Celebrity Crushes

     My mother is in love with Paul McCartney. "Oh, Paulie!" she says. In her youthful sixty-nine-year-old face is the first flush of adolescence, the breathless "I would die for him!" swoon. This is my mother, the seventies disco queen, the eighties jogger, and the nineties horseback rider, the former school psychologist who now cannot shower or dress by herself.
     Alzheimer's crept up on my mother unexpectedly and damaged her orbito-frontal cortex and thalamus and hippocampus, making it difficult for her to control her impulses. Maybe this can explain the sort of Beatles fan she is today, the boy-crazy alter ego who would like to tear her hair out, stomp her feet, and scream the way lovesick girls do, in a horrific frenzy.
     I'm a little embarassed by this woman who says, "I hope Paul visits today" and carries around old CD liners with his picture on them. "Look at Paul," she says in doctors' waiting rooms and in the supermarket line. All she has to do is fish into her purse or coat pockets and Paul appears as unexpected as if he had just made a fresh entrance into her life. Paul is more real to her than her husband or her daughter. To her, we are rude, nonsensical creatures who help her dress and undress in a tug of war over arm holes and buttons and the subtle differences between right and left.
     It reminds me of my first celebrity crush. I was a young girl at summer camp and my cousin in another cabin had a poster of Tommy Howell (the centerfold in Teen Beat) taped to the wall of her bunk. I had to have one just like that and I kissed my glossy flat poster boy with quick, shy pecks on the mouth. He was my practice boyfriend.
     The adolescent Marcel experiences something similar with the actress La Berma. He yearns for "the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams." While Tommy Howell doesn't necessarily compete with La Berma as a masterwork of dramatic art, there is still that unfulfilled desire for a well-known actor.
     At its absolute best, my relationship with my mother is a form of "karma yoga" or selfless service. I try to perform some small kindness. Sometimes that means offering her a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes that means talking about Paul as if he were a dinner guest. And sometimes all that means is putting on a Beatles CD and watching her sway back and forth like a fish swimming upstream, mouthing all the lyrics. For a moment, she is a boy-crazy teenager, biting her knuckles and screaming through her tears. And then the moment passes and we have to navigate the rest of the day as mother and daughter.