Haircut day

Usually I visit Grandpa in the late afternoon, but he called at lunch and wanted someone to bring him ten dollars, before one. It as haircut day, and while I imagine the staff would wait a few extra hours for the money, I knew Grandpa would worry until he could pay. So I got in the van.

When I arrived he was just leaving his room in his wheelchair.  He saw me and said, “Go ahead and push me down there,” gesturing towards the far end of the wide hall. His hair was already cut, and cut close, much like my own, and numerous brown and red spots, a few small scabs, showed on his scalp; he has fairly thick hair on the sides and back, some but not much across the top. He held in his hands a bottle of generic dandruff shampoo.

The small salon room by the front desk was empty, and we waited for the woman to return. I couldn’t see that Grandpa had much hair to wash, and I couldn’t see anything in the way of dandruff either, but no reason to argue. I went back to the room with the Boise newspaper while he was being tended to….

No television today. We sat together at the small table in his room, engaged in the slow and long-pause-laden conversation that is our style. I spoke loudly and in short bits but still needed to repeat most of what I said at least once. One of his hearing aids is out for repairs.

There were two packs of cards on the table and Grandpa asked if I played, and I said, no, a little alarmed that he would want me to play. But no, they were just a means to an anecdote, about a friend out in New Plymouth in the late 1930s, Gilbert Zams, and how they would play pinochle over to his house, and they were Germans, the Zams were, and Gilbert’s father was… well, difficult. Grandpa waved his hand, as if I already understood what it meant to be German-y…. Loud and temperamental, it seemed. The father became explosive when the cards did not go his way…. “Oh, I didn’t like playing with him,” Grandpa said.

“Course, the Zams were from Nebraska, like us. They had twelve kids, Gilbert was the oldest. That’s how people did back then…. I don’t think all the kids came out here, though, maybe just eight or nine…. When they first got here they was staying with some of their people, and it wasn’t a big place…. But they had this porch”—he moved his hand back and forth across his chest—“this porch…it went across the whole front of the house…. And every kid had his own…what do you call it? Sleeping roll?... and all those blankets were laid out neatly on that porch, filling it right up….” Grandpa laughed, as if this had been a sight.

“I was over there for supper once, and they had this long table set up, with long benches, a bowl at every place. And you sat down, and everybody got some bread, you know, torn into…sort of like bits, in their bowl there…. And then the mother come along with a big jug and poured milk in everybody’s bowl, on that bread, it was fresh bread, and that was supper.”

Grandpa fell silent, and we both thought on the bread and milk, and then he sort of laughed but with a catch in his throat. Earlier he had taken up one of his favorite subjects, about how much everything has changed and not for the better. Everything costs too much and scams are rife. The hearing aid business, for example, is simply organized thievery. More generally, he compared commerce to “those big boxes, you know, just inside the door of a store, and you use the … the thingey”—he made his hand like a claw—“and it comes down and you pick up a toy or something, but then you drop it before you can get it out, and there you are, you don’t have nothing.”

A pretty young woman came into the room, holding a tiny plastic cup filled with a white liquid. “This is for you, Patrick,” she said. All the attendants call him by his first name, except the one who calls him “sweetie.” Their tone tends to be patronizing, as if they are talking to a young child, but they are friendly and cheerful. "It’s Milk of Magnesia,” she said, “to help you go to the bathroom.”

Grandpa waited a long moment, then took the cup. He sniffed it, paused again, then took a sip. “This is Milk of Magnesia,” he said, as if he’d made an obvious discovery. The woman simply agreed. He took another sip and grimaced, his mouth puckering. I thought he was going to reject the dose—I’m always nervous when he’s dealing with service workers; he has a history of being particularly curt and rude with waitresses, for example. But he’s been consistently polite at the rehab center if sometimes resistant. He drank it all done and handed the woman the cup and said thank you. I thanked her too and wondered if she was free after her shift, but I didn’t ask….

I stayed a couple hours, and before I left he directed me to a drawer in his bathroom at the house for a nose- and ear-hair cutting implement. I had brought him a Boise city map on this visit. He’s slowly transferring the accoutrements of his daily life to his rehab center room…. 

When I left, I drove to Rosemary’s house, where I had a spaghetti dinner with the younger, healthy and able and free people.