I'm sure people here would say that it's not particularly hard to imagine I might be depressed. After all, I've lost a significant amount of strength in my legs and back. I walk with a walker out front of me, and, drunken-sailor-ish, with a cane. My coordination is not gone, but it's been waving good bye for some time already. Last night, late, I wanted to eat at least something as I swallowed the basketful of pills I take morning and night. I grabbed the huge box of cornflakes I myself bought last week--"the bigger the better." I told myself in harsh tones to be careful, be very careful, because you don't want to drop the frickin' box, and then, as if on cue, I dropped the frickin' box.
It bounced off the counter-top and went down, where it sprayed out cornflakes all over our new floor (new house and all) so that no matter where I stepped I'd be in trouble. I backed out, got the handy-dandy broom from the garage, and went to war with the mess. It's not a battle anymore; there's been altogether too many battles. It's a war I'm waging with dropsy, when what's supposed to happen doesn't.
I drop things constantly even as I am telling myself not to. Pills?--at least once a day one of the dozen squirts out of my hands and hits the floor in a full gallop. It takes me half a day to find it; for the record, it takes Barbara far less. This morning when I made coffee, I told myself to be frickin' careful because it's so easy to bump the measuring stick off something on the machine and end up marching on coffee.
"Be careful," I told myself, then proceeded to bump the measuring stick off the side of the bucket so a fine spray of coffee ended up on the floor. Not even eight hours after the same patch of flooring was festooned with corn flakes, it was heavy-laden with coffee.
I'm increasingly of the age when my father-in-law used to lament, with onerous regularity, that old age isn't for sissies. He lived to be 100 years old; I'm still a long way off confessions.
I think Herbie was born with a catcher's mitt in hand. I played on ball teams with him for six years, maybe more. I live hundreds of miles away from our childhood sandlot ball games, but somebody tells me Herbie's gone, and his being so sends me into a psychic dungeon. I haven't seen Herbie, our catcher, for fifty years, and his death has me staggering.
An old girlfriend of mine, an old friend tells me, has Alzheimer's, and not just early onset. She's down, he says.
For three days, she's very much with me, except she's 21 years old, never having aged because that's how I see her, never knew her a day older. I have no idea who she married, whether or not she had kids, where on earth she could be occupying a bed in some institution's memory unit. I don't know anything about her except this--she remembers nothing.
It haunts me--it does, another signal of my age. It's hard to want to think of a world without Herbie with a catcher's mitt, or this old girlfriend of mine coming out of church on Sunday night and getting into my dad's 63 Chev with me. I can't handle it. Finally, I decide to write about it. If I can write a short story, maybe I can get her suffering out of my head. I haven't written fiction for fifteen years, but I'm thrilled with the prospect of trying.
Here 'tis: https://reformedjournal.com/2025/05/12/cheating/
Thanks for listening. I feel better already about the corn flakes.
2 comments:
Jim, we know her. She is, and will always remain for us, tall, beautiful, amazing. She knows things. She sings and I suspect, as with unresponsive Helen, she reaches them in wavelengths undetected by most. She has a family who love her. We love her too.
Reflect and treasure what once was, as I suspect you do. But know that the paths we've chosen have honor too. And of course, they put up with us as we are.
Thank you.
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