(As an aside...
I just pulled this week's copy of
Time out of the mailbox, and it boasts two specific pieces on the cover: "A Cause Greater than Self" by McCain and "A Faith in Simple Dreams" by Obama. No mention of any article speaking to
my main concern, "Cloverfield: Sure It's a Long Shot, but Goddamn, Let's Throw Some Ideas Out There Just in Case". Giant alien monsters are going to make global warming look like a sitz bath, seriously. I'd like to see
somebody in this race take a little fucking initiative. It can't all be tea parties and the health care crisis.)
Olivia stopped by.
Olivia stopped by on Tuesday. MeeMaw hadn’t had a huge amount of visitors because most of her friends were in a shape similar to her own. But her faithful church friend Olivia fought the odds, called a cab, and shuffled over in her Easy Spirits.
Olivia’s husband passed away twenty-one years ago from botulism at the age of forty-three on Christmas Day. Which happened to fall on a Tuesday. I know this because all three times in my life I’ve spoken with Olivia, approximately once a decade, this information makes up the majority of her opening paragraph. Olivia has spent the last twenty-one years alternately thinking of ways she might have convinced her stubborn husband to go to the doctor on Friday instead of Monday and hating Christmas.
She sat down on the couch next to the hospital bed and held MeeMaw’s hand in that easy, familiar way older woman seem to adopt around the infirm.
“Can I get you something to drink? Water? Diet Coke?” We were attempting to empty the fridge in preparation for our trip so the guest beverage pickings were slim.
Olivia considered a moment and sighed. “Not that Diet Coke is so great, but okay.”
Strike one.
I poured a not great Diet Coke into a glass with ice and brought it to her. My grandmother plucked the napkin we’d given her as a bib for dinner off her chest and handed it to Olivia to wrap around her glass. “Here,” she said, “This is clean.”
I got a look for that one. Strike two. I would have just surrendered and gone outside at this point but the mosquitoes were keeping a vigil, waiting for me to emerge. I’m used to Arizona insects that sting once and kill you, not Georgia insects that bite you a thousand times and itch. Clearly my confusion was delicious. So instead I moved a stack of blankets off a chair and sat down. Olivia has a painfully obvious fake eye that might actually be made from a small rubber ball. It doesn’t move with her other eye, so I couldn’t tell where she was looking while she was speaking; this meant that in order to avoid strike three, I had to react as if she were talking directly to me the entire time lest I seem uninterested. This took more energy than you might suspect.
“I got my invitation in the mail last week for the reunion,” she announced, smoothing a stray hair into her bun.
“Oh, really?” I answered. Olivia squinted… somewhere. Probably at me.
Sissy took over. “Oh, did you? Mine’s probably waiting for me at home.” She looked at me over the rims of her Chanel glasses. “Olivia and I were in the same high school graduating class.”
It took every ounce of breeding in my body not to let “You’re kidding me,” get past my teeth. I choked on it instead and somehow managed a nod. Evidently hating Christmas can really take a lot out of a person.
We’ll just round that up to strike four.
Nanny called!
After I kissed my MeeMaw hello Monday night, I quickly made my escape to the backyard to sit on the swing. My grandmother had fallen asleep five minutes after I arrived, and there were two caretakers already on the couch, quietly text messaging and keeping watch over her hospital bed in the living room. The room was so small the front door had actually been blocked with equipment; I knew that if I stayed in there for any period of time I’d only end up crying, knocking over something critical, and using up valuable air. So I grabbed the cordless phone and snuck out back to touch base with my dad and to answer the phone when it rang, which it did. It was Nanny.
Nanny! Nanny is Sis’ first husband’s mother. My cousins’ grandmother. I totally can't think of Nanny's first name right now. She and her husband (the alleged “Pappy") also live in Columbus and were good friends with my grandparents, so when we were little we grouped together at the holidays. Sis and her first husband had two kids, so there were always four of us at the kids’ table; a table that was strategically placed as far away as possible from the grown ups’ table because we were all of us annoying little bastards. The obvious upshot of this was that our parents could enjoy their meal in peace—the down side was that there was no one to order us kids to take a bite of food occasionally instead of just spitting pieces of chewed up napkin at each other for two hours. Inevitably we’d find ourselves sitting there, somber and hopeless, our vegetables getting colder and our milk getting warmer. That’s when Nanny would come to our rescue. She’d sneak into whatever room or garage we’d been quarantined inside and she’d take giant mouthfuls off all our plates. She quickly became a fan favorite because of this, her ability to leap endless mounds of broccoli casserole in a single bound. She made dessert possible, is what Nanny did.
A little while later my aunt joined me outside. She'd been hunkered down in the bathroom on her cell phone, trying to line up hospice and comfort care in Charleston. Also trying valiantly to convince our chosen and paid for assisted living facility that MeeMaw still qualified as an elder who could manage on her own without bed rails or six registered nurses camped out in her bedroom. So she'd been lying her ass off, essentially. I told her that Nanny called. Nanny! She called! What time? Yeah, I have no idea. It stayed light outside until like ten o'clock, seriously, something's wrong with the sun out there. Maybe six-thirty? Nine? Long enough that both my legs had been chewed off by mosquitoes.
In her height heyday, Nanny had been like four feet, six inches tall. At ninety-four years old, she’s now approximately two foot three. When I was in town last year MeeMaw and I paid her a visit. She’s literally in her nineties, living completely alone and unaided since Pappy died years ago. I credit her tenacity to mass quantities of holiday vegetables. When we stood to leave, she wrapped her tiny arms around my shins and kissed me on the kneecap.
“I love you, Nanny,” I said, patting her soft head.
“I love you, too, Darlin’.” She scratched at her chest. “You know I have the shingles.”
Yeah, you know what'll fix that? Seventeen pounds of green bean casserole. Just kidding. Stop touching me.
What's the worst that could happen?
This is really long, a lot longer than I intended, but I want to talk about my trip and to do that I need to lay out some back story.
My grandparents, my father’s parents, were married for sixty-four years. A sixty-four year love affair. Both of them from worst-case scenario Depression-era broken homes: orphaned, abused, hungry, fostered. They smothered each other and all of us with a love so complete and without compromise that even from inside it we couldn’t help but recognize its rarity. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never even read anything like it. It is profound.
My grandfather died of lung cancer in December of 2006. It hit him quickly, mercifully, but hit the rest of us like quicksand. 
My grandmother was determined to stay in the house they’d lived in together for fifty years, and she managed better than we all expected. At the beginning of this year a variety of maladies began fighting for top billing, and several weeks ago she was diagnosed with severe chronic anemia, congestive heart failure, and a cancer assumed to be lymphoma. She’s eighty-six years old. She adamantly refuses further injections, biopsies, iron infusions, and Procrit. Her doctor took her off her diabetic diet and sent her home, telling her to eat anything she wants and to enjoy herself.
My father’s only sister lives in Isle of Palms, South Carolina. Since the beginning of this year, she and my dad both have spent weeks in Columbus with their mother, either in the hospital or at the house lining up the requisite in-home care. A month ago, everyone decided that it was time for my grandmother (“MeeMaw” because we’re from the South and that’s what happens) to move into an assisted living facility in Charleston to be closer to my aunt. My mother made plans to fly out and help with the move, but as the trip got closer we all realized she needed to stay in town and focus on her own recovery. Instead I would pinch hit.
The original plan: My aunt and I both fly to Atlanta, drive to Columbus, movers pack the house, MeeMaw rides in the back of her own Lincoln Mercury and we all happily drive to Charleston and into the assisted living facility, an extremely civilized and well-respected place called Sweetgrass.
Several days before I was to leave, however, MeeMaw’s condition began deteriorating faster than anyone could have predicted. My aunt, who had been home in South Carolina a total of forty hours, had to turn around and go right back to Columbus after another unexpected hospital stay. We wouldn’t be meeting in Atlanta because she was already there, right, and there was no way MeeMaw was up for an eight-hour car ride sitting upright in the backseat of a car, either, so the movers were canceled and we went into a holding pattern.
About my aunt: Three years older than my dad, she’s sixty-three. She’s very fashionable, very beautiful, and very rich. She’s also loving and bossy and spiritual and dingy. My dad called her “Sissy” when he was young and “Sis” from then on, and as kids she was “Aunt Sissy” to us and now I just call her “Sis”. Which is weird, probably, but no weirder than a thirty-two year-old woman saying “Aunt Sissy” out loud so I’m calling it a push. Fun family fact: my brother called me “Sissy” when he was a baby and I’m “Aunt Sissy” to his boy, Logan, now. It’s a sissy legacy, I suspect.
So back in Columbus. MeeMaw’s in a hospital bed on oxygen in the living room. It takes two people to help her up to use the potty chair next to the bed. On Sunday I start packing to fly out and what, spend a week doing crossword puzzles, I guess, and generally being ineffective. Just like at home, only sadder and with more sweet tea.
Ultimately Sis realizes that the end goal hasn’t changed—MeeMaw still needs to get from Point A to Point B, and if I’m coming into town, it really needs to happen then, while she has the extra help. She agonizes over it for days. “I think Daddy would want you to go,” she tells her mother.
“Oh, I know he wants me to,” MeeMaw answers. Clear eyed. Ready.
So we’re on.
When Sis picked me up at the shuttle station on Monday she gave me the full update. We were going to fill the Mercury with as many personal effects as possible, clothing, pictures, keepsakes, and I would drive it to South Carolina. The problem of getting MeeMaw there was much more complicated. Ambulance companies had been called, but the cheapest she’d found was still more than five thousand dollars. And that was like “George’s Ambulance”. I don’t even think it was an actual ambulance, I think it was a pickup truck with a camper shell and a CB radio.
“So Terry,” she said, referring to her husband, “is going to drive down on Wednesday in the Suburban with a tempurpedic mattress in the back. The hospice nurse can do a catheter that day, and then we can get them to help load her into the Suburban Thursday morning.”
I looked at Sis. She looked like Lauren Hutton on Lauren Hutton’s best day ever. I, in comparison, looked like I had wrapped myself head to toe in bacon and then stood in the sun for an hour.
“They’re delivering a portable oxygen tank,” she went on, “and we’ll pack coolers and all her medicine and everything. We can give her some Imodium the night before, too. I think it’ll be fine. It has to be fine. What do you think?”
Huh. What do I think about loading my invalid grandmother—the source of all that is loving and true in this family—into the back of a Chevy Suburban with an oxygen tank and a catheter to drive eight hours through deserted northern Georgia? I think it’s potentially the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life, ever.
“I think it’s a great idea,” I said.
“Okay,” she breathed, relieved. “Okay. I’m going to stop at Publix real quick, we need plain yogurt and chardonnay.”
The first thing I did on Wednesday of last week was load every precious belonging my grandparents ever owned-- eighty-year-old baby pictures, love letters rubbed soft, quilts made from the christening gowns of relatives long gone-- into a 2001 Lincoln Mercury. At which time I realized that if I dared back said Mercury out of the driveway with the intent to find wireless internet, I would either immediately spontaneously combust or be carjacked.
So imagine my horror when I learned that I was the one who had to drive that car from Columbus, Georgia to Charleston, South Carolina. I'm not kidding, I would rather have been in charge of a van full of fresh donation kidneys and old dynamite.
That was a hard week. More later.
(I had a lot of problems with spam while I was gone so I'm taking comments off for a while until I can fix it.)
I'm technically in Columbus, Georgia right now, not Atlanta exactly. There's no internet so I'm typing this on my cell phone. Which is awesome- truth be told, I prefer writing with miniscule buttons, no spell check and a screen that emits almost as much light as a white Tic-Tac. I'm so thrilled I lugged my fifteen pound laptop along; I could have saved myself the airport security hassle and just strapped an anvil to my back.
Under the best of circumstances this house is about 900 square feet; throw in a hospital bed, a wheelchair, two hospice nurses and an oxygen tank and I'd say we're operating inside a forty foot bubble. Everything's going well, though, extremely well under the cicumstances. We leave for Charleston on Thursday, and I'm going to try to drag this laptop somewhere tomorrow to answer my email. If I'm not successful I'll probably become the first person ever to use a laptop computer as a boat anchor.
I leave town for a week tomorrow morning. I'm pretty prepared, I think. I mean, I haven't packed or done laundry or even glanced at my travel itinerary, but I
did drag a suitcase out of the garage and into the house. Obviously it's break time.
I was digging through the dresser yesterday to get a vague idea of what I was going to take, and before I knew it I had dumped all six drawers on the bed, launching a massive clean-out strike. I finally decided that if there ever really
does come a day when I can fit into those Banana Republic shorts I bought my junior year of high school, I will probably be too busy mustering up the energy to operate the remote control for my hospital bed to care.
I also chucked all those stupid tee-shirts from American Eagle and Abercrombie that I bought because I was too dense to comprehend the explicit screenprinted sexual innuendo. Apparently unless the shirt expressly reads, "SEXUAL INTERCOURSE: I'M 100% ON BOARD, YES", I'm not going to get the joke. I'm seriously going to think the shirt is suggesting I
go down to Costa Rica because it's
so different. I'm about three thousand years too old for American Eagle anyway; when they start making shirts like, "Don't Rub Too Hard, You'll Drive Me Crazy!" only they're referencing Sensodyne toothpaste, call me up.
Four blurry hours later, I'd filled three giant garbage bags for Goodwill. Not exactly the most productive use of my time, and eerily reminiscent of all those times in grad school when I'd take a five-minute bathroom break from writing a research paper only to accidentally spend two hours reorganizing my nail polish.
And I might have gone a little overboard, in hindsight; I really need to run to the grocery store and it looks like the only thing I have to wear is a denim skirt and an Everlast sports bra. Maybe I'll run by Target while I'm out. They have a cute bone loss tee-shirt on sale, and I think that's just a super way to promote awareness of osteoporosis.
Post #1000! Cue the virtual streamers.
Monday morning I had the third and last in my series of
photodynamic therapy acne treatments. The technician-- a chipper brunette with skin like spun gold who couldn't have been a day over thirteen-- applied the levulan to my face and then left me reading the new John Sandford novel by the glow of a night light for two hours and fifteen minutes.
When she came back to get me, hours later, she knocked on the closed door. I laughed and told her to come in.
"I like how you knock," I said, stretching, "Like I'm in here doing something secretive."
She laughed with me. "Hold on!" she mocked, "I'm stealing all the medical supplies!"
"Don't come in!" I went on, "I'm not dressed!"
"I open the door and the UPS guy walks out."
"Buttoning his shirt."
We were simpatico, this eleven-year-old and I.
Until she sat me down underneath that blue light and all I could think about was how far I'd have to reach out my arm to snatch her eyeballs out of her head.
It was awful. Horrible. If the second time was bad, this last time was like I'd submerged my face in a pot of bubbling oil. Like someone was making face fries. Face 'n chips. Terrible pain, terrible.
I made it to five minutes and honestly didn't think I could sit there any longer. I told the technician as much, and she was able to turn up the air flow on the cooling hose I was holding under my chin. That got me all the way to the nine minute limit. At which point I grabbed my shit and bailed, sans witty repartee, sped home and buried myself in bed with the bottle of percocet clenched in my sweaty fist.
I've pretty much been in bed since then, save a few trips to the kitchen for Diet Coke and a few trips to the family room to make people sick while they're trying to eat. Today it's a lot better; it's starting to tighten and turn brown and itch rather than burn, so I know tomorrow I'll start peeling. So I'm getting up now. I've got a bunch of shit to do, and I realized if I'm feeling well enough to enthusiastically eat pork barbecue in bed, I'm damn sure well enough to wash the sheets. On the heavy cycle.
I'm scheduled to fly to Atlanta on Monday for a week to help my aunt move my grandmother to South Carolina, and I've got a ton of stuff I need to catch up on before then. I quickly listed a couple of Sock Zombie Puppets this morning and I'll be listing more throughout the week if I have time. I'm tickled with the Zombie Interviews in the descriptions... over time I think I'll go through and add one to every listing. Something to do on the plane, maybe. Besides shed.
Rocky Road makes me itch and Cookie Dough makes me paranoid and Pumpkin Pie makes me throw Big Mac wrappers into national forests.
Randy and I spent most of the weekend in San Diego for that annual fundraising retreat we do every year. Randy's girl, Chelsea, goes to school over there, so after I had checked "make fun of perfectly nice people", "make fun of formal buffet dinner", and "make fun of heartfelt speeches" off my requisite Terrible Person Agenda, we ditched the event entirely, choosing instead to let Chelsea ferry us around La Jolla and Carlsbad. I would like to state for the record that after having lived in Arizona for eighteen years, I admittedly could not get you to any destination more than fifteen miles away without Saint Christopher himself riding shotgun and muttering over a Mapquest printout. I can't even tell people how to get to my
house; Matt and
Melati were late to dinner here months ago because I steered them straight to the sushi place across the street. Yet after only three years in San Diego, Chelsea not only apparently has the entire metro area freeway system downloaded into her brain stem, she can also tell you the best place to have breakfast or the cheapest place to buy gas in any one of seven towns. It's like having a cute-haired
Tom Tom that laughs and runs on sandwiches.
I rode in the front seat eating pumpkin seeds as we drove around, and periodically I'd roll down the window a crack and I'd throw out a handful of pumpkin shells. The first part of the weekend this wasn't a big deal-- save the time I didn't pull my arm inside the car before I rolled the window up,
that was kind of a big deal-- but Saturday afternoon I dumped out five or ten shells and I caught Randy rolling his eyes. I really, truly had not thought of this as littering; I am, of course, AGAINST littering, but somehow these seed shells didn't register on my trash-o-meter. As I tried to explain-- and I wasn't arguing about it, I was sincerely trying to sort of figure out why I hadn't given it a second thought-- I came to the conclusion that pumpkin seed shells were a
natural product, and thus in
my mind they were going back to whence they came.
"So would you throw an apple core out the window?" Randy asked.
You know what? I just
might throw an apple core out the window. Not in traffic, and I'd have to be way out of the city, but I can see myself tossing an apple core out the window and under a tree or into the underbrush. I won't
now because both Randy and Chelsea were emphatic and reasonable in their arguments as to how apple core tossing is a mere toddler waddle away from throwing a broken refrigerator into the Grand Canyon, but I
would have. I'm just being honest.
For the record, I stopped throwing pumpkin seed shells out the window of the car. I'm sure no one appreciated getting a windshield full of pumpkin shrapnel on the highway, and I'm genuinely embarrassed I thought it was okay. I don't even know why I'm bringing it up. Probably because I had my third and final light treatment this morning and I'm all doped up on percocet and ice cream. And you know how loopy I get on mint chocolate chip.
I always keep a little notebook in my car so I can jot stuff down when I think of it. Then when I can't think of anything to blog about I can usually pull out that notebook and find
something.
That notebook is presumably still in the console of the car I just traded in. Much to
that guy's surprise, I'm sure. I alternate between hoping I wrote my phone number in the front and hoping I didn't.
I just watched the season finale of
The Tudors on TiVo, and then I went ahead and followed that up with
Marie Antoinette on HBO. Now I've got some weird dead queen flu, I think, the main symptoms of which consist of an insatiable desire to wear a lot of neck jewelry and a deep seated fear of pissing people off.
A couple of nights ago I woke up groggy at like two am, whining and trying to shove Randy's thirty-pound arm off my chest.
Give it a rest, I thought, pushing and pushing, but his stupid log of an arm kept bouncing back at me. Then it started tingling. Turns out I had a serious case of Dead Arm and I'd been feeling
myself up. Great use of time there, Dead Arm. God forbid you do something
productive.
I've been working on Sock Zombie puppets for a while now, and I think I'm close to perfecting the design.
I had some trouble with the arm positioning and I think I've solved that. Toehawks make the best puppets, too, because they're much easier to stuff.
This guy never even made it to the eye phase because his arms were too high and there wasn't enough room in his head for my hand. FAIL.
The puppets are actually more work than the dolls; the toehawks have to be stuffed independently, and then the arms and mouths have to be reinforced to a redundant extent because they're going to be actively played with and I want them to be as sturdy as possible.
I'm really excited. These guys are ridiculously lovable. I'm going to try to get a bunch made and then list them for sale next week. Not
this guy, though, this one's totally mine.
Samurai Zombie
He's a samurai. And a zombie. And, to a lesser degree, a sock.
Click on the picture for the whole sordid description.
Oh, and I'm keeping this towel.
So
here's something I didn't know about myself.
Turns out if you invite me to a "dinner party" but then literally serve me nothing but Raisinettes and vodka for five hours, at one-thirty in the morning I
will go down your waterslide with all my clothes on.
It's still too cold to swim, by the way, even in jeans. Another couple of weeks, I think.
It costs $65 to take a taxi from 124th Street and Shea to south Tempe. That's $65 we could have spent on
FOOD JESUS CHRIST WHO HAS A DINNER PARTY AND SERVES
CANDY?
I was standing out front, shivering, waiting for the taxi, and the host goes, "Yeah, when you come get your car tomorrow we'll have breakfast."
OH NO YOU DON'T, you son of a bitch. You'll set a bowl of lemonheads on the counter under the guise of "brunch" and I'll end up in the hospital.
My grandmother was determined to stay in the house they’d lived in together for fifty years, and she managed better than we all expected. At the beginning of this year a variety of maladies began fighting for top billing, and several weeks ago she was diagnosed with severe chronic anemia, congestive heart failure, and a cancer assumed to be lymphoma. She’s eighty-six years old. She adamantly refuses further injections, biopsies, iron infusions, and Procrit. Her doctor took her off her diabetic diet and sent her home, telling her to eat anything she wants and to enjoy herself. 
