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
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)