I missed writing my Tuesday blog yesterday as I got caught up in the day, which is typical. I sat down in the afternoon but again got pulled away. That’s how it goes.

It’s been a rough three days actually. I’m on the third day of colonoscopy prep, three bottles of Miralax, ten Dulcolax pills, and a liquid diet with some Jello and Italian Ice. It’s not the breakfast of champions you might expect.

All this is on top of getting stitches above my right eye and a nice shiner last week as well as getting a level two shoulder strain two days before that.

Oh, and I got over covid just three weeks ago.

And a bee stung my toe right after I got the stitches.

As for why it takes me three days to prep, I won’t comment. Apologies already if the thought of a colonoscopy causes you some grief.

It’s causing me some grief, as you can imagine. I’m pretty sure that’s why I couldn’t finish a twenty minute write.

Excuses, excuses.

That’s all small potatoes, though. My story today is more interesting.

I’m working today on a book that my mom wrote back in 1992, not just wrote but illustrated with watercolor art and penned by hand. The original book is held together with a binder clip and is watercolor paper back to back making up the twenty or so pages.

I am totally biased, but it’s a pretty amazing book.

The book tells the story of a young boy staying with his grandmother for a day. Opossums keep showing up at the back door, first one, then two, then three, etc.

Each time the boy tells his grandma but she’s sitting in a comfortable chair reading a book and simply says, “Well, whatever you do, don’t open the door!”

Then, of course, he opens the door.

Each time he opens the door there is a double page illustration of the opossums getting into mischief. First, one gets into the refrigerator.

When the next two come in, the three sit at a table and have snacks.

When the next three come in, one of them calls and orders pizza.

When the next four come in, the living room is full of opossums sitting around watching television and eating pizza.

Finally there are fifteen opossums in a living room playing the piano and dancing in a conga line.

The opossums are adorable. Again, I’m biased. But they are.

I have taken these pages and digitized them to the best of my ability. I’m colorblind, so I’ve relied on mom to confirm that they are accurate representations of the actual illustrations.

I have uploaded the book to Amazon and have used their Kindle service to prepare the book for print-on-demand. Soon, when I feel the book is ready, I’ll assign a release date and start to promote the book. Again, to the best of my ability.

Part of the reason I’m so excited for this project is that Mom has mixed dementia. If you’ve read Monday’s Marla poem, you’ll note that Grandma Mabel also has mixed dementia. Ultimately, we write what we know.

I showed Mom the book after I received the first proof. I filmed her seeing it for the first time, with her permission, and then I handed her the book and read her the dedication, which is here:

We both cried. I’m not sure I want to share that moment with anyone, but it was beautiful and I treasure it. And, when my own memory begins to fade, I can watch it again.

As her memory has gotten worse, Mom tends to forget that she wrote the book at all. I would guess that most all of us tragically know what dementia is like. Or will as some of the people we love get diagnosed with one of the many diseases under the dementia umbrella.

I’ve heard that getting older is hell, but it’s better than the alternative. My dad had Lewy Body Dementia and suffered for over seven years before he passed in 2012 at seventy-five. For many of those years he had frequent hallucinations and gradually lost his mobility as well as the ability to speak. And his memory.

Oh, and he had prostrate cancer and heart disease, including two major heart attacks with multiple bypasses starting when he was thirty-nine.

I’m not sure the alternative is always better.

Part of the beauty of the book, which only our family would realize, is that the escapade takes place in my boyhood home. The house is totally our house–the kitchen, the table, the family room, the dining room with the piano.

The phone is our phone. The piano is our piano. The plants, the cats, the wallpaper, the memo pad, the television–all ours. When the opossum makes the phone call for pizza, he uses a North Manchester, Indiana phone book.

No one but family and friends who visited our house can notice this, but because she drew what she knew, there is incredible detail in the pictures. You can read the word “pizza” inside the phone book.

That’s the book she’s holding, in case you haven’t seen a phone book before 🙂

For those that knew our home, the book itself is a concrete memory of the 1980’s and 1990’s. I don’t know anyone else that has watercolor illustrations of the inside of their entire childhood home.

For my mom, as she slowly loses her memories, and we, in turn, experience her loss, and, possibly, lose our memories as well, what an incredible gift she has given us–a portal back in time.

I’m sharing some of those images here before the book is published. Normally, I only use black and white images on my blog. For these, though, I’ll make an exception.

Mom has always been a shy artist, rarely sharing her work with anyone, thus our family did not know about this book until a year or so ago. She didn’t even share it with us.

Her artistic ability has passed down to her grandchildren. My sister Cara’s four daughters are all exceptional artists. My niece Gillian even illustrates children’s books. My own son Theodore studies digital art and art history in Florence, Italy.

Apples don’t fall far from trees. Really, they don’t. I was out for a run the other day and passed an apple tree. The apples were all right there. Evidence that supports the theory.

I hope this book is enough evidence for my mom that she is special. Of course, we are all special, in a myriad of ways. As dementia takes over, I want this book to sit on her coffee table, right in the open, where she can see it everyday, a concrete reminder of her life.

All of our lives will be lost eventually. Hopefully not to dementia, and hopefully not until we have a chance to experience fulfillment, in whatever form that comes for us.

For mom, this book, and her artwork, will be a touchpoint for all of us that came from the Amstutz line, straight from Sigriswil, Switzerland when my great-great grandfather Daniel Amstutz came to America.

I’ve been to Sigriswil and visited the graveyard which is full of my Amstutz relatives. My son Theodore is planning his own trip there this fall. He’s taking his camera and his drone. I can’t wait to hear about his adventure.

It is nice to have an ancestral home, a specific place to say we are from. But of course we are all from many, many places.

And we are all special.

Here’s hoping that you know you are.

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