Magnetic

If you were to read my blog entries over the past years (don’t, really), you would know that my siblings and I have taken care of the elderly of our family, in all stages of life, death and that gray area in between.

We have found people collapsed in their homes, held their hands as they died, negotiated for access into their homes, slipped past police tape, found blood heirs because — while they were our relatives in love, mind and time — at their deaths, they were strangers as a matter of law.  (Love matters in life; legal papers matter in death.)

I have surrendered firearms, repatriated funds from unnamed accounts, and taken those suffering from acute dementia and paranoia to psychiatric wards and held their hands through the process.

Aging is a nasty business.

These experiences must emanate from my being.  Sometimes I think that there is a magnet implanted in my forehead in the shape of S.

S as in SCHMUCK

How do I know, you ask.  Thank you for that segue.

Just last week, I was on the phone (being all important, OF COURSE) and another call comes in.  I can tell it is an internal call, because the name flashes up.  I get an email from my assistant that someone from one of our Florida offices asked that I call back (instead of the usual: “oh I will just email her”).  I have never heard of the person so I look her up as I am dialing her back.  She works in the records department in another office so I cannot imagine why she is calling me.  No way our paths would have crossed.  I have never been to our Florida offices and it is not likely that she traveled to the New York office.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Cindy, this is [Blogger] returning your call.  How can I help you?”

“Thanks for calling back.  My brother died yesterday in New York and I need some advice.  Because he was relatively young, the police have cordoned off his apartment.”

Really, you are kidding me.  Someone with whom I have never possibly crossed paths knows to call me when there is a death in the family.  And a messy death, at that.

MY SCHMUCK MAGNET IS SO STRONG, IT DRAWS PEOPLE FROM ALMOST THE SOUTHERNMOST POINT OF THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES.

And what is crazier?  I actually have experience in this.  Because I had an aunt who. . . . blah blah blah.

I offer advice, not as a lawyer but as a family member who went through this.  Her brother and she were not close, at all.  She wants it all to go away.

Days go by.  I email Cindy and ask about everything.

She types back:  “Oh, yeah.  He is really dead.  There is some lawyer handling this. Thanks.”

Soooooo many things wrong with that.  The obvious ones are too good to pass up:

  • of course, he is [still] dead.
  • I am invested in the outcome, but
  • in the span of three days, she has moved on.

Me? I am still in freeze frame in my own Law and Order episode.

I deserve the magnet.  But, it may be that I am the one who gets sucked in.

Dear Dad,

These days, I keep thinking of the old times.  How you were so playful when we were toddlers, too strict when we were teenagers, my rock during the turmoil of my twenties, and, along with Mom, your kids’ greatest cheerleader.

Sometimes I think that I see the glimmer of the old you.  Beneath the bizarre outfits and the confused talk.

Our weekend of celebrating your big birthday was wonderful.  (After 90, they are ALL big.)  Sometimes you didn’t really understand what was going on, but you were happy that your family was around you.

10630568_10202625072736212_3324593164443517949_o(And you knew to wear the appropriate outfit your aide set out for you.)

And I know you didn’t need the luncheon to be in such a fancy place.  I know if we said, “Dad, we are coming over and we are eating cardboard for dinner [fiber-rich],” you would say, “how wonderful! I can’t wait to see you.”

But you might worry about whether you would get an evening cocktail.

And so I know you have not lost your mind completely.

In the light of day, you know you get confused at night and, appreciating the humor, refer to the nighttime aides as your guards.

Your kids prefer the term, body guards.  So, let’s use that term, shall we?

Today, you were mostly discombobulated and, yet, and yet, you were ready to go to the aid of an old friend whom we didn’t see in the diner today, and whom the waiters hadn’t seen since last week.  You called him to pay a visit and bring food.  In a clutch moment, the old you comes shining through.  (P.S.:  Sam is ok.)

This is a hard road, Dad, for all of us, and, most of all, for you.

And yet.

And yet, even in the waning days of your life and the continuing diminishing of your faculties, the essential you shines through.

You won’t ever read this.  But I had to write it.

I love you, Dad.

~Blogger

P.S.:  See you tomorrow, Dad.  Same time.  Lunch.  But let’s change it up a little; let’s order something different.  Because I cannot watch you try to put jam in your coffee or on the tomato slices that comes with your usual order of scrambled eggs.

 

 

 

Once Upon a Time Near the Beach

Once upon a time, in the 1970s, in a snuggly hamlet close to the beach lived — for many summers — about 100 girls, at any one time.  And they would grow up and know each other for decades and decades.  But not yet.

And some years spun by and the little girls became hormonal teenagers.  And, as hormonal teenagers, the subjects of sex, drugs and — alas, not rock ‘n roll, but — punk captivated each and every brain cell in their still-formative minds.

There was one such girl, shy in her youth and averse to tongue kissing (let’s not discuss Greg Pogarsky), whose hormones would transform her, in her teenage years, into, well, let’s think of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly.

And more years spun by and now the girl is 50.  And Septembers bring her back to that snuggly little hamlet filled with love and friends, like a genetic homing instinct.

The smell of the air is the same as it was in our youth.  We all breathe in so deeply as if to capture the memories in our bodies’ organs.

And karma is a boomerang.  And it plays out like a maestro hitting our emotional buttons.

[play music to suggest that the idyllic story takes a turn for the humorous and slightly ooky]

And now she is a mom of a college freshman son.

And in the serene place where we can be as carefree as we were decades ago, technology and too much information intrude.  And in the same place (Google doesn’t discern between the steps of Lodge 1 or Lodge 2) as she pined for a young man named Will, came . . . .

OMG, my son just got to college and he slept with a girl!!!

He texted you that?”  All of us were thinking, but one person said.

They spent the night together but I don’t know what happened, HAPPENED!  I am trying to find out by asking if he put his sheets in the laundry.

GREEK CHORUS: “Understated, yet smart.”

Wrong question.  He is a BOY.   No matter what happened, he is not changing his sheets.

GREEK CHORUS: sigh, “Truth”.

Do you really need this information?” asked a sage one.

GREEK CHORUS: “NO one needs this knowledge.”

DOES HE HAVE CONDOMS?” asked ALL of us.

GREEK CHORUS: “Is this ready for prime time?”

I don’t know!! Ok.  This is a first!!” [“Ok, HOW do you know that?” thought all of us.]

GREEK CHORUS:  “We are closing our ears. We can’t HEAR you!!”

Ok, congratulate him for ALL of us.  Now, make sure that he has condoms,” said another sage one.

GREEK CHORUS: “Wait, this isn’t Braxton Family Values or Crazy Wives of [pick a City]. Let’s play on.”

Coincidentally, one among us is not only a professor at the young man’s college, but a professor of human sexuality.

I would be happy to deliver the condoms in a see-through bag while I am on the campus.  Is it ok if I say, ‘a group of your mother’s middle-age friends are very happy for you, but use these, please?

GREEK CHORUS:  “This is a whole new reality genre, like Naked Dating.  Let’s hang out; we may be revived by something other than a Shakespeare festival!”

[Revert to the fairy tale music]

The morals of the story, as you can plainly see:

  • You do it, you live with it (you along with a posse of older women).
  • Stop texting your mother about these things.
  • Things are only sacred if they aren’t bloggable.

And we all lived happily ever after, looking forward to the next visit to Camp Wingate.

 

So thirty or so middle-age women are at a reunion . . . .

Sounds like the start of a joke, huh?

Well, we do have our own odd communal sense of humor — and propriety.

First, a little background:

  1. And most of us are comfortably in our middle-age (but we look — to each other — as if we are still campers).
  2. We all feel close to each other, regardless of the facts — many of us only recently met at reunions.
  3. Those of us who did know each other at camp now share each other’s food, drink, and menopausal medications.
  4. As we age, we need to add supplements to our foods, and those supplements vary.

And that closeness has its draw-backs.

Imagine one middle-age camper’s surprise upon learning that, after taking a gulp of another’s coffee, it was laced with the mother lode of Miralax.  One camper’s constipation became another camper’s . . . . well, you know.

By lunchtime, the following conversation ensued:

Hey, yo, [Constipated one], I am f^&*ing stinking up Lodge 2 because I can’t stop shitting!  How much of that stuff do you need?

I need a lot because I have not gone in a while.

How constipated?  So long, as in an enema with a vacuum?” I offered (not so helpfully).

Let’s ask the doctors here.  You need help.  And I need to stop friggin’ shitting my brains out!

Oh, gross, we cannot talk about this about lunch.

Ha.  Of course we can.  Those assembled asked about our friend’s colon, intestines and just how much Miralax she takes (with every meal and then some).  I renewed my suggestion about a vacuum.

Thereafter at every meal, we discussed the progress of “things”.  The bizarro nature and the hilarity of it all got people laughing so hard, that yet another camper peed in her pants.

I’ve had THREE children.  These things happen!

And no one thought otherwise.

Next installment:  Twelve 50 year-old women are talking about their children’s sex lives. . . .