Mommy and Daddy are eighty-eight and love to come to New York for lunch with my friends Cornie and Terry. Cornie and Terry really enjoy "Peggy and Walter" since they have no elderly parents. They especially enjoy my mother in her pink beret. We all stroll to a nearby restaurant where my mother will order soup, finish it, and suggest soup. Cornie will tell her she already had soup, mother will ask if she liked it. When Cornie tells her yes, she’ll smile.

Cornie usually takes mother’s martinis, that are very strong, and pours half into her waterglass. One time, Cornie took a huge swallow of her water and turned ghostly white. Needless to say, she’d forgotten her efforts to keep Peggy from inebriation. But that is part of the total Peggy and Walter experience.

My mother, who is very pretty, is very forgetful and very deaf. She knows something is wrong with her and it worries her, but then she smiles and waves it off.

Mommy used to take me to task for my lack of energy. She was like a whirling helicopter, but now her propellers are damaged permanently. She is still so lovely and she tries so hard to follow the conversation and make appropriate responses which are so far off that they can be sad or very funny. I can lose her in a museum and worry as if I was losing a child. She desperately wants to be a grown up again.She hates Hillary Clinton, thinks my brother is dating a Feragamo instead of someone who manages Feragamo. She insists on things that are totally wrong and oh she loves to hide her jewelry and blame the gardener (who doesn’t exist as they live in an apartment now). We can’t find her jewelry either; she hides it so well. She has had the silver taken to the vault and insists it’s stolen. This can make us all very irritable. My friends find her senility charming. I feel sad, angry, protective in flashes all at the same time. My brother who finds humor in a dishwasher finds my mother hilarious. Her repetitive questions are fielded well by Daddy. He is in total use of his faculties and got pneumonia last year playing golf in the snow with a red ball. So Daddy has to deal day to day with the extinction of her personality. She adores and thrives on attention and asks for it continually. Some days she will take a bath, dry off, forget she has taken one several minutes later and repeat the process, confused that the bathmat is wet. Some days she’ll send two very nice gifts to a bride forgetting another bride who will be presentless. Her friends forgive her as she was so wonderful once, but they don’t call as often (except Hallie Jane). The bridge games are over, luncheons over as she forgets to go. She is left with a fragment of her fragrance, like a sachet left too long in a drawer.

By Tina