tuesdays with yollie
In early November Mom and I were driving on the BQE East, we’d just crossed the Kosciusko Bridge.
She says:
“There are alot of things I have to tell you…and you’re not going to like any of it.”
Me:
“Wow, what do you have to tell me?”
Mom:
Pause. “I forget.”
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Home Freak Home
Pop made it to Florida.
I did get him on his cellphone when he was still answering it in the first few hours of his trip. I kept telling him how he should come back. He didn’t see why. For Aunt Eileen’s 80th birthday party, I told him. Oh, and, uh, Mom. He stopped answering the phone after an hour or two and we didn’t speak again until he already forgot he’d ever left.
I could count on him doing his daily routine of Bob Evans for breakfast (every single waiter and waitress and manager in that place knew him, knew exactly what he liked to eat and how he liked it cooked and to give him a coffee to go with the plastic lid that went on the soda cups instead of the coffee cups. He didn’t need the open spout to drink from – too easy to spill – he was taking it home to add to the other ones he’d already arranged in a perfect straight line on the top shelf of the frig).
He’d try to pay his bill several times, but I’m pretty sure the BE crew always kept things right.
For dinner: Steak ‘n Shake. Same exact situation as Bob Evans. He got the “Original Double ‘n Cheese” (hold the cheese). It came with fries and all for under $4.00.
The most important thing that could not happen at S’nS was putting mustard on his burger. Pickles were bad too but mustard was an unforgivable crime. “Who puts mustard on a burger?!?!?“
His face would shake, he’d wag his finger at the terrified teenaged server (this is actually really scary), chin lowered, cataract-y eyes burning beams of all kinds of crazy out from under his unkempt brows.
One time I saw him fling a bun after he lifted it, revealing the dreaded yellow surprise.
Another time a tall pimply waiter walked by us and my father glared at him, nudging his chin in the clueless boy’s direction. I knew what was coming. “That guy put mustard on my burger,” he said. A few seconds later, “I think he’s getting over it.”
So, to be clear: no cheese, no pickles, NO FRIGGIN MUSTARD. Just tomato and some white onion that he would cut with a very dull butter knife into little squares and arrange them in an even distribution – a carefully crafted constellationion (that’s right!) – on top of his (now cold) burger. Mmm. Every day.
To round out the routine: television (more for background than anything), crosswords, and naps. “Safe as milk”, my friend Brendan would say. Well, unless the refrigerator breaks and he calls in a repair man who shows up and fixes the frig at approximately the same time Pop forgot about moving a small folding table.
Later, when Pop can’t find said folding table (we’re talking Walmart brand, for eating your dinner in front of the tv) he deduces that the that the refrigerator repairman stole it. And the contents atop it. What contents, you ask? Contents such as these: empty envelopes, mechanical pencils, lead for the pencils, crossword puzzle books, and a random smattering of bills, letters, and statements from various companies and dating as far back as the 20th century. Maybe a few AAA batteries. The mother load!
Pop called my uncle when the cops arrived. They eventually got hold of the phone and promptly told my uncle that if Pop was their relative, they sure as shit wouldn’t let him live by himself.
The table was a few feet away, in the laundry room.
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Irish Goodbye
I moved my parents to Westchester County, New York on November 15th of 2010. They had been living in Florida for the past 10+ years until they both started to have health problems – Mom with her heart and eventually a stroke and Pop with dementia.
It all began (sort of) when they drove up to NY for a visit the weekend after Memorial Day. One morning, soon after their arrival, while Mom was napping and my Aunt (their hostess) was at church (yup, weekday, 8 o’clock mass), my father got in his car after leaving a Post-it note explaining that he was returning to Florida, and started driving to Florida. (I can’t help but think that he was one Post-it note away from pulling a very hardcore Irish Goodbye which would be pretty cool if he were someone else. And didn’t have dementia.)
Now, the only streets he could safely navigate, and sometimes even then he had trouble, were in Palm Coast, Florida – their home of 10+ years. He knew them so well, in fact, that at some traffic lights he’d know the EXACT time the light would change from red to green – eyes blazing, itchy foot on the gas, lips counting the seconds, quietly but not so quiet you couldn’t hear.
Anyway, once that fella crossed the Palm Coast city lines, he was one lost something-or-other (he’s my Dad and you don’t know me yet so it feels a little weird calling him silly names like he was a stranger, but it’s doubtful I’ll refrain in the future. It keeps it light, you know? They are terms of endearment, I swear!) Anyway, it took that crazy bastard (see?) almost 5 hours to drive the last 30 miles to my brother’s house in Fort Lauderdale once.
My brother was desperately trying to give him directions but when asked where he was, my father would only say things like: “Well, there’s a bridge over there…” or “Well, there’s a big truck just drove by…” Apparently, my dear father could not, even with direct instructions, ask for directions or identify any street signs. Such a fascinating, heartbreaking phenomenon, dementia.
He also tended to gaze out the window for long stretches of seconds while on long stretches of road, like good ol’ I-95, with its’ generous 75 MPH speed limit. He was quite taken with the endless line of trees along the highway that he claimed were experiencing an apparently violent (but very slow – they looked fine to me) death by kudzu and could not figure out why in the hell the state of Florida wasn’t doing anything about it.
Needless to say, we (me and my family) freaked out. I remember hanging up the phone after my weekday-church-going Aunt called to tell me, reading the Post-it over her landline telephone. (I miss landline telephones – the long, tangled chord that you mindlessly wrap around knowing fingers, pacing the well known path between the base of the phone and the end of that chord, the comforting heft of the receiver, the clicky-connecty satisfaction of hanging up, the slam factor, I could go on).
I spent an hour on my bed, crying and looking out my bedroom window, desperately trying to figure out the adult I was going to call to finally take over the whole blessed mess. Unfortunately, that adult was me.
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(Rare, pre-dementia) driving advice from Pop:
“Sarah, when you drive you have to pretend that there is an egg between your foot and the gas pedal…and you never want to break that egg.”
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