Jill Chenault - Kind of Blue

 

 

Jill: [00:22:39] So, I was one of the last of my friends to get my driver's license when I was in high school, because I was younger than everybody else in my class. And so, I finally get my license. My father is big on cars. My parents are both from Detroit. I was born in Detroit, but my father was just car crazy. So, he insisted that he could teach me better than anything I had learned in school. So, he taught me things like how to smoke in the car,- [audience laughter] -how to eat fast food and drive with your knees,- [audience laughter] -how to fiddle with the radio or the tape deck, because that's how old I am, while you're driving, all of that. So, those are the things that I basically learned from him. So, I said, “Well, can I have a car?” Because my friends had cars. So, he and my mother said, “Well, you got a bike. You have a really, really nice bike. Any place you need to go where you can't get on your bike, we're going to take you. So, no car.” But that meant that I spent a lot of time in the car with them, really with my father more than my mother. 

 

And jazz was always a big part of our lives. He was a big jazz fan. So, in the car, I was always listening to Miles Davis or Coltrane or Charlie Parker. I was probably the only kid in my class that knew who Fathead Newman was. But at that time, I thought it was just a pain in the neck to have to ask them for rides everywhere. But there came a time as I got older that I began to appreciate the time in the car with my father. When I was trying to pick a school, he picked Oberlin for me, but luckily, I loved it when we went to visit, so that worked out. He would drive me to school every year, and he'd come and get me for fall break and then take me back. So, we were in the car all the time. 

 

Now, we had a fraught relationship at times. I still have a problem with arbitrary authority. I'm basically unemployable. [audience laughter] I thought that the advice that he would offer in the car when I'm captive was really just an attempt to control me. He thought that I should apply to-- Before I even thought about Oberlin, I should apply to the naval academy, that never would have worked. He thought that one of the key things I needed to have in life was a wool navy-blue blazer with brass buttons. He thought that that was like the uniform of success. And I didn't want any of that. 

 

And then, as I got older, after I was out of school and everything, I still spent a lot of time with him in the car, and he was very critical of my clothing choices. My skirts were too short and he would say, “You got to learn the difference between a general announcement and a specific invitation. [audience laughter] These little short skirts that you wearing, that's a general announcement. You don't want to make you showing all your particulars to the public. You shouldn't do that.” [audience laughter] So, we would argue about stuff like that. And at the time, those things seemed very important to me, because I felt that it was an effort to control me. 

 

Eventually, I ended up moving to New York. He thought that was a terrible idea. I wanted to be a full-time actor and writer. Well, he said, “I paid all that goddamn money for school, and you want to do what?” [audience laughter] So, he didn't drive me out there. Some friends drove me out there, but in part that was because he was starting to have some mysterious health problems. While I was in New York, another thing I did, I stopped doing what I was trained to do when I started being a dog walker. He thought that was just the dumbest-- He just didn't understand that at all, because he's from Detroit. You get a job, you punch a clock, you get a pension, all that. 

 

Well, finally they called me. I'd been in New York for maybe three years, and my parents called me and said that my father had MS. That was part of the weird, mysterious symptoms he'd been showing. And they said, “But we're cool. You don't need to come back. We're fine.” A couple of years after that, they called me and said, he had Alzheimer's disease. And they said, “But we're still fine.” 

 

When I saw him at Christmas time and when I came home for their birthdays, because they're like a week a part, he seemed okay. But one Christmas, I went home and he didn't seem okay and my mother looked really, really tired. He was using a cane at that time. So, I talked to some friends of the family and my cousin, and they said, “Yeah, it's time for you to come home.” 

 

Well, I hadn't lived with them for 39 years. When you moved back in with your parents, you're still 17. “You’ve got a bike, you don't need to drive my car.” It was ridiculous. My mom and I bumped heads a lot, because she hadn't had a grown woman living in her house ever. My father was the peacemaker at that point, but he had fallen several times before I moved home. And so, my first main job was to pick him up when he fell, which was hard, because he was my father and he taught me everything. 

 

He still didn't have a filter. He never had a filter. But with Alzheimer's, it was even worse. I'd mention a friend and he'd say, “I went to undergrad with his mother. She just liked to drink wine and listen to jazz and screw. That's all she--” [audience laughter]  And I would try to leave the room. I would tell him, “That's inappropriate, and I really don't want to hear that about my friend's mother.” But that was Alzheimer's, in addition to the fact that he didn't have much of a filter to begin with. 

 

I thought that moving home, we'd be able to resolve a lot of the issues that we'd had when I was younger, because I was grown and I had a different perspective, and we could have these deep conversations. Alzheimer's has no rules. The disease advanced much too quickly for me to be able to have those conversations with him. The hardest part about his Alzheimer's was he always knew that something was wrong. He was never just in such a fog that he wasn't aware. He would say things like, “I'm slipping, something is wrong with me.” And my mother, bless her heart, would say, “You’ve got Alzheimer's.” [audience laughter] And every time he would say, “What? Me? Oh, that's fucked up.” [audience laughter]

 

And I kept telling her, “Just stop telling him. Don't tell him. We'll just roll along with this.” But she was insistent on keeping things as they were and factually correct, which I just didn't think was all that important. I watched this man go from having a photographic memory, knowing everything to know about jazz, knowing about cars, knowing about the world, to him becoming incontinent, to him not knowing what day it was. 

 

Eventually, he was not able to dress himself. My mother had promised she'd keep him at home. So, we fought about that all the time. I kept telling her, “We're not equipped for this. We don't know what we're doing. We'll hurt him. I'm not even picking him up, right? I'm sure.” But she promised. So, we got a hospital bed and put it in the living room. We took care of him until the very end. It was the hardest thing that I've ever done. It was the best thing that I have ever done, and I have no regrets about doing it. I do have regrets about moving back to Michigan-- I'm in Lansing, if you so. 

 

But I am still reminded of him whenever I drive. I am still reminded of him whenever I wonder if my skirt is too short. I still do not have a navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, but I am thankful for every moment that I had with him. Thank you.