Sometimes nothing helps the I’m-97-Years-Old-Dammit blues.
You can’t listen to music because your ears don’t work right and the sound is all jumbled.
You can’t watch a movie because the closed captioning, often with misspellings and critical information missing, speeds by, making it hard to follow the story.
And anyway, because of your eyesight, the set and the actors are blurry. Also, so many actors are young and dress in crazy ways. “Who are these people trying to be?” you often find yourself asking.
Your sisters are gone, your husband and three of your four children too, and there’s this daughter who was actually your least favorite child and she appears to be in charge of your life, or thinks she is. She’s really only about nine years old and just got a new bicycle. She doesn’t know everything. Come on.
Andrea on bike (age 9) with friend.
Your tear ducts are “clogged,” the doctor says, and so you can’t cry when you want to and you want to cry for all of the above and because your eyesight has gotten worse lately and it’s getting harder to read and do puzzles, the only two activities you can perform while sitting in your La-Z-Boy aside from napping, which gets old. The warm compresses and massaging for the tear duct clogging is helping but not much.
The daughter comes over and tries to think of things for you to do.
Like trying on wigs at the wig store, which is a place you’ve been telling her you want to visit so you can purchase a wig and won’t have to keep paying to get your hair permed. The hair is so dry and it’s not much of a head of hair any more, really. It’s almost all gone on top. A wig would be so much easier to deal with.
No. Not in the mood for the wig store. It’s too far to drive there, wherever there is. This town is way too big.
How about shopping? Dollar Store? Goodwill? Grocery store? Mall?
No. It’s raining, or it might rain, or there’s a breeze that will muss the head of hair, whose few remaining strands have been carefully constructed by the kind lady in the beauty shop who always asks about the well-being of the daughter and her dog, and who has recently learned that the dog sometimes wears a raincoat.
The daughter thinks the raincoat makes the dog look a little like Audrey Hepburn. This is not something to tell the hair lady, though. Really the daughter ought to reconsider making such a silly statement, but she has always said far-fetched things. All her life. What can you do? She probably got this from her father. The Irish are known to stretch things.
What about, the daughter asks, bringing your rain hat in case it rains?
No. That flattens the hair out.
Go for a walk together around The Place?
No. The walk to the dining room and back is enough right now.
Talk about ways to fix the heater?
No! We’ll wait until next fall to talk about that heater.
Talk about people?
Okay. Mr. Fickle has a new girlfriend. I call her The Young and the Restless.
Cast of The Young and the Restless celebrating 40 years on television.
The daughter asks: The Young and the Restless is what you call the woman in her 70s who moved here last year? The one who wears a lot of jewelry?
Yes. And she paints her fingernails and her face all up and she has dementia. Mr. Fickle’s always walking around and she’s always walking around. He totters. She swishes. She dyes her hair black. She dresses well. They dance together when there’s a dance going on. Every day he kisses her on the top of the head or he hugs her on his way to his table at lunch and dinner.
What does she do when he kisses her and hugs her?
Nothing. I wonder if she likes it, really. Sometimes she doesn’t act like she does.
Then it shouldn’t happen.
Oh, I guess she likes it. She sort of asks for it.
She has dementia, you said. How does she ask for it? By swishing?
Turn away. Shake your head back and forth. This is an example of why this daughter was not the favorite among the four children. She isn’t interested in just the story. She wants people to behave better. Next thing you know she’ll be telling the administration that The Young and the Restless is being harassed. Time to put a stop to any leanings toward activism.
Well, let’s not talk about that any more. The shawls came that Donna made for me to keep me warm. A white one and a green one.
Show me!
The daughter seems enthusiastic. Sometimes the daughter is okay, even though she doesn’t much like Donna, the distant relative who made the shawls, because Donna tells mean-spirited lies about people who refuse to do what she wants them to do. Oh, so what? Donna has other good qualities. At least the daughter brought her camera along and will take pictures of the shawls to send back to their maker, which will make Donna happy, and that’s one good thing anyway.
The daughter snaps photos to e-mail to the lying shawl knitter, but only because it pleases her mother to pretend to be a model for a little while. It fills up some time in a long day.
Alice in white shawl (green shawl on her lap).
She demonstrates how she will wear the shawl when she feels cold.
She likes her posture best in this photo.
