Big Mama is picking at her food these days. She hates the vegetables. Photo Socotra
It is rainy and gray again today. The Bay looks strange- there is a white highlight to the north shore at Harbor Springs that is so silver it could be ice. I got lost in Dad’s office last night. I went down to take the new microwave out of the packing and check how the defrosting was going in the little fridge- I doubt it had been done in years. Then got sucked into story of my father’s life. Ugh.
The thing that struck me was the sheer number of different means of keeping track of what he had to do- the Pocket Day Timers, notebooks, “To Do” binders is huge. I was making three piles outside- empty plastic containers, generic office supplies, and things that he actually touched or wrote.
It got to be too much. What struck me was the number of organizational binders, all of them blank. Maybe that is when he knew that something was going wrong.
I will devote time today to getting them to lunch, and maybe out to the mall. But I think we have got to another tipping point: Dad may be too frail to go out, I don’t really want him peeing in the Caddy, and though I have a couple bath towels for him to sit on, the whole thing fills me with dread.
Big Mama has ventured into entirely new territory. I had the iPad with me, and it was useful to keep her engaged. She wanted to talk about the four Hemingway wives; we got through two of them, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer at lunch. She wanted to know what my relationship was to them, and when I showed her pictures on the iPad, she said she could clearly see the likeness in our looks.
Big Mama was once the foremost expert in town on the years that Ernie spent at Walloon Lake just down the road, and his summer of love here in the little Village By the Bay as he recuperated from his war wounds and began to invent himself.
Big Mama is lost in that story now, and is inserting me into it. The memories are all jumbled up, no longer connected to a central narrative. She wanders among them, still curious, but the dots are not connecting. She wondered if my new relationship to Ernie would change anything here. I assured her it would not.
Then there was the big controversy over the fact that someone has decided she is a vegetarian, and is filling out her menu forms with all the steamed broccoli and cauliflower they cook, and deleting the entrée.
Big Mama hates vegetables. It is very strange.
We will see what happens- it may be that things have got to the point where being with them for meals is enough. I just got sidetracked again with crap in the wonderful library.
Ugh. I want to go home- and yet I also feel that I am home…weird…all those memories, and the rain coming in across the bay.
Raven enjoys his milk with ice. Photo Socotra.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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