Andy Christie - Edelweiss

 

So, a few months ago, I guess in October, I'm down in Florida, Boynton beach, at my mother's one-bedroom little condo apartment she has down there. For the last 12, 13, 14 years, I've been going down there three or four times a year to visit, and fix her toilet plunger and rehang her cabinet doors, be a son, tell the neighbor to turn down the fucking TV once in a while I'm down there. 

 

I'm down there for the last six or seven years, one of those visits was always, I would always get there a little bit early and I would spend a few days first being there alone, setting up the apartment to make it nice for her when she got back from the hospital, because she would spend a couple of days in the hospital having her essential systems retuned, tuned up. [audience laughter] 

 

She'd come back home as good as new or as good as a used but well-maintained [audience laughter] machine. She wound up down there after a pair of not wildly successful marriages that began with my father. They met at the end of World War II in occupied Austria. He was a 5’6” private who worked in the Scottish private, who worked in the mess hall. She was a 5’9” Yugoslavian farm girl refugee. 

 

They got married, had a couple of kids of which I was one, moved to America and got divorced, so quickly it was almost like they moved to America to get divorced. [audience laughter] I always figured it was like once the Nazis were out of the picture, they finally had time to take a good look at each other. [audience laughter] But they were just different. The shorthand is she was easily pleased, he was easily satisfied. It's a subtle distinction unless you are both variables in that equation there. Dad was always like, “Yeah, that's good enough.” And mom was always like, “Oh, that's good. That's good. You're not setting fire to my ancestral home. Thank you. That's good. That's good.” [audience laughter] 

 

You know, the war-torn experience leaves a mark on you. And she was like, “I enjoyed that.” She used the word enjoy a lot. We all say, “Well, do you enjoy your dinner?” She would say, “I enjoy my dinner.” But she used it in a way that was sometimes not just perfectly on the button, like she would say she enjoyed her gravy or something. Because I think she had never lost a little bit of shame about not being American, about not being so fluent in language, about being a farm girl, being uneducated. I think she thought the word enjoy was just a little fancier. A couple of pages further along in the Slavic American Translation Dictionary, she enjoyed things. 

 

So, I'm down there this particular time and I am setting up the place, and it's one of the times when she is away at the hospital. Only this time, it's a little bit different, because I find out after I get there, after I've been there for a couple of days, that she is not doing as well as she usually does at the hospital that she has-- The doctors said she turned a corner, and I am setting up the apartment to welcome her back home. Only now she is not just coming back home, but she's coming to back home hospice. 

 

So, I have spent the last couple of days, getting rid of her bed and replacing it with a hospital bed. Taking all of this stuff that has erupted out of boxes, like I say, she had never left behind her European-Austrian-Slavic background. All the stuff that I spent my entire youth telling her that, “Really, it's not a very American thing. You really got to put that stuff away. All those little tatted doilies that you get from your nieces, they're a little embarrassing to me. This not American. We're more hard edged, you know?” 

 

But when she moved down there and she finally had her life all by herself, these things bubbled up out of these cardboard boxes that we had forced her to store away. Now, I had to get rid of her bed. I am pushing all of this stuff, all these artifacts from her background, from her youth, into the perimeter of the room and putting a hospital bed in the middle of it. It's not flowery and it's not soft. It's very hard edged and very modern and very high tech, it's as if you took the roof off of your dollhouse and he found a switchblade sitting in the middle of the [audience laughter] vanity. 

 

All these things that I also found sort of embarrassing and a little mortifying has suddenly become a little bit sad and beautiful. She had turned this little one bedroom apartment back into the old country. And now, there's a hospital bed in the middle of it and she is in it and I'm outside on the landing smoking a cigarette. She's not spoken. She hasn't eaten for a couple of days. She's in hospice. They're just letting her go away. I'm not by myself. There's a nurse, a private duty nurse, and there is a health aide in there with her. I'm smoking out there, remembering that maybe even in this state, she knows that I'm smoking because she could even tell that I was exhaling smoke and not air when I talked to her from New York, between New York to Florida, [audience laughter] somehow. 

 

I'm out there, and this girl walks down the landing and she has a guitar strapped to her back and a shoulder bag and she says she is the hospice music therapist. I like her to sing some songs for my mother. I think really like this retro hippie is going to, “What are you going to sing? Send in the Clowns for my mother, who was--" [audience laughter] Music wasn't a big part of our lives anyway. “But what am I going to do?” I said, “Okay, let's go in.” I go in and she sits down. My brother and I are in there and she says, “So, what music did you like?” Music, again, was not a big part of our lives. I wanted to be a rock musician, of course. My brother wanted to be a drummer. And so, my mother got him accordion lessons. 

 

I said, “I don't know. Do you know any polkas?” She says, “I don't know. Does she like show tunes?” And I said, “I don't know.” She said, “What about The Sound of Music?” Artie and I, my brother, both looked at each other. Sound of Music was the only VHS tape we had growing up. After every Thanksgiving, after every Christmas, after every Easter, we went into the family room, we watched The Sound of Music. It was about Austria. It was about my mother's homeland. And we said, “Yes, The Sound of Music.” 

 

And so, this girl ran her guitar and she started playing. And in the most, just unbelievably angelic voice and the sound she played Edelweiss. And Edelweiss is the kind of song that you could easily make fun of until you hear it again. It's like somewhere over the rainbow. It's an unbelievably beautiful song. She sang it to my mother and us, the four of us in the room. 

 

My mother again, who had not spoken, had not eaten, had not recognized anybody for a few days, listened to it with us. There was not a dry eye in the room when we left. One of the nurse's aides had to leave. She was sobbing. I was crying, of course, my brother was crying. When it was over, and there's that instinct you have when any performance, I don't care if it's at a funeral or whatever, you clap when someone finishes. And we all clapped. And my mother, who hadn't moved a muscle for a couple of days, raised her arms to clap. I leaned over, rubbed her head and I said, “Did you like that?” And she said, after not having spoken for a couple of days, said, “I enjoyed it.” [audience laughter] And the next morning, she was gone, and those were her last words, “I enjoyed it.” Thank you.