“You were dozing, Mom.”
        She stares back at me from the soft high-backed chair beside her hospital bed with the rails lowered, but does not respond. Who could blame her? She is 83. A tumor in her lung constricts her breath. A tumor in her brain squeezes away memory, shrinking her world into a tighter ball each day. I've been informed once again that she is near the end. That's one reason why I'm here.
        “This just came on,” I say, gesturing toward the TV. “We could watch something else.”
        Mother's eyes drift toward the screen, where Alice, with a much-too-sweet smile on her face, is leading a suspicious Ralph toward a wooden chair beside the table covered by a checkered cloth in the middle of the Spartanly furnished living room/dining room/kitchen.
        Ralph, mother isn't here. It's like I said, I just want to make you comfortable. Come on, now, sit down and I'll get you a nice cold drink. Come on, Ralphie. What would you like, Ralph? Lemonade? Or milk? Or juice?
        Let me have what you're drinkin'. I want to get loaded too.
        My parents rarely drank, and Alice's ploy to soften up Ralph with fawning attention so he'll buy them a TV would never have worked for even a second in the Heller house. But there is something about this scene that is familiar, nevertheless. Perhaps it's simply the fact that, like Mother, I've seen it before—with her and Dad, on our own snowy black and white Motorola with rabbit ears, when I was six, seven, eight, and older. Or maybe it's the stark minimalism of the stage set: the humble credenza in the corner with Ralph's black prairie schooner-shaped lunch bucket resting beside the out-of-place-looking silver candy dish on a pedestal, the only ornament in an otherwise almost unbearably bleak room, with walls so old and washed-out looking I could never tell if they were covered by faded wallpaper or simply stains. Not a single picture or memento relieves the blank gray walls. On the opposite side of the set, the “kitchen,” the deep sink looks like it belongs in a janitor's closet beside a mop. To its immediate right is the tiny gas-burning stove, and of course the barely 20th-century-looking ice box, which Alice will complain about through the entire series.
        Maybe what I really recognize is the one-determined-step-above-poverty reflected in the fierce austerity of the Kramdens' apartment, which Alice labors so relentlessly to keep running, the home that would be so much homier, if only she and Ralph had a TV. Or an electric stove. Or a refrigerator. Or a child.
        “I don't care,” Mother says. “Whatever you want.”
        I watch her take a shallow breath. Each breath is noticeable. Planned.
        Comfy, Sweetums?. . . By the way—