On the Forgetting of Names

Two weeks ago I participated in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and took a class led by Doug Goetsch. We wrote four or five short pieces every day spurred by a variety of prompts. One day he asked us to write a piece based on a title: "On the Forgetting of Names." I immediately thought of the last time I visited my grandfather in the nursing home about a year before his death and wrote this piece based on that visit.


On The Forgetting of Names

     He was laying on his back, on top of the covers, in the middle of the small bed. The black and gold plaid flannel shirt was buttoned over a dark blue t-shirt. Neither coordinated with the brown polyester pants that stopped two inches above his ankles revealing white cotton socks. Black loafers completed an ensemble that no one would have ever seen him wearing in his younger days.

     For most of his adult life he wore the blue-gray uniform and work boots of those who were employed by the Board of Water and Light. He put it on in the morning before he walked to work and he left it on after he got home. Sunday was the only day the uniform changed. On Sunday he would don one of this limited church outfits (although he would never have called them outfits). Polyester pants in a hazy green or a gray (rarely brown), paired with a more brightly colored button shirt and a one of the eight, big, fat-knotted ties that he owned. When he retired the work uniforms were traded for a flannel shirt and jeans.

    Now, at 81, he didn’t dress himself anymore. The pants probably weren’t his own but were, instead, the nearest pair of pants that fit his diminishing body, grabbed hastily by the nursing home orderly charged with getting him dressed for the day.

     He laid on the bed in the middle of the afternoon with his hands entwined across his stomach, elbows tucked neatly at his side. He looked up at the ceiling trying to conceal the frustration of having forgotten another name. This time it was someone who repeatedly called him “Grampa” even though he was sure they were close to the same age. It only compounded the confusion of living in the Navy barracks with all of these old people. He didn’t know why he was here or who this person was or why they were talking to him. He just wanted to leave; to walk through the woods outside his window to his mother’s house. He just wanted to go home.