Life and Death and Some of the Stuff in Between

Stacy's grandmother Bunny is in the hospital in Glendale. We drove up a couple of times this week to see her and check on Lefty who has been left alone and lost at the nursing home without her. Since Bunny is in the ICU, the kids can't see her, so yesterday we drove up and installed them at Aunt Claudia's then went and grabbed lunch before heading to the hospital.

We drove slowly through downtown Glendale looking for some place to stop, but the multitude of over-marketed chains lining Brand Ave was depressing rather than appealing and we found ourselves all the way through town to the hospital without finding something agreeable. Knowing there was a little strip up ahead on Los Feliz with a slightly more bohemian feel, we past by the hospital and proceeded on another mile or so. We parked on a residential side street and then Stacy and I walked hand in hand along Los Feliz.

It was a young area, somewhat hippie and multicultural. There was a psychic on one corner, an Indian grocery on another - a pizza joint over there. Palm trees and traffic, and that Los Angeles compact, shabby, single-story disheveledness. I kept expecting to smell incense or pot, but I never quite did. Twenty-somethings jogged past, buff and beautiful, but impoverished because the auditions hadn't been going their way. I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember thinking what it was like to be freshly married, without kids and in a sense free. We could take walks alone and go into bookstores or art galleries. We could hold hands that weren't sticky and were the same size as our own. We could eat at restaurants that didn't serve macaroni and cheese. We could be young and handsome and proudly self-conscious, (rather than awkwardly).

We found a cafe that overlooked a narrow peninsula of golf course that somehow managed to squeeze into the dense LA landscape; we ate on the porch in the warm winter midday. There were young couples and foursomes scattered about; a few couples in their 50's or 60's who looked like they might have spent most of their time in Orange County. There was a guy who was probably thirty sitting behind Stacy talking loudly on his cellphone ignoring his girlfriend. "They're in their late twenties and you're calling them old?" he said into his cell. "Thanks a lot!" A young couple who were in their late twenties sat across the patio from us. They had a blond California boy of about three with them. He was chattering away and reminded me of N. But N's older than that now and some of the fresh cuteness has faded. Stacy and I talked about vacations. How hard it was to go to Maine. How we would like to go on a cruise, but it would have to be Alaska and not the nasty Caribbean, and it would have to wait because we couldn't justify spending all that cash on a trip the kids wouldn't appreciate. Bunny and Lefty went on a lot of cruises, we remembered. But they waited until the kids were gone and they were freed up with both time and money. They went all over the world. We talked about Sweden and Switzerland, how we had wished we had the chance to show the other our old Euro-haunts, but the conversation was pretty much framed in the past tense. We won't get to Sweden or Switzerland now, at least not for a while anyway. Bunny and Lefty had to wait to travel. Lefty is in a nursing home and is often confused and frustrated. Bunny is in the ICU at Glendale Memorial with a broken neck from a Christmas day tumble out of a wheelchair. Lefty misses her greatly. I don't know if she'll ever be able to go back to him again.

We paid our bill, retraced our steps through the neighborhood and found our car. It took us very little time to reach the hospital and Bunny's room. She was half asleep when arrived, stilled drugged-up from a just-completed MRI. She looked like hell - purple and blotched and in a neck brace. As she tried to move she would moan with the pain. We told her about Christmas and how the kids said hello. We found her TV remote control. Her hands fidgeted purposelessly on her chest the whole time. We told her how much Lefty missed her. When we said that a brief smile passed her face and her blue eyes were alive and striking again, and I saw clearly that classy twenty-something I've seen so many old pictures of. We told her she was beautiful and gave her kisses and then left her alone.