The days I started spending by watching over my mother were long. Very long. Even in the beginning stages or her early onset Alzheimer’s. Sande was diagnosed at 59 years old.
There’s a great book about caregiving for people with various forms of Dementia called The 36 Hour Day. I can’t recommend that book enough for anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in need of such information. It wasn’t long before I understood what the title meant. Even on days that might be uneventful, one must be vigilant. The slightest nap or distraction could lead to a horrific and unforeseen tragedy that would ultimately be the caregiver’s fault.
It drains you.
Going home after a full day with my mother felt like I’d been gone for a week. I couldn’t even imagine what my pop must have endured each night.
Usually, my mom and I would just watch daytime television in bed while I folded laundry or something. Those days were cool, but they would drag on.
I learned to stop looking at the clock. The key is finding activities that you can engage in that somehow include the person you are watching while not challenging them. Something they are comfortable and familiar with.
Since we had just shut down my mother’s art dealing business, we had a huge room full of framed and unframed paintings and prints that needed sorting.
I figured my mom could oversee the sorting of all the art she acquired over the years. I had no idea of what anything was worth. A job like this would already be quite an undertaking on its own.
Now, factor in my mother’s capricious mental state, her uniquely abstract filing “system”, and then her dreadful handwriting style to decipher in her old ledgers. All this would make cataloging and determining art value quite the time-consuming challenge. But time I had in spades. It would seem that The Time Thief could give chunks of hours as well as take.
I basically had to become an archeologist tasked with my mother’s accumulation of various genres and different periods of art during her time as a gallery owner.
I was looking for hints, deciphering signatures, and researching talented, but largely unknown artists who had crossed my mother’s path over the last 20ish years.
The whole process was admittingly a bit triggering.
It brought me back to my childhood in a variety of ways. In 1980, I turned 10 years old. My mother opened up her gallery, “The Art Place” in a cool little artsy village called “Cauley Square.” Cauley Square was sort of a historic hidden gem of a community founded by a woman named Mary Anne Ballard, who purchased and restored the place with her husband in 1949.
I liked Mrs. Ballard, as I called her. I addressed her that way out of respect, even though she had been a widow for many years. She was always very sweet to me. She was the most beautiful old woman I had ever seen. Her skin had the appropriate distribution of wrinkles but was flawless. Mrs. Ballard’s long, gorgeous white hair was always kept neatly and extended past the small of her back. She perpetually had some sort of antique hair clip fastening her long, ivory braid back, tastefully framed by rare stones or crystals in both her necklace and earrings as well. All her jewelry had stories. Mrs. Ballard would would sit me down and tell me sometimes when I asked about them.
1980 was the first tough year for me. That was the year that my grandmother on my father’s side passed on the day of my tenth birthday. The only grandparent I ever had.
The call came as I was cutting the ice cream cake. Heart attack. She was my “Abuelita” and I absolutely adored her. It was my first real experience with deep loss. I refused to go to the funeral. My father understood. But it was something that weighed heavy on my young mind.
Spanish was my first language. When my Abuelita died, I refused to speak Spanish to anyone for years. She didn’t speak any English. I viewed it as “our language”. After a while, I forgot it. I still can’t speak Spanish to this day.
Some years prior to that, my mom was the victim of a terrible car accident that damaged her spine for life. She could not pick up anything that was very heavy at all after that.
My father worked all the time, so what that meant for me, was…. well, everything.
All the day-to-day chores that most people take for granted were my responsibility to perform while growing up. Vacuuming, taking the garbage out, cleaning, yard maintenance, you name it. That was now my job. I didn’t feel it was fair that I had to do such things. All my friends didn’t have to do any of that.
Just about every time I felt I had enough slave labor, I’d storm into my mother’s room, ready to protest. Then I’d see her on her bed, feet up under several pillows, laying on her heating pad, crying from the pain in her back.
What was a mother’s son to do? Her tears were always my kryptonite. One drop from her chestnut eyes and I’d move the world to make them stop. I used to try to kiss them away if she would let me.
My mom even took to fake crying when I was causing problems for her for too long. A horrible little game she would play with me, in retrospect. I would always drop whatever issue I had just to get her to stop her fake crying. Probably not great parenting, but very effective.
Now that we had The Art Place, I had a new unpaid job. Transporting, storing, hanging, and re-hanging volumes of mostly framed art was now part of my daily life for years to come.
Sande was a real figure in Miami’s art community in the 80’s. She had a loving relationship with the local artists and had a great eye for good art. She had clearly learned a lot from her brief marriage with the Bulgarian artist, Nicola Blazev, in her early days. She was a staunch supporter of her artists and vehemently believed that just because they were “local artists” they should not be treated as lesser artists just because they happened to live in South Florida.
That trait clearly got passed on to me.
During my years of booking bands in Miami venues for a living, I felt the same way about the local bands I would book and put on shows with. I always believed that we have some of the best musicians in the world in Miami. It frustrated me to no end that it would be hard to get them to draw people to my events just because of where they lived. Just because they were viewed as “a local band”.
As I said before… I truly am my mother’s son.
Most of the artists my mother represented also wound up being her close friends. The majority were lesbians. That didn’t bother or confuse me at all. Some were super cool. I especially loved going to women’s rights marches with them and my mom. They were kind of badass.
But many I did not like. They just didn’t acknowledge me very much. It was like I didn’t matter. Like I was living evidence of my mother’s heterosexuality. They certainly were not very friendly with my father. But he didn’t seem to care at all, so why should it bother me? He always respected my mother’s life apart from his and continued to support her always. He was cool like that.
There was one artist that stuck out to me, though.
I’ll never forget him. He taught me more about my mother with one short story than I could have ever learned on my own as a child. His name was Frederick Sprague. Originally from the Cezch Republic, Frederick painted his early works on framed wood as a first draft for giant stained glass works he did for Catholic cathedrals across Eastern Europe.
He had moved to South Florida and was looking for someone to represent him and sell his paintings. His work was very dark and religious. Right up my alley. I didn’t really have much of an opinion on most of the art in my mom’s gallery. But Sprague’s creations appealed to my taste and curiosities. I would just stare at them forever.
There was a lot of competition in the art community for people who wanted to work with Sprague. Many art dealers with bigger names all interviewed with him, but he decided on my mother. It was a big deal for her. Sande was stoked.
One morning, I went with her to her gallery to meet with Frederick and discuss their plans together. I didn’t think much of it. Most of the artists just ignored me and I would usually wander around Cauley Square, climbing trees and exploring the old, uninhabited houses and shacks nearby. Looking for secret treasures that I never found. Just staying out of the way, basically.
Frederick Sprague gently walked into my mom’s gallery and right away I could tell he was different. He was old. Very old. But he had a youthfulness about him. Frederick was short and thin. About the same height as my five-foot mother.
He dressed very neatly with a button-down shirt that was tucked in without a wrinkle into his khaki pants fastened round his svelte waist with a leather belt. His hairline was receding a bit, but he had a modest mane of white hair that complemented his long, snow white, artistic goatee. He wore clear glasses that could not mask his glistening, sky-blue eyes.
Right away, Frederick looked down at me with those eyes and smiled. I looked up and smiled back. He had questions for me before he really engaged with my mother. Not strange questions. But he asked about me, and that was huge in my mind.
Sprague and my mother spoke softly about business for a little while. He wanted to arrange some of his pieces in a certain order. My mom told him that I would help him with that and then she excused herself to speak to some people admiring the art in the next room of her gallery. Frederick was very polite with his instructions to me as I happily helped tend to his eccentric, borderline blasphemous, oil paintings on wood.
Then he spoke to me with a hint of a Czech accent.
“Eric. Do you know why I chose your mother to represent me?” I told him no. Fredrick went on. “I met with so many silly art people. Frankly, I was starting to get bored.”
He handed me a small painting and motioned for me where to place it.
“Then I met your mother. We were speaking. Actually, I was speaking to her, when she suddenly stopped me.” He softly grabbed another painting and placed it near the other one himself this time. “You see, there was a fly in the room. Buzzing around. As flies do.
Your mother immediately found a plastic cup and a piece of paper. She followed the fly around for a very long time until she was able to put the cup over it. Then she carefully slid the paper under the cup and took the fly just outside to set it free. Then she returned to our conversation as if nothing had happened.”
I was a bit perplexed so far by his little fly tale. I thought to myself, “Yea. That’s the kind of shit my mom does all the time.”
Frederick stopped what he was doing, the corners of his mouth curled up into a sly little grin. “That’s when I knew. I knew I would work with her. Anyone who takes such care to preserve even the tiniest life, is someone I want to represent what I do and what I have created.”
At that moment, my mother walked back in the room and Frederick Sprague and I continued working as if nothing had happened.
Frederick and I never spoke of it again. But I’ll always remember that moment. My years of alcohol abuse since have wiped away much of my memories. But for some reason, I remember that interaction like it was yesterday.
That’s how I choose to remember my mother, Sande Garcia. Each life was just as important to her. No matter how big or small. I’ll always have that memory. I hope… Round two with The Time Thief would be a tie.
