These are the text messages my wife sent to me the other day:
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Rachelle: How’s the pulmonary rehab going, my love?
Rachelle: Oh, I’m so glad to hear that you’re dominating the warm-up exercises!
Rachelle: Yes, you are a natural leader, it’s one hundred percent true!
Rachelle: What’s The Flower Pot?
Rachelle: I see.
Rachelle: So you sit in a chair, and then move one of your legs as if you were lifting it over a flower pot?
Rachelle: What a strange name for an exercise!
Rachelle: Well, I don’t know. Maybe something a little more macho, something like The Grizzly Stomp or The Sumo Crush.
Rachelle: I like The Grizzly Stomp, too. You should write that down and put it in the Suggestion Box.
Rachelle: You already suggested a Cosplay night! Interesting idea, Pickle, but aren’t all the other residents elderly?
Rachelle: I see, that’s good thinking on your part, you can make your oxygen tanks look like rocket packs!
Rachelle: You are very creative, it’s true, and as you say, you are the Wayne Gretzky of The Flower Pot.
Rachelle: Really? The physiotherapist asked you to lead the class yesterday?! How flattering!
Rachelle: Yes, I am sure it was a great honour that everybody else was bitterly jealous of! I’m curious, did you get to choose the music for the work-out?
Rachelle: That’s great! Who did you pick?
Rachelle: Oh.
Rachelle: Well, it just seems like an odd choice.
Rachelle: I didn’t know, Tori Amos just seems weird to me. Complicated, annoying.
Rachelle: Sorry. I am trying to encourage and support you, my love.
Rachelle: Really?
Rachelle: Right in the middle of the stretch she said you had a very small flower pot?!
Rachelle: OMG, That’s hilarious!
Rachelle: I mean nasty, just nasty.
Rachelle: 90 is old, and aging can make people mean.
Rachelle: You’re probably right, that smart-alecky Yvette lady likely had dementia.
Rachelle: Because it’s not your class, honey.
Rachelle: That’s why they wouldn’t let you “expel her from your program.”
Rachelle: Well, I’m glad you put her on notice, anyway, and sorry that everybody is now calling you The Little Flower Pot.
Rachelle: Think of it being like Dear Leader, a term of respect and fear.
Rachelle: Well of course I miss you terribly, but I’m struggling along. Even had a little party last night to fight the loneliness.
Rachelle: Probably less than 25 people, I don’t remember.
Rachelle: He might have been there, not positive.
Rachelle: Oh, you’ll get a kick out of this!
Rachelle: He brought his Porsche over the other day to take Jones for a ride, and Jones just loved it! I’ve never seen him happier! It’s astonishing Pierre doesn’t have any kids because he is just SO amazing with them!!
Rachelle: Yes, you’re amazing with Jones, too.
Rachelle: Sure Jones misses you.
Rachelle: Well, he’s still not really talking yet, so he missing you in a kind of subconscious way, I guess, but I can tell that he really does miss you!!
Rachelle: Tonight?
Rachelle: Oh, Steve needed to take somebody to the magazine awards at some fancy hotel and Jen is out of town, so I have to go as his date. Barf.
Rachelle: He was nominated in two different comedy writing categories.
Rachelle: It is a shame none of your work was nominated!
Rachelle: No, I have no idea why Steve won’t accept your Facebook friendship.
Rachelle: The world is mysterious.
Rachelle: Never mind that though, what are you up to tonight, my Little Flower Pot?
Rachelle: Fish stick night! Yum!
Rachelle: You’re my favourite fish stick, you know.
Rachelle: It’s true.
Rachelle: Don’t ever doubt that!
Rachelle: You will always be my favourite fish stick! xo
The nurses found him elbow deep in the garbage can, sifting through the spent trash as if it were the soil of his native PEI. He was harvesting anything that felt like a potato to his hands, and then dropping whatever it was on the floor by his hospital bed for later use.
Whether it was a sleeping dream he was having or a waking one no longer mattered. Lost on the rolling seas of dementia, Marcel had passed into the timeless overlap of memory where reality is nothing more than an unbidden chemical spark from deep within the mystery of his receding brain.
Marcel was harmless and never given to rage, and the nurses seemed to love him, treating him more like a pet than a patient. You could see the gentleness within him, the shapes of the men he used to be who now pushed against the diseased exterior: the fair trader, the husband, the guy who was always the first to dive in off the dock, the grandfather who did corny magic tricks and loved fishing.
Now in his mid-nineties, he wandered the corridors half-dressed. Like a poltergeist given form, he drifted in and out of the rooms on the 14th floor as if living all the lives contained therein, with each visit subtly rearranging the small articles he came upon, always setting this new house in order. The expression on his face that must have once been so clear was now lost and uncertain. He seemed blinded, a subterranean creature guided through these alien and unnaturally smooth corridors not by sight but by scent, called to this strange transit by a timeless ocean that only he could discern.
As far as I can tell, Foster’s iconic status was earned for surviving childhood stardom with fewer visible scars than most. This is no small achievement, of course, but it’s not exactly an artistic one. As one friend put it, we feel protective of Foster because we will always see her as the precocious child she was in her defining role in Taxi Driver, and because of this we shelter her.
On Sunday night Foster was given a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes awards. (Helen Hunt, who received her fifth Golden Globe nomination this year was not) As many of you are probably aware, Foster’s speech was a weird, seemingly improvisational flight that had a polarizing effect on the audience at large. Those who instinctively shelter Foster or see in her a champion of intelligence and integrity loved it, while others saw it as a self-serving and deluded Hollywood indulgence. I would fall into the latter camp, I think.
Looking entirely healthy, beautiful and confident, she proceeded to congratulate herself on her appearance and then pretended to come out of the closet, all the while using a tone that diminished those who had previously come out of the closet as somehow self-interested or even vulgar. She then talked about how hard it was for her to lead a normal life, ignoring the possibility that it was hard for anybody to lead a normal life, made a self-important plea for privacy, and then seemed to enjoy flirting and teasing the audience by hinting at retiring from acting (what a national tragedy that would be!) — before publically and somewhat melodramatically, bringing attention to her mother’s dementia. And of course, she chose to do all this from the glittering pulpit of the Golden Globes.
She was a little mixed-up, I think, and far too fast to congratulate herself and dismiss the pedestrian efforts and realities of those who lived outside her bubble of privilege and popular acceptance. It was ironic, to say the very least, that she would choose this platform to champion Mel Gibson, her great friend, instead of pioneers within the LGBT civil rights movement. There was an angry piety to her words that suggested the megalomania of a person who saw herself as a kind of martyr. She seemed small, lonely and disconnected up there on stage, almost cruelly insulated, and it made me sad to see that celebrity had torn her so.
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