Silver Bells

"Thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine."

Nadine looks on fondly. The patients remind her of her beloved grandmother. She treasures the stories these elders have to share, coaxing memories from them with gentle curiosity and visual reminders, like a vintage wedding gown or old military uniform. It's part of her job -- to join the journey when a patient's mind rambles. Her background is in nursing and social work. A decade ago, she was working in a mental hospital in New York, and remembers with horror how dementia was treated then, the cold baths to try to shock someone back to reality, the restraints to prevent patients from wandering, the drugs that fogged minds that were still vibrant, just confused.

"I didn't understand back then," she laments.

The people she cares for now remind her of her Jamaican grandmother, who raised her back home on the island after her mother emigrated, alone, to the States. On Christmas morning, Nadine's grandmother would put her in the special dress sent from America, "with three big clocks on the front of it, I called it my clock dress," and they would go to the marketplace, where the older woman would buy her spun sugar.

Now Nadine asks Col. Amos Shattuck if he likes Christmas and leans forward eagerly when the 82-year-old West Point graduate nods and says, "Oh, sure. Christmas, let's see, you got things to open, those are fun, interesting, worthwhile things to do." His fingers nimbly unwrap an imaginary present. What about a bicycle, wonders Nadine, did he ever get a bicycle?

"I've done okay," he replies with a grin. "I've gotten bicycles recently." Nadine makes no attempt to bring him back from the memory he is reliving. His hands fuss again with the unseen gift. "Putting stuff together, it doesn't fit, all the pieces," he frets. Nadine knows the Colonel has a talent for building models, that he used to assemble military airplane reproductions for museum displays.

Betty drops by, wanting to know if it's time to go yet. She doesn't want to miss today's outing.

Christmas has always been one of her favorite seasons, she says, recalling the archery set she got one year. "We expected to see Santa Claus come down the chimney, so we didn't light the fire on Christmas Eve," she says. "We always left Santa Claus goodies. We'd have to bring boxes down from the attic, with Christmas balls and the silver, the silver, what do you call it?"

"Tinsel?" Nadine ventures.

"Yes, tinsel. It fills up the holes," Betty goes on. "We always had to leave something for Santa to eat. We'd leave some coffee, but we thought maybe he liked Coke, too. The cookies were gone when we woke up." She remembers how the lake in the city park froze, how people could skate on it. "We decorated things," she says, "things to float on the water. Christmas trees were on floats." Beauty catches somewhere on a corner of her mind, and she is thinking now of art, she was a fine-arts major, yes, at Goucher College.

"In my last year, I was selected to go into the WAVES," she discloses, and Nadine nods, knowing from the history provided by Betty's family that this is true, that Betty Plack served her country during World War II. "All hush-hush work, of course," Betty confides, "to break the Japanese codes."

She was the middle of three children, and her sister lives in the District. Betty, who is 86, looks forward to helping decorate her sister's tree. "We had to leave something for Santa Claus to eat," she says. "We had an honest-to-God chimney in that room."