At the assisted living home where my grandmother lives I watch the bobbing birdy heads, the grinding and cycling rhythms of their tremors. Parkinson’s, Essential Tremor, Huntington’s. All grave conductors of a rhythmic bodily noise. The ladies at St. Ann’s walk with a lithe labor; they look hung on hangers and lift each foot with patience and care, shaking all the while, strumming prayers, heads stuck in saintly bobbing, strumming a prayerful rhythm of staccatos that swarm the simple movements of looking left and right, up and down. The eyes hover amid the vibration and compose a mighty dignity, eyes of gentle and stricken lionesses. There are the non-shakers, usually nattering, living a necessarily self-centered lifestyle with nothing but their particularities to guide them in the discontinuity of a purely continuous life on six identical floors all drawn in a time and space that seems to shift and lag. I get lost nearly every time I visit St. Anns. Once inside the building I’m thrown off kilter in the font of sanitary smells and the fluorescent washes of bleak, memorial familiarity. Grandma laughs when I arrive at her door on the fourth floor panting and flustered. Grandma has no disease but the left side of her body is stitled and compressed from a stroke she suffered. She is a tiny woman, small enough that I pick her up like a baby and place her in the backseat of the car rather than patiently guiding her in. I spend more and more time at St. Anns. I slowly absorb and adopt the tight swinging motions of the tremor and the ladies don’t seem to notice. In fact it feels as if we’ve come into mutual focus, we’ve all surrendered and now drift in the same bobbing current together. Grandma runs the till at a little store housed on the first floor known as The Little Shoppe. Grandma is seventy-nine, one of the younger women in the building. She works two-hour shifts three times a week and I sit on a stool next to her behind the counter studying the gyrations of her customers. There is a strict center of gravity to each woman. She knows them all by name and the women are curt but polite, mildly competitive in the recounting of their woes. A round little woman with a walker that has two wheels in the front scoots around the counter and begins showing me a pair of three by five photos of her grandson. Identical shots of the boy from two different angles, his arms in front of him, blue casts from knuckles to elbows and she explains how he fell head over heels from an ATV. He had to wear the casts on graduation day, accepting his diploma with shattered bones struck in place by stiff blue orthopedic plaster. She bobs and yammers, repeating bits of the story in a sort of cycle until she is content that I’ve understood and when she tells me he’s in his thirties now I realize she’s been carrying these two photos around for twelve years or more, telling anyone who will listen about how happy the boy is, even when both arms were in casts and his mother had to help him shower. He looks happy in the photos and I imagine him walking home with two broken arms, the capsized ATV lying somewhere in a field waiting to be hoisted back to its four wheels, a monster turtle stuck on its back. By the end of her story we are nodding and bobbing in a perfect spasmodic polyphony and she seems comfortable with me, like we’re speaking the same chattering language. She wears a cropped wig pinned a bit too high and in an improbable frosted light brown color, the sheen of it’s acrylic mange. Her face is round and tight, drawn in toward a center, her little nose like a pinion point. Her navel is the other pinion, drawing her into a tight hunch, her spine curved like a warped spring. A symptom is like an expression, the way the disease expresses itself. Different diseases can express in similar ways, such that the tremor is a common language, a bridging cognate for universal communication among sufferers. The ladies at St. Anns don’t question my authenticity so much as they simply find it easier to understand me in our drifting language of ticking clocks and humidifiers, beanies babies and tuna fish sandwiches. A new acceptance of gravity and cycles and sameness, bobbing, marking time as you go.