CityView Magazine

8 | Januar y 2020 M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S Remember Uncle Owen? BY BILL MCFADYEN O ne of the saddest but most useful lessons I learned in living alongside an Alzheimer's patient was that I could not bring her to where I was in time. A lifetime of memories appeared to still float around inside my mother's head. However, the pathways that connected the memories in an orderly fashion were irreparably fractured. Sometimes, we could navigate around the potholes in her mind. But sometimes the gullies were too deep to cross. Repeated reminders as to what day it was or what year it was or what city we were in did little to backfill those gullies of washed-out memory. All that did was frustrate everyone in the room. Instead, I became a time traveler. If Mom believed she was waiting on the Fayetteville-to- Atkinson train in anticipation of visiting her maternal cousins and aunts and uncles, then I sat down in the station with her. We waited together, looking across the room at the wall calendar from 1944. If she was teaching kindergarten again on that September day in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel devastated the North Carolina coast, then we made sure that all the children in the classroom had rides home. If it was the aernoon that she was to teach children's Catechism at the church, then we would practice the first few questions: "Who made you?" "God." "What else did God make?" "God made all things." "Why did God make you and all things?" "For His own glory." Sometimes I was still her son. But increasingly, I was just another nice person in the train station or another figure of authority in a classroom of vulnerable children or simply a vaguely familiar visitor in an even less familiar sitting room. Mom's dad was Malcolm McQueen. His brothers were Pete and Bill; his sister was Catherine; and there was another brother who died very early in life in a fire. ey grew up in the little North Carolina community of White Oak, 20 or so miles from White Lake. Mom grew up spending summers at her paternal grandmother Kate McQueen's cottages on the side of the lake close to where Goldston's Beach is now. I was less than a glimmer in someone's eye during those years, but my brothers and I heard stories of those old days from our very beginning. In my childhood, Bill McQueen and his wife Louise used to rent a place on that side of the lake for a week each summer to commemorate the old days. We brothers would go with them for the whole week, and Mom and Dad would come in and out and in again.

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