- Playing
- A Necessary Deception
- From
- Nathan Callahan
Ten years after her husband's death, Ruth’s mental facilities began deteriorating. Senility, you might say, brought her to live with my parents. Their house was never the same. In Ruth’s eyes my father Frank was her Uncle Harry. My mother, her daughter, Betty Lou was Aunt Elizabeth. Harry and Elizabeth were long dead, but that didn’t stop Ruth from enjoying an afternoon with them — and she didn’t stop her imaginings at swapping the dead for the living. She imagined settings, situations, livestock. My parent’s Laguna Niguel tract home back yard filled with fantasy cows and chickens. “Did you milk the cows, Harry,” Ruth would say to Frank. Reality became negotiable.
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Piece Description
Ten years after her husband's death, Ruth’s mental facilities began deteriorating. Senility, you might say, brought her to live with my parents. Their house was never the same. In Ruth’s eyes my father Frank was her Uncle Harry. My mother, her daughter, Betty Lou was Aunt Elizabeth. Harry and Elizabeth were long dead, but that didn’t stop Ruth from enjoying an afternoon with them — and she didn’t stop her imaginings at swapping the dead for the living. She imagined settings, situations, livestock. My parent’s Laguna Niguel tract home back yard filled with fantasy cows and chickens. “Did you milk the cows, Harry,” Ruth would say to Frank. Reality became negotiable.
Transcript
A Necessary Deception
My Last Dance with Ruth
Fantasy escapes me. Hobbit, Star Trek, Batman and Potter worlds don’t engage me. Call it a defect, but personally speaking, my friends are more fantastical than an Orc or an Ewok.
And yet there are times when fantasy creeps into my life, as it did via my mother’s mother. Ruth was her given name, but she had an alias in her teens. After she left her family’s farm, the only way Ruth could find work was to become Dianna. The deception worked. By day, she was a department store clerk. By night, she partied in Wisconsin’s beer gardens — dancing, laughing and having the time of her life. That’s where she met her future husband Joseph. Ruth and Joseph were married in a Bakersfield, California cotton field three years later and spent the next 40 years — until Joseph’s death — in love. Ten years after his death, Ruth’s mental facilities beg...
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