Tuesdaytalk's Blog

People are getting younger these days. Not in the Benjamin Button kind of way, but maybe it’s more like an age delay. We’ve all heard that 40 is the new 20 or 60 is the new 40. I have a cartoon on my refrigerator that reads “living is the new dead,” which takes that whole age thing to the extreme. But it does seem like either our perceptions of age – or limitations from age – have changed.

I just had a milestone birthday and remember when my grandparents were about the same age. I’m old, yes. But it’s a number that seems at odds with what I know about myself and how relevant I am, if that makes sense.  One thing is for sure, though.  I’m much younger than they were at my age.

My grandparents were always old. One grandma always had white hair and the other blue hair. They could no more relate to my interest in Barbie Dolls or the Beatles than I could relate to their crocheting or the “stories” they watched every afternoon. Speaking of that, it’s always been a mystery to me how my straight-laced grandmas could reconcile all the bad behavior on the soaps with their old fashioned attitudes. With all the stuff that happens on those shows, it’s hard to believe they could understand the storylines. One grandma simply commented she was bothered by the characters on the show drinking alcohol. The philandering, paternity tests, blackmail and murder were no problem for her, she just didn’t think liquor was necessary.

Although my grandkids aren’t teenagers yet, I like to think I’m kind of with it or, at least,  have some notion about their interests, what kind of music they listen to and what their favorite movies are. I’m sure I’ll become a fuddy-dud to them soon enough.

One of my grandsons always introduced me to his friends or to strangers with a big grin. “This is my grandma,” he would say with pride. Then one day at the park, he introduced himself to some new kids, pointed to me and said “and that old lady’s my grandma.” No disrespect intended, that was just how his perspective – and my standing – had changed.

I digress.

So maybe we’re not all getting younger, we’re just staying healthy longer, thanks to modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. I know, no one gives any credit to drug companies, but we’re sure not living longer because we take better care of ourselves. And yes, I know we’ve exposed tobacco and other carcinogens for the killers they are, but something aged our grandparents faster than us and is keeping us younger, longer.

Maybe it’s the modern conveniences like washing machines or dishwashers or treadmills. Or maybe we’ve figured out how to better balance work and play. Or maybe there’s so much more to do, to explore and to accomplish that we do whatever we can to keep ourselves young so we can experience everything. Like having a bucket list keeps us going.

We just don’t let age limit our aspirations or activities anymore, as well we shouldn’t. Aging gracefully is kind of an oxymoron. Hence, a Jack London quote I have in my office:

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

So if you see some old lady in the park crocheting Barbie clothes while listening to the Beatles and, if she has blue hair and wears a sweatshirt that reads “I am not a fuddy-dud,” it could just be someone who looks like me.

I was never keen on amusement parks – especially rides that went up into the air or left me white knuckled or nauseous. In fact, the tilt-a-whirl was almost more than I could take. So, I was totally unprepared for the ups and downs and wild turns, when I found myself strapped in the front seat of an emotional roller coaster.

It was my birthday and we were headed to our ninth annual Labor Day family weekend in Wisconsin, when my son called to say his wife was in labor and our new grandson was on his way. A new grandson on my birthday. Happy.

We stopped in to visit the excited, expectant parents and, after some deliberation, decided to stick to our plans and meet up with the rest of the family in Cumberland. More happy.

My cell phone rang as we walked into our lake home rental and, rather than my son calling to announce the baby’s arrival, it was my sister calling to say she was taking our mother to Rochester for emergency surgery. Sad.

Other than the obvious, the real issue was who would care for my dad (who has Alzheimer’s) while my mother was away. Remarkably sad. Although we’d had more than a few discussions about what we’d do if Mom was ever incapacitated, we never really made any arrangements because my mother assured us that would never happen and she seemed to think that planning for such an event might make it so. Frustrated.

As I was trying to wrap my mind around it, my son beeped in with news of a healthy baby boy. Super happy. Happy trumped the sad for a moment. But there were decisions to make and arrangements to attend to so, without mentioning my parents’ situation, I congratulated him, said we’d talk later and clicked back to my sister. Happiness fleeting.

Here’s the unbelievable part. On Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend, I was able to reach the nursing home administrator, where my Dad went to adult day care. He agreed to admit him, if I could assure the appropriate assessments and documentation. Anxious.

Luckily, I found the public health director at home and asked if she would waive the admission assessment until after Labor Day. She did. Hopeful. My luck was still running when I called the hospital nursing supervisor, who put me in touch with my dad’s doctor (who was vacationing in Michigan.) He empathized and gave verbal orders to admit. Relieved. With the reassurance my parents were in good hands, I called my son back to express my unencumbered joy. Grateful.

Not sure how/why my cell phone worked or held out up in the north woods while I made those crucial calls or how it was possible to reach everyone necessary on Labor Day weekend and why they were all so incredibly accommodating. The way things fell into place was nothing short of a miracle. In awe.

When the ride came to an end, I loosened the strap, jumped out, pulled myself together and joined my family for lunch on the beach. Bliss.

We’ve talked before about waiting rooms living up to their names, but this particular area really redefined “waiting.” It was as if there should have been an “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” sign posted at the entrance. The first thing we saw was four people stretched out on couches, sound asleep. Others were bringing in blankets and pillows. Some men had a few day’s growth of beard and I think one person even finished War and Peace.

Each table sported a sign asking people to respect others by not bringing in food or drink, which means absolutely no food or drink. Not sure how I respect someone by foregoing my Diet Coke, but I kind of got the heebie jeebies wondering what the heck kind of place this was, where patients camped out, made little effort to leave and had food and drink withheld. Made me feel like we had descended to some particular level of Dante’s hell.

During the three hours we waited, I kept thinking about the movie Coma, where patients went into cold storage on gurneys – out of sight, out of mind and out of it.  Don’t remember exactly how that movie ended, but that was probably just as well. We did emerge unscathed, despite expressing our dissatisfaction more than once. They were just idle threats, really.

Maybe I’m just hyper-sensitive to these things because I work in health care. It’s kind of a curse, because I see things that normal people don’t by totally picking apart and evaluating every patient experience. For instance, in one of the areas we visited, three out of the five staff were chewing gum. Not sure why it bothered me. I guess because it just seemed so unprofessional. Not sure whether they all had halitosis, were exercising their jaws or just trying to stay awake, but people in scrubs wearing masks and gloves to prevent infection, while chomping on gum, seemed contradictory to me.

Most of us don’t have the skills or training to medically evaluate our care or health care interactions, but we do know when we’ve waited too long or when staff don’t look or act professional. And it colors our experience in a bad way and causes some of us to question everything else. So seeing staff casually chewing gum made me think that (1) they don’t take their jobs seriously, (2) they’re pretty cavalier about how well they do them and (3) they never learned their lessons when they had wear the gum on their noses in grade school.

And okay. I mostly notice and comment on things that bug me. What about all the good stuff? Oh, there’s plenty of that. Our hospital experience this week has been exceptional and, hard as I try, there’s little I can criticize. All the staff are incredibly friendly and accommodating. Their professionalism and sensitivity to our needs continually reassures us that we’re getting the best care possible. When you feel anxious and vulnerable, well, that makes all the difference.

I haven’t yet figured out why we weren’t allowed to eat or drink in the waiting room. If I’d dared to pull out a pack of gum, wonder if the foodie police would have wrestled me to the ground before I could pop it in my mouth. Or, more likely, they would have confiscated it and given it to the gum-chewing unit. That’s one mystery solved, anyway.

I know there was some clause about “in sickness and in health” in our marriage vows. I probably should have paid closer attention, but I couldn’t get past the honor and obey thing. Honor? Sure, no problem. Obey? What was I, a puppy? What was next? Speak, roll over, play dead?

Actually, during marriage preparation, our minister actually said that when my husband says “jump,” I should respond with “how high, sir?” Over the last 40 plus years, I still haven’t figured out whether he was joking, making a point that husbands have more say than wives or whether he was just plain wacko. I prefer to believe the latter. So I shouldn’t have been blindsided by that “obey” word in the vows. And who knows, maybe our marriage is null and void in the church because I was untruthful when I finally uttered “obey.”

I’m pretty sure I agreed to love and cherish or whatever in sickness and in health. But it didn’t dawn on me at the time that it would mean emptying bedpans or, in my case, urinals. I’m not hiding my light under a basket when I say my caregiving skills are limited. Although the thought of Clara Barton ministering to wounded soldiers on the battlefield, or Florence Nightingale caring for patients night and day with no thought of herself or her own needs made nursing sound so noble and self fulfilling.

But more realistically, I would have been the Nurse Ratched kind of caregiver, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If a patient asked for a pain pill, I would probably say “just tough it out, you big baby.” Or if another wanted to use the urinal, I would likely respond with “maybe, after I finish my lunch.” And if some patient pushed for a bed bath, I would hand over wet wipe and say “go for it.”

My husband recently shattered his heel and is confined to bed, waiting for the swelling to go down so he can have surgery. So the “in sickness and in health” clause has kicked in. To compound his misfortune, he has me for a nurse. While I haven’t literally said those Nurse Ratched things, I haven’t been the cheery, “anything else I can do for you?” type of caregiver, either. Maybe I just don’t have the right footwear to make 37 trips a day from the bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom or it could be my inopportune gag reflex. More likely, it’s about independence – or lack of it – for both of us.

Two years ago I broke my leg and our roles were reversed. Now I get comments that his injury is payback for mine. But it’s not payback, really, it’s one up. Although my injury was more the went outside wearing slippers at midnight on fresh snow on Christmas night type of thing, his was more the jump three feet out of a boat on the Mississippi on wet sand deal. What these incidents have in common is that they were both errors in judgment. Just plain stupid. And in each scenario, one of us was helpless making the other an accidental caregiver.

But we’re hanging in there. I can now balance a tray with dinner tray in one hand and the urinal in the other, while plumping up his pillow with my foot. My husband can use the back scratcher to relieve an itch, reach to shut off the lights and flatten an unsuspecting spider. And did I mention we now have a 42-inch plasma TV in the bedroom? While I have no medical background, I do know the best medicine is some oversized, expensive and cable-ready entertainment system. What I lack in caregiving ability, I make up for in shopping skills.

I paid my kids not to go to the fair. That’s probably sounds heartless or selfish or downright un-American. But spending their summer’s hard-earned babysitting, lawn mowing or paper-delivering money to snag furry dice in the digger, try to win rigged games (like knocking down milk bottles welded together) or to eat until they puked didn’t seem like such a great idea, either.

But more than that, I wasn’t keen on them hanging out at the fair everyday surrounded by people without background checks or permanent addresses. That was probably unfair or paranoid. But, when I was a kid, bad stuff went down there sometimes. Some of that could have been folklore, I suppose. But I remember one time, in particular.

My friend Julie W. and I spent the evening at the fair and her parents were supposed to pick us up by the animal barns at 9 p.m. When they hadn’t showed up by 9:30, we reluctantly walked towards the midway, where we knew there was a pay phone. Guess we woke her dad up out of a deep sleep because he said he’d be right there, then hung up and rolled over.
 
The crowds were gone, the lights were off and the 4-Hers were home snug in their beds. It was just us and, we assumed, the carnival people who, for all we knew, were some kind of aliens from another universe. While it wasn’t exactly Night at the Museum, we found ourselves in an unknown, eerily dark and silent place, where the carnival people (or whatever life form) moved in and out of the shadows and spoke in whispered tones. The midway was silent and the earlier aroma of funnel cakes was overpowered by manure from the pig barns. Once in a while, the darkness was interrupted by the glint of a knife blade or a shiny, metal gun barrel and we clung to each other out of fear – two 14-year-old girls, whose heavy breathing was drowned out by the bleating and mooing of the 4-H animals, anxious about the next day’s showing.

We weighed our options of waiting at the fairgrounds and chancing murder or worse and walking the three miles home in the pitch black, where we would be easily snatched by some freak in an old van. By 10 p.m., we made the dangerous decision to walk back down to the pay phones and call my parents, although I was sure they had either put out an APB by then or were discussing just how long I’d be grounded this time. Probably both.

Feeling like someone was following us or, at least, monitoring our movements, we put our heads down and tried to walk and talk like boys to stay safe. But neither of us was over five feet tall, we weren’t sure how guys walked and we found talking like them distasteful, so we held hands and kind of tiptoed our way down to the phones, instead.

While waiting for our ride, we were smack in the middle of bizarro world, where we briefly caught the scent of mini doughnuts and sensed the motion of the tilt-a-wheel and creaks of the ferris wheel, certain that we’d heard muffled laughs and screams. But the screams, we realized, belonged to us, as we reacted to my dad honking the horn to signal his arrival.

As the car lights illuminated the area on our way out, we saw the glint of a shovel and pitchfork, the shiny water fountains and pump handles and passed by the trailers of the carnival workers, where we could see people inside – quiet and contained.

We left a bizarro world behind us that night. Well, not totally, I guess. Any psychologist worth his or her salt would likely conclude that’s why I tried to bribe (such an unfortunate word) my kids to stay away from the fair. So maybe I was Psycho Mom, after all. But here’s the lesson I learned: the fear of the unknown can make your imagination run wild – to see and hear and smell things that aren’t really there. And to believe stereotypes about people that simply aren’t true.

So take my lesson for what it’s worth. Because, believe me, living without corn dogs and funnel cakes for the rest of my life is a pretty high price to pay for my mental health. I hope Julie W. has “faired” better.

I have Power of Attorney (POA) for my parents. No, that doesn’t mean I can collect for whiplash or save prisoners on death row. But it does mean that, for all intents and purposes, I can act as them and make decisions for their business, health care and whatever other needs. It would be great if someone would let the bank, credit card and cable companies in on that.

I realize those service representatives are trained to guard their customers’ security at all costs. Their common mantra seems to be “no, sorry, we can only speak to the account holder.” They probably have it tattooed on their foreheads so they can look at each other and repeat, when I call. Seldom does anyone deviate from the script or even try to understand that yes, they can speak to me about my parents’ accounts, because of this power of attorney thing.

I usually have to fax the POA to them and, once in a while, some enlightened service rep gets it. But then I hit that brick wall and the information flow comes to a screeching halt. Yesterday, I only had to speak to three people in as many departments to get my folks’ credit card bill faxed to me. But when I tried to set up auto pay, the system continually kicked me out because I didn’t have the pin number. To get the pin number, I tried to answer the security question, but it was “name of first girlfriend.” My parents have been married for 63 years and I’m not privy to information about ghosts of girlfriends past, so I put in my mom’s name as my dad’s first girlfriend. Tilt. Guess my dad had a life before my mom. TMI.

Those security systems are set up for user failure. I could request an email with the pin number, but it could only be sent to the address on the account: my folks’ defunct address. And to update with my email, I had to enter the pin number. Foiled again.

Is that what they call circular reasoning?

I really do understand the whole privacy and security thing, but come on. Do I need a blood test and legal counsel to convince these service reps that I can access this information? Out of frustration, I tipped my hand, when my call was transferred for the fourth time at the credit card company. “You know,” I said. “You leave me no choice but to lie and impersonate my mom, so you will talk to me.”

“Well, the rep replied, “guess that’s between you and your God.” She blindsided me, when she played the guilt card. I mean, who does she think she is, my mother?

I had a flashback to a conversation with the cable company, when I had a question about my own account. They refused to talk to me because it was in my husband’s name, not mine. I thought about putting on a fake mustache and lowering my voice, but couldn’t think fast enough. So I argued they should talk to me because I paid all the bills and signed the checks, but that didn’t work and I had to totally demean myself and set women’s rights back 50 years by asking my husband to give them permission to talk to me. I still shudder at the thought.

So I’m feeling pretty daring, at the moment, and am about to call to the credit card company again. Just hope this time I either get some rep on the ball who understands the whole POA thing or someone dumb as a box of rocks who just hands over the info. I’m still debating whether to impersonate my mother, use my own name or maybe say I’m Ralph Nader or someone from 60 Minutes. And, when I get to the Pearly Gates and am asked about lying to the credit card company, I will find out whether the ends justify the means. Until then, you can just call me Ralph.

My Grandma was a penny pincher who lived like a Spartan. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld says. She would tolerate no frills or creature comforts and when you looked up the word frugal in the dictionary, Grandma Ruth’s picture was there.

When my folks were out of town, Grandma stayed with us and we lived the Spartan life, too. We were allowed to turn on one light in the house “we’re not running up bills for your father to pay” at night, television watching was minimal “in my day we played button, button, who’s got the button – all we needed was a button to amuse ourselves” and the dishwasher sat silent “a waste of water and electricity,” as we washed and dried the dishes. Did I mention Grandma was probably instrumental in ending the energy crisis of the 60s?

Although my mother left cash for incidental expenses, Grandma refused to spend a penny. “I’m giving this money right back to your mother,” she said.” Did I mention her frugality extended to us, too? When we ran out of shampoo, Grandma said we washed our hair too much. “Once a week should be plenty,” she said. If we ran out of milk, we drank water. And, at week’s end, Grandma would take all the leftovers and throw them into one, big casserole for our final meal. Did I mention she was no Julia Child?

When we went to visit Grandma, my folks would take us to a fancy ice cream place for dinner, once in a while. Dozens of flavors, along with burgers, fries and malts and a ton of other tasty treats. Grandma would order tea and dry toast. “Really, who needs all this” she would say, as she looked us up and down. Did I mention she watched her weight and ours, too?

Grandma never learned to drive. My dad, the dutiful son-in-law, tried to teach her. But she got nervous, stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake and ended up in the neighbor’s front yard. Did I mention she never took a shine to my dad? Grandma hiked everywhere (her word for her power walking.) Although she took the bus downtownSt. Paulto work at the Capitol, she pretty much hiked everywhere else. To the grocery store, to the bank and to visit friends. She even used to sling golf clubs over her shoulder, hike to the golf course, play 18 holes and hike back again in her younger days.

My mother often bought taxi vouchers for Grandma to make it easier for her to get around. But when Grandma died, my mother found all the vouchers intact. She never used even one. Did I mention she was stubborn?

But she was kind of a pioneer, as she conserved energy, walked for practicality, not exercise, and was a single, working mom, when widowed in her 30s. Her strong resolve to be self sufficient allowed her to rehab back from a heart attack and return home to live alone for almost another 10 years. A pretty remarkable feat in the mid-70s. Did I mention she was willful? Although I haven’t exactly followed in Grandma’s footsteps, I did learn a few things about living simply and living healthy. Did I mention I watch television with the lights on and while the dishwasher is running? Yeah, well, being frugal is not hereditary.