Yesterday is over and today is today. Profound thought, I know. But maybe I am saying that yesterday with all its mistakes and irritations is behind us and today is a blank page, a fresh gift of life.
I work at a group home where I care for three high-functioning ladies with intellectual disabilities. I also live with my eighty-year -old mother. I’m not saying the two are equal. I’m just saying that today, both provided illustrations of how you just gotta laugh at life’s little idiosyncrasies in all their vast array.
This afternoon, I convinced two of my ladies to walk with me on the local rail trail. The weather was lovely–unusually balmy for late autumn with sunshine softly diffused by high clouds. Both gals needed their daily exercise–exercise they are all too often reluctant to engage in.
Not long into the walk, Margaret, who had started out at a relatively slow pace, picked up speed, coming up behind an elderly gentleman who must have wondered if he was being stalked. Margaret passed him, gained more speed and was soon walking like a house afire. If I ever see a burning house walking, I’m going to command it to stop, drop and roll. But that’s beside the point.
Maybe Margaret thought that the faster she walked, the sooner she could get back to the locked minivan and stand there and wait for her housemate Elena and me to catch up.
A few minutes later, Elena and I stopped to pet a dog. We both love animals and he was a friendly pup–a beautiful red-coated Golden. Of course, we forgot all about Speedy Gonzales and by the time we’d bid farewell to the pooch and his mistress, Margaret had vanished. I discovered at this point, that keeping an eye on these two women in a large, open space could be a bit like the proverbial herding of kittens. Concerned that Margaret would be unaware of where the trail ended and might disappear down one of several streets, I jogged ahead to find her. In the process, I lost sight of Elena who continued along at her usual, lumbering gait.
All ended well, however. I caught up with Margaret, and we headed back–with Margaret full steam ahead once again and I worried she might just keep on going past the parking lot and across the next street.
The afternoon concluded and I went home to my mother. I love her dearly and we get along just fine but there are definite challenges to living with an aging parent who refuses to wear her hearing aid around the house.
I prepared a quick dinner. Work had gone later than expected and I’d stopped to pick up a few needed items on my way home.
At one point, I selected a pear to eat, then changed my mind. My mother saw me return it to the fridge and the resulting conversation went something like this:
MOM: Is that a pear?
ME: Yeah.
MOM: Yeah?
ME: Yeah.
MOM: (perfectly serious) It’s a yeah pear?
ME: What?
MOM: It’s a yeah pear?
ME: No. It’s a bosc pear
MOM: A box pear?
ME: A b-o-s-c pear.
At this point, my mom facial expression was akin to that of someone who’d just been told that science had managed to crossbreed a whale with an elephant.
Would that be a whalephant?
My mom is great though. She’s sprier than I am some days. I’ve never seen her groan and stagger stiffly away from her chair after a long stretch of sitting like I do. She springs up like the rest of her body hasn’t gotten the message that she’s no longer thirty.
And there’s that thing she does with her dentures. At least I assume it’s her dentures. She sorta gives me the creeps when she does it. She seems to be chewing on something but I know she’s not because we’ve both been sitting there for at least a half an hour and she didn’t have any food with her and I never saw her put anything in her mouth. But she’s chewing.
“Mom,” I ask. “Are you eating something?”
She doesn’t say a thing, just keeps on chewing.
“What are you doing?
Still no answer. All I get is this enigmatic look as if she knows something but she’s not telling me.
At this point, I begin to feel like I’ve been dropped into a scene from, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
I want to say in my most commanding tone: “Where is my mother and what have you done with her?”\
Eventually, she’s back to her old self and the denture gremlin has left my mom’s body and gone back to whatever planet he came from.
And I hurry to my laptop to encourage you all that sometimes–you just gotta laugh.
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