Robert Peters

I saw Meryl Streep’s portrayal of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in movie THE IRON LADY. It’s not surprising to me that her portrayal is causing a great stir. Ms Thatcher presently has dementia and Streep tackles getting inside the mind of Thatcher utterly flawlessly. There’s not one nuance out of place of Streep’s enactment of a person with dementia along with a person who once was so powerful and visible on the global stage of history.

I have read where Ronald Reagan’s son Ronald Reagan Jr disapproved of Thatcher’s daughter Carol’s biography on her Mother with very candid details on her dementia. Well I disapprove of Reagan Jr disapproval because he thinks Carol exploits her mother’s private matter of dementia. Having dementia is not a disgrace; it’s a brain disease, which needs to be explored in order to develop knowledge to see if any remedy is at hand. Sugarcoating dementia by keeping it closeted leads nowhere of dealing with its insidious reality.

Reagan Jr’s dad former President Reagan made his own public announcement of his dementia, which his brain disease was commonly labeled as Alzheimer. As American aging population lives longer the percentage of dementia is forever on the increase.

I too, live with a person with dementia. He is the well-known poet and critic and former Victorian Scholar Robert Peters. He’s been my beloved companion for almost forty years. He developed signs of dementia for at least ten years. He’s been taking namenda and aricept drugs for his dementia for some time now. I believe these drugs have kept the progression of Robert’s dementia at bay where he still can be a jolly fellow without any concern of his plight. It’s my job to protect him from harm’s way. Comparing notes with other caretakers of how to deal with dementia is definitely therapeutic.

Meryl Streep, Carol Thatcher or I owe no apologies for sharing the world of dementia because it is here with us with a vengeance.

I find it arduous at times to unblock the flow of blogs and keep a steady currency but I insist on trying. In the relative news of poetry I received word from Lawrence R. Smith, editor of Caliban Online is going to run Robert Peters’ long poem How an Old Man Commemorates  Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) in #3 issue in mid-April. This forthcoming issue of Caliban will be paying tribute to the deceased Renaissance poet George Hitchcock (1914-2010) It great to see that Lawrence has resurrected his now au courant magazine being online and all. He took a hiatus from his editorship of Caliban by doing his own writings– novels and such. As they say, there’s a season for everything.

Robert and I met our producer & the composer of the  musical score Harlan Steinberger and our associate producer Michael C. Ford of RP’s latest CD Going Down The River In A Hayloft Coffin at Mimi’s Café.

This kaffeeklatsch gathering between us four is the fun part.   It is always a  pleasure to break bread amongst birds of a feather before getting back to hardcore business.   Layers of our past become thinner as we find more about each other.   When friends & business associates allow themselves such encounters there are elements of risks.   Did I reveal too much?   Did I bore my fellow kaffeeklatsch gatherers with too much details of my past?   I say to these rhetorical questions is to learn balance of reciprocation so what you bring to the table will soften the blow of our hardcore endeavors.

So after the scintillating kaffeeklatsch, we went home to my place where Harlan gave us “Art for Art’s sake” lessons on  cyberspace of how to promote RP’s cd.   Harlan was lenient on us by being cognitive of how much we can take in before our brains began to fry.  Therefore the anticipated hardcore business aspects of promoting art was reduced to softcore business.     So seriousness and pleasure can definitely produce potentially great art.

Poet Robert Peters came out with What Dillinger Meant to Me published by Seahorse Press in 1983.  These poems truly captured the time in the 1930s when John Dillinger was caught in a shootout with FBI agent Melvin Purvis who tracked down Dillinger in small North wood resort town in Wisconsin called Manitowish Waters at the Little Bohemia Lodge .    This place was very near Peters small home town Eagle River. Robert Peters evokes such keen flavor of these rustic areas and the rural folks who inhabited the areas with all salacious hanky-panky and other idiosyncratic attitributes amongst them.  Peters also calls up the ways of survival of picking wild berries, deer hunting, sawmills,  ice-fishing, & building one’s home with the natives trees.   Outhouses were as ubiquitous as the trees and the numerous lakes.  Sears Roebuck catalogue’s pages were used for wipes.  Peters filled in his poetic lines with such clarity and detail of  the indigenous flora and fauna of that area.    He captured the  fears & myths of the wilderness be it “Swamp man” or prowling wolves & lurking bears.   Peters’ parents had seen John Dillinger as latter day Robin Hood.   They were dirt poor like so many of these north wood Wisconsin kinfolks and they were glad to see their sense of  justice done when it came down to proper distribution of wealth during the Depression.

Anyone interested can now read this whole book  Dillinger on line for no cost.   Anyone can print it out and read it leisurely.  Peters does have limited signed author’s copies for anyone who would like purchase them by Check for twenty dollars to 9431 Krepp Drive, Huntington Beach, CA 92646.

I so impressed with Karen Neurohr in how she conducted the interview with Bob. She came replete with state-of-the-art video & mike & whatnots. Her line of questions to Bob brought out the vintage performer he once was. She would request him to read some of the daughter of a dust bowl sharecropper poems. Karen did her homework. She found so much stuff on Bob’s relationship with this daughter Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Karen would ask Bob to interpet the poems he would read in the mike. Lo and behold! Right off the cuff, Bob, in a professorial and folksy vein, would extrapolate the poems with zest and insightfulness. He topped off this inteview reading his own poem to Wilma:

“Wilma, We Might Have Been

Sweeties.

In overalls and straw hat,

chewing timothy, I’d amble

over. You’d fetch a jar of

frosty artesian well water

and draw me to the parlor

to hear new poems from your

five cent tablet, poems about

lovable (and not so lovable)

kith and kin. You were setting

up shooting gallery ducks–No,

that’s too facile: you embedded

folks in amber. Did you know

back then that poems were so

durable? Or that I loved you?”

After the interview ends, Karen begins to pack up her stuff and I offer her a slice of carrot cake.  Bob gets up from his seat, the warm blanket with two prideful lions printed on it that I covered his legs before the interview  falls on the floor, exposing his large catheter bag as he picks it up to go to the bathroom. It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s dog Toto knocks down the Wizard’s facade and his warts and all were revealed.   Karen never batted an eye. This morning inteview was an utter delight for me to witness the finesse between poet and journalist. This conducted oral history will be integrated on Wilma’s Web.

Robert’s is going to be interviewed this morning, He doesn’t know it yet but he will when Karen Neurohr arrives here at ten o’clock. Karen is a Oklahoma State University Librarian who is coordinating a project over “Okie” poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Karen is going around conducting oral history interviews with folks who knew Wilma. Wilma and Robert had a great mash. Wilma especially would call Robert from time to time and rap about poetry or anything.

Wilma would send original poetry to him on gum wrappers, ripped brown paper bags or anything she could to write on. Most of these archives are housed away in Lawrence Kansas University unopened to the public scrutiny. There are some of these items at the Dr Seusss Library at the University of San Diego. Here is the website for Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel: Wilma’s web.  In one of Robert’s poetry books The Faimial Love and Other Misfortunes, he dedicates this book in the Prologue to Wilma. He’ll probably read that on tape today with the interview with Karen. I better get Robert all gussied up for the forthcoming event. I got to make sure he has his small catheter bag attached instead of his large one that drags on the floor. We must keep up appearances.

Robert had to get a biopsy from his urinary bladder. This was called minor surgery. The surgery went well but Robert had to go home with a catheter. Yes! It took him awhile to get used to it. To pee at anytime without going to the toilet was too liberating for Robert to assume. He was given two pairs of pee bags. One pair was one that would be suitable at night because it could carry more pee. The other pair were more portable. One can latch the bag on one’s thigh and meet your public. The problem with this portable bag is because it’s smaller, that one will have to subtly slide away into a public stall and furtively empty the bag. Robert and I have not gone out in public to give this a a twist in the wind. Perhaps we will before the end of the week before he goes back to Kaiser and gets the catheter removed. Now why did Kaiser give Robert two sets of bags? Courtesy my friends-courtesy. It never hurts to have a backup bag in case something botchy happens.

I am Bob’s spouse and his caretaker. He has a form of dementia and he’s had for some time. He takes two memory pills a day. What do these pills do? In lay-person’s terms, they stop bad protein molecules from progressively destroying neurons. In Bob’s case these pills seem to do the job. Like most folks who are caretakers do more and more research so they can do what they can to help their beloveds with their type of dementia. I have a detached fascination of learning from Alzheimer’s literature that there are seventy definable forms of dementia. Alzheimer seems to be the most prevalent form of dementia. I will not use this forum to even name a few other forms because of the tagentry that might derive by doing so. I will say this much that many of the seventy definable forms of dementia deals with different locations of the brain and different types of bad protein molecules. Some forms of dementia may not deal with bad protein molecules because a person can get brain damage by so many other ways such as near drowning, auto accident, lack of oxygen to the brain etc. Bob’s form of dementia hasn’t really been definitively diagnosed by Kaiser Permanente. Our family members and friends too seem not to make of it of Bob’s short term memory deficit. It’s not completely shot.

Bob has the good fortune not to be bummed out by his short term memory lost. Occasionally he brings it up to me in a concerning manner but doesn’t dwell on it for long. He’s going on eighty-five so he does have aging syndromes such as stiff hips, very hard of hearing and other expected creaks. Some folks who have dementia, their personality turns to worse but Bob’s good natured personality has not done that. Believe me I’m not looking for the other shoe to drop. Meanwhile I try to relish every nanosecond I have with Bob. You see he’s still an extremely creative man. His editorial part of his brain in totally intact. He does spend many hours doing New York crosswords. We go to our local Scrabble clubs at least twice a week. His new CD Going Down the River in a Hayloft Coffin deals at the end of journey about his frailties. One of his poems Memory Loss In A Parking Lot speaks volumes of his poignant vulnerabilities.