The Moon in the Water: Reflections on an Aging Parent

The Moon in the Water: Reflections on an Aging Parent

by Kathy J. Phillips
The Moon in the Water: Reflections on an Aging Parent

The Moon in the Water: Reflections on an Aging Parent

by Kathy J. Phillips

Hardcover

$79.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, April 4
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Named a Best Book of 2008 by Library Journal

In a series of moving vignettes, the author begins by describing a particular representation of Water-Moon Kuan Yin, a Buddhist teacher and goddess associated with compassion, who often sits on a precarious overhang or floats on a flimsy petal. Then Kuan Yin steps out of the frame to join the author in the mundane challenges of caring for her father-transferring his health insurance, struggling with a wheelchair van, managing adult diapers, or playing in the fictions of dementia. From perplexed to poignant to funny, the vignettes record the working-class English of a fading but still wise dad, and they find other human versions of Kuan Yin in a doctor who will still make house calls or kind strangers in the street.

The book includes ten illustrations: both classical representations of Kuan Yin and also the author's own drawings, which adapt Kuan Yin in an act of practical spirituality, reading art through life and life through art. Each vignette invites the harried caregiver to take a deep breath and meditate on the trials and joys of caring for an aging parent.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780826515865
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date: 04/25/2008
Pages: 160
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kathy J. Phillips is Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i. Her most recent books are Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature; This Isn't a Picture I'm Holding: Kuan Yin; and Virginia Woolf Against Empire.

Read an Excerpt

The Moon in the Water

Reflections on an Aging Parent


By Kathy J. Phillips

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2008 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-9239-2



CHAPTER 1

Dug Up Kuan Yin


Someone has chiseled Kuan Yin on a slab of stone. As near as I can make out from the photo in a book, she sits on the ground on her island, holding a willow sprig in one hand and a water jar in the other. The outline of the full moon marks her off from rows of etched calligraphy, in two separate inscriptions. According to the translator, one Chinese worshipper in the eleventh century wrote that he had lost his father and was making this prayer stone for Kuan Yin. Much later, a magistrate in the seventeenth century recorded, closer to the artwork, that people lost track of the slab until a farmer dug it out of a field and gave the ridged and dirt-clogged stone to his daughter, to scrub clothes. Then (so goes the story) the washboard began to glow....

In May 2001, I'm emptying out Dad's house in New Jersey, where he's lived for fifty years, and notifying his friends that he's planning to move to my apartment in Hawai'i in a month. The old house is the one I grew up in, so I have memories stashed here too, but for the moment, unwelcoming stuff overwhelms me: rows of lawnmower guts and chassis, unconnected, receipts from gas and electric bills going back to Methuselah. Upstairs, cast-off furniture huddles together, the very names fallen out of use: chiffonier, china closet, vanity, commode. My heart catches at the furniture Dad has built himself, incredibly beautiful, but too heavy and too many to ship to Honolulu. I convince cousins to lug away precious pieces, hoping that if I manage to visit them some day, I might find Dad's cobbler's bench, on which he incised a tree, or rediscover his clothes chest, making a new life for itself with some other child's mittens.

Dad's pals from the firehouse bring him a plaque. For their send-off, they roll up in style, clinging to the long hook-and-ladder truck. The neighbors must think the house is on fire. As a kid, I'd hear Dad get up in the night at the siren's summoning. I'd try to stay awake until he returned, safe. Recalling these vigils digs out the memory of his return vigils, at his small child's bedside: rubbing my back and waiting for me to fall asleep. Now the gray-haired firemen and the younger ones, who know Dad from quieter years as firehouse secretary, troop into the living room to read their etched plaque aloud: "in sincere appreciation...." Standing at the screen door with his walker, the old volunteer watches them go. When these Kuan Yins pull away from the curb, tooting their horn, Dad laughs—the only time in a morose month.

Down cellar, I breathe cool mustiness and survey boxes, jars, drawers of nails, screws, bolts, and whatnots, plus a stack of unplayable 78-rpm phonograph records, homemade by Gram on a machine that spun out fragrant black hair and put Mom's songs in the grooves. I invite Aunt Verna to the cellar for souvenirs. She pokes at empty mason jars, formerly filled with Dad's red grape juice, transformed from blue grapes, and his cucumber pickle, whose turmeric painted the whole kitchen yellow. Suddenly Verna's eyes light up: "I've been looking for Mummum's doily stretcher!" She must have been looking a long time, as that grandmother died—let's see—forty-one years ago, when Dad brought the contraption home from his parents' dismantled cellar. He's been using it, unrecognized, to hang tools, until the pegged board glows back into an unsnarler of washed lace.

Pat, Dad's employee but also buddy, is devastated at his impending move to Honolulu. She has helped him since his bypass surgery in 1996 by cleaning up the house and rubbing his back; he helps her by repairing her vacuum cleaner and listening, probably one of the few to do so in her crowded day. Together they planted an unclaimed back field in collard greens and strawberries. "I ain't no young chippie," Pat sighs, but if they'd met a decade or so earlier, a few of the sparks crossing may have caught fire. He gives her Mummum's oak sideboard and the van, which he used to transport his electric cart to the grocery, when he could still drive. Now when Pat comes over to say good-bye, she cries, and Dad sinks more into himself.

Before packing his firehouse plaque, Dad is rereading its chiseled gold letters. When he comes to the lines "We wish you health and happiness in your new home in paradise," he frowns. "Do they think I'm dying?" I tell him the firemen are echoing marketers' jargon for tourists to a Pacific island. "I ain't going on vacation," he mutters.

I'm still sorting and tossing out stuff. Finally I've lured or begged or cajoled people to cart away all the tables and picture frames, and the house stands nearly bare. In the attic, I sweep up pins from the old sewing machine, ladybug bodies from summers past, and, inside the cedar closet, one red sassafras leaf. That sassafras tree disappeared years ago, cut down for reasons now lost. But here, in this empty space, lies a sassafras leaf found: still red, still glowing.

CHAPTER 2

Pilgrim Gifts


This illustration, with a gold cast over the entire picture, shows Kuan Yin perched on a rock, with three bamboo stalks. A girl behind her and a boy on an opposite shore present some kind of undulating banners. Kuan Yin pours sustenance from her jar, and its delicate stream swells into the sea surge. The waves, the swirls of the drapery (blowing as if in a gale), and the squiggles of rock all follow the same pattern. Sometimes it's hard to tell rock from water.

Dad is putting together the recent past: "Somebody took me to the Philadelphia airport in a big car." "Yes, that was your niece Joy." "You two must have been in cahoots." "And you too, Dad. We didn't kidnap you!"

Somebody picks us up at Honolulu International Airport too. Mark, the first in a long line of Hawai'i friends who turn into helpers for Dad, rents a wheelchair and meets us at the gate. At home, Suzanne stops by with a jigsaw puzzle, whose picture of seashells—broken, for now—Dad drifts into piles. She also brings homemade chocolate-chip cookies, gone in a day. "Those were good," he pronounces, the most enthusiasm I've heard since he moved in.

Another friend, Lorna, hearing that Dad favors soft foods, arrives with a tin of custard powder and a quart of milk, then (already surpassing my capacities as a daughter) stirs at the stove for forty minutes. Cheryl offers a trip to the aquarium, hefting the heavy wheelchair into her trunk. Not one to give compliments face to face, Dad later praises her to me. He's glad to have seen the exhibits, but he also admires that "she didn't tarry" at any one fish. The most important thing is to keep one step ahead of looming tiredness.

When the wheelchair rental runs out, I decide to splurge on a lighter one, for chair-pushers less athletic than Cheryl. Joe drives to the shop, dissuades me from purple titanium ("It's not Marvin"), and slings a sensible "companionate chair" into the truck bed. But Dad is devastated at having no input whatsoever; he wants side wheels, so I go out questing again, and Joe slings around more chairs, small wheels, big wheels, till the Goldilocks traipsing from store to store is satisfied.

The bears are not satisfied. Now the bed is not right. Richard rigs up wood blocks to raise the foot of my old bed. (I've moved to a futon in the study.) Charlene sends muffins. When Dad's shoes won't fit his swollen feet, Deb finds him a pair of Velcroed, size-twelve slippers. (He calls them "sloppers.") On her own initiative, my neighbor Nora, downstairs, begins lugging a few extra groceries for us: a half gallon of milk, or a hand of bananas. One day when we're tallying up, I ask Nora if she'll teach me to say "Water-Moon Kuan Yin" in Cantonese. "Kuan Yin" sounds like "Goon Yum." "Water-Moon" sounds like "soy yih-guong." Nora tells me that during the Cultural Revolution in China, she had to stand guard for her mom to—. Her English failing her here, Nora shakes her joined hands. After an initial impression of mom shaking the dice, I get the correct picture of her mother bowing joined hands to Goon Yum and defying the government prohibition against religion. Or maybe the first picture of gambling hits the mark too; those two women knew how to take risks.

When Nora's daughter Marty, age seven, stays here for a few hours, she encourages Dad to get out of bed and visit with us by doing her dog imitation: padding on all fours into his room, then yipping excitedly when he reaches for his walker. Dad smiles. He agrees to play "Go Fish" with the dog. "Do you have any Jacks?" she pipes. "Go fish." "Your turn," she keeps reminding him.

He's on a different shore, already. From his rock he accepts our paltry gifts, humors us, smiles. The rocks and the waves are blending together. Kuan Yin knows: Both are gold, both are flowing.

CHAPTER 3

Water Pill


In this picture, Kuan Yin sits on an embankment. The water has bitten out the underside, in chunks. Ink squiggles swirl below. The whole overhanging bank will just let loose, in one of these frames, in one big chunk.

On her tiny peninsula, Kuan Yin hooks her hands around one knee. The artist has folded the other leg under her, but the angle is wrong. That puffy foot looks stuck on, upside down. Meanwhile, a scraggly willow stem sticks out of a bottle on the ground next to her. The bottle appears to be sitting inside a bowl, as if the artist couldn't decide which would look better. So we get both, bottle and bowl: largesse, on a pincushion.

A waterfall trickles down at the left of the picture. An enormous moon backs Kuan Yin, with her head in its center and the lower circumference sweeping along with her arm as she calmly reaches out and clasps her knee. What's that at the top of the frame? Pine needles. The moon hangs below the pine branch, a moon where it's not supposed to be.

Dad takes one furosemide every morning. The folks I grew up with called such diuretics "water pill." The pill is to make water, churn water, hint it to the body, like a waterfall tinkling down. Make shishi for mama. The body won't. It's hoarding its water, in the feet, in the ankles, where water shouldn't be stuffed. Water seeps to the lungs. Can he drown in those drops? The ankles puff out, a waxy, waxing moon, with little latticed hatchings, like pine needles.

The pill is to make water, get rid of water. But water makes us. We're supposed to be water. The liver is 70 percent water. The muscles are 75 percent water. Even the dry part of bone, no marrow, is 25 percent water. The brain, as Kuan Yin sits on her embankment, thinking, squishes along at 85 percent water. By contrast, water forms only 80 percent of the blood. Sodium ions and chloride ions float in the blood, the same as in the ocean, and make us and the ocean, the blood and the water as it laps past her embankment, both taste of salt.

The water pill will cure all. The pill looms as a pale, puffy moon, backing the person. Look to it! Phone call to physician's assistant: "His water pill doesn't seem to be working." "Elevate his feet." "He does elevate them." "Higher." Higher than pine branches. Assistant: "How much Lasix does he take?" "He doesn't take Lasix; he takes furosemide." Impatiently: "Furosemide is Lasix." Dummy. Oh and, fool, that's not a moon in the sky, framing Kuan Yin. Instead of sky, it's more water, a whole sheet of it, holding a reflection of the moon. The moon hangs under the pines, where it's supposed to be.

CHAPTER 4

The Moon in the Computer


Observe all dharmas as illusions, flames, dreams, the moon in the water, echoes, flowers in the sky, images reflected in a mirror, shadows made by light, magical creations.... —Great Prajnd-pdramitd Sutra


When I call the heart doctor's office to schedule an appointment for Dad, the secretary comes back to the phone to ask when he can make the trip from Hilo. "He's in Honolulu." "He's back from Hilo?" "He never went to Hilo." "But he lives in Hilo?" It takes us a moment to figure out that this doctor treats two men with the same name. The first folder plucked from the file cabinet offers a near look-alike, but not the real moon.

This particular appointment will enable a technician to check Dad's defibrillator, the mysterious box protruding from his upper chest like a deck of cards in a high pocket, a skin pocket. When we arrive, we sit, then get ushered from the waiting room to an inner sanctum, to further await the high priest. The representative for the company that manufactured the defibrillator finally shows up. He pores over the file, then looks baffled. At first I think that he has been handed the wrong folder, the one belonging to the reflector Dad, but no. It turns out that the secretary has invited a rep from the wrong company. The man standing there in his tucked-in aloha shirt comes from some pacemaker company, a near look-alike of what we want, but not the real moon.

The dauntless secretary decides to try to snare down a new moon, same day. Forty-five minutes later, the right rep appears, the one whose company has put its logo on the magical creation stashed between skin layers, two inches below Dad's collarbone. This rep grunts, goes straight to work. He sticks four moonlets onto Dad's arms and legs, clips a wire to each, and snaps open his laptop. After awkwardly compressing his girth toward the plug, he holds up a square that resembles a computer mouse, hovering over the look-alike square on Dad's chest.

I venture to interrupt the technician's mesmerized stare into the watery screen. "Dad's defibrillator put out two shocks about a month ago. They flipped him over!" "Mmmm," says the rep. Dad usually launches this recollection by asking, "Was I lying on the floor in the bathroom with my feet by the toilet and my head on that white threshold?" Now when I'm the one to bring up this event, he doesn't deign to regale this preoccupied stranger with any details.

(At the first shock, Dad let out a yell, which wakened me, and, at the second jolt, another yell, which brought me scurrying. I'd been home in New Jersey for six days, and with all the information I was trying to absorb at once, on his medications, his nebulizer, his tangled finances, his house sale, I had just that afternoon glanced over the pamphlet called "Your Defibrillator": "If your device puts out two or more shocks within five minutes, you should probably call an ambulance." Or was it five shocks in two minutes? No. Just call.

At least six rescue workers, men and women, crowded into the dim hallway, all unusually tall, muscular, poured into tight clothes, and laden with heavy equipment. But they had the Kuan Yin touch. Two policemen gently lifted my six-foot dad to a desk chair grabbed from the bedroom, then stood aside to let a medic check vital signs. Since Dad could breathe and talk and marvel that he'd been lying upside down, with his feet by the toilet and his head on that white threshold, he slipped clear of a trip to the hospital, that time.)

Abridging all that, I just tell the manufacturer's representative that the magical box gave Dad two shocks so strong they knocked him over. The rep goes on reading his screen. Finally he looks up and says, "The shocks were at 2 a.m.?" He adds a slight, respectful, interrogative lilt to his declarative sentence, but he needn't have cast any doubt. The real heart is floating there, on the screen's placid, gray, all-telling surface. The moon is in the water.

CHAPTER 5

Waterfall ID


In one picture that I see in a journal, Kuan Yin observes from a rocky outcropping, bigger at the top than the bottom, like a saltshaker. (I mean, that's the shape of a saltshaker in use. Maybe she'll fall through the holes, in her porous rock seat, at any little seismic tap.) An aureole encircles the bodhisattva's head, and another aureole, outline of the moon, encircles her whole body. A waterfall, distant and skinny, sluices beside her.

Dad wants to know if his railroad pension has followed him from direct deposit in New Jersey to direct deposit in Hawai'i. "We can move the pension as soon as we open a bank account for you," I assure him. "I'll do it today."

"Does your dad have a picture ID?" asks the bank clerk. "He had one—on a driver's license, but he gave up driving. His reflexes are not as quick as they used to be, and he voluntarily threw away his license, so as not to endanger others," I burst out proudly, thinking of my friends' elderly parents bumping stubbornly over curbs. Good citizenship, however, reaps him no rewards in the bank's karmic system. "You'll need a state ID, with a picture." "I could bring him in, in person," I offer valiantly, calculating the distance pushing a wheelchair. But no, the real moon won't do, only its reflection, caught on a card.

In order to get a state ID (to get a bank account, to get the pension moved), we need Dad's birth certificate. I know I just saw this raggedy paper recently—I noted his birthplace, Titusville, New Jersey—when I sorted through his shoeboxes of papers. I plucked the birth certificate from among the receipts for purchases of lawnmowers and such and tossed it in a parcel to ship to Hawai'i. Altogether we sent eleven parcels. The parcel with the birth certificate has not arrived.

Kuan Yin is sitting on her outcropping, eating a banana. After listening to the distant waterfall, peeling down the banana, and chewing contentedly, she leans over her rock to toss the banana skin. Hey, there's another waterfall, below this rock level. How many waterfalls are there, and how high is this rock face?


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Moon in the Water by Kathy J. Phillips. Copyright © 2008 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface, vii,
Dug Up Kuan Yin, 1,
Pilgrim Gifts, 5,
Water Pill, 9,
The Moon in the Computer, 11,
Waterfall ID, 14,
No Moon, 18,
Yankee Moon, 21,
Transferring the Willow, 25,
Willy Moon, 29,
Artsy Crappy Moon, 33,
Moon Body, 37,
Kuan Yin Prescription, 39,
Riding the Tides in the Handi-Van, 45,
Peace Moon, 51,
Moon Passing through Cloud, 54,
Blue Moon, 56,
Calling the Moon, 60,
Moon Dung Kuan Yin, 64,
Accidental Moons, 69,
Bodhi-Dad, 74,
Roundabout Moon, 78,
Kuan Yin's Taxable Domain, 81,
Slim Pickings/Fat Moon, 86,
Moon Rings, 91,
Kuan Yin Foot Dangler, 95,
ER Moon, 99,
Kuan Yin Shopper, 103,
Car-Key Kuan, 107,
What'dYou Say, Kuan?, 111,
Weak as Water, 114,
Moon Wears Out, 117,
Moon Sealed Red (1), 121,
Moon Sealed Red (2), 124,
Kuan Yin Not Contained in a Box, 129,
Afterword, 133,
Sources for Art Works Described or Reproduced, 135,

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews