Janie in New Plymouth



At noon I pulled into the New Plymouth cemetery and parked in the shade underneath one of the big elm trees. The temperature was already in the upper nineties. I noted the gravestones for my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my uncle Kelly, and the new one for my great uncle Chuck, who died last December, less than a month short of ninety. His wife Janie’s name was on the stone too, but she was still in their house in town about a half mile away.

At the house, Chuck’s pick-up truck, a 70s Ford, is still in the carport. Janie’s 94’ Cutless Cierra is in the garage, but she doesn’t drive any more. She told me later, “I have my license, but it’s not a good idea.”

I came into the kitchen, and her very small little dog, Zoe, barked at me ferociously until Janie said to her, “oh, shut-up.” Janie wanted to feed me right off. She made me a fried tuna sandwich and microwaved a piece of corn on the cob, then put out a bag of potato chips. “You want ketchup?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For the sandwich of course.  I couldn’t eat that without ketchup. Here,” she said, putting the plastic ketchup bottle down on the table beside me, “you try it.” So I did and it wasn’t bad.

She asked about my trip, and we talked about Chuck’s funeral. At one point she referred to his death as “when he left.” She asked after grandpa, then talked about her own ailments. “I was fine till Chuck went, but I‘ve been falling apart ever since.” Janie’s eighty-five, short and skinny (I‘d guess she weighs ninety pounds, at the most), and the biggest problem is her back. “The doctor says my vertebrae are all disintegrating. He gave me some sort of pain pill but I didn’t like how it made me feel….” She grimaced.   “Sort of floaty…. So I told him I was just going to take Tylenol, and he said alright, go ahead.” Her back had been pretty good the last couple weeks, but she was having a bad day. She stood in the kitchen while I ate, and later when we moved to the living room she sat in a rocking chair but soon got up. “I just can’t get comfortable.”

She had also had a cancerous bit removed from her right cheek, and she moved her glasses up to show me where. “Just call me ol’ scarface,” she said. She lit up a long cigarette and said, “Don’t say anything to me about smoking.” It hadn’t occurred to me to counsel her. “I told the doctor, I’m not going to stop, it’s been fifty years, and it doesn’t matter now.”

She told me how she’d had a chest x-ray and the doctor had asked, did you grow up on the Plains? She did, in Kansas. It turns out that people of her generation, who lived in the Dust Bowl region, have what she called “dust bunnies” in (on?) their lungs, ancient dust that has calcified in small clusters. “Those dust storms were just awful,” she said. “You just couldn’t keep the dust out, it got in everywhere. People had their ceilings collapse, after even the attics filled up. My two sisters and I slept in one big bed, and every night my mother would tie a wet sheet to the four bed posts, over us like a tent. In the morning there was a layer of mud on that sheet, not just dust but mud.”

Her parents had divorced when she was young, and after a few years her mother got a proposal from a rancher who lived in Idaho. They got on a train in 1936, when Janie was nine, and went west. “He was twenty years older than mom, but I think she was sort of desperate, with three kids and all that. He was supposed to take care of us, but then he got hurt and lost his cattle and we ended up taking care of him.”

After high school she took a nursing course down in Boise, with her best friend, Verleen. They would sometimes hitchhike the fifty miles back and forth, or out to Verleen’s family in Emmett. Janie didn’t meet Chuck until after the war. He had enlisted shortly before Pearl Harbor, and his ship had left Hawaii just before the attack. Later he was on a ship that was sunk off Australia. When he finally got back to Idaho, none of his family had seen him for five years. He said he was never going anywhere again and he never did. “I was looking for a handsome man,” Janie said, “and I ended up with stubby Chuck Fitzsimons.”

After a pause she waved a hand as if pushing something away, then said, “Old people and their boring stories.”

She said to the dog, “I bet you have to pee.” We went out to the backyard, where the temperature had risen to one hundred degree, and she lit another cigarette and showed me her tomato and cucumber plants. She told me someone else mows for her now, and she’d had a sprinkler system put in at the end of last summer. For fifty years she had been dragging hoses around the yard to water the grass. “But I don’t think I could do that anymore.”

I spent most of the afternoon with Janie, then drove a half mile to the other side of town to see my aunt Jeanette and her husband, Nig, who live in a small, newish subdivision, in a small, non-descript house littered with gewgaws and aphoristic signs about the joys of home. They also have a noisy lap dog that heralded my arrival. Janie had offered to come over with me, but I could tell she didn’t want to leave her house, because of her back, and I assured her I could find the way on my own. The three old people have known each other for seventy years—Janie and Jeanette were in high school together—but they don’t see each other much these days. Nig can just barely get around with a walker, and he rarely leaves his house. There are three steps to get up into Janie’s kitchen, and those are not possible for him. During an operation on his left knee a key nerve had been severed, and there was no going back. “But I can still drive,”he said, patting his good right leg.

I sat down in the second living room of the day, and Jeanette explained that she couldn’t hardly leave the house because she had to watch her husband all the time. She made it sound like a cross to bear, but he didn’t seem to mind. I went over some of the same conversational ground, about grandpa’s health, about my trip, about family and how old each person had become, and how did all this time go by. I sat next to Jeannette and Nig sat across from us on another couch, with his walker, its basket loaded with mail, between us. “He’s been looking for a check,” Jeanette explained. “It got lost somehow.”

Nig seemed to be able to hear well enough, but periodically he would throw out a question that had nothing to do with the conversational topic at hand. Jeanette didn’t seem to mind these non-sequiturs, and I’d answer his question—about my work (he was in education too) or some past event—then take back up where we had left off. Jeanette was better able to stay on point, but she had moments of drift when she would seem to forget who I was, or to forget that she had just said something and say it again. They were not quite as sharp as Janie.

Jeanette had recently broken her right wrist and still wore a brace. They were each being slowly whittled down. And not so slowly in recent years. But they all seem to be looked after fairly well. Both households get regular visits from their children, who are nearly old people now too…. Janie talked of how her daughter Sue wants her to move to assisted living, down in Boise where Sue lives. Janie’s thinking about it but seems in no hurry to leave her house. But it won’t be long. When I left Jeanette and Nig I said I hoped to be back next summer to see them, and Jeanette laughed and said, “If we’re still here.” But they’ve always been there, as long as I can remember.