It was a good week-long trip back north up into the U.P., mostly the time spent with Dad, who's 97, and Mom, who’s not far behind, and with my younger brothers and sister. Culley Jane and I are back in Denver now, but something of the journey remains. I’m clearer now than I was before we left, especially about Gaza. Mom showed me the way.

Mom talked about us when we were children growing up on D Street. And she talked about Teddy as if he were alive, in language in the present tense.

I was a year and a half old when Teddy died for no apparent reason in his crib. I still have pale-gray dreams about the night Mom and Dad found him that way.

During the 90s, after I’d gotten myself exiled from the press, I worked the midnight shift as a nurse on the long-term care unit on the 6^th floor of the VA hospital in Iron Mountain. After getting the old WWII vets ready for sleep with heavy doses of morphine, in the silence I’d gaze through the hospital window that looked down on the town’s cemetery where my grandparents and great-grandparents were buried next to Teddy. In winter, the graves are blanketed beneath a frozen snow-whiteness that I could melt with my mind and Teddy was alive and we were playing in the apple tree in the backyard of the house where we lived on D Street.

Mom and Dad will be buried there someday and they’ve got a spot reserved for me there too. But I’ve told Culley Jane and the kids that I want my  ashes scattered to the winds of the empty plains… my metaphysical wavelength swept  across the place I know in the present tense to far corners of the world and beyond where a different language is spoken, unlike the one I learned on D Street, in the cathedral, in America, my home… Oh, why, America, are you doing what you’re doing now? Why can’t you see that there’s another language?

It had been years since the entire family of Gauthiers who lived on D Street in Iron Mountain were all in one place gathered together again. Mom was able to recognize each one of us and place us with a name and story. “But I’m sure I had more children than this,” she said with a puzzled look. We reminded her of Teddy. “Yes,” she said in the present tense, “I have five children.”

She paused to look around her, like gazing into empty space. “But I have more children than five children,” she announced like stating a scientific fact. “I’m sure of it. Why can’t you hear them playing?” She started trying to count them all, but got confused.

Knowing nurses the way I do, I’m sure they document in their nurses' notes that Mom sometimes loses touch with reality, or something to that effect. Myself, I think they should modify the noun “reality” with the adjective “another,” where Teddy is real and playing with children beneath the rubble, sharing stories in another language, in the present tense.