Today I took my mom to a movie in Berkeley. We went on BART. I think I traumatized us both. I have to put the ticket in the turnstile machine for her and have to tell her urgently to GO when before the gate closes while I process my own ticket at the same time. Then we go up a smelly concrete hallway and escalator and wait on an equally concrete platform with strangers and a big chasm in front of us until a big metal train starts coming towards us.

“Whoa! They are trying to kill me!”
This is a phrase she uses as kind of a joke when something seems dangerous to her. I think it is the kind of humor that shows how brave she is. And it’s pretty funny the way she says it.

Then we get on a car that smells like the alcohol that comes out of the huge man playing gangsta rap on his cell phone behind us. I try to hold her hand the whole time but she always ends up taking mine, cupping it really, folding my fingers in onto my palm and enveloping it in her two soft, skin and bones hands. They always tremble just a tiny bit and I remember that some dementia patients develop Parkinson’s.

She is like a teenager, both terrified and exhilarated by the unfamiliarity and the vulnerability she feels here. I hope she is not more terrified.

Once outside, on Shattuck Ave., five blocks from the real estate office she worked only a few years ago, she looks around and says
“This is just a whole other world!”

I think maybe she is right. Maybe worlds are only divided by time and memory, not space or matter.

A walk down the street brings us past nuts talking to themselves (“that guy is really not happy.”), homeless guys shouting guilt-trip pan handles. She searches her pockets for change that isn’t there every time. Once we get stuck next to one at a red light. She tries to explain to him earnestly why we haven´t given him any money. He talks to her aggressively, I shoot him a dirty look, drag her across the street and distract her with pleasantries about the old buildings. Why have I brought her here? I feel guilty and irresponsible.

There is a conflict at the popcorn counter. I am paying for everything and the matinee ticket is much more expensive than I expected. So I order a medium popcorn for us to share. Once I pay, she says she needs to have a drink too. I tell her the prices are ridiculous, we´ll do without. She says she´ll pay for it, I remind her she has no money with her, she points to my wallet and says “you do.”

I heard her away like a dog sniffing at something on the street and we get half way up the stairs before I realize just how fucking insignificant the $4 are and how petty I have been and we go back for a drink. Now there are two people in line ahead of us. The probably brilliant 20-year-old CAL student selling popcorn is getting treated like he probably doesn’t know how to count to ten by a blonde mother my age. My mom doesn’t understand why we are waiting and keeps telling me to ask the guy for a drink. We finally get up, I order one small coke and she says “two”. I say “One.” And tell her she can drink the whole thing. We resemble each other so much, it must be obvious that we are mother and daughter. The poor popcorn kid must think I am a monster.

Other times we get warm fuzzy looks from strangers and I feel like I am getting undue credit. That if she didn’t have dementia, we wouldn’t be walking down the street hand in hand but instead we would probably be arguing. She might be espousing advice that I condescendingly disregard. Instead we are walking down the BART tracks in El Cerrito on a Saturday evening and she comments that the weed-overgrown gutter on the side of the trail is “really creepy.” That she loves that tree but she doesn´t like them big because then it´s all dark and also, again, creepy.

A woman is coming our direction on a bicycle and I gently pull my mom to me by her elbow so the woman can pass. She gives us a long, steady, smiling “how sweet” look because she thinks she has just witnessed a moment of divine tenderness between an adult mother and daughter. She doesn’t know that if my mother weren’t half-vegetable at age 53 that I would probably have yelled “Mom! What are you doing? Get out of the way!”

I don´t know why I am writting this. Why you have read it. I don´t even know if she liked the movie.

I don´t know what the moral of the story is.