That Time of Year

We’re looking for him.  We find 130 Michael Smiths.

I’m standing at the kitchen counter chopping an onion at eleven in the morning. We’ve just walked seven miles, on what feels like the first day of spring. Real spring: The sky is blue, the maples are in lush full leaf, the ferns along the east side of our house are burgeoning. The birds are so noisy even with these bad ears of mine I can hear them. Ten minutes into our walk I pull off one of my two layers, the long sleeve shirt. 

“That’s a lot of Michael Smiths,” I say now. Tizi is looking for him on her IPad. 

And I’m thinking, there could be a joke– How many Michael Smiths does it take to…? But it’s 130 obituaries. An obituary is not funny.

Earlier today, on our walk to the top of Van Ness, an avenue of maples near our house, we stopped and talked to Carol, a friend from the local senior center, which we abandoned during the plague, then never went back to, post-Covid. 

“Will you look at us,” she says to Tizi, pointing first at her own hair, then at Tizi’s. Both gorgeous silver. Carol is sleek and energetic and funny. This morning she’s dressed in slim jeans, a gray fleece, and running shoes. When we walk up her driveway she’s stabbing a weeding fork into dandelions along her front sidewalk. She says her house is too big. She’s lived here, post divorce, thirty some years. Too many flower beds, she says. Too much work. When I ask, she says her hip replacements were a great success. Yes, she tells Tizi, she did go back to the senior center, where there are some of the same people. And there are those, like us, who never came back. And there are some new seniors too. I think: Does that make us old seniors?

“What about Ed?” Tizi asks. 

I know she’s afraid to ask. Ed the trumpet player. Ed the leader of the senior center big band. Occasionally he took the elevator downstairs to the exercise machines and didn’t exercise. Mostly he sat at the round table upstairs, drank coffee, and dispensed witticisms. A few years ago we missed his 90th birthday bash. He had a yellow Corvette in the parking, but didn’t drive much. One Tuesday night I took him (or he took me) to a jazz jam session over on Woodward Avenue. We sat through two sets. Every so often, he wiped tears from his eyes. He drank one glass of beer. 

“Gone,” Carol says now. 

Tizi shakes her head. “I knew it.”

Carol says, well, Ed was 92. “But Michael Smith?” 

He was a young senior, with a shock of very premature gray hair and a wicked sense of humor. He had no business being a senior. And now, he has no business being dead. 

Like Carol I think about the flower beds. And the basement. And a spare room upstairs. Every house has a junk drawer. We have a junk room. At our age you begin to reckon with the too-muchness of a house. At least I do. Tizi not so much. 

Part of the problem is accidental shopping.  We try to avoid Home Goods. There’s one right next to Costco. If you’re waiting for Costco to open you can kill time at Home Goods. But there’s peril. We don’t need another pan, another serving dish. We have enough tongs. When I open kitchen and bathroom and mudroom cupboards, I find soaps we bought at Home Goods and forgot about.

I find soaps with a French accent–savon pour les mains (soothing, it says on the label, soft cotton), three 17 ounce pump bottles of those; Lemon Verbena made by or for aromatherapy rituals; Ginger Mandarin Hand Soap, which is pure and good, biodegradable and plant-based; a Rain Forest Collection of Ecological Products (meaning, judging from the look of them, soaps); we have Thyme Vegetal Soap and Cedar Vegetal Soap; Kirk’s Original Coco Castile pure botanical coconut oil 100% natural hypoallergenic skin care with no synthetic detergents soap; we have The Chef’s Soap (not A chef’s soap) also made in France. All that soap makes me want to get dirty. It also tells me don’t buy any more soap, maybe ever.

Online shopping has exacerbated the problem. It’s too easy to buy stuff. 

A helpful message popped up on my phone one day. I’m paying too much for hearing aids was the message. That day, it just so happened, I came home from Shake Shack,a stressful outing with a grandson involving touch screen menus and digital ordering and a flood of hungry young professionals, and I was missing one of my hearing aids. I tried calling. Did you find a small electrical thingie on the floor… and learned if you press 1 you can place your order and if you press 2 you can leave a message for the manager but really you really can’t. They don’t ever say wait for the beep. There’s no beep. I pictured Big Beaver lunch traffic passing through Shake Shack, my dinky, obscenely expensive device under foot, smashed.  

This ad said, “Get new hearing aids for less than $100!” 

The operating instructions, a 12-page manual only slightly larger than a postage stamp, said it can take up to two weeks to get used to them. I lasted three days. The problem was feedback, annoying high-pitched squealing coming from the direction of my head. I could hear the feedback just fine. The frequency-adjusted audible world that came to me sounded like sharpened knives.  Tizi said, “What’s that noise???” She meant the feedback. The one-button control panel on the side of these things, which are the size of a peanut inserted into your ears, is no bigger than the head of a pin. Press the head of the pin three times to adjust volume. Squeal. Hold the head of the pin down for three seconds to change the mode. Squeal. 

When my father got old and wore hearing aids, his fingers were always in his ears, adjusting, pressing, fiddling, which I think now, in my case, is only slightly less unsightly than a finger up my nose. No one wants to see that.  I am becoming my father. Deaf, like him. Old.

I sent them back.

Poor Michael Smith. We never find the obit. Nor the death notice

Next day I’m thinking about him again, walking out of a local market, and I see Ted. I’d see him at the senior center, too, but we go back a number of years. We go way back to BC (before Covid) years, to the years our kids were in school together. He is heavier. He has unkempt gray hair and an unruly goatee.

He squints as we pass each other in the parking lot. “I know you,” he says.

“Ted,” I say.

“What’s your name?” 

The look of irrecogntion is there. I tell him my name, feeling a shiver of alarm. He says, “How do I know you? Do you go up North?”

I say yes, we go up North. I tell him we’ve been to his house up there. This doesn’t register. He’s trying to puzzle it out. I can see he’s tired of puzzles. “We sat all those nights by the Herman’s pool?”

“The Hermans,” he says. He gets that. Then: “Whatever happened to them?”

I feel a moment of panic of my own when I can’t remember his wife’s name. I ask, Grandchildren? Yes, he has two. 

“We’ve got three,” I say. “We’re going to California on Tuesday to see the new one.” 

He asks again, “Do you go up north?” If he knows me I can’t tell. He has other things not on his mind.

When I get home I tell Tizi. She says she surprised Ellen lets him drive.

Ellen, I think. That’s right.

Before lunch I step outside to walk around the house, to feel the spring air again, to stand in the sun. In Tizi’s patch of trillium we have a lump of rock that’s a foot tall and comes to kind of a point on top.  Every year on a day like today we’re likely to see a chipmunk perched on top of it, looking around in its nervous, jerky chipmunk manner. This is one of those days. It’s the first chipmunk day of the year. I can’t hear it chipping and chattering, but I know it does that. What I do hear is a sound in the distance. At first I think: electric bicycle, the distinct whine as it picks up speed, probably just down the street. Then I realize, no, it’s a motorcycle accelerating, running through the gears in the far distance, going who knows where, fast, and enjoying it.