It was fourth of July when my 9-year-old sister and I set out to accomplish two goals: buying sparklers and filling Marty’s bird feeder.
Marty Kanon is an 85-year-old woman who lives alone on Park Avenue in a little old house full of little old things.
As we pulled up into Marty’s driveway, I turned off my phone camera that had been recording our drive. The camera was on because I was recording a clip for my video blog, an excursion I learned is much harder than it looks.
“Well! I didn't know you were coming over,” Marty cried with enthusiasm and a hint of concern as we stepped into her kitchen.
She was sitting at a card table in the corner looking over papers, her walker nearby, holding a newspaper and her morning coffee. I knew my mother had just phoned her to say we would be over to fill her feeders, but I expected she might forget.
It turned out, her neighbors had just filled them, and the birds were gathering seeds already.
“Well, that’s OK. Why don’t you stay for a bowl of cherries and we can catch up?” She spoke with determination as if this was an order, not an invitation. Even though we were supposed to be on our way to Target, we stayed because it's not easy to turn down a nice old lady.
I didn’t protest because I was accustomed to Marty’s love for quality time. With Marty, it’s never just a pop in and pop out.
I first met her when I’d pick up my brother from cello lessons. Her relationship with him is an odd one at that. A former cellist, Marty has traveled the world, playing music for dozens of years. Though retired now, she still teaches on occasion, and for five years she taught my littlest brother. She deems him her own grandson and glows with pride when she hears about his success.
Whenever he performs, Marty calls him after the concert and wants to hear about the whole thing. The phone rings from her not only after a competition but even after the smallest recitals. She calls him on his birthday and he calls her on her’s. And God forbid if he forgets to call her after a performance.
“Hello Marty,” he’ll say into the receiver, a few days after a concert.
“Hello, who’s this?” she’ll reply in her shaky, opera-like voice.
“It’s me, Isaac,” he’ll say a smile tugging at his mouth.
“Isaac who?”
Yes, she doesn’t take it well when she's forgotten.
Marty scooted across the kitchen with her walker. A slow procedure but a sure one. A lonely egg simmered in a pot of boiling water on the stove, and she noted that it was supposed to be her breakfast.
“No worries, I’ll just eat it for lunch,” she said happily.
After a long shuffle through the doorway to the dining room, we all sat and pulled the stems off of violet cherries.
“What are you doing?” she asked curiously as I began filming myself eating cherries.
“Oh, it’s for my video blog,” I replied.
“Well isn’t that funny,” she remarked, then reached for another cherry.
I wondered what she thought of me. Did she understand that millennials document their lives on the daily? Was this totally obscure to her and insensitive?
Marty seemed OK with it, but still, I put my phone away and grabbed a cherry.
Eating fresh fruit with Marty is the only way to spend time with her. She always has a bowl of something sweet and perfectly ripe waiting in her fridge. One week it was peaches, so ripe the skin slipped right off with the sticker. Another week it was deep purple seeded grapes. And with every fruit, we eat she has a story.
“This reminds me of picking cherry’s in Bulgaria with my friend Sylvie,” she began with a playful smile. She told us Sylvie invited her to see Bulgaria and meet her family when she was in her 20s. Unfortunately, the family was suffering under a communist regime.
“In Bulgaria, the people wait hours to buy meat,” Marty said, shaking a cherry-stained finger at me. “The line stretches down the street and if by chance you were last in line all that’s left for you is a small slice of meat with flies buzzing around it.”
It’s amazing how many places Marty has been and how vivid her memory is of each one. It’s never yesterday or last week or even last summer. It’s always before she was married and sometime in her youth.
A half hour later we were leaving Marty's place and with little time to get home before our family barbecue. But nonetheless, I left feeling enriched and rewarded to be able to spend time with an elderly woman.
Sometimes our generation feels we have it all figured out from social media to interpersonal communication, but what we lack are genuine stories from the past that reside within the memories of the elderly around us.
