ben's_my_friend tender_square i had my first meeting with my learner, ben, yesterday. we were set to meet on zoom at one, but he wasn’t there. i called him after waiting five minutes; turns out, he was having trouble logging into his email. “i signed in early to prepare,” he explained. “now my email has locked me out. when i’m afraid something will happen, it happens.” “isn’t that how it always goes?” i said to him. he was so apologetic and i assured him it was all okay. “this gives you an indication of how much trouble i have when using a computer,” he joked. after about 20 minutes, we were able to see one another through zoom for the first time. i waved enthusiastically when ben popped into our meeting room. “it’s so good to see you!” we were both excited to talk with one another. ben is the most adorable man. he was using a desktop computer, so his body only filled the lower right corner of the screen. he was dressed in a golden sweater that was as bright as he was. he had wispy white hair and eyebrows, he had a broad nose. his face was dotted with sunspots like spreading freckles, and his lips had a purple tinge that only made his eyes look more blue. the purpose of our first meeting was to get to know one another; next week we’ll dive into our literacy tutoring. ben shared so much of his personal history with me and all of it was fascinating. he’s a month away from turning 90. he was born in china in the early 30’s, when japan invaded the country. he was in grade school when wwii happened, and in high school during the chinese civil war. in the 11th grade, he and his family relocated to taiwan. he went to college and became a teaching assistant after in the physics and chemistry department of the chinese military academy. later, he taught in taipei so he could be closer to the capitol while he wrote the exams needed to come to the states for graduate school. he and his wife attended berkley in the early 60’s, and his first son was born there. he studied nuclear chemistry, while his wife studied nutritional science. after graduating, he taught for a time at cleveland state before coming to michigan to pursue a phd at michigan state. he never graduated. “i got in trouble with the professor who was the advisor for my thesis,” he explained. “i don’t think he was being fair to me and i said to him, ‘if you treat me like this, i’m going to quit.’” he explained that the disagreement occurred when ben informed his advisor that he was going to take a week off from research over the summer so he could take his family on vacation in northern michigan. his advisor said he couldn’t leave until all his work was done. “i tried to reason with him, ‘you’re a family man, you know how important this is. i promised my family this; i will only be gone for a week.” ben went on vacation with his family anyway. i told him how much respect i had for him for making that decision. after michigan state, he transferred into the chemistry department to do research at university of michigan, where he worked until he retired. when he turned 60, ben went back to school for a dental degree. the man doesn’t stop. “i admire your desire for learning,” i said. “i would like to be ‘an eternal student’ as well.” “there’s a confucius saying: ‘you learn until the day you die,’” he offered. “everything is new to me. i’m like a kindergartner with computers, that’s why i need you.” he told me he wants help with his “broken english,” but i told him his english didn’t sound broken in the least, i thought he was incredibly articulate. “it’s difficult for me to say what i want to say,” he said. “i’ve lived in the us for so long, but i’ve never felt at home. i still feel like a stranger here.” i know the feeling, but i didn’t say that to ben; i know he’s faced far greater challenges with immigrating here than what i’ve ever experienced. even so, the us does not feel like home for me either; i’m ready to return to where i was born. he told me how difficult old age is—everything declines so quickly. he thinks about the time ahead of him in terms of days, not weeks or years; he’s suffered two serious falls recently that resulted in broken ribs, a couple of which never fused back together, but he assures me he’s okay now. “the older i get, the more i am interested in human behavior and thoughts and feelings,” he said. “i think of that more; before work mattered more than the world. the world is now worth more to me.” 211016 ... tender_square (see also: "placement" for the backstory) 211016 ... tender_square “there’s a chinese saying that people have the same heart, that the heart has the same reasoning,” ben explained. “we are all the same.” he wanted to talk about the state of the world during our session—why are there wars? why are people divided and fighting one another? i didn’t have answers for him. he asked what factors caused these issues and i grappled for a response. we landed on the notion of selfishness somehow and he argued that one had to do what was best for the group. it seemed to me that he was more collectivist-oriented whereas i tended to favor the individualistic path, and i stated this. “we don’t know what’s really good and what’s really bad,” he rued. “you have to have certain limitations…rebellion is not criminal but it is something that needs to be modified and regulated. we need to obey certain rules; people set their own rules.” i wondered to myself if the problem had to do with hardline dualities, when we could all benefit from synthesizing a bit of both sides, but i didn’t say this. i’m no good in analytical discussions though i try. i think ben sensed my hesitation. “any time you feel differently, you tell me, ‘ben you are wrong!’” i laughed heartily and slapped my desk when he said this. “there’s two generations between us, we’re going to have differing views on things.” i asked if he had any tech-related questions for me and instead he wanted me to explain the filibuster. “i don’t watch the news, ben. i’m afraid i don’t know anything about it,” i conceded. he seemed surprised by my admission. “my friends and my husband know this about me—i don’t pay attention to news.” “shouldn’t a writer be open to everything?” “i suppose; i am ignorant, yes, but i am at peace.” i explained that while i don’t distance myself from people, i do distance myself from what i perceive is “noise.” getting wrapped up in what’s going on in the 24-hour news cycle cuts me off from my creativity. “are you telling me you want me to research the filibuster so that i can develop a position about it for our next discussion?” “yes! there is so much about us democracy that i don’t understand. the two-party system doesn’t work.” i agreed with him there. ben asked me about my citizenship. “well, i’m dual,” i said. “i took the citizenship test five years ago. i’m guessing you were naturalized because you’ve been here for over 25 years?” ben nodded at this. “i was naturalized in 1972, the same year that my family and i moved to michigan.” i love that these two dates coincide in his personal history. our conversation shifted to canada for a time: “canadian’s aren’t so different from the americans,” he claimed. “don’t say that to canadians!” i laughed. ben and his wife would drive to windsor frequently to go for dinner in decades past. he reminded me of how easy it used to be to cross the border when i was growing up; all you needed was your birth certificate pre-9/11. ben said he hadn’t been back to canada in at least 20 years. i asked about his wife. she passed 12 years ago. they met in college; he was three years older but they ended up at the same level because of ben’s stint in the chinese military. his wife came to the states a year before he did and they married in berkley. they were together for 50 years. “i don’t speak chinese now that she’s gone.” “your children don’t speak chinese?” “none of them do. we tried speaking english at home, we didn’t speak chinese to them, it was a mistake we made. we didn’t realize how easily kids can pick up a second language.” a similar experience happened in my family. my grandmother wanted to teach her children italian, but whenever she spoke the language at home her husband said, "speak english." my mom wishes she had learned as a kid. the only time my grandma speaks her native tongue is when she's with her siblings in niagara falls and now she's too frail to travel there. 211023 ... tender_square i missed out on a key part of our narrative when we talked about canada in my earlier post. ben made a comment that canada seemed to embrace a slower pace than the us and i agreed wholeheartedly with him. "it's probably one of the main reasons i want to go back home," i said. "it's too chaotic here; maybe it suited me when i was younger, but i find as i'm aging now i don't do well with that sort of energy." 211023 ... tender_square “half of my classmates in dental school were from canada,” ben explained. he said medical school is terribly difficult for applicants to get into, and, oftentimes, folks will attend dental school first as a way of getting into their desired path later, that graduating from a dental program gets them a leg up on the competition. i told him about the house michael and i bought earlier in the week in windsor and ben reminisced about the chinese restaurant he frequented with his wife, the chinese drug store across the street they’d buy ingredients from, both in windsor, both now closed. ben wore a blue denim shirt with large pale green snowflakes to our session and i was mesmerized by their simple stars and sectored plates. behind him, i studied his classic striped bedspread, the paned glass lamp at his bedside table, and the red chinese calendar hanging on the wall over his left shoulder. he asked me about the present participle and how it functions in a sentence, as the chinese do not have this component in their grammar. “when i write to you, ‘i am looking forward to our meeting friday,’ it is meant as continuous action lasting until the meeting has occurred. if i write you that statement on wednesday, that means that all the time from then to our meeting is filled with that idea of anticipation—it’s ongoing.” how lovely it is that we are able to shape words at will in english to denote such feelings? “i am looking forward to meeting you.” sparrows sang in the silence between us. ben said the birds live in the air conditioning unit at his window, but he couldn’t hear them, even with his hearing aid. “are they too loud?” “no, not at all,” i pleased to hear their song from faraway. “what does the word ‘dragnet’ mean?” ben had been watching a basketball game the night prior and an athlete said this term in his post-game interview. the player had been traded from his previous team, in exchange for three players, and while his first game with his new team started out on a promising note (they were ahead 25 points), they lost this advantage as the game progressed and his team lost. “i was a dragnet on my team,” he told reporters after. “sometimes athletes have a funny way of making analogies,” i said. “this probably isn’t the best example. but what i think he’s trying to relay is that he feels he’s responsible for bringing his team down. his performance acted as a drag on the other players.” we spent time on zoom using the share screen feature, going back and forth with it. the background of ben’s desktop was a closeup of blades of grass glistening with dew. we played around with the blackboard feature in zoom, too. ben wrote me messages using the drawing tool: “hi, cassie. you are great.” he moved his mouse to create a jumble of green lines. he created several new pages he left blank. we struggled to use other tools from the whiteboard feature; in share screen mode neither of us could see the other’s menu for navigation so i had difficulty directing him. eventually he found the black ribbon with the images hovering above the whiteboard and he selected “text.” “cassie, you are even greater,” he typed to me. i laughed at how sweet he was. “you’re really getting the hang of it now!” i cried. “what’s that thing your grandma says?” for weeks, i’ve been telling him about this saying my grandma uses that her own take on the adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” “you mean, ‘i teach you and then i lose you’?” “that’s the one!” he said. “but i haven’t lost you ben; you’re right here getting it all!” “i have learned a lot but i will forget it.” “i’m here to walk the steps with you,” i assured him. 211030 ... tender_square ben said he wanted me to be the commander. “i want you to teach me how to use zoom as if you were teaching me how to ride a bike.” he was curious about how to set up a meeting with a friend, but i couldn’t figure out whether it was a hypothetical situation or not. we went through the program’s controls, played with the reactions button. “what are these for?” “they’re like emojis, you can use them to express how you feel on zoom. you know how people text with them? it’s a way to give context with your writing so it isn’t misinterpreted.” “i’ve wondered what those are!” “why don’t you try one?” “i have your permission?” he laughed. “the commander says yes!” i saluted him. ben selected the red heart. it appeared in the upper left corner of my view of him. it was the emoji i hoped he’d pick. i sent the same one back in return. we looked at our images side by side, red hearts alight. we fell silent as we watched them disappear. later, he wanted to know how to use google translate to compose an email message to his friend who only spoke chinese. in the english box, he typed “how are you?” in the adjoining chinese box “你好吗 (nǐ hǎo ma)” materialized. i tried to pronounce it. ben said it aloud for me. ben cleared the text box and wrote “ming, i have not talk to you for sometime.” had his limited computer skills kept him from talking to his friend as much as he’d like to during the pandemic? i imagined that he could only send messages to ming if his son or grandchildren were there to assist him; ben doesn’t know how to toggle between tabs in his browser. “i’m going to make you a set of instructions,” i offered. i want to take screenshots of everything so he can follow along with pictures and red squares and arrows. ben was taking notes during our session but i know he didn’t get everything down, there were too many steps, it all got too complicated. when he opens google it appears as a black screen with white text, making it easier on his eyes. the challenge is copying text from google translate into his email renders the copied text invisible. we had to include the extra step of changing the font color so the symbols could be seen. “i’m going to get it,” he assured me. “i’m only 90.” “it’s a lot of steps for me ben, so don’t be hard on yourself.” this weekend he’s going for dinner at a friend’s daughter’s house for his friend’s birthday. “they are worried about me driving at night but i told them it’s absolutely no problem.” he had cataract surgery not that long ago. “my vision is good but not perfect, i can’t focus as well.” his follow-up appointment with the ophthalmologist is in december to determine if he can get a new eyeglass prescription should the swelling lessen. “you enjoy yourself this weekend at your party, and drive safe,” i called to him. i put a heart emoji on my zoom screen, we waved, and he left the meeting. 211106 ... nr i love all of this. it's so sweet. 211106 ... tender_square earlier in the week i sent ben a pdf of instructions that i hoped he’d try before our next meeting, that way he could let me know where any snags were in the steps for sending an email and i could adjust the document accordingly. we didn’t get that far this week, but it’s more than fine; our conversation went to all sorts of new territories. “i was afraid i’d lose it,” he said of the attachment. i walked him through how to download it from his email to his desktop, and how to find the document after and open it. when ben opened it successfully, i selected the applause emoji in zoom. he’s had trouble locating documents after closing them. “it’s happened before; i don’t know what i did, i lost information, i couldn’t find it.” ben was convinced he was going to delete the steps in my document and i assured him with pdf nothing could be accidentally changed on his end. we talked about trash bins and the difference between his email client’s trash bin and his mac’s trash bin, as he didn’t realize there could be more than one. using screen share he learned how to retrieve an email from his trash, selecting a promotional message from dr. steven gundy. “he started as a heart surgeon but then he changed careers and moved into nutrition.” ben said he trusted him because he was a doctor. “he’s reversed his beliefs though, he criticizes everything; i don’t know about this guy now.” he told me he spent $200 on probiotic supplements from gundy’s business that he’s never used. i wondered if his previous tutor had set those promotional emails to automatically delete from his inbox. ben said he was upset because he contacted dr. gundy asking if miralax affected absorption of the body’s vitamins and minerals and got no response, just more emails about buying products. “well, dr. gundy probably has a whole marketing team that works for him and they’re sending out those messages on his behalf, which may be why you didn’t get a reply.” i googled gundy’s bio complete 3 line, the products ben bought, and (surprise, surprise) it didn’t have the greatest track record. the product’s claims have not been tested by a third party and they’re expensive. i’ve grown protective of ben, i don’t want to see him be taken advantage of. “constipation is a problem for the elderly,” he said that’s why he sought out the probiotic treatment. “don’t tell me that i have that to look forward to ben!” i wasn’t bothered in the least that we were talking about poop; i like that our relationship has entered this phase. “i think it’s because we’re not as active as we used to be.” he continued, “i don’t drink as much water as i should because it makes me go all the time.” our conversation shifted to ben’s distrust of doctors. when his sons were young, they both caught blood infections that turned into meningitis; if ben hadn’t insisted that there was something more happening beyond fever to the doctors, his sons may have died. “they told me i was impossible to deal with,” he said, “because i wouldn’t let it go.” a similar incident happened to his wife after a routine appendectomy; she, too, got an infection and had ben not argued to have her admitted she would have died from complications. “doctors can’t know everything if they haven’t experienced it,” he said. "that's why i raised my sons to be humble." both of ben’s sons are doctors: his eldest is a trauma surgeon working in vermont; his younger son is an associate professor of internal medicine at u of m who works with cancer patients. both of his children were recruited into med school directly from high school, into accelerated six-year programs that had them complete their undergraduate degrees in two years (!), followed by three years of formal medical training before a year of residency. “there is a chinese custom, a common goal you share with your spouse that you work to give your kids a better life than what you had.” “well, i think you accomplished that,” i said. ben regretted that he couldn’t take care of his parents as they got older though; they had remained in china after he immigrated to the states. i wanted to interject that i think that’s one of the major reasons why i feel like i’m being called back to windsor, to care for my parents as they age, but i didn’t want to interrupt when ben began reflecting on his time as a child growing up through war. “many friends and students were killed,” he said. “in my class of 400, less than 100 of us were living after the war.” he said he almost died many, many times. as he spoke, i looked for a li-young lee poem that i thought could relate to his experience. lee was born in indonesia to chinese political exiles, but when anti-chinese sentiment formed in the country, lee’s father was imprisoned for a year, and after he was released, lee’s family fled to the us through hong kong, macau, and japan. i selected “a hymn to childhood” and we listened to lee read it aloud, mesmerized (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/play/75381). “and you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment. you learned to lie still so long the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled safety of a wing. look! in run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting, turning over the furniture, smashing your mother’s china.” after lee finished reading, ben said, “there’s no words, no vocabulary with childhood.” he asked me to send him the link to the poem, which i was glad to do. before we left our session, i showed off the red oak leaf i collected on my walk earlier to the camera. ben recalled, “my wife and i used to collect leaves and put them inside books to save them.” “did you ever forget that they were there and stumble upon them later?” “all the time.” it's a tradition i now want to start with my own books. 211113 ... tender_square he didn’t even need the pdf i created for him that detailed how to cut and paste translated messages into his email. or, at least, he didn’t need to consult it while he was screen sharing to ask if he was doing it right. ben sped through the steps with such breezy confidence and skill, i had to cover my mouth in shock; he used a different translation site than google, accidentally, which actually made the process easier because he didn’t have to change font colors. he completed his demonstration in less than two minutes. “i’m worried you’re not going to need me anymore, ben!” i was so damn proud of him. as usual, he shook off the compliment, insisting that he needed more help. i mean, i’m happy to play along if it means we get to keep hanging out on friday afternoons. we looked at features in word; i walked him through how to change font sizes, how to include pictures with text. we looked at his file folders and how his desktop was organized. “every time i try to move these folders, they won’t let me.” he clicked on one and dragged, and the icon drifted back to its original location. “why does it do that?” i had never seen anything like it before. “maybe there’s a ghost in your machine and that’s where they want those folders to live?” we laughed together. whenever ben smiles, he beams. 211121 ... tender_square he pulled up his inbox with the share screen feature, asking me to review an email he’d received a few days prior. he’d gotten an offer for a book he’d written, a text about sports and the body. a rep from impact media said that penguin random house was interested in acquiring the title. i wasn’t sure if it was legitimate or not, so i congratulated him. “i don’t know if this is real,” he said. i offered to call the number listed in the message. he said he’d already phoned. “i talked to a woman and she told me three things were necessary in order to proceed. first, i needed to provide evidence of my credentials. second, i needed a website. third, i needed to pay them $5,000,” he seemed dubious. “i told her i didn’t have that kind of money and she hung up on me.” i sighed and shook my head. “yeah, i’m afraid this is a scam, ben. no reputable publishing company would ever require you to pay to have your book published. i’m so sorry.” he’d told one of his sons about the message earlier in the week and he asked ben to forward it on. i walked him through the steps to do just that. he was pleased to learn new ways to use digital communication. we explored other features in yahoo! mail during our meeting; we reviewed how to clean an inbox, and how to reply all to a message with multiple recipients. he opened an email received in mid-october from a former classmate in china for our example; another high school alumnus had died. his name was fong. he’d lived to be 100 years old. in the “to” field, the message was addressed to jiann. “is that your chinese name?” “my professor at berkley gave me my american name, benjamin. my old classmates still call me ji-min.” i asked if it upset him to change his given name back in the 70’s; he didn’t seem to mind all that much. he’s been using ben on his identification cards for decades. i didn’t want to read the email he had up on the screen, but i couldn’t help it. his classmate evelyn wrote that “there’s no funeral or any memorial [for fong]. i wanted to send flowers but [his daughter] refused.” she sent a condolence card on behalf of the few of them whom remained, a group of five. ben wrote to her directly in response to the news: “i always feel that i am going to be the next one following [fong]. i am just counting my days. i am looking forward to meeting him in the not faraway future in the other world.” i swallowed the lump in my throat. 211204 ... tender_square ben wanted help transferring pictures from his iphone onto his mac. he plugged the usb cord into his computer and shared his screen with me. there were 75 new photos to upload. “should i delete what i don’t want before i transfer them?” “it may be easier to transfer all the files first and then delete what you don’t want, otherwise you’ll have to individually click through each picture.” through share screen i watched him linger on the images recalling the moments they were taken. he stopped at a black and white thumbnail. “that’s my father,” he said. “it’s a picture i took of him in the ’70s when i went back to china to visit.” one of the last photos taken was of a cardboard box with a ginormous green vegetable barely contained inside it. i was incredulous. “is that a cucumber?!” “i don’t know what that is!” “that thing looks like it should be in the guinness book of world records!” there were random pictures of a car console and a bag of ginger, pictures he didn’t realize his phone had been taking. he scrolled to a photo of a woman. “that’s my girlfriend. she lives in parkwood meadows.” “you have a girlfriend?!” i cried. “you never mentioned this before! how long have you been together?” it makes me giddy that ben is 90 and still has love this way. “eleven years. her name is jainlin. she speaks limited english,” he explained. “we couldn’t marry, otherwise she’d lose her benefits.” “so she’s a widower like you.” ben’s wife died twelve years ago from breast cancer. after the phone transfer was complete, i explained the different features in the photo app to review his library. he had 21 years of images contained there, and he introduced me to faces i had never met but had heard about: his sons, gary and larry; his wife; his five grandchildren. “these pictures remind me of so many memories,” he said. there was an image of his whole family, and some of them were wearing birthday hats. his wife sat front and center, looking frail in a bucket hat worn to cover up her hair loss from chemo. in a photograph taken a few years later, ben and jainlin stood in a parking lot between two white painted lines, their shadows shortened in the noonday light. ben is facing the camera, smiling in shorts and a black fanny pack; jainlin is turned toward him, her hand lifting his ball cap to better look into his eyes, an intimate gesture. yellowstone’s imposing white-peaked mountains watched from the background, steady and true. 211211 ... tender_square ben’s fascinated by how the motor cortex functions and its connection to muscular movement, especially with how it relates to the hand. and though the opposable thumb is what separates us from animals, ben is writing a book which argues that, neurologically and mentally, the index finger is the most important part of the hand because of how it translates action in human systems. “it gives a sense of direction,” ben explained. “if you don’t have a sense of direction, you’re restricted. if you have direction, you can think as far as the sky.” as i listened, i became enamored with his idea that a simple action, pointing one’s finger, could undergird the internal processes that shape our goals. “direction is an extension,” he said. he held up an illustration to the camera of a clasped hand, the index finger sprung like a hidden switchblade, ready to cut through whatever stood in the way of attainment. 211218 ... tender_square ben and i haven’t had a session in three weeks. with christmas and new year’s eve falling on fridays we thought it best to wait until the first week of january to begin tutoring again. last thursday i sent him the zoom link, but didn’t hear back from him. typically, ben sends me an email at 11:30 at night, and i’m always joking that he’s too hip to be 90 because his messages are delivered after *my* bedtime. when i called him on friday afternoon at our start time he didn’t pick up. i worried something was the matter but i didn’t leave a message. a few minutes later, ben called me back. he’d forgotten all about our session; his girlfriend was ill with covid and because he’d been taking care of her, ben worried that he’d been exposed to it too. “we can reschedule if you’re feeling unwell,” i offered. “i’m sorry to hear that your girlfriend is going through that and i wish her, and you, a speedy recovery. why don’t we be in touch when you’re better and we’ll arrange another time to meet then if you want to make up this one?” i didn’t hear back from ben earlier this week, and so i figured we’d were all set to meet at our regular time on friday. he sent me an email on tuesday apologizing for not being in touch and asking for us to resume friday. i saw the message but didn’t reply back—i’m terrible with my email—and yesterday, because ben hadn’t heard from me, he called me. twice. i am also terrible with my phone. i keep it on silent unless i’m expecting a call. ben phoned at 10:30 in the morning, and again at 11:30, leaving messages both times. i didn’t see the notifications because i was writing. and i didn’t listen to the messages until later in the day at 4. i initially thought he pocket-dialed me. in the first message, ben was extremely worried and apologetic. he thought he had insulted me in some way for missing our last session, he thought i was dropping him as a learner, and he thanked me for the time we spent together hoping that it wasn’t over. i felt awful for leaving him waiting when he was carrying such anxiety about the future of his tutoring. i had no idea he would reach such a conclusion—everything was friendly and fine in our last conversation. “ben!!” i said excitedly when i heard his voice. “i’m so sorry to be getting back to you so late!” “oh, hi, cassie!” he was just as thrilled to hear mine through the receiver. “of course we’re going to meet on friday—i’m still your tutor!” “i’m so happy to hear that,” he said. “i thought you were giving me up.” never ben. never. 220113 ... tender_square i admitted to my mother, “i don’t know that ben’s retaining what i’m teaching him. i’m worried that i’m not really doing what the literacy program is designed to do.” “how old did you say he was again? ninety-something? it’s pretty incredible that he still wants to learn,” she marveled. “yes, but he needs a lot of direction from me. he forgets how to navigate basic areas of his browser that i’ve seen him tackle before and i have to walk him through step by step. though some of that could be that he can’t see the screen very clearly, the writing is so small.” “are you meeting in person?” “no, we haven’t yet. all our meetings take place in zoom. which i suppose is pretty incredible, that a 90-year-old man is able to use that platform with me.” “i’ll say! there are boomers in my generation who still have no idea what they’re doing with computers,” she laughed. “you know, there is such a thing as maintaining skills, as opposed to learning new ones. and it’s just as important that you’re doing that for ben.” “i never really thought about it that way,” i conceded. “so many of our sessions are just about being social, and i’m grateful for that. i want to be there; we enjoy each other’s company. i guess i was just worried that i wasn’t keeping in line with what the program is designed to do.” “is ben satisfied with your sessions?” “yes. very much so.” “then that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” 220123 ... tender_square “university of michigan was the first school i applied to for graduate studies,” ben said. he ended up at berkley when he turned 30, after passing an english exam at the us embassy in china. “i couldn’t absorb the lectures,” he said. “i understood about 5% of what the professor was saying. other classmates and i would try and write down specific words we remembered, and then go through the index of our textbook trying to locate them so we could study what we needed to know in the library, late into the night.” after graduating in california, and teaching for a few years in ohio thereafter, ben and his family eventually made it to michigan in the early 70s, and he’s lived in ann arbor ever since. “i liked the name of the city because it’s so close to my last name. i’ve never had problems here; in berkley i was discriminated against for housing. i couldn’t find a place to rent. i went to an available apartment and they told me it had already been filled, and yet, months later, the sign was still up in their window saying there was vacancy.” he ended up moving in with an 80-year-old woman who was renting rooms out of her house. ben shared a space with a korean student. he talked about the upheaval of the 60s; protests with the vietnam war, the beginnings of the cold war, and the assignations of the kennedy brothers. “i still remember, i was in an elevator when i learned jfk had been shot.” ben worked at cleveland state, 45 minutes away when the kent state massacre occurred. he remembers the detroit riots. he moved to the us during a time of explosive change. “it’s such a peaceful time now,” he said in comparison. in other sessions, he talked about seeing the moon landing, and hearing martin luther king jr. speak. it’s pretty incredible how much history he’s lived through, in his former home country and his current home country. at the end of our meeting, ben asked after michael. i told ben that michael was trying to get into hockey, that he was in the market for skates and was having a hard time finding ones that fit because his feet are so wide. “does he know how to skate? he’s not from canada like you, right?” “no, he’ll have to learn; he’s from the south.” “i used to make an ice rink for my kids so they could skate when i lived in university housing.” ben would pack the snow in and flood the rink after conducting research for the day at university of michigan and his kids would play hockey on it after school. “one day i got a call from university housing, i thought i was getting in trouble. they asked me if i made the ice rink in the yard and i told them yes. ‘everybody likes it,’ they said. and they offered to put a light outside of my apartment so we could use the rink at night. we did that for two years.” 220204 ... tender_square ben and i hadn’t seen each other in three weeks. he had to cancel one of our sessions to take his girlfriend to a doctor’s appointment, and i had to cancel one when i was out of town the following weekend. yesterday, he told me he was having trouble with his computer. the bookmark he uses to navigate to his email was giving him the message “404 not available” whenever he tried to load the page. together, through the power of screen-share technology, i led him through creating a new bookmark and deleting the old one, and we arranged the new bookmark in the place where the old one had been, like furniture he was accustomed to seeing in the same place. our sessions begin with me phoning ben. we’ll chat about our week for twenty minutes or so, then he’ll log onto his computer and join the zoom session. we always wave to one another animatedly with both hands when we’re able to see each other. “it’s so good to hear your voice,” he says to me. whenever he asks me how i am, i answer, “better, now that i’m talking to you.” ben spoke of oncoming spring, how he’s eager to be out and exercising again. with all his recent falls that resulted in life-threatening injuries for a time, i’m worried about him taking on too much, about him not knowing his limits when he’s been a capable man for nine decades. he was quite active when he was younger, golfing, skating, skiing and the like. and i’ve seen what losing mobility has done to my grandmother. she is stubborn, refusing her walker because she insists she can manage and she’s fallen several times. grandma lived for exercising at her ladies gym, walking to run her errands, and dancing when she heard her favourite songs and now that her physical engagement with the world has been compromised, she’s unable to counter her depressive states like she used to. she’s withdrawn and morose now, angry about aging. ben is independent still, living on his own and driving himself around town, yet he talks to me about not knowing how much time he has left, about waiting for death to come to him. during our session, ben asked me how to write an email to a classmate, how to translate a message from english to chinese so that he could send his friend a letter. “we’ve done this before ben. i made you a set of instructions. do you remember?” and i wished i hadn’t said it, because if he had remembered, he wouldn’t have asked. one of the tips i came across for dealing with alzheimer’s and dementia that i’ve read in preparation for my dad’s decline was “don’t ask your loved one ‘do you remember?’” i don’t want to say ben struggled our entire session because he was doing his best. and i wish i hadn’t felt my patience eroding when we walked through the steps of the document i’d made for the seventh time, the frustration in my voice rising when ben would become disoriented and unable to reproduce the steps he’d done only a few minutes prior. “i just want to write an email to my friend,” he kept repeating, as he typed “please send me a letter” in seven different draft messages. “ben, are you really trying to write a message to your friend, or are you just trying to get these steps down for your own reference?” i couldn’t tell if we should be sending out one of the completed drafts to an actual person, or if the exercise was purely hypothetical. “no, i’m just practicing right now,” he said. “but i want to know how to do this so i can talk to my classmate.” ben reminded me of my father, overwhelmed by directions, staring blankly at the screen. he kept clicking on the screenshots in my instruction document, waiting for pages to load and i had to remind him he wasn’t in safari. “where’s safari, ben?” and his eyes would become fixed and he wouldn’t speak. even in the course of our discussion, he was dropping words in his sentences, he was having difficulty formulating his thoughts. the only difference between him and my grandmothers, the only difference between him and my father, is that ben remains positive and upbeat, he doesn’t descend into anger and frustration. he’s a determined man who wants to get it right. but much like the compromises he hasn’t wanted to make with his level of physical activity, ben doesn’t want to compromise when it comes to his mental acuity either—he wants to do it all on his own. the trouble is, using multiple tabs in a browser, or toggling between safari and his pdf instructions impedes his focus and concentration. “ben, we lost your email,” i said. “why did we lose your email?” no answer. “it’s because you navigated to a new website when we were in your email, instead of opening a new tab.” “oh.” then he’d close the browser suddenly without warning and start from step one all over again, instead of allowing me to walk him through how to create a tab for his email and a tab for the translator. “ben, see the second window with the plus sign? click on that.” no answer. vacant stare. “your mouse just hovered over it.” i’d wait, struggling with the balance of when to hold his hand and when to let go. “ben.” i was trying to call him back to me. “ben! there are two boxes, one on the left and one on the right. click the box on the right.” “oh. this one?” “yes, ben. perfect.” and i felt guilty because i couldn’t wait for our zoom call to be over. “ben was working my last nerve,” i sighed to my husband afterward, collapsing into bed dramatically. the situation is more layered than that though, gnawing at my nervous system. in my fear of losing those i love, i lash out. i don’t know how to witness when they can’t do for themselves as they were once able to. and the anger bubbles up as a defense because i’m scared. my loved ones who are slowly losing memory’s ground to the onslaught of dementia won’t know what’s missing, but i will. their losses sear my recall with a branding iron, singeing my hippocampus with scars. 220305 ... tender_square ben comments on the speed of time’s passage when we’re together, how often he hears of friends getting sick and friends passing away. “my friend’s mother is 95 and she died just the other day. her daughter was putting a blanket on her and thought that she was in a really deep sleep and realized not long after that her mom had passed.” “that’s the best way to go, right? it seems so peaceful to close your eyes and sleep.” “you know, there was this man who died during a brain scan and the doctor’s found out that there is still brain activity after the heart stops, like all of your memories running through your mind when you leave,” he shared. i was fascinated. “you know what my favorite memories are? flying. in my dreams i fly all the time. i can be by mountains and i just—” he held his arms out and tilted his body down to the right, “move around it.” during our past couple of meetings, ben’s been wanting to discuss the russia-ukraine invasion. “war occupy my life, directly and indirectly. i’m very sensitive to the way—it occupies my mental and affects my emotion—it changes how i think about everyday life.” he talked about wwii and when he was a child, witnessing his dad get arrested by japanese officers and forced to dig trenches along the yellow river. “history is a footprint,” he said. “so much of my life has been affected by war.” 220325 what's it to you? who go blather from