Tuesdaytalk's Blog

My mother is losing her sight. It’s an insult to injury kind of thing, after dealing with my dad and his Alzheimer’s, breaking a hip, going to assisted living and moving back home. Her odyssey started the day before Thanksgiving last year, when she fell on the ice three steps outside her back door and broke her hip. From there to the hospital to rehab to home to the nursing home to assisted living to home to again. All in less than a year.  

We’ve tried different approaches to address her living situation, based on a consistent theme: keeping her safe. We used that logic to convince her (well, she’s never been convinced, but she gave in) to move my dad to a memory unit, to finally move to assisted living in the same building as my dad and as the reason for our reluctance to let her move back home. Although assurance of safety sounds absolute, it has been more of a negotiation tool, a variable that has led to a series of temporary moves and stop gap measures. And she’s still not safe. Sure, she isn’t crushed under the weight of caring for my dad, she’s mostly recovered from a broken hip and she has a caregiver to help her out a few hours each day, but that doesn’t really do it.

She’s bound and determined not to return to assisted living under any circumstances, “I’m never going back to that place,” she adamantly and constantly reminds us. So she’s reluctant to tell us when she has a mishap, for fear that we’ll ship her back to that place which, I guess, is a fate worse than death. So when she’s fallen or forgotten to turn off the water (which caused a flood in the bathroom) or heard the doorbell at 2:30 in the morning, she’d prefer we not know.

But now, with her eyesight failing after a detached retina in one eye and macular degeneration in the other, she is less safe than ever. And bad eyesight is a risk for falls or misreading directions or operating appliances incorrectly or failing to maintain awareness of her surroundings. Try as I may, I can’t fully understand why living at home is The Thing. After all, it entails elaborate arrangements, a driver to shuttle her back and forth to the memory unit daily, an unsettled feeling for me and my sisters and one concession after another on our part, as additional risks and concerns come to light.

But she’s home and she can only use the main floor, someone else does the cooking, the cleaning, the wash and her medication dispensing. She can’t visit my dad without a ride and probably won’t be able to go at all when her sidewalk is icy. And if she needs immediate assistance, well, immediate isn’t available.

So we’ll try to monitor the safety risks caused by her failing vision and try not to feel like we’ve sold out, by letting her live at home. But this is her last bite of the apple, I’m sorry to say. Any major malfunction (not sure how we’ll define that) and the odyssey continues, most likely to assisted living, despite her protests. While I don’t look forward to that, I pretty much expect it.

Until then, we’ll plod along as we always have, make necessary adjustments and hope for the best. Maybe at some point she will realize that being safe should count for something and that assurance of her safety would be a comfort to us. There are times I harken back to her telling me I couldn’t do something just because she said so, followed by “and it’s for your own good.” If I thought that would work, I’d give it a shot.

While driving through a little town in Iowa last week, I guess I made some kind of wrong turn. A block or so later I sensed a truck keeping pace alongside of me. When I turned to confront my stalker, I looked straight into the reddened face of some guy who was shaking like a bobble head and whose finger was wagging at me just like Miss K.’s did in fourth grade. His lips were moving fast and furiously, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. So I rolled down the window and got the worst scolding of my adult life. He screamed something about a truck lane and his right of way and some other animated jibberish to which I responded, “sorry,” rolled my window back up, broke out in a cold sweat and hightailed it out of town.

His license plate said he was a veteran and there was sticker on his window that said Colonel something or other. My guess was that he used to berating people and giving orders. I have great respect for veterans, but his behavior towards me wasn’t even close to respectful and had nothing to do with his military service. He could have just rammed my car or forced me off the road like any other self-respecting vigilante, but he had to scold me. And I don’t take kindly to that. Flashback to Miss K. who did the same thing. One day, to try to knock some sense into me when I just wasn’t getting that long division stuff, she put her thumb and index finger together and thumped me quite forcefully on the forehead. Scolding didn’t give her the results she was looking for, I guess.

But I showed her. I promptly developed a headache, went to the office to say I was sick and was sent home. They maybe forgot to call my mother to tell her I was coming, though, because she seemed pretty surprised when I walked in the door. It could be – and my brain hasn’t been thumped for a while, so I can’t really remember – but it’s possible I went home without stopping at the office.

Back toIowa. I realize the protector of the truck turn lane had no way to graciously educate me on the error of my ways. But screaming and finger waving aren’t terribly effective methods to communicate, much less educate. Maybe for this guy, it’s all in a day’s work. He entertains himself by monitoring that turn lane, assuming the mantle of a colonel and challenging drivers who don’t follow the rules. But he scared me and triggered a flashback that produced a headache on a par with that one 50 years ago. But this time I didn’t go home, with or without permission.

No, my retaliation this time is more passive. I won’t be driving through that town again and I’m weighing the pros and cons of sending some anonymous letter to their newspaper suggesting they remove that big welcome sign. On the other hand, maybe I could have overreacted and this guy was just a concerned citizen trying to keep his town safe. In that case, his behavior could have been justified. I’m just relieved he wasn’t close enough to tweak my forehead. That would be like crossing the Rubicon.

Being a Good Samaritan can be a thankless job. I suppose that’s the whole point, helping someone out without taking credit or getting a reward. Twice in the last month, for instance, I put quarters in other people’s parking meters and they didn’t even see me. I probably invested over a dollar with that act of kindness, yet asked for nothing in return. Have you seen that commercial where someone helps a woman across the street and she, in turn, tells some guy he dropped a dollar and then he helps a woman find her lost dog? That’s my backup plan, should my meter expire someday before I get there.

There are probably lots of unsung Good Samaritan heroes doing things every day that go unnoticed.  Like the other night when the Maid Rite guy gave me $5 too much change, I said, “hey, you only owe me $9.” And when I turned around to see if the sun was shining directly on me or whether those behind me in line had their mouths hanging open in awe of my honesty, there was nada, nothing, not one single, “wow, I’m going to nominate you for citizen of the year” or “let me shake your hand” or “you are my hero” or even “let me give you $100 for saving that man $5.” Nope. Instead someone asked me whether the guy took credit cards and another told me my shoe was untied.

I find that curious because I see lots of stories on the news like the kid who caught a baseball and handed it off to another kid who had reached for it. For him, they rolled out the red carpet and give him tons of stuff worth more than that baseball. Positive reinforcement has now gone viral as things like that hit YouTube, Facebook and then bounce around the world until that person is showered with gifts and cash and offered his or her own reality show. I know I’ve said it before, but isn’t helping someone its own reward?

Someone I know once defined integrity as doing the right thing even if it might cost you personally or professionally. It’s kind of like doing the right thing, even when no know is looking.

So, do you put money in the tip jar only when the cashier is looking? Do you put a note on that car you back into when no one’s around? Do you quietly take the change handed you, even though you know it’s too much? Or do you pretty much act and react the same, regardless of who, what, when, where and why?

As for me, I’ll likely do the same thing next time I get too much change, except I’ll try not to make a scene or compare myself to Mother Theresa.  After all, she was much shorter.

Whatever happened to day old bread? Simple. It’s masquerading as fresh bread. So when we buy bread, we’re clueless about whether it was baked today, yesterday or when Fido was a pup. But, whereas we paid two vastly different prices for fresh and day old bread years ago, now we pay the same $2.99 or whatever a loaf, despite its freshness or shelf life.

When I was a kid and even into my adulthood, I could walk into a bakery and choose to pay the price for fresh bread and pastries or the greatly-reduced price for day old stuff. The idea was that fresh bread and day old bread were two totally different products at two totally different prices.

Around the time bakeries moved into grocery stores (seems to me,) day old bread went the way of the dinosaur. The assumption was that it was all freshly baked. That is, until “fresh dates” appeared on bread. That told us what day it was baked, which was good, but there was no price difference between fresh bread and days old bread. Some kind of subversive plot cooked up by short, chubby men in poufy white hats and aprons? Perhaps. And I can help but think the Pillsbury Dough Boy might have been the ringleader. And those Keebler Elves, are they in on it?

Well, all right. That was okay because we could still buy fresh bread, based on the date. But no sooner had I gotten used to that, than those fresh dates were replaced by “sell by” dates. Way to go, Dough Boy.

Not sure how “sell by” is helpful to consumers, except to hint that we might not want to serve sandwiches to the Ladies Aid group that day.  But even “sell by” was preferable to the new “use by” date I just happened to notice on the hamburger buns I bought last week. The operative word is “notice,” because I don’t always wear my glasses when I’m grocery shopping and may miss a few things, which is probably why I bought pickled okra instead of pimento (a lot of the letters are the same) and artificial natural sweetener (isn’t that an oxymoron?) as opposed to pretty real natural sweetener.

I guess I could do what my mother used to do. Date or no date, it didn’t matter to her. She never used the bread or buns the day she bought them. She would bring them home, stick them in the freezer and pull out something six to nine months old for dinner. It speaks to consistency, I guess, because the buns were always dry and flakey (in a bad way.) All bakery products were relegated to the freezer, so baked fresh, “sell by or “use by” were all the same to her.

It’s quite a responsibility keeping all these dated products straight. Fresh and day old were concepts I could understand. Is “sell by” the day before “use by,” maybe? Or is it like milk, where it’s good a week after the date? And what about expiration dates? Are products like aspirin or eye drops harmful or just ineffective after they expire? It’s all very confusing. I even noticed that bottled water is dated. Can water go bad?

So, two things. I guess I better start wearing my glasses on a chain around my neck (like my first grade teacher) to read dates so I don’t inadvertently hurt myself or others. Or  maybe keep a master calendar of “use by” and expiration dates. And maybe next time I’m in the bakery department, I’ll tell the baker person that she’s not the boss of me – she can’t tell me when to use my bread. And when Security comes, I’ll leave peaceably, go home and pull a beat-up, old loaf out of the freezer for lunch.

I have no problem calling up a big box store or an 800# in some far off land to complain or to register my righteous indignation about their incompetence, indifference or lack of response. In fact, it’s almost therapeutic sometimes, when I’ve worked myself into a state because I’ve been on hold for 20 minutes (you remember the story,) or had my call transferred four times or have found them to be negligent somehow.

It’s scary easy to unload on that person on the other end of the phone I don’t know and will never meet. It’s much harder when I have to deal with someone locally, someone I know and will see again.

Living in a small town and knowing people who know other people who are related to still other people, can be tricky because you have to pick and choose your words and not push too hard, when you think they’ve done you wrong. There’s kind of a fine line between bringing an issue to someone’s attention and getting a reputation around town as a malcontent or a whiner.

But there may come a time when the mistake is so egregious that you can’t be responsible for your actions. As in the case of my bank’s $10,000 mistake last week. It goes without saying, I suppose, that the mistake was not in my favor. Just as I couldn’t control my physical responses like my heart palpating, my palms sweating and the color draining from my face, I couldn’t control my impulse to call and give those people both barrels. So I had a momentary lapse – call it temporary insanity – and forgot my rule about not raising heck close to home.

Immediately following my freak out, the bank person apologized and I said, “you just don’t sound sorry enough. Do you know what you just put me through?” And I went through the whole laundry list of immediate physical ailments caused by their incompetence, throwing in stuff like “and my hair came out in clumps and I could have whiplash from shaking my head in disbelief and I maybe cracked a rib when I clutched my chest.”

Bet I’ll be about as welcome there now as Typhoid Mary.

Well, back to my original point. When you do business locally with a pleasant, well-intended person and it doesn’t go as planned, it’s really hard to complain. The other day, I had a product installed and realized immediately when I got home, that it was not what I ordered. I agonized over making the call to let Mortimer (not his real name) know. I didn’t want him to think I was one of those people who is never satisfied and, at the same time, I was a little worried that maybe I’d made a mistake and ordered the wrong thing. Either way, it was going to be awkward.

Imagine my surprise and relief when I called to say I thought there was a problem and Mortimer (still not his real name) said,”you are right. I made a mistake and I own this problem. Here’s how I’d like to fix it…” Wow! Just like that he took responsibility, suggested a solution and put me at ease. Incredibly refreshing, isn’t it? And I will do business with him again because, somehow him taking ownership of the error, instilled in me some kind of gratitude or empathy or maybe even loyalty (and also because he’s related to a friend of mine.)

So in the last seven days I’ve learned two things: local businesses care about their customers and you can’t get post traumatic stress syndrome from a bank error.

When you record my calls for quality assurance, do you record my colorful comments while I’m on hold? If so, what do you do with that information? Hand it over to a national watch group? Make a CD to play at the Christmas party? And, by the way, how do you assure quality by putting me on hold for what seems an eternity? Because I feel pretty much assured that my call, despite your message to the contrary, is not important to you.

I’m no clock watcher but, come one, this is my lunch break. The smell from some microwave meal is wafting down the hall, I hear people munching and chatting and I’m subjected to on-hold agony in an infernal wait for your ”next available customer service representative.” The truth is, I hang on okay for the first 45 to 50 seconds, busying myself by responding to emails, drinking my Diet Coke and looking out the window at a car going the wrong way in the front drive.

As I hold into the second minute, I start tapping my foot like a metronome and notice that Beethoven’s Fifth, or whatever classical selection playing  in between your broken promises was repeating itself. Saving money with the discount Muzak that only plays one song, huh?

By the seventh minute, I start talking back to your on-hold message. When the voice says, “we are currently experiencing a high volume of calls,” I say “oh yeah, well maybe you should trying answering one.” And when it says,”your call is important to us,” I say, “sure, sure and I’m the Queen of Sheba.” I have a retort for all the disingenuous lingo, punctuated by an occasional “geez,” or “come on” or some unflattering comment or grunt.

Luckily, those in offices close to me are kind of immune to my groaning, snorting and exclaiming. They no longer rush in, when they hear a sudden outburst, to check on my well being or for fear I’m being held by gunpoint. For the most part, I think they ignore me now. Although three people have moved in and out of the office across the hall in the last year. Do you think… nah.

After 12 minutes, my neck starts to spasm under the weight of the receiver perched on my shoulder. When I punch the speaker button for temporarily relief, I realize I’m  drumming my fingers to the rhythm of my foot, my Diet Coke is empty and the car going the wrong way is pinned in between two headed the right direction.

19 minutes and counting. I’m way past the point where I could have a civil conversation, so I shut my door to ramp up my rants and raves and to muffle my growling stomach.

I lose track of time. I just can’t hang on anymore – I’m slipping away. The phone is sweaty in my hands and my ears ring from the incessant  foot tapping and finger drumming. I forage for food in my desk and am about to eat a cookie I spy on the floor, but stop at the sight of Security out front extricating wrong-way Magoo. Back to reality.

I regain my senses and, in a desperate move, hang up. Then I am hit with the realization that I haven’t accomplished a thing and I’m going to have to call back again. But not today. First, I’ll have to lay in a few supplies like Diet Coke and snackies, make sure everyone has left for the day and see if I can get a port-a-potty delivered to my office. And maybe I’ll get lucky and see someone get wheel-locked. Hey – I have to stay grounded somehow.

Sometimes I ask my Dad questions in an attempt, I suppose, to coax some lucidity to the surface or to experience some semblance of a normal conversation. You know, the kind where one person speaks, the other listens and then responds. Sounds pretty ordinary. But that would be extraordinary for my Dad because he’s about seven years into Alzheimer’s Disease. And not only is his repertoire limited, but he now speaks so softly that I have to lean in closely to hear him. Predictably, he answers most questions with “I don’t know” or by just shaking his head. And if I say something off the wall or outrageous, hoping to get a rise out of him (like when I told him I didn’t really have stomach cramps, I just wanted to get out of the math test,) he doesn’t react at all.

In the far reaches of my mind, I’m probably hoping that he will cast out some gem or profundity – something of the variety people needlepoint on pillows or wall hangings. Not the answer to who killed JFK or where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, but more like a life observation or some kind of advice by which I can live my life. I really only remember two such things, as I was growing up: “You don’t have to have money to spend money” and “don’t burn your bridges.”

The money thing he repeated often, usually in response to my haranguing about why we didn’t have a color tv like the neighbors, why we couldn’t take a family vacation to Europe or why I couldn’t have a pink canopy bed. His point was that anyone can buy anything on time or on credit and he wasn’t going to live that way. Okay. I did pretty well heeding that advice. But the burning bridges thing, not so much. I should have listened.

When he doesn’t greet me by name, I tend to ask him – again, not sure why – who I am. He often replies “one of my daughters,” which I think is pretty good. Last week I pressed my Dad a bit further, when he recognized me as one of his daughters, and asked “which one?” After studying me with soulful eyes, he replied “the fifth one.”

Well, the thing is, there is no fifth daughter – or fifth child – in our family. So, of course, I went about the business of analyzing what he meant by that. Maybe I didn’t really count or maybe he considered me fifth out of four or, more likely, he just didn’t remember how many children he had, much less our names or birth order. But again, I was trying to find some hidden meaning in that, some clue to the innermost thoughts he never expressed.  

I should probably stop with the twenty questions and unrealistic expectations for a quotable quote. Yesterday, I sat with him in the emergency room for four hours, an experience that he pretty much slept through and that turned out okay. But each time he moved his lips, I would lean in close so I wouldn’t miss anything. And mostly, he would open his eyes, smile and simply say “thank you.” Not sure why or for whom that was meant. But I accepted it. No analyzing.

I probably should have paid more attention to my Dad’s advice, but I was too busy trying to get out of my math homework or trying to figure out how to shame him into buying a color tv or protesting the injustice of sleeping without a canopy over my head. Now I realize it was I who didn’t understand the art of conversation, when we had the opportunity for it. Enough said, Dad.