Minter KrotzerSHAKER OR FEEZERI am picking up dry cleaning at the New Spring cleaners in Brooklyn. I tell them I will be moving to Philadelphia in a couple of weeks and thank them for the good work they have done over the years. The seamstress comes out and says goodbye as does the owner and her husband. Here, the owner says, handing me a Chinese wall calendar for the next year, for you. Why leaving New York? She asks, concerned. My husband has Parkinson's. It is hard here with the subways, I explain. All three of them nod. They know Hal*. The woman behind me in line, a stranger, speaks up in a Brooklyn accent. Is he a shaker or a freezer? (With accent: shakuh or freezah?) I have a puzzled look on my face, am not sure what to say. You know, with Parkinson's you're either one or the other, she explains. My father was a shakuh but my brother is a freezah. I know what she means now. I had never thought about Parkinson's in quite that way. I knew the symptoms were very different for each person but I hadn't realized that if you were a shaker then you weren't a freezer – you couldn't be both. It's true that I had never seen anyone both shake and freeze with this illness. He's a freezer, I answer. Of all the years I've known Hal I have never seen him shake with tremors but he does freeze when he walks. Freezing is the term used to explain when someone with Parkinson's tries to move their feet but can't, they become glued to the ground. With Parkinson's you can become a human statue, unable to move, grounded to the ground. Ironically, the woman we rent our apartment from down the street, an elderly woman with a Lebanese heritage, has Parkinson's. She's a shaker. I tell people I am the only person in the house without Parkinson's. It is interesting to observe the difference between Yvonne's Parkinson's and Hal's. Hal always tries to help her since she is doing worse than he is. He helps her with her laundry and he takes the trash out for her. He even went to visit her in the hospital when she had an infection in her foot from wearing the same pair of tennis shoes for thirty years! She is notoriously cheap, even gave the trick or treaters old candy canes from the Christmas before. In the winters, after a snowfall, she'd stand on the front step with a shovel, hoping that someone, a stranger, would feel sorry for her and offer to shovel for free. One time she snagged Hal's friend, Dennis, on his way in to visit us. I see more clearly now the difference between Yvonne's version of Parkinson's and Hal's. Hal's neurologist says there's no such thing as one form of Parkinson's – it's many diseases under one name – and just under our roof you can see what he means. It's a hard disease, the woman behind me continues. I wish you and your husband the very best out there in Philadelphia. (Every place outside of New York City is often referred to as "out there.") Out there in the abyss. I wish you well too, I say, waving to all, taking my dry cleaning and heading out the storefront. As I walk home, past all of the other stores I will miss, Terrace Bagels, the Kim Family's Food Mart, the used bookstore, I think about how, in a minute long conversation at the corner dry cleaners, I learned something about Parkinson's I had not known. Sometimes it's the everyday people you learn the most from, the ones who are also living with this disease, who can speak of it as simply as he's a shaker or a freezer. Speaking of it so simply can sometimes make you feel better about it, pretending what your husband is experiencing can be boiled down to two words. *(Editors note: Minter Krotzer's husband is the poet, Hal Sirowitz.)
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