Morning Thanks--her powder

It's brand new and perfectly clean, but perhaps the most distinguishing thing about my mother's studio apartment in the old folks home is her brightly lit bathroom; it's totally unlike most others because it's big, really spacious.  The apartment itself isn't tiny--the cathedral ceiling helps a little; but the bathroom is roomy enough for a few donuts in her wheelchair.  

It's got a roll-in shower that's immediately accessible, maybe twice as big as the little unit we just put in in our basement.  Chrome handlebars are on the wall, enough apparatus to remind you of a gym maybe--that may be stretching it.  And there's the safety cord, a string that, when pulled, will bring the nurse.  When most old people fall, they do so in the bathroom, I'm told.  

The place is full of medicines, tons of them--ointments and pills and a volley of over-the-counter remedies for just about everything but old age.

On Christmas eve, both my father-in-law and my mother, 500 miles apart, both of them in their early 90s, fell.  When people that old fall, it's normally not much more than a crumple, but even a crumple can shatter ancient bones. Sometimes even a slow-motion fall is the beginning of the end.  Bones break and never heal.  My father died a month after a fall.

But today they're both improving.  Nothing got broken.  Our grandson plays hockey and goes down on the ice a hundred times an hour, I swear; but when he takes off his skates, he's just fine.  With my mother, it 's not that easy.  On Christmas Eve she crumpled, and she's still being punished.  

I walked into that spacious bathroom when we visited her a couple of weeks ago.  There's an extension on her toilet so she doesn't have to bend her knees as far as most of us do, and there's just so much stuff all over, so much bathroom stuff.  Depends, too.  Lots of them.

And there on a table between the sink and the stool I saw this round box of powder, talc, foundation--I don't know what it is, really, but it's called "Evening in Paris."

It's getting really hard for Mom to get out these days, even though she likes to.  You've got to figure on an afternoon of extra time for her to get in and out of the apartment, the car, and, say, a restaurant.  I don't think she cares to go out of town anymore--maybe just a sandwich at the restaurant downtown.  Otherwise, she's there, in that studio apartment in the home.  And that seems to be just fine.  

"An Evening in Paris" really isn't even a dream.  "An Evening in Paris" is absurd.  It's black humor.  Her life--I thought as I stood there in her heavily armed bathroom--is just about the polar opposite of the kind of billowing romance suggested by that phrase.  It's a bad joke.

But then, I thought, maybe my mother needs her Evening in Paris.  Maybe an Evening in Paris is just as important as those shiny safety bars or that single string on the wall beside that ultra-tall toilet.

We all do, don't we?  We all need that Evening in Paris.  

I do, and that's why, this morning, I'm thankful for Mom's Evening in Paris.