And Then There's This... Norma: Pennies in a Stream

This is an Oct. 16, 2019 excerpt from "Stardust: An Alzheimer's Love Story", my day to day accounts of caring for my wife in the advanced stages of her dementia. Learn more about this series in last week's column.

I miss romance, which I guess is another way of saying I miss being young.

A few minutes ago, I sat on the side of my wife Norma's bed as she listened to Willie Nelson's "Stardust", just as she has each night for the past week or so. Her memory struggles to ignite her mind, but when she hears Willie singing “Moonlight in Vermont” or “Don't Get Around Much Anymore,” her eyes widen and sometimes sparkle and she is with me again.

Sitting there beside her and loving her beyond tears, I rambled on about the sophistication and majesty of those songs that still move us. I talked to her about paging through the "Life" magazines I kept in a box under my bed when I was a boy and how they spirited me away from my West Virginia hollow with their pictures of men in white dinner jackets and be-jeweled ladies with sculpted hair and cigarettes held at jaunty angles. That was romance—not sweaty and urgent but casual, civilized and beautiful — like “Long Ago and Far Away” or “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

Romantic that I am I do not romanticize history. I know that in my own golden days Blacks were being lynched, woman were denied all control of their bodies and gays were hounded into desperation. But I miss the songs that made love a big deal instead of just another score. I miss the quiet corners of songs about meadows and skylarks and the gleaming lights of Broadway, the places your imagination could flow into and fill with its own white dinner jacket imagery.

Norma long embodied the bright elements conveyed in those songs — the soft voice, the elegant gait, the sly and formidable wit. She was a Gershwin lyric come to life, and I thank Willie for bringing her back to me in a swirl of stardust tonight.