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Dealing with Dementia: My Grandpa and his crazy story.
My ninety-two-year-old grandpa fell and broke his hip last week. He was just out walking/hobbling in the garden area with one of the nurses from the assisted-living home that he resides in and he took a fall. Nobody knows why exactly but unfortunately there was a good bit of time between his fall in the afternoon and when he was actually taken to the hospital via an ambulance.
My mom stayed with him all night in the ER waiting for him to be admitted. He was finally admitted and put on pain-killers sometime in the wee hours of the morning. I’m sure it was horrible for him. My mom called me several times and I could hear crazy people wailing in the background. Somebody was drunk, somebody else over-dosed on drugs. It was a crazy night in the ER like usual. My poor old grandpa.
When I went to see my grandpa the next day in the hospital, he was pretty high on morphine. But he’s been slipping in and out of dementia for a while now. Last week I went to visit him and he was in tears trying to tell me a story that was so important it could change the world, he said. It took him forever to get the story out and when he did it wasn’t really a story at all. But I’m going to share it here because I promised him I would.
He has this painting (or photograph, I’m not sure. It’s a reprint) on the wall of an old man praying over bread. It’s a very popular picture and has been around for ages. (Google tells me it was taken by a photographer in Minnesota in 1912). My grandpa has talked about this picture many times before but lately it’s taken a new twist.
When he was in the service back during World War II, he was in London and had dinner with a man named Old Brother Ball who looked exactly like the man in the picture. Same hair, same clothes, same bread, the book was a bible and in the bowl was something he called mutton which was like lard. My grandpa remembers having dinner with Brother Ball and he took a knife and spread the mutton on his bread. Grandpa says the mutton was horrible tasting and turned his stomach. He smacks his lips in disgust and tells me that he can still taste it to this day. “Disgusting stuff.”
Anyway, my grandpa is now convinced that this picture is actually of Old Brother Ball and nobody in the world knows this. He desperately wants to tell the world that the picture isn’t a mystery anymore. The man’s name is Brother Ball and he lives in London in a town called Rickenberry (I didn’t write it down so I have to double check this because I have no idea what town he was talking about.)
Before he always told the story as if the man in the picture looked a lot like his old friend but now he’s convinced it is Old Brother Ball and it’s my job to tell as many people as I can. Maybe we could even make some money off the story, he says, which is just like him always trying to find a way to get rich quick (it runs in the family). Over and over he frets, Do you think we can do this? It’s such a big story. We have so little time. Can you print it? How many copies can you make?
In the hospital he must have seen on television that there was a ballgame this weekend and he was adament that I get the story printed in the newspaper and hand deliver it to the ball game attendees. I kept telling him over and over that I could put it on my website and thousands of people would read his story. (I exaggerated slightly for his comfort.) He’d pat my hand and thank me and then one minute later he’d start over again.
It was crazy-making. I started putting my story-telling skills to work and told him big fat yarns about how I would print the story two-up at Kinkos and then stay up all night long rolling the half-sheet flyers inside newspapers. Maybe I’d even set up a table and hand out free cups of coffee with the newspapers. His story would get out I assured him. I’m sure his hospital roommate was thoroughly amused/confused about what was going on.
It was so hard. I wanted to comfort him but the distress just wouldn’t go away. I’d convince him that his story would get out and he’d calm for a few minutes and then start up all over again. Do you really think you can do it? It’s so important. We have so little time. Maybe you better go and get started right now.
So finally I did leave. I told him I’d come back in the morning and show him the printed story. I figured I’d just print out this blog post and hope he didn’t have his glasses on, which have been lost for a few days anyway. I don’t know if he really knows how much time is passing. It seems like he is in a perpetual state of the last five minutes.
The good news is he had hip surgery last night and he came out of it like a champ. My dad said he was more lucid than ever. He knew who was president. He wasn’t talking about his story or the ballgame at all. He was happy to see my dad and just wanted to get some rest and see everybody later. So who knows, maybe he’s got a few more years left in him.
I just hope they’re good years. I’m so happy to have him still with us. I love him so much but I don’t know how long I can go on making up stories about making copies at Kinkos and handing them out at ballgames. But I’ll do it because someday somebody is probably going to do it for me. Or at least I hope so.
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Waiting for paint to dry.
I figured I might as well write a post while I wait for the paint to dry on my latest craft project. Unfortunately, this project is not one I’m going to blog so you’ll just have to wonder until the end of time what paint might be drying but I can share that I’m working on an April Fool’s craft that should post this Thursday. I haven’t done it yet but it seems pretty cool in my head.
So! I almost got an oven this last week. That would have been exciting. The oven here has been broken since I moved in. The gas guy came out to fix it and sent us off on a wild goose chase for a 1970’s thermal couple that doesn’t exist anymore because they don’t make them anymore. He did say I could sell this old Okeefe & Merritt for a couple thousand dollars. I wish that was true. Does anybody know anybody who collects old ovens like this (the one on the left)? It’s really cool and green! It’s also very narrow but I didn’t care. A narrow oven is better than no oven.
But as things always go, the exhaust pipes for the new oven didn’t quite fit so now I have a new oven (which is actually an old one from my mom’s old house) hole in my house that is not quite hooked up. It’s okay. I’ve waited this long, I can wait a bit longer. My dad says he can fix it when he has home time again which might be as soon as this coming weekend. Woot! If it really happens, I’m sure I’ll be posting all kinds of pictures of me making lemon bars! You don’t know how many times I’ve looked at my lemon tree wistfully thinking of all the lemon things I could bake if I just had an oven!
The new old oven is kinda cool and funky too. It even has a clock in it that all the cool cats are making into screen savers these days. I don’t care. I just want it to BAKE!! I tried making cornbread in my mom’s toaster oven a while back. It did not work. The top burned and the middle was raw. There might be a way if I just adjust the temperature and time variables.
The coolest thing is that my dad was home. I wish he was home every weekend, but you know how it goes. He’s a long haul trucker and the more you drive the more money you make. So them’s the breaks.
Hmmm… what else is new? St. Patricks Day was pretty fun. Bug wore green from head to toe which brought back old memories. I whipped up a really quick Leprechaun treasure hunt in the backyard for her. It wasn’t that special really but she thought it was fun. I just painted some rocks green and then put them out strategically so she could follow a trail to an old Easter Basket filled with some leftover green taffy I already had on hand. When she questioned the item’s familiarity, I told her the Leprechauns are probably just like Santa Claus and they like to borrow stuff from us like wrapping paper and old baskets and things. They’re very resourceful, those seasonal characters. She seemed to buy it but I think that explanation won’t last much longer.
Speaking of Bug and her many outfits, I have found a solution for the constant pink. You might recall that she will only wear a particular shade of hot pink and sometimes I feel like whipping out the pantone book and telling everyone who gives her gifts to match it to a number (Pantone 233 if you’re curious). It’s that bad. But sometimes she likes to play act certain characters. Her favorites are Sleeping Beauty and Barbie, of course. Occasionally she will dress up as me and put together an outfit that looks amazingly like mine.
Recently we have been having wars about how she wants her hair done. She always wants two braids at the top of her head pulled back because that’s how Barbie does her hair, apparently. That’s all fine and everything but her long long hair gets sticky and tangled and all I ever want to do is chop it all off or put it in a high-up pony tail. Her dad doesn’t want her to cut her hair at all, which I can kind of relate to since I too had really long hair as a child, so that’s not an option. A pony tail is the obvious solution but I guess I just haven’t put enough Barbies in her path wearing a pony tail.
I thought I’d take a different track so I showed her a video of Lara Croft kicking butt and it worked like a charm. Now she wears boots and shorts and wants her hair up all the time. The back yard has become a tomb and she’s always hunting for treasure. Whatever works, I say. Kids are funny and sometimes require parents to be even funnier.
This weekend while Bug hung out with her dad, I tagged along with my friend Deb to a cool antique store. Except it was sort of like a cross between a thrift store and an antique store and they had all kinds of “junk” out on the sidewalk for super cheap. I wasn’t going to buy anything but the ladies working there were so nice and kept pawning things off onto me. “Here buy this purse, it looks so nice on you! What a great shape!” “You like that chair? I’ll sell you both of them for twenty bucks!” etc etc… it was kind of fun and silly. I would love to own a shop like that and sit around with a bunch of girlfriends drinking coffee and encouraging suckers to buy stuff.
I could find all kinds of old forgotten gems (aka junk) out in the sticks where people don’t know what they have and then sell them for twice the price at the beach. Now if someone could just rent me a store front for next to nothing. That would be the thing to do! I could have a little espresso machine in the back and probably do graphic design on the side. I’m not sure where Bug would hang out though…Lara Croft kicks might not go so well with glass lamps and fine china. But it’s a nice day dream.
It was a great place to take 7days shots, there were mirrors everywhere! Which by the way brings me to how much I hate my new haircut. Every shot I take of myself, I hate. I guess this is just part of getting older but please tell me next time I get a haircut that I’m NEVER allowed to have layers above my ears again. It’s taking forever to grow out. I guess you can’t really tell in these photos, which is intentional. My delete key sees way more photos than anyone these days.
I found my shot and bought this silly mirror thing for five bucks. It’s pretty cool I think.
