Words at Work: Collected Stories

By Donald Sommerfield

Words at Work: Collected Stories is a collection of starstruck nonfiction stories and fictional stories that still keep the author up at night. Famous people have come across Sommerfield's path, and that's all right with him. Sometimes, those encounters shook the author up. Some came from the world of music, while others came from acting and directing careers. The fictional stories as well make the author question his place in the universe. You will encounter all that as you fall into the Words at Work: Collected Stories landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639855803

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Copyright © 2022 Donald Sommerfield

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

ISBN 978-1-63985-579-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88505-362-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-63985-580-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dancing with Mom and Dad

Funny how the past suddenly lays bare the unsettling reality of the here and now. Never that distant or unavoidable, it is the unwelcome visitor that never really goes away. It races alongside you or sits out in the backyard under a low-hanging tree, waiting, staring like a sullen child until you acknowledge its insistent presence.

Tony’s Pizzeria is located just off the 101 Freeway in Ventura, California. Often when I drive by it now, along Thompson Boulevard, I am reminded of a world in slow motion when the family car brought us out this way from San Diego. What a place. Tall trees, eucalyptus and palm all around, old benches, and a small, very old white building with a yellow awning. You can hear the crashing waves along the shoreline—if you listen closely. The old pizza place is much the same as it was when I was a kid, but the wind, ocean air, the constant traffic, and the press of humanity has taken a definite toll.

As we made our way toward our grandparents outside San Francisco, Mom and Dad would stop at Tony’s, grab some steaming black coffee, switch places, and jet away in our two-tone ’57 Chevy. Driving all night was no problem for them: the company they kept was the best. Listening to the late-night radio, I slept on the floorboard, on top of several blankets Mom had made up for me, while Bruce slept on the back seat. I don’t recall being happier.

My dad (call him Bob) was a navy guy (awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in WWII), and if you ask him, he still is. My mom (call her Barbara) was a beautician, which sounds so simple and ordinary but really isn’t when you stand on your feet all day.

I can’t prove it, but I think the jitterbug, early rock ’n’ roll, had something to do with their crazy love for each other. I had watched them many times tear up the dance floor, and that had led to me dancing like a kid and a man, possessed, daring any girl to take my hand. Which, thankfully, had led to both my kids dancing like lunatics under a full moon. I had always accused my parents of being joined at the hip, and dancing was just one more way of expressing all that gravitas.

Then something strange happens: you grow up. You can’t wait to get there, to get out of the house, and if you make it into middle age, you wonder where in hell the time went and why you are where you are and why, why, why. Someone went to the dance without you, and suddenly the shrillness you hear is your own voice in a wilderness of your own making.

So as life often does, it catches up with you, shoves you forward, whether you like it or not, into an open field of lost opportunities waiting for your arrival. The past becomes the present, which threatens to become the future—the cycle remains unbroken.

I got the call from my brother in San Diego that I was needed to help Dad take care of Mom. At eighty years of age, she had recently suffered a stroke, but I did not know what that meant exactly until I saw her tiny body almost lost in the folds of her pink robe—trapped in that wheelchair. I was shocked and deeply saddened at her condition.

My brother told me, Imagine what she must be feeling and going through every day.

Bruce and his wife, Sandy, had spent time assisting and consoling Mom as best they could, alongside Dad. They now wanted me to lend a helping hand, which I could easily do—on the face of it. More like capturing lightning in a bottle.

Our schedule ran something like this: every minute. Period. Go back to the parents’ place, sleep and eat some, then make the run back to the convalescent home down the I-15 to relieve Dad, and practically wrestle Mom to the floor. What was going on here? She battled every moment to speak, but the words were trapped somewhere while her body fought against becoming obsolete. I had always admired my mom for the way she worked hard during her life, and now this was the greatest test of all. Her right arm was dead for good. She couldn’t walk, and she couldn’t stand up on her own.

Be patient, Dad would tell her.

For a vibrant woman who had stood and worked in beauty salons for more than forty-five years, that must have been quite a blow to everything she believed in: a terrible irony she could not comprehend. I did not have the guts she had.

My dad is eighty-seven and still has all his hair. How did he do what he did day in and day out? His constant energy, his refusal to give up against enormous odds, made him a rock for Mom and inspired awe in me. Besides, she was the love of his life. They came from the stock of a generation that understand what a good work ethic meant, and they never gave up. The world tilted away sometimes for them, but their diligence paid off.

He once told me, Well, this is our life. We’ve had good times too. Why complain?

But Dad had become difficult and cantankerous, something I hadn’t seen in him before, which troubled me. Allow me to explain cantankerous as it applies to my dad. This would include the ever-important territorial imperative, resentment that anyone would even think that he needed any help, and did I mention territorial imperative? I would ask questions, and he would get defensive then realize I really didn’t know what to expect.

He told me, Expect the unexpected. End of conversation.

Except that I would look at him expectantly, half-expecting the unexpected.

Yet when I got home late, he was still up, asleep sometimes in his big comfort chair, waiting for me to report in on Mom’s progress. Only then did I witness his exhaustion, his refusal to give in on behalf of Mom. This was truly a different kind of dance.

Wearing the same clothes as the day before, he was up early every day and out the door, ran errands, and then went out to be with her 24-7 as she fought to regain a shred of dignity in a new world of useless language and insult from injury. Her fury knew no bounds, and Dad took a lot of it, even days before I arrived to relieve him of the constant battle my mother fought to overcome.

I was only there five weeks, but my dad soldiered on, staying with Mom, taking her abuse, her invective, her lack of control.

He would tell me, after she would slur words of an unkind nature, That’s the stroke talking.

Dealing with Mom in her state of being and mind took a lot of patience I usually didn’t have. I have so little patience with myself at most times anyway that I could hardly expect to give her a lot. But I tried and often surprised myself how much abuse or idleness I could withstand. Moments felt like days when I would help her eat or ask her questions that took her some time to answer. Even then, answers borne of logic were not forthcoming. Then the light bulb went on. I understood suddenly what Dad had been going through with her, what my brother and his wife had already endured, and most of all, what she was dealing with, though that was still in the abstract until the fourth day of my stay.

The more I saw, the more I came undone.

I stayed with her most nights until she fell asleep, but that didn’t always work, especially when the medications wore off because her body was getting used to them. In dim light, she would reach out to smack me as she had done to Dad and Bruce. We knew her fury was all about trying to find a sense of normality. During the days, I stayed with her through physical therapy. This was an arduous task of lifting the good arm, then the dead right arm, then the legs, one at a time, over and over; and with the help of staff, they would stand her up then sit her down. Then begin the process all over again.

In the cafe, I fed her, which she detested. With her good arm, she would pull the plate of food away so I couldn’t reach it or eat from it. She looked at me, and every so often, she would say something like, Sometimes you are so stupid. The look in her eyes was one of mistrust bordering on hate, and I wasn’t even sure she knew it was her son trying to help her. But that kind of comment would knock me right back to age seventeen when treading lightly was the only option around my mom most of the time. Just that one admonishment reminded me very quickly of my mom’s formidable presence, even now, and the many times we did not get along as we both grew older. We came to a standoff sometime around my thirty-fifth birthday, backing