Back in the summer of 1995, I took a job at Brigtsen’s waiting tables while getting freelance jobs writing. I remember a woman came in with her father, a frail man who looked as if she had just sprung him from a nursing home. They sat at one of the tables on the front porch and she was wearing a power suit and was describing to her father her recent accomplishments. He just kept nodding. She continued to try to impress upon him that these were indeed accomplishments and he kept nodding his head. Much in the same fashion Arlene does now when she walks into a corner and stares in the outer limits nodding.
On Saturday, at our regularly scheduled mom and daughter lunch, I was telling my mother a story and I could see that she was trying to listen, to pay attention, but she couldn’t follow the story. Instead she kept nodding her head. The more I tried to get her to understand what I was saying, the further away her mind went from the story at hand and the more she nodded her head.