Eight Years, Today

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aging, bloodhound, caregiving, children, elderly parents, Essex County Canine Unit, Essex County Police Department, faith, family, love, patience, Salem Road, search, search dogs, UCPD, Union County Police Department, Union NJ, walk, walking

Today is eight years since my father took his last walk.
This is my imagining of his last day.

The brightening sky is clear; the birds sing. It’s too early. He doesn’t sleep the way he used to. Slowly, carefully, in the dark, he feels his way down the stairs. He shuffles through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen; he turns on the light, the radio. He gets his plastic glass, his cereal bowl, a spoon, his box of Cheerios. He looks at the empty fruit bowl. Bananas. He ate the last mushy brown one yesterday. That’s the problem with bananas; you buy a bunch and they’re green, and you have to wait a few days until you can eat them. Then, they all turn ripe at once. At least one will be almost black by the time you eat it.

Bananas. It’s not too early for the 7-11 at Salem and Chestnut. They’re always open.

He turns off the radio and goes into the dining room. He takes off his pajamas and drapes them over a chair. His clothes from yesterday, and from the day before, are on the other chairs. He picks up the clothes he wore the day before yesterday. He already has on a short-sleeve undershirt, boxers, socks. He puts on a long-sleeve thermal undershirt that is yellow with age. On top of that, his lined flannel shirt. He puts on his pants­­ and his belt (to which he’s added a few holes), and buckles it in the last hole. He puts on his new windbreaker, a gift from one of his granddaughter’s friends. He puts on his shoes, his watch, takes his wallet and a handkerchief. He puts on his old tan hat. He takes his keys, locks both doors, walks down the steps and down the driveway, past his car. It hasn’t worked for months. The battery is dead. His kids won’t let him replace it. His kids won’t let him drive any more.

Yesterday had been so strange—people in and out of his house all day. His youngest daughter had come in the morning and brought her friend, that nice lady, the nurse—what was her name? The nurse helped him with his physical therapy exercises, made sure he took his pills. She said she was coming again today.
As the girls were going, his son-in-law’s best friend stopped by. They talked for hours about things he forgot he remembered, about the old country, about his job in the shipyard during the war.
Later, the doorbell rang—it was the Meals-on-Wheels girl. His visitor tried to get him to eat the food she had brought while it was hot, but the food from the day before was still in the refrigerator. He ate that instead. It’s a sin to waste food.

Then, his visitor left. Alone in his home for the first time all day, he stretched out in his recliner and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was time for bed. He undressed, put on his pajamas, went upstairs.
Strange day.

Oh.
Bananas.
He walks down his street to the corner, turns left, and goes down to the shortcut path through the woods to Salem Road, where the 7-11 is. He will get the bananas, go back home, eat his breakfast.

He hears something: a woman? Is she calling him? He follows her voice, veers off the path into the woods. He used to walk here with his granddaughter, when she was little. Now, there are brambles, branches, tangles of vines and weeds. The more he walks, the more mixed up he gets.

He hears her again: “Tony…Tony?”

He looks up, down, all around; no one is there. He walks some more. He’s deep in the woods now. He knows these woods end in a grassy half-circle on Galloping Hill Road, across from the hospital, a block away from the 7-11. There’s a playground, a small basketball court, a bench facing the brightly colored slide. He could sit there for a bit, then walk down to the 7-11. If he keeps going, he should come out on the other side.
Ahead, in the middle of a thicket of vines and brush, he sees a log, a fallen tree, lying on the ground. Hasn’t he seen that tree before? It’s all beginning to look the same. Maybe he should take a little rest.
He makes his way to it, sits, and thinks: Why is it so hard to get out of here? It’s not a big forest. There are streets and houses on all four sides, the playground at the end, the hospital across the street. He used to walk here all the time.
His head is swimming. His feet really hurt. He unties his shoes, takes them off, places them next to the log, in arm’s reach. He is breathing hard; he tries to catch his breath. God, his head hurts. His chest hurts. Everything hurts. He is so thirsty that if there was a puddle, he would drink from it. A little dirty water wouldn’t hurt him. You should have seen the stuff they had to eat back in Europe, back when times were bad.
He’s going to take a little rest now, then put his shoes back on, and he’ll find his way out. He shakes his head, tries to focus on the dial of his watch. It says 12:15 and 25 seconds, but the second hand isn’t moving any more.
It was so bright when he left the house, but it…it looks so dark now. How long has he been walking? He can’t tell if it’s still daylight. He is so tired. He takes off his hat and lies down.

Four days later, the bloodhound from the Essex County Police Department will find him by the fallen tree, fifty yards from the grassy half-circle edging the suburban forest, his untied shoes still in arm’s reach.

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Five Years On ~ Missing Dad: Day 5 ~ FOUND

Tags

blessings, caregiving, communities, doggedness, Duty, elderly parents, faith, family, father, friends, God, gratitude, grief, home, hope, loss, love, mercy, Missing Dad, missing persons, patience, persistence, prayer, responsibility, siblings, trust

Tuesday,  June 15th, 2010

That day is a blur; it was supposed to be my day of rest, after going out to Union to search for Dad on Saturday, Sunday, Monday. I had set Wednesday as my return to work, if we didn’t find him. I had very mixed feelings about going back to work. I couldn’t stay out indefinitely; what if we never find him? Sometimes, people who go missing are never, ever found. They just disappear without a trace. How does a person just disappear? The laws of physics tell us that matter cannot be created or destroyed in a closed system; therefore, he can’t just be gone. He is somewhere in the Escheresque universe in which I’ve been living since 8:40 Friday morning; I just can’t find my way to him. The angles are all wrong, they are impossible, incomprehensible.

I’ve been saying: “My dad is missing”. I could just as easily say: “I’m missing my Dad” and mean it in all its double-entendred glory; he’s missing; I miss him; oops, have I missed him? What am I missing?

When someone goes missing, what happens to the people who are missing them? What do they do? Do they return to their jobs? Do they shop for groceries on the way home from work? Do they still buy Metrocards, and make sure that there’s milk in the refrigerator for breakfast the next morning? Do they plan their meals for the coming week? What about the laundry? Do they carry on, do they do all of these things, all the while waiting for a call from the police or the FBI or a hospital or a morgue that their loved one or their loved one’s body has been found?
Or do they simply sit still? Do they wait by the telephone, or stake out a spot in front of the computer, searching, researching, unable to move? Do they take their cellphones into the shower? Do they take showers? Whatever I am doing, I feel like I should be doing something else instead. What if I’m doing the wrong things, and that’s why I can’t find the right angle? Is my approach all wrong?
I don’t know how to do this. If we don’t find him, I don’t know what we will do.
I’ve never known anyone else who had this happen. I have no experts to consult. I need a roadmap for this terra incognita where we are marooned.

My plan for Tuesday was to talk to the detectives in the morning and get them to set the bloodhounds looking for my father. We were in Day 5; Dad had been missing for ninety-six hours (I had decided that, when we got to one hundred hours, I would switch to counting days). Frank and I awoke to the alarm, took our showers, ate our breakfast, drank our coffee, shared the New York Times, watched Weather Channel, just like we do every day. It was all so nice and normal.
I turned on my computer to check email. I had messages from my friend Janice asking if there’d been any word (no); from my friend Peg, who pointed out how easily the elderly become invisible to the rest of us, allowing as how if Dad had gone out in his pajamas, someone might remember having seen him (he had done that already, the week before); from Nancy, letting us know that she, Chris and Grant would be in New Jersey by around 2 that afternoon. She added that Chris suggested that one way to get Dad back would be to buy and install an air conditioner in his dining room (Dad was legendarily spartan about heating and cooling).
The detectives called me while I was still at my computer, sometime after 9AM.
Det. Moutis confirmed to me that today was the day that the bloodhounds would search the woods while the helicopters flew over.

Today was the day that Dad would be found, but I didn’t know that yet.

The search had become its own creature, apart from Dad; Dad and the search for Dad were two separate beings. There had been moments when I felt we were searching just for the sake of doing something. It wasn’t that I thought our efforts were useless or hopeless; there was a small (and shrinking) part of me that thought we might yet find him, and find him alive. Surely there was a reasonable explanation for him being missing; the Laws of the Conservation of Matter decreed that he was still somewhere in the known universe.

What I would say, or do, if I saw my father sitting on a park bench, or walking down a side street?
Would I run up to him, hug him and kiss him and ask him if he was hungry, thirsty, tired?
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Would I just stand there, mouth agape, unable to speak?
Would I even believe my own eyes?
Would I yell at him for putting us through this living hell for almost five days?
Or would the stress of all of it, combined with the shock of seeing him again, cause my body to crumble into a pile of dust and blow away on the wind?
I do not know how to do this.

Since Friday, I had been dealing with the unknowingness of my situation by trying to control those things I could. To be effective, to move forward, I had to be dispassionate about the alternatives that lay before us. I had to be on task, I had to manage time well, I had to ruthlessly prioritize. It was like managing the store (people/product/operations), except this really was life and death. I wasn’t alone; I had lots of help, all the help I could ask for; my husband, my siblings and sibs-in-law, their children, our friends were living through this with me; but I felt so terribly alone.

These were the things I could control at this moment: I could check email and respond; I could talk to people on the phone; I was home this day, so I could do research online to find something, anything; there had to be something, and I was just missing it.
I had promised Frank I would try to rest, just this one day; I planned to take a nap at some point, lie on the couch with the windows open (the weather had been so gorgeous since Friday) and let myself drift…
But first… I had to…
Okay, so the detectives would have dogs and helicopters … Det. Moutis said that we should register for a Silver Alert. I said I’d set it up if he sent me a link.
As soon as we got off the phone, I followed up with him by email, confirming the details of their plan for the day, and copying my sibs; I asked if the police had issued a general press release yet, because some news outlets would do nothing without something from the police.

Monday night, when I got home from New Jersey, before we had dinner, Frank and I were talking about places that George and Barbara and Alyssa and Kevin and Glenn and the neighbors and I couldn’t get into to search on our own. Frank had made a list of the kinds of places that should be searched; abandoned buildings within a reasonable radius; houses that had been foreclosed upon, and were vacant; garages, sheds, outbuildings, even on occupied properties—we’d had a cat years ago who had gotten locked in a neighbor’s garage by accident, and he’d been missing for three days before the neighbor returned, opened the garage, and out came our Patch. Maybe Dad crawled into or under an abandoned car in a foreclosed garage and has been unable to get out and come home. Maybe he fell through a rotted floor in a vacant, derelict house. Maybe he got lost again, and went into a house that he thought was his, except it was empty, and now he thought we had sold all of his things or that he had lost the house to taxes. When we had his income taxes done earlier that spring, he got confused, and thought the new accountant was there to take his house away. Maybe he was looking for Mom.

I asked Det. Moutis if anyone had searched abandoned buildings in the area, homes that were vacant due to foreclosures, sheds, outbuildings, anywhere where someone who was tired, lost, and scared might crawl in to get some rest.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

I asked Det. Moutis if we should hire a private detective. Would that help or hinder the police effort?
I told Det. Moutis that Nancy and her family were coming in that afternoon, that John would be arriving Thursday, and that my siblings and I had decided that I would be the point of contact in order to streamline our communications.
My email to Det. Moutis crossed with his email to me giving me the web address for setting up a Silver Alert. I should have guessed it—www.silveralert.org – and I can’t remember now why I couldn’t. I registered my dad for the Silver Alert and uploaded the picture that we’d used on his flyers. I emailed the link to Det. Moutis and all my sibs with the login and password. For some reason—and I don’t know if it still works this way—the login and password were only good for an hour, and I had to re-log-in and re-upload his picture once the hour was up.

How do people who really are alone in their search for their missing loved one manage the logistics? You have to be at least three people at the same time to do everything that needs to be done; one to be out in the world, searching, one to be researching new places to search, and one to be the operations point person coordinating the searches and eliminating time-wasting redundancies and duplications of effort.

It helped me to try to think of all of this as a management problem, which could be broken down into small, discrete components, and thus be solved.

I called my contact at Union’s Channel 12 to give her Dad’s information and the Facebook page URLs so she could do a screengrab of the flyer. I promised to follow up with a flyer by email, in case the screengrab wasn’t sufficiently clear. Lexi promised to get the information on the air that day.

Janet and Wally were at Dad’s, getting ready to leave for Maryland, since Nancy was coming up. Someone had to be in Maryland to take care of the total of five cats and one dog between the two households, so Janet and Nancy tag-teamed. I think that George and Barbara were both back at work—it’s so hard to remember now, and my cell phone and text records aren’t clear. Alyssa had finals coming up, so she was back in school. John was planning to arrive on Thursday. Maybe we’d find Dad by then.

At the same time we were searching for Dad, we each had to consider the possibility of needing to take time off from our jobs to plan and hold a funeral.

We had arranged for Glenn to be at the house to meet the detectives and the canine unit, so that the dogs could start the search and (we hoped) find Dad. I texted Glenn to let me know when the police arrived.

Done with email, done with the phone, I turned up the ringer on the answering machine in the studio, left my computer, turned on the television to a channel that only played New Age relaxation music, and I lay down on the couch.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

I drifted in and out, aware of the music and the traffic noise from Northern Boulevard, coming and going.

The phone rang: it was Glenn.
The detectives had arrived, with the bloodhound and his handler from the Essex County Canine Unit. It was mid-day. They’d had to wait for the bloodhound to come from the next county, because Union County didn’t have one of their own.

This is what Glenn told me:
The handler needed a scent article for the dog. They used the pajamas that Dad had left on the dining room chairs.
The handler, wearing latex gloves, took my father’s old worn pajamas outside, and spread the top and bottom out on the lawn in front of Dad’s house. (The image I conjured for myself of my father’s nightclothes spread out on the lush grass is indelibly imprinted on my mind’s eye.) The handler wears gloves so that he doesn’t transfer his own scent particles to the scent article.
The dog sniffs and paws at my father’s garments on the grass not too far from the huge oak tree; the dog gets Dad’s scent.
After a minute or two, the leashed bloodhound pulls back from the pajamas, excited, hyper, panting, wanting to go. His handler settles him, looks the dog square in the eyes.
“Do you wanna go find him, do you wanna go find him?”
The bloodhound—his nose to the ground—and his handler quickly turn and head down Huntington to the corner of Livingston; they turn left, and go down the incline (it is not quite a hill).

(Glenn didn’t see this next part. He will recount this to me in our next conversation, after he speaks with the detective by the park:
The dog and handler crossed Forest Drive, and approached the shortcut path that cuts through the woods to Salem Road.
The dog veered left at the head of the path, into the woods, without hesitation.)

Glenn stays at my father’s house. He is waiting.
I am in my living room. I am waiting, too. I text Glenn (not wanting to tie up the phone); he has heard nothing, and is getting anxious. They have not been gone long.

Sometime, not too much later, one of my father’s neighbors, a woman, tells Glenn that there is a police car and an ambulance at the little park across the street from Union Hospital.
Glenn thinks he knows what that is about, and he drives down to see. He meets the detective where the park’s grassy half-circle meets the woods.
They have found a body deep in the woods. Glenn wants to go, but the detective shakes his head, tells him he won’t be able to identify him.

The bloodhound veered left at the head of the path, into the woods, without hesitation. They went deep, deeper, following my father’s scent, over brambles, and weeds, and thickets of vines, into the heavy brush. They found him lying on the ground.

Glenn comes back to Dad’s and calls me and tells me what he saw and heard.
I thank him.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

I don’t remember the details exactly. I think at some point, not too long after, Det. Moutis called me.
They found the body of an elderly man, a man they believed was my father, in the woods, about fifty yards from where the grassy half-circle of park begins.
He said it would have been impossible to find him without the bloodhound. The brush and tangles of vines and weeds were more than two feet high; Dad had sat down on a log, taken off his shoes, and either lay down or fell back. He was on the ground, his glasses and tan hat were off to the side, his watch still on his wrist. He was clothed except for his shoes, which were on the ground next to the log.
They would have to confirm his identity with dental records. He had been out in the elements for more than one hundred hours. The coroner would later say that he had almost certainly died the first day. That would account for the lack of sightings, I thought to myself.

Nancy, Chris, and Grant arrived at Dad’s house at about the time that the detectives were calling me. I must have called Janet and Walter, John and Cheryl, Barbara and George, but I don’t remember doing so. Frank came home sometime in the late afternoon and I told him. I am sure I was crying, but I don’t remember. I texted my friends. I called the store and told Emery that they had probably found my father, and I wouldn’t be coming in on Wednesday after all.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

_________________________________________________________________

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Five Years On ~ Missing Dad: Day 2

Tags

caregiving, Come to Me, Duty, elderly parents, faith, family, father, friends, grief, home, hope, joy, loss, love, Matthew 11:28, mercy, missing, Missing Dad, missing persons, parents, patience, prayer, responsibility, search, search dogs, siblings, strength, trust

Saturday, June 12, 2010

I take the 10:03AM from Murray Hill to Penn. I bring an extra $50 and the Capital One credit card statement so I can stop at the bank at the corner of 7^th Avenue and 33^rd Street in between trains. The NJT train won’t leave until 11:07AM anyway. That’ll give me almost half an hour to cross the street and pay the bill on its due date. It’ll also add the slightest semblance of normalcy to my increasingly surreal situation.
How can I think about paying bills, and the schedule at work, and when to do the laundry, and is there milk in the fridge, and what will we have for dinner tonight, when I have no idea if my father is alive or dead? I am used to multitasking, but a part of me is standing here, looking at my self, arms crossed across its chest, and shaking its head at me.
“You cannot control this situation. You should try to control what you can, though.”
When I get to Penn, I go to the NJT ticket machines and get two off-peak round trips (I can always use them, is my very practical thought). I go up the escalator, turn left and walk to the Capital One on the next corner. It is empty at 10:35AM. There is one teller on, and no line. I pass the statement and my fifty-dollar bill under the bulletproof glass. She takes the statement and the money, inputs the account information, completes my transaction, and slides me my receipt.
“Thank you”, she says.
I want to say, Please pray for my missing father, I am so scared right now. But I don’t.
I walk through the door, and as I cross the street back to Penn Station, my tears blind me. I stop for a moment and just stand there, crying, while people in the middle of their Saturday mornings pass me quickly on both sides.
I collect myself, pull out a tissue and wipe away my tears, and walk back to Penn.

I arrive at Roselle Park at ten to twelve. George is there to pick me up.
We go back to Dad’s, so I can walk around the house myself. I just want to see for myself how he left things. I know this is not logical, because since Dad left, Vee has been here, Glenn has been here, the policemen have been here, detectives have been here, George and Barbara and Alyssa have been here, and maybe some other people, too.

I just want to start at the beginning of Dad’s day yesterday.

The self that was standing next to me earlier, looking at me and shaking her head—that self is looking at me again.
“Do you think you can change what happened if you look around this house, these rooms, look at his clothes, his bed, his kitchen table? Do you think that if you retrace his steps, you can unwind them, and rewind them so that the result is different?
“You can’t. Go find him”, this other self says to me.
We leave Dad’s, grab a quick bite at Galloping Hill, go back to George and Barbara’s house, and go over what’s been done so far. They walked the woods by the house yesterday, and again today. They walked the woods by Washington School again this morning. They’ve been driving around the neighborhood.

Barb thought she saw Dad when she was out driving and looking. It was about 7AM. She was driving up by Union Station, on Morris Avenue, when she saw an elderly man walking. She slowed down, and took a good look. She couldn’t really tell; he had his hat pulled down, and he wasn’t facing her. The man’s clothing was similar…. could it be Dad? She got out of the car, and went up to him, looked at his face, closely.
“Dad?”
Not Dad.
Back in the car, and back to searching.

I’d brought my staple gun and packaging tape with me from home. We have to make a flyer for posting. I ask Barb if I can use her computer. I go downstairs to work. I remember that Alyssa has recent pictures of Dad on her Facebook page—she and Dad visited the cemetery right after one of the huge snowstorms this past winter, and I know that there are a couple of full-face ones. I right-click copy the one where he and Alyssa are looking right at the camera, paste it into an image editor, and crop Alyssa out. I close in on his face and center it. I type my text, fine-tune the spacing and size of the text so it can be easily read from a passing car, and print out about a hundred of them.
Then Barb, George, Alyssa and I get into the car and go to look for Dad.

The first place we visit is the cemetery. We post a flyer on the tree by Mom’s grave and ask her to watch over Dad, and to please help us. We know that if he can be helped, she will see to it.
We go to the office and speak to the manager; he knows my dad. He has seen Dad visit Mom’s grave every day in every kind of weather. He says all the groundskeepers know who Dad is, too. He asks the ones on duty if they saw him. No one can remember if he was there yesterday or not.
He promises to keep an eye out. I give him some flyers, and ask his permission to post some more around the cemetery. He agrees. I look back at him over my shoulder on my way out, and I catch the unguarded sadness on his face.
We drive the cemetery road carefully, the four of us looking out the windows in four different directions, seeing nothing. We take the turn out of the gate on to Galloping Hill Road.
We drive around Union and the surrounding communities.
We visit every park, every local body of water (dementia patients are attracted to bodies of water, I had read somewhere, sometime) every doctor’s office, school and playground that Alyssa ever went to with Mom and Dad, posting flyers. We go to Town Hall (post, outside and in), to the library (post on the bulletin board and on trees in the parking lot), up to Café Z to tell Patty, the owner, and leave her some flyers and our cell phone numbers. She knows Dad well—we’ve had our family Thanksgiving dinners there since the year Mom died. We drive up and down endless streets, posting. We leave flyers with whomever we speak with in Union. We post more. In Westfield. In Kenilworth. In Cranford. In Garwood.

We go to Dad’s church, Holy Spirit, and to Mom’s church, Saint Demetrios. We speak to a handyman at Saint Demetrios and give him some flyers, and get out of the car to post some more on the church grounds and on the nearby telephone poles.

The first time Dad went for a walk where the cops brought him home, they found him up by Saint Demetrios, almost three miles from his house, a few blocks away from the precinct house. That was almost three months ago, in late March. Two patrolmen just starting their midday shift saw an elderly man who seemed confused and went up to him and asked him if he was okay. He couldn’t figure out where he was, but he knew who he was and where he lived, so they took him home and called Barb at work. At about 2PM, George left a voice mail on my cell to let me know what had happened, and that he had sent Glenn over to Dad’s to look in on him and make sure he was all right. I called Dad as soon as I picked up the voice mail, but only got the answering machine (with my mother’s voice on the outgoing message; we’d never changed it). I called Barb, and we tried to figure it out; we thought that Dad must have been on his way to the cemetery, which meant he was walking for about four hours, if he followed his habit of leaving the house at around 8AM. He had probably just continued on Chestnut Street instead of taking the left fork on to Galloping Hill, at the Five Points intersection where Galloping Hill Road and Chestnut cross the end of Salem Road. He was found all the way up on Rahway Avenue, past the entrance to the Garden State, past the turnoff on to Stuyvesant and Cioffi’s, almost as far from the house as Alyssa’s high school and Café Z.
When I talked to Dad about it later that afternoon, he said he didn’t know what happened, that he was “in a dream”. He said he’d gotten turned around and “a little bit lost” before, a block or two off course, but he’d always been able to right himself.
As I saw it, the good news was that his physical therapy was working; he could walk all that way, and all that time, without falling. The bad news was that he hadn’t known where he was when he stopped.
This happened at the end of March, on the first real spring day of 2010. It was the first time he couldn’t find his own way home.

We drive and walk and post flyers for a few more hours, all over Union. By Dad’s house. Around the corners, both ways. On Salem Road. On Chestnut Street, by his bank and the vegetable store where he buys his bananas and the Dunkin Donuts. By Eisenstat’s office on Galloping Hill Road.
I am finally exhausted, and George drives me to the station so I can go home. We post flyers all along Chestnut Street as we go. Tomorrow, we will do this again.

Dad has been missing for almost thirty-six hours now. It will be a while before I stop counting hours and start counting days.

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Five Years On ~ Missing Dad: Day 1, continued

Tags

caregiving, Come to Me, Duty, elderly parents, faith, family, father, friends, grief, home, hope, joy, loss, love, Matthew 11:28, mercy, missing, Missing Dad, missing persons, parents, patience, prayer, responsibility, search, search dogs, siblings, strength, trust

The police meet Vee and Glenn at Dad’s house. They call me for details about Dad and where he would be likely to go. They want to know where he shops, where he banks, if he has friends he liked to see, who his doctor and dentist are, which area schools are the ones Alyssa has attended (since he had shown up at her elementary school in his pajamas just eight days before), what church he attends, and anything else that might help.
I told them everything I could think of; I told them things I didn’t realize I knew. They thanked me and said they’d be in touch.

I have to leave soon, to go to work; I am the manager-in-training at the Papyrus flagship store on Broadway and 76th Street in Manhattan. I am scheduled for noon until closing, which means I need to be on the 10:33 train. I would call out if we weren’t so short-staffed. As it is, our full-time keyholder, Mary, will be alone until I get there. Emery has a travel day and is going to be at both of his other stores giving performance reviews. Jacque isn’t scheduled until four, and since her review is supposed to be at the Columbus Avenue store, she probably isn’t even going to get to Broadway until almost five.
If I call out, Mary will be alone either until Jacque comes in, or until Emery can get there. That just won’t work—that store is just too busy, and cannot run with only one person on the floor for six hours—is there anybody else who can cover me on short notice? No. (So, what would happen if I got hit by a truck on the way there? Would they find someone then?) I’ve managed the floor by myself for hours, or worked a thirteen-hour open-to-close shift when staff calls out or just doesn’t show up; that’s precisely why I don’t do that to other people. Not even today, with this good a reason.

I call Mary on my way to the train to tell her my father is missing. She said, “Oh, did they find him?” I said, NO, HE IS MISSING. No one knows where he is.
I text Emery to let him know what is going on. I add that I am on my way in, but that someone else will have to close with Jacque if my father doesn’t turn up soon.
I get to Penn before eleven. I have no news from anyone. I have enough time to try to find a charger for my phone. I hadn’t charged it the night before and I’ve been on it almost the whole morning. I take the local to 79th Street, stop at the T-Mobile store to see if I can find what I need. No dice—the sales associate practically laughs at my three-year-old no-frills Samsung. I try the electronics store across the street. They don’t have one either, but I do replace my broken watchstrap with a new black leather one.
I get to the store by 11:30, clock in, tell Mary there still hasn’t been news, and try to concentrate on my tasks at hand.
I never bring my cellphone on to the sales floor, but I make an exception this day. I am fielding texts from my sisters asking if there is any news, while I am emailing back and forth with my district manager and Corporate about a man who had attempted to make a fraudulent return in our store. In between, I am ringing up Father’s Day cards for customers.

Frank checks in with me a couple of times, to see if I’ve heard anything, to hear how I sound. He knows me better than anyone else on God’s green earth. He can pick things up in my voice that even I don’t know are there. Such are the blessings of a long-term happy marriage.
“Hi Claud. Anything new?” (Are you okay? Tell me how you are really doing.)
“I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I’m going to Port Authority after work, in case Dad got on a bus.” (I’m scared and I don’t know what else to do.)
“Please take care of yourself.”

I have Mary take her lunch break at 2, and hope I don’t have to flee while she is gone.
Emery calls to check and see how I am doing.
“No news. Yes, thank you for offering, please come and close the store with Jacque. I don’t know where my father is, and I don’t know what is happening.”
I haven’t really taken a break this day. Jacque comes in at 4:40. Mary leaves at 5:20.
Emery comes at around 6. I tell him that I am taking a sick day the next day, either to go looking for my dad, or to recuperate from the stress of this day, depending.
Then, I am out the door.

I grab a cab on Broadway, and I call home from my cell as the cab makes its way downtown. I am going to Port Authority on the small chance that somehow, my dad tried to come to see me in New York. Maybe he waited at our old bus stop, got on the 113S bus, got out at Port Authority and…. what? Did I really think he could find his way to the 7 train, go to Corona, or to Flushing? No, I didn’t. But in case he did, I need to tell the cops to be on the lookout.

I hear the worry in my husband’s voice. I have to do this anyway. My mind’s ear hears him saying, “Come home now” when what he is really saying out loud is good luck, be careful.
The cabdriver has overheard my conversation, and asks me if I am okay. I tell him my dad disappeared that morning and has been missing all day. I tell him why I am going to Port Authority. He asks me my father’s name so he can keep him in his prayers. We take the turn east on to 42nd Street, past Holy Cross Church, and at the southwest corner of 8th Avenue, he lets me out.

I find the police station in the terminal. I speak to the desk sergeant, who asks me to take a seat and wait for the officer who will help me. She is very understanding and kind—she has heard this story before (but it was never my story before).
I give her a description of my father. I pull out the wallet-sized studio photo of my whole family that my brother had set up for Dad’s 80th birthday. She photocopies it. When she comes back, I tell her that the day we took the photo was the first time in twelve years that we had all been under the same roof. The only other picture I have of Dad in my wallet is the one from December 1972, with him and Frank and me all dressed up for a gala dinner dance celebrating Our Lady of Sorrows’ 100th anniversary. In that picture, Dad is five years younger than I am now.
The officer reassures me that if Dad makes his way into the system, I will be notified. They will keep an eye out for him.

I call my mom’s best friend, Thea, as I am leaving the police station—she works at the 110th Precinct in Corona, our old neighborhood. She still lives next door to the house I grew up in, on 42nd Avenue. She will put the word out at the 110, just in case Dad somehow finds his way “home” to Corona. As soon as her husband hears the news about my dad, he takes a folding chair downstairs and sets it up in front of his building. He will wait there until about midnight, until he is exhausted and has to go upstairs to sleep. He is determined that, if my father comes walking down 42nd Avenue, he will intercept him and return him safely to Union, New Jersey.

It is 7 PM and Dad has been missing for eleven hours now. I call Frank and tell him I am done at Port Authority.

“Come home”, he says, “You’ve done all you can for now. Just come home.”

I won’t find this out for a while yet, but throughout the day, Frank has been trying to find ways to help me. Friday is one of his days at NYU’s School of Medicine, where he is the computer tech for a research group in the Psychiatry department. He has been asking the doctors who work there how he can best help me through whatever is coming.
On his way home from work that Friday, he goes up to a police officer and tells him about my missing dad. The cop gives him an outline of what to expect and when, if Dad isn’t found on the first day. Frank is taking the long view; he already knows that if Dad isn’t found before nightfall, the outcome is unlikely to be positive.
It will be longer before I come to that realization.

When I get to Penn, I stop into the police station on the Long Island Railroad concourse, and tell them my story. They are very kind and, as the Port Authority police did, they take down my information. I get on the 7:49 Port Washington train to go home.

I get in at about twenty past eight. Frank has dinner waiting for me, keeping warm on the stove. I eat, we talk. Unless we hear something tonight or early tomorrow, I will go to New Jersey in the morning to search for Dad. I will be with Barbara, George, and Alyssa. They, and Glenn, and Alyssa’s boyfriend Kevin have walked the woods by the house and near the Washington School several times already to see if they can find any sign at all of Dad.

After dinner, I turn on my computer. All of us sibs and spouses discuss next steps by email. Nancy and her husband, Chris, are thinking of coming up, but I think it’s better if they stay in Maryland for the time being. Their eleven-year-old son, Grant, still has another week or so of school. Nancy and Janet (who lives two doors down from her, with her husband Walter and their four cats) can make calls from home—they will call hospitals, senior centers, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, urgent care centers, clinics, and any other place they can think of to see if there are any John Does matching Dad’s description.

I send this email to everyone in my address book:
Subject: Prayer request – my dad is missing
Date: Jun 12, 2010 12:12 AM
Hi friends,
My 88 year old dad wandered off from his home and has been missing since 8AM Friday morning. He was gone when his morning caregiver arrived. Our extended family and friends and the Union County police are looking for him. I visited the station at Port Authority and talked to the PA police (just in case he got on a bus, but I doubt it). I notified a friend of mine who works in our old home precinct in Corona (just in case he tries to go back “home”).
Please just keep us in your prayers.
Thanks so much~
~Claudia & family

I am emailed and talked and texted out. It’s time to sleep now, and I will sleep the sleep of a loving daughter exhausted by grief and worry.

My father has been missing for more than sixteen hours. It’s dark out. He is almost always cold, even on hot summer days. I try not to think about this. I do not succeed.

All of us, at Dad’s 80th birthday.

---

 

Why: Reading is a Modern Superpower…

Tags

Books, creativity, gifts, night-time ritual, patience, persistence, reading, writing

Everything Mr. Radcliffe says about reading is absolutely true…I’ve made reading fiction part of my nighttime ritual and I think better, sleep better, am more creative, and just plain feel better. Reading is the correct answer to asked and unasked questions.

James Radcliffe

It is my contention that:  In the modern world, Reading is no less than a Superpower.

In this post I will explain the thinking behind this, and share 7 reasons why you should consider make reading an integral part of your daily life.

So sit back, strap in, and turn on, dear reader, while I expound upon…

View original post 1,150 more words

Pithies

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art, Claudia Karabaic Sargent, Design, fearlessness, friends, gratitude, neuroscience, peg streep, Pithies, Pithy, Psychology, Psychology Today, spirituality, writing

Pithy: adj. [PITH-ee] ~
Brief, forceful, and meaningful expression; full of vigor, substance, or meaning; containing a definite point.

My dear friend Peg Streep and I have been working on a new project that we call “Pithies” (singular:“Pithy”). You know the memes you see all over the internet, that presume to give you advice or make observations, sometimes spiritual, sometimes psychological, and usually accompanied by mundane and cliched pictures? We wanted to reinvent that. We wanted to combine smart advice, grounded in neuroscience and psychology, with a spiritual bent, good writing, and thoughtful, interesting imagery. We call them “Pithies” because we are offering more substance than your average meme.

Peg does the writing, and I do the art and design. This is our first group of Pithies, and we hope you like them. If you do, and you’d like to share them with your friends and family, please visit our Facebook pages and share from there. You can find me here, and you can find Peg here.

We have big plans for our Pithies. If there’s something you’d like to see us address, let us know and we’ll do our best. In the meantime, enjoy!

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I Come from a Long Line of Warrior Queens

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art supplies, choice, diocesan, entrance exam, fearlessness, fork in the road, gifts, hang up on, Happy Birthday Mom, high school, High School of Art and Design, love, Miss Mary Biedermann, mother, ninetieth birthday, Our Lady of Sorrows, persistence, portfolio, principal, responsibility, The Mary Louis Academy, trust

Mom & me, Early 1955

Today, Mom would have turned 90 years old. We lost her on July 18, 2005, after a brutal and harrowing couple of months that I covered here, here, here, and here. I am very fortunate that in her final years on this earth, I made my peace with her and she with me; her last words to me were “I love you, you’re my prize.” A person can live happily for a long time on a memory like that.

For me, winter and early summer are about my dad; he was a January baby, and we lost him (literally) in June of 2010.
Spring is always about my mother; when the snowdrops start to peek out of the cold ground, and crocuses begin to unfold, the forsythia blossoms bright yellow and the Bradford pears start their bridal march up Northern Boulevard, their white blooms wafting on the warming breezes, my mother is close by. She’s never too far– there are times when I imagine I see her face in the mirror overlaying my own– but she breaks out in the spring. It’s her birthday, Greek Easter, Mother’s Day, our first communions…spring is and always has been her season.

When I was a teenager and then a young adult, and thought I knew everything about everything, we rubbed each other the wrong way, often. As stubborn as my mother was (she was, after all,  born on the cusp of Aries and Taurus), I could match her. We would yell and carry on; she’d forbid me to do one thing or another, and I would do it any way. I honed my passive-aggressive skills at her knee.
If she knew she was right, she would not cave; neither would I.
Those battles were great training for life. It wasn’t until I was older, and we made our peace with each other, that I recognized what a boon her fighting spirit was to me. When I was young, I felt thwarted by her restrictions and demands and opinions; in retrospect, I see that her fighting spirit was what made my life possible.

Here’s one story:
I decided sometime around the fifth or sixth grade that I wanted to go to the High School of Art and Design. The twin sisters of a grade school classmate had been accepted to A&D, and when I heard about it, I wanted nothing more than to go to a school where I could draw all the time. I told my folks, and I think they were hoping I would get over it, the way I got over wanting to be a nurse (when I was six) or a Maryknoll Missionary nun (when I was eight).
I didn’t get over it.
Fast forward to eighth grade, and taking the diocesan placement tests in mid-autumn (for the Catholic high schools); my choices were Mater Christi (where almost all my friends would go), The Mary Louis Academy (where my close friend Carol was trying to persuade me to go), and St. Agnes (where I REALLY did not want to go, but I needed to list three schools). I did very well on the test, and would have no problem going to the school of my choice. In January, I had the placement test and portfolio submission for the High School of Art & Design. I’d worked on my portfolio all during my Christmas vacation with Our Lady of Sorrows’ third grade-and-art teacher, Miss Mary Biedermann. She helped me matte all my artwork while listening to Leonard Cohen songs (a revelation!) and eating brie (ditto!!). It was a glimpse of what a student artist’s life might be like and I was hungry for it.

I wondered in later years if the nuns knew that Miss Biedermann had helped me; she did so outside of class and on her own time, in her own home. I travelled by myself on the subway with my art and supplies in hand; she picked me up in her car near Borough Hall on Queens Boulevard to take me to her place in Richmond Hill. I do not remember how or by whom the arrangements for all of this extracurricular activity were made. Miss Biedermann wasn’t even my teacher– my middle sister Nancy was in her third grade class– but, at some point, my parents had to be involved with the planning. I remember bringing home the day’s matted work and showing what I’d done to my mom and dad; I remember thinking they did not really understand what I was doing, but at least they were not fighting me. At that point, I don’t they thought I would get into A&D; they knew I loved to draw, but I don’t know how talented they thought I was, or –even if I was talented enough– whether this was a path from which I could be diverted. There were no artists in my family; there was no road map for them, or me, to follow. They were not sold on the idea of me being an artist…but time could change things, and anyway, maybe I wouldn’t get into A&D.

I got into Art and Design; my real life would begin that fall. All I had to do was tell Sister Mary Dorothy, the principal of Our Lady of Sorrows.
I told my teacher, Sister Regina de Lourdes, that I’d been accepted to A&D.
She, or someone, told me and told my parents that there would be a full scholarship for me to go to The Mary Louis Academy, an offer which was rarely made to anyone.
I told my parents about the scholarship, and that I didn’t want to go “Snob Hill” (what everyone called The Mary Louis Academy in those days).My mom asked me where I did want to go, and I said Art & Design. They asked me if I was sure, and I was, so that was that; there was no fighting.

I recognize now, as an adult, what an extraordinary leap of faith that was for my parents to make. Their firstborn thirteen-year-old daughter would be going to a high school that none of her classmates were attending, taking a subway into midtown every day, learning to be a professional artist.
She/I would be doing this instead of going to a Catholic high school that wanted me enough to pay the full freight, a high school that would put me on track to St. John’s, Fordham, or even an Ivy League school.Inexplicably, they let me do what I wanted to do.

It wasn’t over at OLS, though; Sister Mary Dorothy was incensed by my choice. She called my home while I was in school to speak to my mother. She yelled at my mother, carried on about how my mother was letting me ruin my life, that I wasn’t old enough to make such a choice, and on and on; she pulled every manipulative trick in the book to try to get my mother to change her mind, or better yet, change my mind for me.
My mother refused, and told Sister that it was my choice, and it was done. Sister persisted, and yelled some more.
My mother hung up on her. She fought for me, against every grain of her own doubt and fear about my choice, and she hung up the phone on the principal of my school.

I don’t know that I would have been so brave had I been in my mother’s place.
When I asked her, many years downstream, why she had let me go, she said “Because you wanted to– it meant so much to you.”
That is love, and courage, and faith, and hope, wrapped in the fighting spirit that my mom held on to until her last breath. She not only gave me life, but she gave me MY life, the life I was truly meant to have.

On this ninetieth anniversary of her birth,  I say THANK YOU, Mom, for all your many gifts, but especially for that one. It was the fork in the road that made all the difference.

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Stuck ~ A Fable

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angry boots, booted foot, communities, construct, content of their character, courtesy, dangers, I have a dream, inside the walls, loose thread, mission, nothing, outside the walls, perfect world, professionalism, respect, shards, shreds, silence equals agreement, sirens, social fabric, threats, tiny tear, trust, weak statement

Cowardice asks the questions,‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question,‘Is it politic?’
And Vanity comes along and asks the question,
‘Is it popular?’
But Conscience asks the question,‘Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

~ The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Perfect World

Once upon a time, there was a perfect world, inside the walls. Well, not really perfect, but it was mostly happy; rules and systems were in place, and new inhabitants were welcomed warmly. Children were fed, and learned, and grew, and dared to dream. There was the world inside, the nearly perfect, happy one, and there was the one outside, which still posed dangers and threats (not all the things you thought you would be threats out there actually were, and not all the things you thought would be safe actually were).

One day, everything changed. One of the things you would have thought was safe became definitively unsafe. There had been news of similar incidents, some quite close to the walls; but it’s so easy to let down your guard when you are fed, and learning, and growing, and dreaming. It is so easy to think that you can go abroad freely, just because it’s safe inside the walls.

Things can change very, very quickly when you are walking down a main boulevard on a beautiful sunny day. It only takes one tiny tear in the social fabric, one loose thread; before you know it, you are standing amidst shreds and shards, wondering what happened and why and what to do.
One moment you are walking down the street, and the next, you are lying on the sidewalk, a booted foot shoving your face into the sidewalk leaving it a bloody mass, another boot belonging to another foot kicking your midsection, your arms twisted up behind your head in directions that arms are not meant to easily go. You are crying. Someone is shooting a video and shouting, while the sirens are screaming and more angry boots are on the ground, running.

You can see how something like this might change what happens next inside the walls.

As unexpected as what happened outside is what happens inside.

NOTHING. Well, meetings. A week later, a weak statement. Tears are shed, some furtively, some openly, inside the walls, some by people who surprise you with their tears or lack thereof. There is no help from outside, but there are rumors that help will come, someday.
The children are still fed, they are still being taught, the rules and systems are still in place, though fewer, it seems, are taking them seriously because, really, what protection have they afforded the inhabitants once they leave the walls?
The almost perfect world inside is shown to be a construct. The rules that the inhabitants try to live by inside– rules of courtesy, professionalism, responsibility– those same rules (which were adapted from the world outside the walls) are also largely a construct. They are billboarded on the sides of the vehicles with the sirens, but who lives by them?

I have a dream that the children inside these walls will one day live in a nation where they will be judged only by the content of their character. I have a dream that those who proclaim that their mission is to protect the children and help them to grow, and learn, and prosper, will remember what the mission is and not sacrifice it to undeserving gods. I have a dream that assault and unjust imprisonment will not be condoned with relative silence, because relative silence equals relative agreement. I have a dream that justice will prevail and that almost-perfect world inside the walls will look deep into its heart of hearts and see that its response is flawed.

I have a dream.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

~The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Why I Write

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breaststroke, details, exercise, family, fearlessness, friends, health, love, memories, memory, missing persons, moment by moment, mother bear, notes to self, persistence, personal odyssey, plots, sharing, siblings, story, storytelling, universal

What kind of story would you like to hear?”

said Mother Bear.

“Tell me about me,” said Little Bear.
“Tell me about the things I once did.”

–Else Holmelund Minarik, Little Bear

…and THAT is as good a reason as there is.
We all have stories; they differ in the details, but the themes are common, universal.

I started writing Missing Dad when my father disappeared. A lot of the detail in what I’ve written so far is extracted from emails, texts, and “notes to self” that were contemporaneous with the events I’ve described.
I am writing it because I don’t want to forget. I want my nieces and nephew to have a record of what happened, so that they can share our family’s story with their children and grandchildren and beyond.
The one day I didn’t do any contemporaneous writing was the day he was found. I was home that day; no need to email, no need to write notes-to-self.
That was the hardest day for me to write, because I had to dig deep into my memory and excavate the day, moment by moment. I was blocked on writing that day for months, because I wasn’t ready to do the necessary digging.

But dig I did; my need to tell them, and you, and everyone else the Things I Once Did surpassed my fear of the pain I anticipated that my digging would cause me.
The pain, as it turned out, was not so bad. Swimming really helped open me up to it.

My writing about my swimming is something else; it’s recording a quest. It’s my personal Odyssey.
It’s going very well, by the way. I now swim laps for an hour to an hour and a half, three or four times a week, once a week with fins.
I figure I am swimming about three to four miles a week.
My breaststroke is now my best stroke; I’ve taught myself how to do an open turn at the end of the lane. My hands hit the wall, I fall back, turn over and push off with my feet. It’s not quite pretty yet, but it is highly functional.
My bully has returned to the pool several times since I first told you what happened. There have been no further confrontations, which is a good thing. I’d hate to have go all WQ on her, and you know I would.
(Forewarned is forearmed. What got me last time was that it was a surprise attack.)

I hope these are stories that you like to hear. I tell you about me, and in doing so, I am trying to tell you about you.
The details are different, but the plots are universal: love, loss, quests, successes, failures, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back.
It is all a journey; thanks for listening to mine.

Please share yours, too. If you have a blog, please post a link in my comments and I will add you to my blog roll if I haven’t already.
If you don’t have a blog yet, why not start one?

PS ~ Many thanks to Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog for unknowingly providing me with the great prompt at the top of this post.

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