Peter’s Gift to My Mother and to the World
In 1941, on July 30, my mother and father were married in a white farmhouse set amidst hay and potato fields near grazing cows fenced aside a county road. Standing up with the wedding couple were my mother’s brother and her girlfriend. My father’s parents and two sisters attended from Brooklyn, New York. My parents chose the area of Ripogenus Dam in northern Maine for their honeymoon.
Their marriage was a loving one in which they shared the responsibilities that a family life includes. During the later years of their marriage, my father expressed his love for my mother in new ways. My mother had Alzheimer’s disease.* As her memory decreased, his more supervised care was necessary. Her care was in a nursing home her last eight years.
The Peter of this story, Peter Schneider,* is in his eighties, but he does not have Alzheimer’s disease and he still lives at home with his wife, poet Pat Schneider.* However, Peter does have issues with his memory and it is because of this shared experience with my mother that I share his words with you.
LOST IN PLAIN SIGHT
Somewhere recently
I lost my short term memory.
It was there and then it moved
like the flash of a red fox
along a line fence.
My short term memory
has no address but here
no time but now.
It is a straight-man, waiting to speak
to fill in empty space
with name, date, trivia, punch line.
And then it fails to show.
It is lost, hiding somewhere out back,
a dried ragweed stalk on the Kansas prairie
holding the shadow of its life
against a January wind.
How am I to go on?
I wake up a hundred times a day.
Who am I waiting for,
what am I looking for
why do I have this empty cup
on the porch or in the yard?
I greet my neighbor, who smiles.
I turn a slow, lazy Susan
in my mind, looking for
some clue, anything to break the spell
of being lost in plain sight.*
Peter Schneider
Peter’s profoundly moving and accessible narrative of his situation offers me a newly opened window onto what might have been my mother’s experience, had she been able to express it as Peter has. It reveals the possibility of an integrity of the mind and the still-present ability to communicate her thoughts behind the seemingly unexplainable “Thank you, Barbara,”* that she spoke aloud at times. And so, Peter’s thought-provoking conversation with himself and with us is a gift extending far beyond his words first entered by his wife into her computer. Former United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, also a poet of conversations, shared Peter’s “Lost in Plain Sight” in his online column. As a result, this poem seeking answers now spans our globe, perhaps adding meaning to so many others seeking similar answers.
My realization is, “Through another’s unique self–description, we may recognize possibilities about one we know that awaken new awareness.”
This post was co-written by Prema Camp and Rosie Pearson.
* See: Purely Prema: “An Orange in the Snow,” January 6, 2016.
* Peter Schneider, clarinetist and poet. I have referred to Peter in several other Purely Prema blogs. See also: Purely Prema: Peter Schneider, “Meditation on ‘Fern Hill,’” in Line Fence (Amherst, Massachusetts: Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2006) 25–27. “Peter Schneider is a poet who has also been a farmer, theologian, counselor, co-director of Amherst Writers & Artists, and father of four children. A Wisconsin native, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.” ‘The Waunakee Farm’ poems are “a composite of observation and hearsay in the experience and imagination of a boy between ages five and fifteen on a Wisconsin farm, 1935 to 1945.” And: Purely Prema: “Peter Schneider’s Music in His Eighties,” September 17, 2014.
* Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists, and recent author of How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). For more about Pat Schneider, see also: Purely Prema: “Everyone is a Writer, Family Writing, Part 1,” September 16, 2015, and Purely Prema: “A Girl’s Voice From the Unconscious,” July 18, 2018.
* Peter Schneider, “Lost in Plain Sight,” Line Fence (Amherst, Massachusetts: Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2006), 66.
* My mother called me by my birth name, Barbara.