapiens. You’re why I can’t rest in a shower, or in the cool cavity of my skull. Not with the world’s open sewers, polluted alleys, those impossible bellies and the flies plying the sweet corners of children’s mouths. You’re why
run for being muscle and horse, and birds, even in cages, sing for a sake all their own, and I am you. I am the knowing to anticipate my sons’ returns in joy, my sons’ returns in the skinnings, the exiles of their own lives (a throbbing knot in the throat in either case), and their one day not returning.
the soft, inexplicable give so satisfies and why the take, abrupt as a thought, snatches the calm of veiled being, a permeable haven, after all— what we didn’t have to feel to be salvation. But horses
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Rena Patel
Sati
First published in “Sunflower Station Press”
Sati (goddess) The first wife of Lord Shiva, whom she married against her father’s wishes. She committed self-immolation to protect her husband’s honor and is seen as a paragon of a virtuous and dutiful wife. sati (practice) A ritual, now mostly historical, that gained prominence in South Asia in the late medieval period, in which a widow, dressed in her wedding gown and jewels, commits suicide by sitting atop her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. The practice was outlawed by the British Empire in 1892. The Indian Government passed the Sati (Prevention) Act in 1987, criminalizing the practice and its glorification as an act of selflessness. *** Embers crackled. Ash rose and languished in the air. I slipped my shoes off and stepped onto the mandap. The stone was warm under my feet. A long, almost opaque rectangle of silk, held by my brothers, separated me from the yagna fire and from the eyes of my future husband. My neck, wrists, waist, ears, and ankles were weighed down with gold—all gifts from my parents to take with me into married life. I sat down on my red velvet chair shaped like a throne, wearing a sari of my mother’s choosing. Shackled by my grandmother’s bangles, I listened to the pandit recite the holy Sanskrit verses of matrimony. “You look like a bride,” my mother had told me after clasping a golden choker around my neck. “This is more than you deserve.” The veil, still in place, obscured me from my future husband’s view— though, with my rouged lips, kajal-hooded eyelids, and foundation three shades lighter creating a mask on my face, I very much doubted he would even recognize me. Every little Indian girl dreams of their wedding day from the moment they understand what a wedding even is. From their mother’s wedding album filled with blank faces staring into the camera to the passionate wedding scenes of Bollywood blockbusters: there are fantasies about the
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dress, the bangles, the mendhi, the dancing, the food, and sometimes the person sitting across from them in the mandap itself. We were told that marriage is the start of a new life. Marriage is sacred. Marriage is supposed to save us. The veil dropped. Across from me—dressed like a conquering prince— sat the man I was meant to marry. He smiled with embers in his eyes. I felt the heat roll off my skin. I shivered. He was handsome—there was no doubt about that. I’d heard the aunties say as much after he’d compliment them on their jewels and their figure. How did I of all people manage to secure a marriage with him? How did I beguile him so? What sort of bargain did I strike? They’d hissed under their breaths from the moment the invitations went out. They would never know he’d already taken what he wanted. Someone—my father—handed me a garland without meeting my eye and turned me towards my fiancé. The priest motioned for us to stand together. “Place the garland around his neck,” he instructed. The string, weighed down by red roses, dug into my palms. He bowed, eyes never moving from mine as I laid the garland over his head. My hands stung when they touched the fabric of his salwar kameez. The scent of his cologne – smoky and overwhelming – burned my nostrils like ashes. I bent down, holding back a cough, as he dropped the garland down onto my neck. My skin prickled in pain as soon as the string touched my neck. An itching, almost burning sensation enveloped through my dupatta, heating the choker like a hand. The clamor of applause from the audience drowned out my gasp. I ran my fingers over the back of my neck, feeling nothing but the woven garland string and my own skin. My mother, stern and unflinching, took the end of my dupatta and tied it to his with finality. He grabbed my hand for the pheras, and I jolted back without thinking. When he touched me, a spark—hot and painful—ignited. Each step burned through my soles as the yagna fire scorched the ground under my feet. Family members pelted us with petals, singeing my skin like coals. I could feel blisters bubbling with each hit. After following him for the first two rounds, it was my turn to lead. His knuckles dug into my back like a branding rod, forcing me forward. I cried out as the skin on my soles melded into the stone, tore away from me—stuck to the mandap. “Move,” he hissed. Red footprints trailed behind me. Fallen rose petals stuck to the blood and coated my feet but did nothing to temper the heat radiating from the The Heduan Review
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fire into the floor. Each step scalded my skin, cauterizing the wounds, and ripping them open again. He sat down before I could even comprehend that the pheras were over. The first one to sit rules the household, they said. Blood burned my ears from the hums of approval from the audience. The pandit was speaking, but I could hardly hear him over the hissing fire. Seven betel nuts, each perched on a mound of rice, sat in a line at the front of the mandap. “The Saptapadi unites the souls together with the seven vows,” the pandit explained. “With each step the bride takes, she must tip the betel nut with her toe to accept the vows.” He was by my side again, pulling me forward to face the audience— witnesses to my vows. “May God shower you with food and nourishment as you vow to put the wellbeing of the family and of each other before your own.” I stumbled. His strong hands, possessive, grasped my waist, slipping in between fabric, meeting bare skin—retracing the ghosts of his bruises. The first betel nut tipped over and burst into flames.
“The bangles—my grandmother’s—were scalding, blistering, twisting my skin into the gold. Tightening around my wrists like his hands. An imprint of his breath crackled against my skin.” “May God bless you with a healthy life as you vow to support each other and protect your family.” A ring of fire shackled my ankles as the golden anklets burned into my skin, prickling like pins, pulling my feet forward. The second betel nut tipped over and burst into flames. “May God bless you with sacredness and service as we vow to respect our elders and to thank them for the support they have given us.” The bangles—my grandmother’s—were scalding, blistering, twisting my skin into the gold. Tightening around my wrists like his hands. An imprint of his breath crackled against my skin. “I will ruin you. You are mine.” The third betel nut tipped over and burst into flames. “May God bless you with children as you vow to continue our sacred traditions.”
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The golden chain around my waist burned into my bare skin, bubbling over into my abdomen, slick like his tongue, lapping at the heat erupting into my core. The fourth betel nut tipped over and burst into flames. “May God shower you with bountiful seasons as you vow to share in each other’s joys and sorrows.” The necklace my mother had secured around my neck melted my flesh in a chokehold until gold blended with blood, dripping, holding me in place for him to do whatever he pleased. The fifth betel nut tipped over and burst into flames. “May God bless you with peace and fulfillment as you vow to remain true and faithful in love.” The golden thread embroidered into my clothing ignited, searing the designs into my skin. Flames like his fingers split through my skin, felt up my shoulders, over my breasts, down my stomach, between my legs. The sixth betel nut tipped over and burst into flames. “And may God bless you with a long and lasting life as you vow to never part, in this life and the next.” The last betel nut tipped over and burst into flames. The mandap was engulfed in fire, but no one paid any heed. Fire roared in my ears. My earrings dripped into my hair, whispering sweet nothings in his voice. “You asked for this.” Ash filled my lungs, burned my chest. My skin scalded, sinew melting into gold. The curves of my mendhi gleamed like coals, the lines of his name hidden in the designs seared through flesh down to the bone. My husband presented the mangalsutra—gold and black beads— the necklace of a married woman. He delicately dragged the necklace over my charred collarbones, splitting skin with fire, and secured it around my neck. My skin, waxy and hollow, stretched against my muscles, blistering, breaking against bone. His hands were everywhere, following the flames around my throat. Holding my arms in place like he had when he spread my legs apart. I couldn’t breathe. My nose dripped away like wax, nose ring clattering to the floor. Fire ate at my hair, licking my scalp. My lengha fused into my flesh, fabric weaving into skin. Everyone watched the ceremony; my whole body burning. His fingers dipped into the sindoor, blood red, to mark me as his wife. He brought his hand over my head. The burning reached my heart, and I screamed. The Heduan Review
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I could see it so clearly: the flames, eating away at me, leaving nothing but melted gold and bubbling blood behind. My bones crackled, steam hissed underneath my skin, stinking of sulfur and charcoal. I clawed at my neck, my fingernails disappearing, breaking the mangalsutra, gold spilling over my fingers, taking the place of flesh. He tried to touch me. “Stay away from me!” I growled. The wedding guests watched in horror as I tore away at my dupatta, ripping away burnt hair, splitting the cuffs on my wrists, then my waist and my ankles. Each piece ripped open blood, coating my charred muscles with red, but it was still too hot. I ran, clothes burning behind me, eating through each seam while my hands tore away the rest. Cool air hit bare skin as I shoved the doors open. Heaving, I struck my arms, my legs, pushing away the last of the fabric. Wind whipped around me, spinning me in flickering clouds, struggling to stamp out the flames. The first drop of rain sizzled against my skin, caressing me. The heavens cried above me, tears mingling with my own, softly pressing away at corroded skin. My hair plastered around my head, down my shoulders, over my breasts, wet against the smooth skin of my stomach—leaving my body bare, unmutilated, untouched. Fresh air filled my lungs, uncharred. Free. You are pure—the fire said. You are whole.
“I clawed at my neck, my fingernails disappearing, breaking the mangalsutra, gold spilling over my fingers, taking the place of flesh.”
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The Waiting Eyes ARSHI ASHRAF Spring is doomed; flowers do not celebrate its arrival while the moon weaves tragedies in the starry night, which scroll their way to the cracks of the broken hearts. The beauties lost, for which sin does the ocean cry? A melancholy sways the earth. The world is no heaven, for the waiting eyes searching for the rainbow at the end of the horizon. But the rainbow does not show his face. Hours flourish, yet the rainbow does not come.
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Let Me Remember For You A Letter to a Father with Alzheimer’s
STEVE MITCHELL
Dad, self-portrait, 2020
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Dad, So, I have this memory. You were there, too; but don’t worry if you don’t remember. I can remember for you. It’s a hot, still summer day in 1971, and Hatzic Lake is lukewarm and the color of milky coffee that’s been left on the counter all morning. Motorboats tear across the water, yanking water-skiers across the surface of the lake, filling the air with a sound like a swarm of angry wasps. You are chest deep in the water, with your feet braced in the soft, muddy lake bed. I am four years old and clinging to you, as if to life itself. I am wearing a polyester bathing suit of sickly-bright green and yellow. You’re in a pair of cut-off jeans; you are not the sort of man who has time for expensive, trendy bathing suits. Your eyes are hidden behind a pair of aviator shades, the kind that 1970s TV cops wear, and your black sideburns are a stylish four inches long and one inch wide. Officially, you are second-in-command at the family-run printing company but, in your secret mind, you are a cowboy, a booksmart loner who breaks wild horses deep in the tall grasses and lodge pole pines of British Columbia’s wild, unpopulated Chilcotin region. You are trying to teach me how to swim. My arms are flung around your neck, and I can feel your back. It has a familiar, healthy oiliness to it. You are strong, but I am panicking. I can’t see through the water. Even despite the clear evidence that the water only comes up to your chest, I can’t help but suspect that the lake is bottomless. “I gotcha, Stephen,” you keep saying, in a gentle voice. “I gotcha.” I keep reminding you that I can’t swim. I am a fearful little boy. I’m not old enough to be cognizant that people die, but I seem to have an innate sense that underneath the surface of the water there is an underworld that could consume me in a split second. Your bravery astounds me. I hold on tight and try to absorb it from you. After the swim, we dry off on the concrete and stone pier. My grandmother calls us with a high, cheerful “Yoo-hoo!” and we head up to the big white farmhouse where the great aunts, in their floury aprons, are peeling homegrown apples for pie. The windows are all open and Granda has just come around the side of the house on his red and white Toro riding lawnmower; the air smells of cinnamon and fresh-cut grass. Above the dining room table is a painting of a cowboy on a horse, high above a dry, grassy ravine. You can’t see the cowboy’s face, because he is looking off into the distance, like cowboys do. I stand at the painting and stare deep into it, my eyes following the barren ridges fading into the horizon. I can’t get enough of this painting because I know that you painted it. Every time I look at that cowboy, I see you. * The Heduan Review
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When you were first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, struggling to make it big as a country songwriter. Mom told me over the phone that you had been given some tests for your memory, but she didn’t use the words “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia,” even though the test results had indicated cognitive impairment. I think she was probably too shell shocked by the news to face it head on. Since the A word had not been uttered, I wasn’t greatly alarmed by the news; as far as I was concerned, having a few details slip your mind now and then was just a natural part of aging. You’d always been a little forgetful, anyway, unless you were talking about World War II or the printing business, subjects you were Ted Talk sharp about. We’d been living away from the West Coast for almost 15 years by then, so I’d really missed out on a lot of the day-to-day changes in your cognitive abilities, but Mom routinely filled me in over the phone. You’d been forgetting the names of people you’d known for decades, had trouble with basic instructions, and making decisions had become almost impossible. Mom made a doctor’s appointment for you, the first of three you’ve had. The test you took was called the Cogniciti Test. First of all, you were given a list of five random items to remember. Then the doctor asked you to tell him the time, day and month. Having distracted you with those queries, he then asked you to recall as many items from the list of random items as you could. Mom says she was squirming in her chair for you, wishing she could help you. Later, the doctor asked you to count down from 100, in sevens, and you got stuck in the high 80s. Rattled, you tried to shrug it off, admitting that math had never been one of your strengths (I feel your pain, Dad. I didn’t get that gene either). You were told to draw a three-dimensional box and, being an artist, you aced that. Then you were presented with the standardized Clock Face Test. You’ll be interested to learn the history of that procedure, Dad: When war veterans returned home from Europe after World War One, doctors often utilized this simple, effective technique for assessing the patient’s level of traumatic stress. They would sit the patient at a table with a piece of paper and ask them to draw a clock showing a particular time, typically 10 after 11. Easy to administer and only ten minutes in duration, the clock face activity could do a lot of heavy lifting. It gauged the patient’s verbal understanding (could they comprehend the instructions?), spatial knowledge (could they correctly situate the circle, and place the numbers and the clock hands in their right positions?), visual memory (did they remember what a clock face looked like?) and, finally, abstract thought (did they understand what the clock hands represented?). You nailed that one, too. * Between 2016 and 2020, during our yearly Christmas visits back to the West Coast, I began to notice some changes in your working
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memory, if not your personality. You seemed to be able to keep up your end of the conversation, but I made it easy for you. I instinctively stuck to subjects I knew you’d find interesting and didn’t overpopulate my stories with names of people you might not remember. Your memory loss, over time, has had an unexpected grade to it: It hasn’t just been a slow, constant downhill glide. It’s like a plateau, then a drop, then an unexpected lurch upward, followed by another plateau. I am always exhilarated by those lurches — you’re struggling to find words like sauna, hose or umbrella when suddenly, like a strand of hair coming into focus under a microscope, there’s a moment of startling clarity. On one of my visits earlier this year, you and I were sipping on coffees in the kitchen, and Mom was at the grocery store, buying steaks and asparagus for dinner. We had the photo albums out on the kitchen table, and I was chronologically recalling, in as much detail as I could muster, the six homes we’d lived in while I was growing up. These houses were so much more than just the places we lived. Always drawn to the artistic idea of a home, you designed, detailed and blueprinted each abode, often with the help of family friends who were professional architects. These beautiful structures lived in your head long before the first nails were hammered. It must have been a thrill to watch the architecture come together in real time, cedar plank by cedar plank. I’m amazed by people who can do that, Dad; as you know, I haven’t the ability to conjure up anything more complex than a tree fort. (Who am I fooling? I can’t even build a tree fort.) I was in the middle of describing the equestrian park just down the road from the North Vancouver home we occupied in the early 1970s when, all of a sudden, a light went on in you. As I sat there, trying not to look surprised, you recounted, in detail, every single horse you rode as a teenager, and the ones we had when I was growing up. You could recall their breeds, their colors and their names. Their mannerisms, shortcomings, the quality of their teeth. You explained to me, in layman’s terms, the finer details of gelding a horse, and the reasons why a stallion was chosen to be a gelding in the first place. Your blue eyes were alive, your excitement palpable. It was as if it were 1988 again, with the two of us lingering at the dinner table, sparring over politics and culture as we slowly liberated a full bottle of red wine. * Lately, I’ve spent many spare moments on my iPhone, reading about the brain. I’ve learned that dementia (cognitive decline and memory loss) is the illness and that Alzheimer’s (a build-up of plaque and neural tangles in the hippocampus) is the cause. I understand that, for all patients, a decline in mental — and eventually, physical — facilities is unavoidable. But in Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s wonderful book, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age, I have also found thrilling new research showing that even patients with considerable plaque The Heduan Review
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build-up have experienced great improvement with what Gupta calls the Five Pillars: exercise, discovery, stress-reduction, diet and social stimulation. Artistic abilities like singing, playing a guitar, and painting tend to remain intact in patients with dementia, even in those at an advanced stage. I overheard that you recently described your working memory as “more contemporary than historical.” Get this, Dad: your observation just happens to support the latest research suggesting that people with dementia can continue to build neural pathways in the brain, and learn new things. Dad, I realize this hasn’t always been easy for you. You aim high. You wanted to pick up an old Spanish guitar and sound like José Feliciano. Grab a tennis racquet, stride out on the court, and play like Arthur Ashe. You know: Be an expert immediately or don’t even bother trying. It’s caused you a lot of frustration. I urge you to embrace amateurism! Abandon your pride and dare to do something new, badly — maybe even very badly. Do it for your brain. * I live by a few key aphorisms. Here is one of them: Tell the people you love that you love them while they’re still alive to hear it. Until only just recently, you never told me you loved me. That just wasn’t something that Mitchell men said aloud. But I have never doubted that you do, not for a minute. Back when you still answered the phone, I could hear it in the space between “Hello?” and “Stephen, how are you?” That’s when your business-like reserve would melt away and, in its place, would be the utterly disarming tenderness you have always radiated with those you love. Dad, forgive me, but I watch you closely these days. I know sometimes you find yourself wobbly. You rise from the couch slowly, guiding yourself with the armrest, and it’s usually the first footfall that throws you off. I see this happen many times a day now, when I’m with you; it’s something like a hiccup of the brain, a synaptic command that doesn’t quite land the way it should. Your Gulf Island home doesn’t have any indoor staircases but there are rock steps cut into the tangle of St. John’s Wort covering the steep hillside from the patio to the cement wall at the shoreline. The last time I was on the island, you and I were heading down to the beach to cut brush, and you lost your footing on a loose stone. I had to grab your nylon jacket with two hands to keep you from plunging forward. “I gotcha, Dad,” I said. “I gotcha.” Now it’s my turn to provide reassurance. In my mind’s eye, you are always 45 years old. Kind, thoughtful, consistent, curious and always slightly distracted by a distant thought. You have inspired me, guided me, encouraged me and comforted me.
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You have provided for me. But you have never needed me. I want you to wrap your head around the idea that you are going to have to ask for help more than you’ll want to, in the years ahead. Dad, medicine continues to make great strides in decoding Alzheimer’s and dementia. Scientists at the University of New Mexico have found that inoculating lab mice with a specific virus-like particle helps them develop antibodies that eliminate the plaque associated with memory loss. At Yale University, scientists are working on what has been called a “drinkable cocktail of designer molecules’’ to restore memory. Still another project on the horizon is an endobody vaccine that helps the brain repair itself without the typical side effect of damaging inflammation. And then there is L-Serine, an amino acid found in cheese, poultry, eggs and seaweed. The last time I was staying with you and Mom on the island, I harvested some neon-green sea lettuce and baked it up with olive oil. Mom didn’t like how it tasted, but you ate some of the crispy seaweed chips I gave you and at least pretended to like them. Well, there was a method to my madness: sea lettuce contains L-Serine. The leading edge of scientific research is finding answers that, someday soon, will make dementia as obsolete as smallpox and polio became in the 20th century. I can’t help being hopeful. Dad, you have always believed, first and foremost, in science. You taught me that the truth, as we know it, lives in the tension between what we think we know and what we’re sure we don’t know. Science evolves as we evolve. And right now, the science is telling us that the best thing you can do for your memory is to keep on trying to learn new things. Dad, please do this for me: go to the white side table in the kitchen, the one with all your art supplies and the 18x24” drawing pad we gave you a couple of Christmases ago. Watercolor, charcoal, oils, pencil…it doesn’t matter what you work with, use whatever speaks to you. Make me an illustration that can accompany this story I’m writing for the Heduan Review. Somebody will read it. Maybe, thousands of people will read it. Perhaps one of those people will have just learned they have dementia. A writer who is afraid she may never write again. A doctor who always wanted to learn Spanish and is afraid that now it’s too late. A painter who is terrified of picking up a paintbrush… I know you’re a private man, you don’t have to put your name on it. I won’t publish this until you give me the thumbs-up.
I love you, Dad Steve The Heduan Review
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Contributors POETRY Arshi Ashraf D. R. James Su Kolsal
PROSE POETRY C. Cavanaugh Ola Yacoub
SHORT FICTION Pierce E. Scranton Jr. Rena Patel
PERSONAL ESSAY Steve Mitchell
Cover art by Anya Motwani & Mei Mei Loh