A quarter-million forgotten conversations | David Greenberger | TEDxAlbany

For the past 32 years, artist David Greenberger has made aging and decline the subject of his creative endeavors. As someone who deliberately remains
outside the field of geriatrics and medicine, Greenberger's observations and reflections offer a rich and unique vantage point. While he is aware of
the cognitive losses of his elderly subjects, he approaches each person as whole and complete despite the smaller range of their lives. He responds
to what they have in common: the desire for genuine communication and delight in a new experience. From these conversations, he creates books and
audio works intended as an art experience. The recordings and monologue performances are in his own voice, an abstraction that is essential for listeners to turn inward and think of their own lives.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

The first funeral
I ever went to was in 1979.

I was 25,

and I was working
as an activities director

at a nursing home in Boston.

There was a man at the home
by the name of Arthur Brown.

One day, he took sick,
was taken to the hospital,

and he died shortly after that -
all in a short span of time.

But he was 96, had lived
a long and healthy life up till then.

I asked around to see if anybody
wanted to go to his funeral,

and there was another man
at the home who wanted to go;

he was the one who wanted to go.

His name was Arthur Wallace.

So the two of us set off
to go to this graveside service.

I borrowed a car.

On the way there, it took
a little longer than I thought -

I got a little bit lost -

and the entire way there,

Arthur was giving
a sort of running commentary

on skirt lengths and billboards
and bad directions,

and all the while,

he was monkeying around
with his hearing aid

that would fall
out of his ear onto the seat,

and he would jab it with a pen
in some kind of a repair ritual

and put it back in.

It would fall out again.

And the entire time he had a cigar
that was not lit but was wet on both ends.

(Laughter)

So this is who I was
in this small container with

for the time it took to find the cemetery.

Finally found it, pulled in.

There were a couple people
standing by one grave site.

I parked the car and helped Arthur out.

There were a lot of leaves
on the ground - it was November -

and I walked him across the leaves
over to where these people were standing.

There were a couple of elderly women

who were distant relatives
of the deceased,

and then there was a minister.

And when we were through
with these brief introductions,

the minister then said
a very short service.

At the end of that, he asked
if anybody else wanted to say anything.

And Arthur Wallace, who I brought along,
wanted to say something.

So he stepped forward
from where he was next to me,

and he said something like this:

"Arthur Brown was a good man,

but funny thing was
he didn't like bananas.

Now when his lunch
would come up on the tray,

if there was a banana on it,

he'd give it to me.

I like a banana.

I like a banana okay.

A banana's my number two fruit.

My number one fruit's a big, mild pear."

And then he stepped back next to me.

That was the first funeral I ever went to.

(Laughter)

So I should now tell you

how I came to be working
in a nursing home in the first place.

About a year before,
I was on a cross-country trip

and stopped in Palm Springs

where my grandmother
was spending the winter.

I met a couple who were
lifelong friends of hers, the Feitlers.

And Herb Feitler and I
spent the better part of a day

sort of palling around.

We went in his car

to flea markets in surrounding
desert communities out there.

And I just had a fantastic time.

When I got back home to Boston,

in considering this fantastic time I had,

I realized that what made it unique

was that it was the first time
I sort of had made friends with somebody

who was significantly older than me
but wasn't in my family.

And I liked that, and I thought
I would like to do that again.

I had just graduated from art school
with a degree in painting,

and I thought there was something
I could do that would be better for me

than scooping ice cream
and delivering flowers.

So I heard about a job at a nursing home
as an activities director

that somebody I'd gone
to school with was doing

and was going to be leaving the job.

So I went there and applied,
and I got the job -

for 50 cents an hour less
because I had no prior experience.

But I started then, right away.

It was in a residential,
tree-lined neighborhood

in Jamaica Plain, in Boston,

and it was an old, converted duplex house,

hence its name, the Duplex Nursing Home.

And as soon as I set foot

into this environment,

I was just captivated with it.

It was just filled with riveting bits
of conversation that I had to write down,

here being some examples:

"I keep smoking,

but what I really want to do
is drive around in a stick-shift car."

"If a crow would see my picture,
the crow would fly away."

"Mars will probably be a state someday."

(Laughter)

"I'm going to get me a fly,
and I'm going to keep it in my room."

(Laughter)

"The most important thing
of human behavior

is don't be terrorizing anybody."

"I heard a knock at the door,
and I hung up on it."

(Laughter)

"When you rake the yard,
you rake the yard with a rake."

I love that one.

(Laughter)

"I can speak five languages,
and I can also blabber."

(Laughter)

"The weatherman says
it's going to be cold tonight,

so around midnight, I'm going to cook up
a pork chop in the moonlight.

Doesn't cost too much
to cook in the moonlight."

"My shoveling days are over, Davy baby."

"I'll smoke another cigar, by and by."

So these quotes
and conversations that I had

became the basis
for a publication I started

called "The Duplex Planet."

I didn't know exactly where it was going,

but I felt like it was something
that I needed to communicate as an artist,

and in fact, I set aside painting.

I felt like if this was to be something
that I was to find my way in,

I shouldn't have any other outlet
that would allow that.

I got the first issue together

and gathered all the residents
together one afternoon

and handed out a copy to each one of them.

Within about two minutes, they figured out

that I wasn't also passing out cake
or refreshments or something

and most of them wandered away,
discarding these.

However, that night,

copies that made it home with me
roommates and friends saw,

and I instantly got
that this was for everybody

but the people in it.

Had it been more traditional oral history,

it would have been a keepsake of sorts

for the residents,

but this was something else:

this was characters
springing to life on the page.

So I got to know
all 45 of these residents;

it was an all-male
nursing home, this place.

Some were talkative; some were not.

Some were agitated; some were calm.

Some were very articulate
about all manner of things,

and some didn't really make
a lot of sense in expected ways.

And it was those latter ones
who I was most interested in.

I felt fortunate to be in close contact
with people who were going through that,

and I came to see

that they ended up not making sense

having made the same sense
that we all make when we make sense.

If that makes sense.

(Laughter)

There was one man at the home
by the name of William Gunn Ferguson,

affectionately known as Fergie
to everybody there.

And he needed a sentence or so

as a runway,

and he'd be off, darting around.

And it might come back
to where it started,

or maybe it didn't,

but it was also an incredible trip.

So this is one thing that he said:

"The best place to hide
is in the top of a tree.

I used to tell those children,

'If you want to hide from your mother,
you climb up in that tree and hide.'

I'll tell ya, they'd hide
so I couldn't even find them.

And I don't mean any small trees.

I mean trees that were 50, 60 feet high.

And they'd fall out of those trees too.

(Laughter)

They'd fall out of those trees
just like you'd smoke a pipe.

(Laughter)

And I used to have a lot of pipes.

Until the children got into them,
and they hid them.

And you know where they hid them?

In the trees."

(Laughter)

One day at work -

and I say work, but it really
just seemed like my life at the time.

It didn't really seem like work.

Though there came a time
about two years later

when I felt like I made a better friend
to the residents there

than I did as an employee for the owners,

and so I left the job.

But anyway, this one day,

a resident by the name of Larry Greene

came to me,

and with all the urgency he could muster,

he said, "Dave, nobody's come
to get my dad's tray."

Now, the tray part I understood -
their noontime meal came up on a tray -

but the dad part didn't make any sense,
because his father was long dead.

But I followed him out
of this activities and dining room

around another part of the home,

and he led me to this room
that was shared by two men,

one of whom was sitting there,

Walter McGeorge.

There he sat with his tray
in front of him on a little table,

and Larry went over and stood next to him

and said, "Hi, Dad."

And Walter was smiling.

He seemed to be smiling for Larry
as if to acknowledge the "Hi, Dad,"

and he seemed to be smiling at me

as a way to say, "It's all right.
It's no big deal.

We'll let him think I'm his father."

Larry was in this remarkable state

where he thought
that anybody who smiled at him

was an old friend of his,

and he had sort of remembered his life

into something much easier
than it had ever been.

He had had a fairly difficult life.

He had worked on a coal wharf,

never had enough money,

had six children.

He would now say that he had two children.

You could name any of the six,
and he would acknowledge them as his,

but he would always have
the math come out to be two.

It just seemed like an easier life
that way or something.

But what I learned from Larry
and from Walter and from Fergie

and from many other people there

was that anything was as real
as anybody said it was.

The days of their big
adventures were over,

and they were now
sort of recombining things,

and they were coming out differently,

and the most direct way
for me to get to know somebody

was to just accept
whatever they said as real

because it was real for them

and that was how
I was going to get to know them.

(Music with ticking sound)

(Recording) David Greenberger:
Funny how time marches on.

But they're all in the same boat a year.

Happy-go-lucky.

How time marches on.

They must realize
they are a kid no longer.

They're always looking
for that first snowstorm

that we had the other day.

I don't suppose
you'd call that a snowstorm.

Just about everybody likes to see
the old-fashioned Christmas.

Yeah, but time marches on.

[Time Marches On]

(Church bells ringing)

(Music ends)

(On stage) DG: "The Duplex Planet"

continued as a little, self-published,
chapbook-sized periodical

that I started back then in 1979,

but in the '90s, it became better known,
the work that I was doing,

through several books that came out.

The material was adapted
into a comic book,

and there were a couple of documentaries.

And for the past 15 years or so,

I've been most interested
in creating monologues with music.

I've done a series of CDs and performances

for museums and arts presenters
and universities and NPR.

And these have been done with a variety
of different musical ensembles,

different styles.

But in all cases,

I strive to have the music

be a fully active element
in the final piece,

not background music.

I'd likened it to a band
with a guy talking - me.

So these audio pieces that I record,

they're not recreations
of time that I spent with somebody;

they're abstracted from it.

The words and the music
come together for me and fall into place

when it seems like how it feels
to remember that person.

So that it's a gauge that I use to know,

and hopefully it resonates
in some way for somebody else.

These aren't documentary snapshots

of elderly people that I met.

But I try to have it be

something that will resonate
separate from that.

I'm not using their voices,
the actual voices of them,

or projecting their pictures behind me.

Because I want these to resonate
with listeners individually.

Last year, I was in Milwaukee,
finishing up an artist residency

that I did there for the Center on Age
and Community at the university there.

I had spent three months

talking and conversing, meeting
with elderly who have memory loss,

varying degrees of it -

from barely noticeable
to profoundly fragmented.

The one thing that everybody
had in common that I spoke with, though,

was that everybody liked
the idea of talking with me.

They agreed to talk with me.

Maybe they thought they already knew me,
but it didn't really matter.

What was amazing for me to see

was that the people

who were the least able to have a -
carry on a narrative conversation

still had the blueprint,
the shape of a conversation

that they utilized.

I would say something,
and then they would say something,

and then I would say something:
we'd go back and forth.

And they still adhered
to that sort of social convention.

That it didn't always link up -

I might say something, I often would,

and then they would say something
completely separate from that,

and I would go with that,

and then they would go somewhere else.

It didn't link up, but I realized
that it didn't matter.

(Strumming guitar)

(Recording) DG: I had to behave.

I had two sisters,
and I had a - let's see -

I had a - let's see - six brothers,
a lot of brothers.

My mother, all she had to do was work.

My father worked every day.

He worked in a - let's see -

he worked in a - let's see -

he worked in a - oh, where did he work?

He worked every day.

It took a lot of money
to support his kids.

I wasn't real happy.

I did it because I had to.

When my mother comes after me,
then I didn't feel so good.

She came after me.

She came after me.

She came after me

to see that I was doing okay.

[Mother Comes After]

(Music ends)

(On stage) DG: Arthur Wallace, the man
who had a mild pear as his favorite fruit,

ended up dying about a year
about the man whom he eulogized,

and his demise was not so sudden.

And it was remarkable to see
what happened with him.

He'd always been very precise
in all of his recollections,

was very interested
in world events and politics.

And what was happening then, at the end,

was that the facts
were becoming dislodged.

(Feedback sound)

(Recording) DG: I remember a sign
on Brimmer Street to go to the South Pole.

[The Last Words of Arthur Wallace]

I don't understand,
but I do dream about it at nighttime.

Brimmer is where the State House is.

I signed on to go with Byrd.

I made a mistake, and I asked him

"Why do I dream at night
that I go to the South Pole?"

I remember a sign on Brimmer Street,
near the State House.

His name was Byrd.

I occasionally dreamed
that I went with Byrd to the South Pole,

but he quit when we got to Scott's grave,

where the Englishman Scott was,

who perished.

I dreamt that Byrd
got in a violent argument with us,

and he quit.

But the Americans went on
until they discovered it.

That's my dream. I dream it.

Why is my side all numb?

I must have gotten frozen.

I must have gone there,
and that's why my side is all numb now.

(Feedback sound ends)

(On stage) DG: I did
some rough math and figured

I've had about a quarter-million
conversations in my life,

and I've forgotten almost all of them.

Conversations are a way for two people

to be in the same time
and place as one another.

And we extract the data from it,

and we're left, then,
with an emotional memory of somebody.

I'm an artist,

and I'm also somebody
in the second half of my life,

well into it,

and I think I've learned as a human being
and grown as an artist

from continuing to meet people

who are living
the last years of their lives.

The differences between us are obvious,

but it's the things that we have in common
that are the most fulfilling to me.

That's where you find the surprise
and the mystery and the truth.

(Music starts)

(Recording) DG: I felt like I was really
getting towards Alzheimer's.

I was hoping it wasn't Alzheimer's,

but I was finding myself
repeating myself very often,

just in a normal conversation.

And I felt that I better do something
to help with my memory.

My daughter's the one
that came up with this program here.

One of my sons drove me over
for the first time

to find out what it was about

because he wanted to see it too,
what all was involved in it.

This was actually not too long ago,

and I thought it was quite interesting

and decided to register

and keep on coming back
on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And you know what?

It has helped me.

Since I've been coming here,

I've not noticed any further
deterioration of my memory.

Nothing I can detect anyway.

I'm satisfied.

[Satisfied]

(Music continues)

(On stage) DG: Thank you.

(Applause)