Working backwards, Annie and I have spent the past six hours--not counting a break for not-very-good-pizza--working on Peg's Blue Book Project. What is her Blue Book Project? I used to describe it over the past three years it's been going on variously as "stupid", "a complete waste of time and money!", and "like the Blair Witch Project but scarier". What Peg first of all did was tear apart two or three meticulously kept scrapbooks of her career. You can imagine how much this pleased me, me who's trying to collate stuff for her website. She then made everyone, mostly Bonnie, lug everything--100 pages? 200?--to Staples to get color copies scanned, for nine million dollars. The rest she did here with our own printer. When I say "she", I mean Bonnie, Terri, anyone who is passing who knows how to work the printer. I think she had Lynette the woman who comes to do their feet pitching in too. Peg spends more on printer ink in one month than Kinko does all year. She wanted at least 25 copies of everything, old photos, new photos, old clippings, new clippings, reviews, predominantly stuff from her career. She then bought five hundred thousand plastic sleeves, inserted every single copy into its own sleeve, bought 30 plastic loose leaf binders, most of them blue, the idea being to fill the books with all this stuff all about her for her fans. She then got the idea of interspersing the publicity material with cartoons from the New Yorker, interesting articles, and an assortment of strange items such as a colored photo somone printed for her off the net of a fisher, which is a mink like animal (50 copies) and an 8 X 10 of the guy in Japan she's never met who uses her radio shows to teach English adult education classes in Hiroshima (67 copies).
I have no trouble whatsoever with the thought behind this project. The problem has been that she has taken originals from the albums and not replaced them, cut up original photos if they didn't fit or to make a collage (losing whatever was on the back), and then been totally utterly and completely incapable of organizing the actual filling of these books but would not let anyone help. Boxes and boxes and boxes have gone back and forth from the kitchen to Peg's quarters, back and forth and back and forth for more than two years--all to no avail. The kitchen gets covered with piles for about a week, Peg can't get at it, so treks it all back to her office, about 20 trips all piled on her walker. I have offered to help on about 300 occasions.
So tonight was Blue Book Night. With Peg in the ICU I had free rein to lug it ALL out here, Annie and I, aka The A Team, went to work and presto, we nailed the suckers. 12 books, in beautiful chronological order, not counting the fisher or Kyle in Japan or some old pics of the garage from the place I grew up in Fairfield. We are going to take a complete one in to Peg tomorrow. She will be thrilled. Is the general hope. The hitch now is finding out where all these books need to be sent, I know for a fact three of the fans have died (just waiting for their books).
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STAFF ON CALL:
Bonnie, who helped us get Odd in to Pittsfield to go visit Peg. We got him into Annie's car, plus wheelchair. Bonnie followed in her car and brought Odd home afterwards, after calling Pete from the gas station to meet them at the house and help lift Odd out. (Pete is married to a Hospice nurse, Denise, who was the bartender as it happened at my wedding. They race motorcycles and sidecars, where she hangs out with her head practically on the road, that kind).
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Jennifer, a sort of adopted daughter (Peg's not mine) drove over to the hospital from Boston and she visited with Peg most of the day. It was wonderful to have her support and of course Annie's.
Latest medical news: a little more bleeding today but Peg is stable. She has apparently suffered a massive heart attack, even though she didn't feel it. But they can't dose her with heparin (blood thinner) while she's still bleeding. So they may go up there again to see what's what. Meanwhile, they couldn't get a decent vein (did I write all this already, I worry I may have, too bad) so they went into the jugular and I had to give permission and my poor Mama has so many tubes sticking out of her--oh God.
She is nevertheless chipper. I have told her everything the doctor said. Will she process it? No idea.
I told Odd today that unless the bleeding stopped or they fixed it--that Mama may not be coming home. He cried, we hugged. Bonnie arrived, Odd had breakfast. Half an hour later I said okay, you ready, let's go to the hospital.
"Hospital?" he said. "To see Peg. Yes." "Oh," he says. "When's she coming home?"
It's hard enough telling him she may not, ONCE.
Bed. Knackered. Annie telling me to stop.
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