My Private Wobegon

stories from home

Cassiopeia

By Terri Finkbine Arnold

When they first met, David and Mischa were not what you would call kindred spirits.

David was an old bald guy with horn-rimmed glasses and a big nose. He wore yellow and brown plaid pants.

Mischa had big green eyes, deep dimples and a head full of blonde curls. He was still cute when he was naked.

Mischa looked like an angel. In reality, he was from hell.

David looked like hell but he was a great guy.

David married a woman his own age (just about) and took on six additional children, three existing grandchildren and the certainty of more to come. He loved his wife with all his heart and soul. He adored her children, most of the time. He treated her grandchildren as if they were his own. She loved him all the more for it. It was just as important to her as all the rest.

Mischa was two when his gramma married David. He does not remember a time in his life without Grandpa David.

David, on the other hand, knew a whole serene lifetime without Mischa.

When David met Mischa, the only word Mischa said was,

Outside.

For everything else, Mischa would point and grunt. It worked for him.

David, in contrast, was very verbal. He was a prominent physician and a scholar. David thought he would be happy when Mischa finally decided to talk but when he did, things only got worse.

The next word Mischa learned was why, as in,

Why, grandpa?

David never was able to fit his explanations into Mischa's thirty-second attention span. David liked to explain things in great detail and at great length. He liked it when people sat and listened to him and occasionally asked him an intelligent question. Not Mischa. Mischa wouldn't have any of it.

David was ordered, precise, pedantic and up at the crack of dawn to start his day.

Mischa was exuberant, curious, creative and up at the crack of dawn to start his day.

David liked to use the time before anyone else was up to read and write and study in the perfect quiet of the early morning.

Mischa liked to use the time before anyone else was up to climb the furniture. He also liked to sing. When he was up, the early morning was never perfectly quiet.

Grandpa David would fix Mischa breakfast and leave the room. Mischa would take a bite of his cereal and follow his grandpa around the house and try to engage him in conversation,

Why, grandpa?
Why, grandpa?
Why, grandpa?

David was a gentleman. He never roused his wife from her slumber on those mornings with Mischa but he always breathed a sigh of relief when she came into the room. She could talk to both of them at the same time each in his own language. David and Mischa were pleased when she was there with them.

David was happy to have Mischa come to visit but he was always very, very happy to see him go. Then he would get back his uninterrupted mornings, his quiet house, and his wife.

That is not to say that Mischa did not amuse David. David had a good sense of humor. Once, when Mischa was three, his parents left his older brother, Theo, with his cousins for another week of vacation and took Mischa back home with them. Mischa sat in his car seat, all alone in the back with nothing but his books and his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. All of a sudden, after they had been driving for a day and a half, Mischa woke up from a nap and said,

Uh oh.
We forgot Theo.

David laughed out loud when he heard what Mischa had said. He laughed again when he repeated it to his colleagues and laughed the next time he told it, too, and the next. David had a fine sense of humor. He never got tired of the jokes he told. Mischa never completely understood why Grandpa was laughing.

When Mischa was five years old, his gramma volunteered Grandpa David to take Mischa back to San Francisco so Mischa would not have to travel alone. David had to go to San Francisco to give a big speech to important doctors. He planned to use the time on the airplane to prepare his speech.

On the way to the airport, David tried to negotiate an agreement with Mischa. He said,

I'll tell you what,
Mischa.
You don't ask me
any questions
and
I won't ask you
any questions.

Mischa didn't have to think about it for more than two seconds. He said,

But, Grandpa,
then we won't be able
to talk to each other.

The only time he was quiet on the airplane was when he was eating his sandwich and when he was eating his Grandpa David's sandwich.

David and Mischa did have things in common. David loved gadgets and Mischa loved David's gadgets. In particular, Mischa loved Grandpa David's water bubble machine, a six-foot high Plexiglas box filled with water that made endless streams of rising bubbles.

While David sat at his desk, Mischa would sit cross-legged in front of the bubble machine as if it were a television, watching the bubbles rise for hours on end. They would sit there in the quiet broken only by Mischa's repeated query,

Why are there bubbles, Grandpa?

David was finally reduced to saying,

Because.

When it was lunchtime, they would go into the kitchen together. If Mischa's gramma were busy, Grandpa David would make Mischa a sandwich.

When David was on his own, he took two slices of bread and a piece of turkey, pressed them together without benefit of mayonnaise or mustard and, standing in the kitchen, ate his sandwich only because he had to eat something before he could get back to work.

David knew that his wife disapproved of his version of a turkey sandwich. When she made sandwiches, she would top the turkey with tomato slices and lettuce and sometimes alfalfa sprouts and ripe avocado. She'd cut the sandwiches in half and put them on a plate. She would bring the sandwiches over to the table and they would sit down to eat.

One day, during a break from bubble watching and the study of female urinary incontinence, David made lunch for himself and his grandson. He carefully spread mayonnaise on the bread and added turkey, lettuce, tomato slices and sprouts. He cut both sandwiches in half and put them on plates and sat down to eat next to Mischa.

Mischa took one look at the sandwich with its garden bounty and said in disbelief,

A salad sandwich?

Then Mischa took out of the sandwich all the tomato slices and all the lettuce and every last sprout, licked the mayonnaise off the bread and ate the turkey sandwich without the salad.

After that, instead of asking for a turkey sandwich, David always asked his wife to make him a salad sandwich. When she brought it to him, they would say in unison,

A salad sandwich?

and think of Mischa.

Once in a while, if the night sky were clear and cool, David would take his big new telescope outside and show his wife and grandson Jupiter or Mars or the rings of Saturn or the craters on the bright side of the moon. His wife didn't need to look through the fancy telescope to know the moon. She would see it there, full, hanging in the immense desert sky and gather her grandson in her arms. She'd sing,

I see the moon and
the moon sees me.
God sees the moon and
God sees me.

Mischa was happy to be in his gramma's arms and listen to her sing because Grandpa David would not let him turn the knobs on his telescope. Mischa loved knobs. But there were limits to Grandpa David's patience.

Grandpa David loved his telescope and the planets and stars and comets and constellations. After his wife kissed her grandson good night, she came back outside because she knew that her husband would want her there with him. He'd put one arm around her shoulders and pull her close. With his other hand, he'd point out Orion and Betelgeuse and The Little Dipper. But when her husband started telling her about the distance in light years between earth and the nearest star or the order of magnitude of the brightest star in the sky, she'd say to him,

Let's not get too Sirius.

David was proud of his clever wife and she was happy. His wife was happy because she never had to explain it to him.

Her husband pointed out the constellation Cassiopeia revolving around the pole star. He told his wife, who never can remember the names of the constellations, that Cassiopeia looks like a W if she is right side up or like an M if she is upside down. He said,

Remember
W for wife,
M for mother.

His wife can still find Cassiopeia in the starry night's sky.

*****

About the time Mischa had almost learned how to control his behavior, David lost the ability to control his. One day, he fainted and hit his head. It happened just like that. One minute he was walking along the street in Our Nation's Capital and the next he was waking up in a hospital in the same city. David did not want to be in the hospital. He had bumped his head and everything was fine, just fine. David was not a good patient. He wanted to go home with his wife. The doctors thought he would be all right but when they asked him,

Who is the president?

David did not hesitate. With the same certainty he brought to his medical opinions, he answered,

Herbert Hoover.

The doctors looked at each other. That was not the right answer. They asked him,

What year is it?

David was puzzled by the doctors' simple questions. In the same patient tone he used with Mischa, he told them,

1931, of course.

But it was 2001 and Herbert Hoover was not president. David had had a brain injury. The little man that exercised so much control in David's brain was kicked out of his rightful place in the frontal lobe. An unknown interloper took his place and much to everyone's surprise, including David's, said to his wife,

fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuck

His wife said,

You!
You cut that out
right this minute.

She waited for her husband to return. Every now and then she would catch a glimpse of the man she married. Every now and then she thought that her husband was back to stay for good. But the former controller of the right frontal lobe did not regain his proper place.

A few months later, when Mischa's gramma wanted her grandson to come for his summer visit, her daughter, Mischa's mother, was anxious. If David's right frontal lobe were running amok without its controller, how in the world would it react when it saw Mischa? Mischa's gramma insisted that everything would be all right. Not even a renegade right frontal lobe could keep her away from her grandson.

Mischa went off to gramma's house with his books and his backpack and his own newly arrived controller not quite yet in total control of his brain. His anxious mother kept calling and asking,

How is everything going?
How is everything going?
How is everything going?

His gramma kept telling her,

Everything is fine.
Everything is fine.
Everything is fine.

Mischa's mother insisted on talking to Mischa. They talked about rocks and computer games, the bubble machine and Gorp, and other stuff until finally she asked,

By the way,
how
is Grandpa David?

What she really wanted to know was whether Mischa was behaving himself and leaving his grandfather alone and whether David was behaving himself and leaving his grandson alone. Mischa replied,

Grandpa's great!

This was not a response that his mother expected. No one else thought David was great. They all liked David better with the little man who had absconded from the right frontal lobe and could not be found again. Mischa did not miss the loss of the controller in Grandpa David's brain. He said,

Oh, Mom! Grandpa's great.
He talks to me now.

Grandpa talks to me now. He laughs with me. He answers my questions. He explains that bubbles rise up because they are made of air lighter than water. Grandpa smiles at me. He tells me about gravity and the insurmountable difficulty of turning back time.

Grandpa David talks to me of stars and planets and his journey to see the total eclipse of the sun. He speaks of the dark side of the moon and great nebulas and spiral galaxies and of stars with the luminosity of four thousand suns. He talks about the supernova whose light first reached this little planet a millennium ago and the exploding star that burst inside his head in an instant, in far less time than the wink of an eye.

David tells me that he sees in his mind's eye the galactic center, the abyss at the epicenter of a thousand billion stars, the enormous black hole with a mass of more than one million suns, the black hole where stars are lost forever, the black hole into which disappears all reason and every thought, save the last thought.

He tells me that the man with the damaged right frontal lobe will find his way back to the forgiven queen, to beautiful Cassiopeia, to the circumpolar constellation that never disappears below the horizon. He will return to the constant constellation with the unpredictable star, seven hundred light years from the small blue planet on the outer edge of the Milky Way, the small blue planet where she still lives.

They will love her forever.

The first time they met, David and Mischa did not know that one day they would stand on the opposite sides of the universe and agree on everything.

---

Terri Finkbine Arnold
Terri Finkbine Arnold is a San Francisco liberal who currently resides in Chicago with her husband and their youngest son, Mischa, who now prefers to be called 'Mike'.

She is writing a novel about life, crime and enlightenment in rural Iowa, entitled "Idiots Out Wandering Around."

Ms. Arnold is a great fan of A Prairie Home Companion. She once made her husband and sons wait for hours outside the Fitzgerald Theater (in January) in an unsuccessful attempt
to get cheap tickets for the show. They made it inside only to watch the person in line in front of them buy the last ticket. The story is now family lore, often retold with a lot of complaining about the cold and the wait and St. Paul. Mischa never complains. On that cold January day,
Mischa spied a giant roll of A Prairie Home Companion duct tape on sale in the lobby. He still thinks that getting that duct tape was worth the wait.