It’s gotten hotter here, almost ninety yesterday, and I
emptied the van of all my gear and stored it in the basement. I’ll be parking
the van out in the backyard next to a row of sumacs, which will hopefully offer
at least a little protection from the sun….
In the afternoon I mailed my first two re-supply packages,
so now I’m committed to walking after them.
Grandpa was in physical therapy when I arrived, so I sat in
the lobby and read the newspaper…. Back in his room, he dozed off. He finally
slept through the night last night, aided by the larger dose of doxcepin. But
it had left him groggy.
The television was tuned to Animal Planet, with the sound
off, the captions engaged. I watched an animal control professional drag a huge
burmese python from some bushes at a golf course in Florida. Grandpa woke up
and said, “What?”
I changed the station to Turner Classic Movies, where a
1940s short film about a zoo was playing. Grandpa dozed back off and I watched
a lion walk across a double-tightrope while keeping his gaze in the middle
distance, as if to ignore his humiliation. Grandpa woke up again and, referring
to the tv, said, “What is going on?”
He didn't seem up for talking, so we sat side by side and
accepted what came on the screen. A film started, Fingers at the Window, I think it was called, from 1942 with Lew
Ayres and Laraine Day. Basil Rathbone plays the bad guy, a doctor who recruits
insane people to commit ax murders. Pretty grim….
After a while I asked Grandpa if he went to the movies much, back in the
late thirties.
“Well… yeah, we did, before we got married. Maybe once a
week…. We had to go over to Ontario” (a larger town just across the nearby
border in Oregon). “They had a movie in New Plymouth, but Ontario was better….”
The drive to Ontario got him onto a particular car. “I had this Ford, with a
V-8…. That was one of the first V-8s…. Chuck used to drive it over there”—Chuck
was his younger brother—“and he liked to…. What do you call it?…. He had a…big
foot?” He liked to go fast. “Yeah.... and the police got to know that car, and
any time it showed up on the road, well, they’d follow him all the way to the
river,” until he crossed over into Oregon.
“When you came into Ontario there was a ….”—he used his hand
to indicate an incline—“ a little sort of…hill. And the theater was on the main
street, all lit up, and when you came over that hill it was always … ex-citing
to see what was playing.”
Grandpa shifted in his seat uncomfortably, grimaced. He fell
silent, and after a couple minutes his eye lids drooped, his mouth fell open
and he drifted off…. I watched the movie….
Later, I had to say good-bye. It hadn’t been our best visit.
I want him to be stronger, more alert, but his recovery is slow and uneven….
I went with Rosemary to her new house for a walk-through;
she closes on Friday. The house has lots of large closets and an above-ground
pool in the backyard. The seller, a recent retiree in a Harley t-shirt and goatee,
boasted that he had textured all the walls and rounded off corners throughout
the house himself.
Afterwards we went to dinner, the whole family, nine of us,
at Smoky Mountain Pizzeria and Grille. We sat on the back patio, where a friend
of Rosemary’s was performing, with acoustic guitar; lots of 70s ballads, especially Eagles songs.
I had a truly mediocre caesar’s salad and engaged in we-only-talk-once-a-year
conversations with my cousins. That’s okay; they are people I like….
Six-year-old Rylee went up on the small stage and sang “Twinkle
Twinkle Little Star.” An hour later she did it again. Her mother rolled her
eyes and said, “She is such a ham.”
Back at the house, I cut up a cloth napkin and ineptly sewed
a small case for my camera…. I had lots of other last tasks to do, but I put
them all off until morning, and instead watched SportsCenter.
No comments:
Post a Comment