Can you Bake a Cherry Pie Billy Boy?

The Alzheimer's Poetry Project has its origins in part through my experience of using poetry in comforting my mother at the end of her life in 1997. This last week having the honor of being able to be at my father's bedside, again gave the chance to recite poetry to a dieing parent. The closing lines of Kubla Khan were especially powerful:

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise. 

I would sit at the head of my father's bed, softly saying the poem and connecting to him by matching his breathing with the cadence and rhythm of the words.

Below is a section from the opening essay in Sparking Memories: The Alzheimer's Poetry Project Anthology, it includes how my father and I used "Can you Bake a Cherry Pie," to comfort my mother.

Whenever I speak about the APP one question always comes up: “Do you have a family member with Alzheimer’s?” I do not, however I do have a personal connection to using these poems with a loved one. When I first began this project in 1997, my mother was in the last stages of terminal cancer. Through a combination of the drugs she was given to relieve the pain and the progression of the cancer she had grown unable to think and communicate clearly.
     
One day my father called to ask me to come over as my mother was having a particularly hard time. On arriving, I found her quite agitated. I had with me the poems from the Alzheimer’s program and I began to read to her and soon she was calm. Then my father Billy and I began to recite apoem that she had teased him with when they were childhood sweethearts. My mother quite gently began to say the poem along with us, even laughing as she joined in:

    Oh, where have you been Billy boy, Billy boy,
    Oh, where have you been, charming Billy?
    I have been to seek a wife, she’s the joy of my young life,
    She’s a young thing and cannot leave her mother.

    Can she make a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy,
    Can she make a cherry pie, charming Billy?
    She can make a cherry pie, quick’s a cat can wink her eye,
    She’s a young thing and cannot leave her mother.

          It was one of her last moments of real clarity and a moment of playfulness that quite powerfully brought home to me how these poems could be of use to people.

Maps and Wings

Our father died yesterday at 2am. His obituary is below. On Christmas day when he was in the hospital I asked him if he wanted me to read him a poem and he asked for the one about "Okies."

I read it to him and he grinned and said "pretty good." Below is Maps and Wings written for my father. I will be writing more about him and his and my mother's connection to the Alzheimer's Poetry Project over the next few days. Gary Mex Glazner

Maps and Wings

The road looks the same

no matter where you are going.

Route 66 was my father’s road

and his father’s road.

Model A with the dust bowl

in the rear view mirror

and California in the headlights.

From being men to being Okies.

The vulgarities of newcomers.

A drowsy distant hope.

Route 66 was their plowshare.

They dug into the rank soil.

Held the miles in rusted fingers.

Maps folded like wings.

A banquet of motion.

Beckoning us now

with its broken fragments.

Let us piece the road together.

This is the way they went

and we shall follow them as we are able.

Billy Mex Glazner was born in Blair, Oklahoma on July 31^st, 1930. His childhood sweetheart and wife of 47 years, Frankie Lou Glazner preceded him in death.

As a boy he worked picking cotton and experienced the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Like the characters described in John Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” his family traveled from Oklahoma to California in search of work, where his father Mex found employment as an electrician on the Irvine Ranch. Billy’s middle name comes from the state of New Mexico where his grandfather worked on the railroad near Santa Fe. He was so enchanted by the land; he named his son after the state, who then passed it to his son and on to me as a family name. 

Everyone who knew Billy Mex remarked on his sense of humor and storytelling ability. Perhaps those talents had their origins in the fact his parents not only showed creativity with their unusual choice of a middle name, but in the fact that the given name on his birth certificate is Billy, not William.

He served in the Korean War as an artillery gunner. In 1957, he joined the U.S. Border Patrol in Sierra Blanca, Texas. He was promoted and transferred to work as an investigator in the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in New York City in 1960. His 23-year career in law enforcement culminated in San Francisco as the Assistant Deputy Director, Investigations, INS in 1980. 

Upon his retirement in 1980 from the INS, he supported his wife in the purchase of Novato Florist and they worked together until their retirement in 1991. It takes a man secure in his masculinity to go from carrying a snub-nose, 38-caliber pistol in a shoulder holster and supervising INS agents to running a flower shop.

Recently he developed a passion for bowling and belonged to the Sons in Retirement Bowling League. 

His 1948, Blair Broncos high school yearbook lists his favorite food as: corn bread, molasses, and sassafras tea; his subject as Frankie; his song as “Cigarettes, Whiskey, and Wild, Wild, Women,” and his pastime as sleeping. His sister Ann reported that their mother Minnie was scandalized upon hearing these favorites
read aloud at his high school graduation and said, "He never drank sassafras tea."

He succumbed to cancer of the liver on December 30th, 2001. Billy Mex is survived by: his wife Ann; sisters, Sue and Ann; sons, Gary Mex, Kevin and Lon; their wives Margaret, Alma, and Jennifer, and grandchildren Jennifer, Emily, Frank, Beckett and Ruby. A memorial service will be held at the Presbyterian Chapel, 710 Wilson Ave. Novato, California, Sunday Jan 2^nd, 2011 at 2pm.

Marilyn

The poem Marilyn was created at the culminating event at the Orlando Art Musuem. A silde of the Andy Warhol print, which is in the collection of the museum was projected on the screen behind the stage and used as inspiration for the poem.




Marilyn

Where did you go Joe DiMaggio?
She was always growing.
JFK loved her.
When she died we all died.
We all loved her.
She had a crisp beauty.
She reminded us of spring.
She was a pioneer.
She was an original.
People looked at her beauty, but not her intellect.
She had an old, well-traveled soul.
She sang, “Happy birthday, Mr. President.”
She had everything, but was never happy.
She was full of light and shadow.
She overdosed on life. 

Here is the group creating the poem. 

Photos by Melixa Carbonell

APP YouTube Channel

Check out the video at the Alzheimer's Poetry Project's new YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/alzpoetry?feature=mhum

This video was shot at Sterling Healthcare in Media, PA. The recognition of Sterling Healthcare’s unique programming include an award for creating a science club and their pet therapy dog, a spunky little Boston Terrier named Gilligan won a Bronze Medal for his therapy work from the American Kennel Club ACE Awards. It's an amazing well-run place!

More info at:

http://www.sterlinghcr.com/index.html

Alzheimer's Foundation of America Telethon

The Alzheimer's Foundation of America has been a great supporter of the APP, including helping to fund our Spanish Anthology. Tomorrow they hold their first Annual Telethon. For details about their telethon, which airs including show times, visit: www.alzfdn.org

 

Amanda Deutch on the Alzheimer's Poetry Project

Amanda Deutch is one of the APP's New York Poets, she speaks about her work with the APP and her father's Alzheimer's. This video is from a reading for the APP at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn on Nov. 10th, 2010

Born and raised in New York City, Amanda Deutch is a poet who traveled the world only to return to the borough in which both of her parents were born. Amanda Deutch's work has been published widely in such magazines as Barrow Street, EOAGH, 6x6, Listenlight, Upstairs at Duroc and Full Metal Poem. She was the recipient of a Footpaths to Creativity residency in the Azores, Portugal and is a member of the Dusie Kollektiv and Rewords (www.rewords.blogspot.com). Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she has been invited to read in venues throughout the United States, Europe and North Africa. Deutch is the Founder and Creative Director of Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival in Coney Island as well as an arts organizer and educator. A former Counselor and Case Manager for at-risk youth in Portland, Oregon, she has designed and led poetry workshops for runaways, homeless teenagers, and adult cancer survivors. Whether hitting the pavement or inking the pen, Deutch dedicates herself to revealing the poetry everywhere.

Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s

Union Docs has a wonderful piece on Alan Berliner's film "Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s." Great clips from the film and insight into the filmmaker and his relationship to his cousin, friend and former mentor — the poet, translator, critic, and teacher, Edwin Honig.

Check it out at http://www.uniondocs.org/translating-alan-berliner/

One of the most poignant scenes from the film is when Alan asks Edwin what the “one thing” he would say to millions of people watching him in a film, “Remember how to forget.” is Edwin's answer.

Honig was an early translator of Lorca and Pessoa.

You may read some of Honig's poems at Jacket Magazine

Here are the opening lines from "To Infinite Eternity"

Death is closer
to infinite eternity
than life is

and each life closer
to each least breath
than the blankness of
infinite eternity itself

More on Honig's work at the Poetry Foundation website.