Nerves

At an adjoining table at Starbuck’s, two woman sat through the morning and into the afternoon, one silent, one talking without cease about her long list of likes and dislikes, mostly the latter…. A man behind me tapped away on his laptop (as did I), pausing occasionally to make wheedling phone calls in an attempt to secure some sort of accounting work…. I had a straight shot view of the drive-through window, and a young blonde girl, about eight-years-old, sat next to her father in the front seat of a pick-up, singing a song, her expression mobile and animated, her hands dancing about her face, then his…. One of the barista’s shift ended, and she and her two co-workers engaged in a brief verbal lovefest, expressing their great pleasure in the previous hours together, their high hopes for the departing woman’s afternoon and evening to come, the anticipated joys of all soon being together again....

On a morning walk through a treeless tract home neighborhood, I came across a small table laden with ten pound bags of cherries. The table stood at the end of a short driveway, and a sign said, "Free! Take a bag!" and I did. Despite the sign, I looked about guiltily and quickly moved on before someone should see me. A few houses away I stopped and tucked the bag of cherries in my pack, giddy with the ridiculous but compelling pleasure of free stuff....

I rode down to the rehab center after the dinner hour. Grandpa had eaten in his room again, and the wreckage of his meal littered a tray on his table. One of the attendants came to retrieve the tray, saying with perky delight and a little surprise, “Well, he must’ve liked it tonight.” The entrée had been pizza and he’d finished it off and everything else.

He was sitting in his wheelchair by the window, and I pulled up one of the wood chairs and sat down close beside him. Out the window I could see my bike, locked to one of the small saplings that dot the grounds. At a bench under one of the newly planted trees, an attendant in brown uniform was smoking a cigarette. On the television, an episode of The Rifleman  was just ending but another would follow.

After a time, Grandpa said, “I just don’t know.” He’s been at the rehab center for nearly five weeks now, and he’s frustrated with the slow pace of his recovery. It seems to me that he has made progress since my earlier visit—he’s not shifting in his chair and grimacing, he gets in and out of his chair fairly smoothly. But still, he spends nearly all his time in that chair or another. He can get about with the walker, but only does so during or on the way to or from physical therapy.

Sleep remains a problem. He dozes off during the day, but can’t get a good night’s sleep. “I can’t fall asleep till after midnight,” he said, “but then I wake up after a couple hours….”  He says the problem is “nerves.” But it’s not new. Rosemary remembers him prowling about the house at night when she was a kid.  I wonder what it is he’s nervous about but don’t ask; it’s a question that no doubt resists easy answer.

An attendant looked in and asked Grandpa if he needed anything. He said no at first, then, oreos.

At his request, I had brought him tweezers, a magnifying glass, and a ball cap. He already had a hat in his room, but he told me to go through the hat collection in his closet at the house. “You might as well bring along one of those white ones.” The magnifying glass was for reading especially small text. He doesn’t wear glasses, which strikes me as odd for someone his age. He explained that he used to wear glasses, years ago, but then he stopped for some reason—I think after he had cataracts removed he didn’t need them anymore. The cataracts are back, but he hopes to get them removed again.

When MASH followed The Rifleman, Grandpa wheeled himself around to the other side of the room and got onto the bed to lie down atop the counterpane. Soon he dozed off, and I was left to contemplate the humorous potential of a Korean War surgery.