Come In! Come In!

What do you do when friends or relatives you’re not expecting come to your door? Same question only change the person standing on your doorstep to a neighbor. Or what about a stranger who may be looking for help or a donation? My husband and I never agreed on what was the proper protocol in these situations. He thought my way was wrong, I thought the same about his way. He believed in saying, “Come in! Come in” to nearly everyone. I’m more the wait-and-see-what-they-want-first type.

Don was raised in the country on a farm with no close neighbors and he was brought up in a family that apparently believed that if someone came all that way out to see you or to buy eggs or to sell you something or talk religion that you welcomed them into your home. Even if you didn’t want to, you’d drop what you’re doing and let them monopolize your time. He and his dad also genuinely loved talking to people or to use Don’s words, they loved "shooting the shit.” Side note here: I’ve never liked that phase and it surprised me that it's been in use longer than I though. According to Dictionary.com shoot the shit comes down from 'shoot the breeze' which was first "recorded in a poem written during World War I by a US private, who described his corporals as sociable men who were much better at ‘breeze-shooting’ than fighting or doing actual work. It doesn’t require much skill or effort to hit the wind with a gun, so the expression goes. Shoot the shit emerged in the 1940s, notably found in a letter by the author Norman Mailer.”

Coming up from the 'shoot the shit' rabbit hole, I’m back on topic again to the days when Don and I both had our own houses. Don would drive me crazy by allowing all his bored neighbors to walk in his front door to “shoot the shit” any old time they wanted, eating up a bunch of time that would put him in a bad mood because then he’d be behind on things he needed to do or they'd make him late for something. He was notoriously late. He had several neighbors who’d head over to his house the minute he’d drive in, not even giving him enough time to pee before he’d be expecting him to answer the door and let them in. They all knew he worked nights but they couldn't seem to grasp the concept of him needing to sleep in during the day. Once I suggested he post a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door when he went to bed. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, when he was really sleep deprived he'd come to my house straight from work to hop in my bed with my dog curled under his arm like a teddy bear.

I was raised differently. When someone showed up on my doorstep (or at his and I was the one opening the door) I never stood back and let just anyone walk in. Family and close friends, sure, but they generally knew enough to call and ask if I was up to company and they rarely dropped by unannounced. My catch phase has always been, “Stop over sometime, just call first and give me a fifteen minute warning." I say it in a joking manner but I'm dead serious. And I always make sure I give others the same notice if I want to stop by their place, so they could take their choice of tidying up the house or their appearance or to tell me it isn’t a good time for one reason or another. For me, it was usually the house that gets picked up rather than fuss with my looks in front of a mirror. This whole topic ran through my head today because a person buying something on Facebook Market Place sent a text asking if they could come over Right Now. I lied and asked if they could give me a half hour, that I was just getting lunch on the table. There was no lunch. I wasn’t dressed yet.

But when neighbors came to the door in the old neighborhood I’d waited to see what they wanted before allowing them inside. It used to drive my husband crazy when I'd be in "guard dog mode." I just couldn’t see letting bored people come inside and park them selves in the living room for the long haul if we were getting ready to go out. If they only came over to borrow something, no problem. A cup of sugar? “Sure let me get that for your.” Borrow the vacuum for the fifth Tuesday in a row? “Last time, lady. It’s time you buy your own.” (They never did, they'd just hit up another neighbor.) We had minimalists living next door before they even had a name for people who penny-pinched then bragged about how cheaply they can live. They didn’t own any of their own necessities for keeping a home or car clean and maintained. Nothing. Ya, I would let anyone use my clothes dryer if theirs broke in the middle of doing laundry but don’t expect to use my washer/dryer routinely week after week. Minimalists neighbors will eat up the life of your appliances and power tools if you let them.

One of my future neighbors is apparently worried about living in such close contact with others. She made a comment at a meeting we had recently about hoping we can all use the public areas for our visiting and "not drop in on each other at all hours of the day and night. I like my privacy!” That made me laugh. My husband would have blown a gasket if I had made that statement. I suspect my future neighbors are going to give me plenty of blog fodder. The bigger question to ponder, though, is when someone knocks on my door will I throw it wide open and issue a good ol' country-boy "Come in, come in!" or will I stay true to my city-girl roots and wait to see why they are there first before inviting someone inside? Want to make an educated guess? Okay, that was a rhetorical question, no need to weigh in on whether I'd lick a neighbor's face or bite it off if they stopped by some evening with a bottle of wine or a bunch of gossip up their sleeve. ©

The Shower Stall Mystery

NOTE: This might not be throw-back Wednesday but I felt like sharing a humorous piece I wrote back when I was a caregiver for my husband, after his massive stroke. Back then, I was submitting pieces like this to a site where we'd get paid for each click the articles got. My clicks totaled over a million, but a million pennies does ad up...

THE SHOWER STALL MYSTERY


I wonder if there are any statistics on how many female caregivers stop shaving their legs when we have to start shaving our husband's faces. Time constraints are as good as any other excuse for our apathy about not shaving what can be hidden with slacks or for not applying makeup and perfume. I can't remember the last time I took a leisurely bath where I had the time to lather up my lower limbs and run a razor up in smooth, slow strokes like a model in a Gillette commercial. While helping my husband, Don, in the shower today these were the thoughts that ran through my head as I looked down at my legs expecting to see the natural, European look. I was shocked to see they are bald as a proverbial billiard ball. Oh, ya, I forgot that menopause takes the hair away and it doesn't come back.

I've been shaving Don's face since he went on the blood thinner, Coumadin, even though his occupational therapist wants him to do all his own grooming. But he's so clumpy shaving left-handed and it's really hard to make time for extra trips to ER. Besides, we have a new wheelchair accessible bathroom and the color of blood would clash with the décor and if I let Don do it all on his own, our water bills would be around five hundred dollars.

Our shower routine: I help Don transfer into the shower, shave his face, scrub his back, and pull the curtain closed so that he can do the rest of his shower alone. Then it starts---those sound effects, the kind like Meg Ryan made in her famous movie scene where she's faking an orgasm in the restaurant. The first time I heard Don moaning and groaning I thought, "Oh, God, he's having a private moment and I'd rather not know about." This went on with every shower for a couple of weeks before a voyeuristic moment made me slowly draw the shower curtain back to peek inside. There sat Don, eyes closed, doing his moaning and groaning routine only he wasn't---well, you know what he wasn't doing. He was shampooing his hair! I can be so slow on the draw. It hadn't dawned on me that all Don was doing was an imitation of the shampoo commercial that is imitating Meg Ryan's orgasm scene.

Time to dry off---Don does it all but his tush. But I'm on the creams and ointments committee, so I have to be there. I start with his feet, and work my way up. I apply the Naftlin gel for the toe nail fungus he picked up at the hospital and that his diabetes doesn't want to give back. Next comes the Nystatin for jock rash. That was fun the first time I had to have Don's doctor look at that---all three of us with our noses practically down in Don's crotch. The doctor tells me it's common for wheelchair bound guys to have a perpetual case and it won't go away without air. I've tried to get my husband to sleep commando, but he picks this stage of his life to get modest. Men! Go figure.

Next I apply a coat of Betadine antibiotic to the bruises and scratches on his paralyzed arm that are caused by our lap sitting dog and the Coumadin. Someday I'll probably get investigated by Social Services and I'll have to prove that the bruises are not caregiver abuse---hey, maybe I should knit the dog a set of booties. At this point in Don's routine I think, "Did I miss anything?" No, Don is applying his Stetson antiperspirant to his left arm pit. You should have seen him the time I brought home another brand and his aphasiac brain couldn't tell me in any other way but to throw it across the room day after day until I figured it out. His vocabulary is around twenty-five words and "don't buy this crap anymore" isn't one of his working phrases.

Following the left arm pit, comes his right arm pit royal ritual. No antiperspirant here or the fungus will start back in again. No air gets to the pit when you can't move an arm. So, it's ten powder puffs full of Johnson's Baby Powder. Not nine. Not eleven. I tried explaining the danger to our lungs of inhaling that white cloud in the room but for some reason, Don's aphasiac brain counts everything in tens. Now I just hold my breath and hope that he doesn't pick bath time to start learning to count to a higher number. And people wonder why we take two hours to shower.

After our showers today, we got distracted by a fat cat with long brown hair and four white feet who was stalking the neighbor's bird feeder and all three of us---the dog, Don and me---stopped what we were doing to watch until the cat got bored and lumbered across our back yard. The three of us followed his path, going from window to window until the cat caught Cooper's eye and they tried to stare each other down. The cat won.

Being Saturday, we headed into town to go to our favorite restaurant for omelets. I parked in the last handicapped space, transferred Don to his chair and when we got to the door a waitress barred the way and told us they were doing some painting over the weekend and were closing early.

"If you had just gotten here five minutes ago," she said, "We could have served you."

On the way back to the car I was cursing the cat in the yard and promising Don I'd shoot the darn thing the next time I see it. Damned cat cheated us out of our omelets! Don, he started yodeling at the top of his lungs. The man can't talk but he still finds ways to made fun of me when I get into one of my titters.

We drove to our next favorite restaurant and as I lowered the wheelchair with its Bruno lift, it got hung up on the trailer hitch. While I was trying to decide if there was a beefy guy near-by to help, Don was sitting inside the Blazer joyfully teaching himself the four letter words I had used to describe the cat. I was pleased when he came up with one of his own.

Inside the restaurant Don smiled across the table and I saw the want-to-cowboy he used to be and I thought about how lucky I am that I no longer had to purée his egg rolls and thicken his tea. He's come a long ways since the stroke. I looked down at my plate and saw a couple of tiny cubes that looked like clear gelatin and I wondered what they were. I ate one. Tasteless. I ate another, and then it dawned on me. They were eatable computer chips that program people to drive to their restaurant every time a UPS truck comes down the street.

Back in the Blazer after lunch, Don had to pee. We drove around to the back of the grocery store, before going in, and I pulled up to our regular spot where he could use his urinal. I felt like a male dog that needed to remark his territory as I poured the pee at the base of the 'No Parking, Fire Lane' sign. I laughed, thinking, "If only the people who believe I always live by the rules could see me now." It may not have been a bra-burning march or a stop-the-war demonstration from my youth, but I can still pull off a little civil disobedience.  Jean R. © 2006

Preposted from my caregiver blog From The Planet Aphasia

Holiday Break, Cowboy Outfits and Diaries

I’m winding down my e-Bay sales until after the holidays, maybe even for the whole winter and that's a good thing because I’m getting burned out and need a break. Since I started in the spring I’ve had great sales and good, trouble-free customers but the cigarette related collectibles I’ve been selling this month are attracting a lot of people in China and I don’t ship overseas. The e-Bay software and my settings there are supposed to filter out people without a U.S. address and stop them from bidding, but it doesn't stop them from sending a lot of messages in broken English wanting me to change my settings so they can bid or to buy the items directly without bidding at all. It’s not like they don’t have other choices if they really want to bid on my stuff. There are several large import/exporters on our coastlines that place bids for overseas e-Bayers. If they win, the exporter pays the seller who ships the item to them and they reship the items to the overseas buyers. The Chinese collectors apparently have deep pockets to be able to pay for this service plus they always outbid the American collectors. I don't mind selling to the import/exporters but the only unpaid auctions I've had all year have come from selling cigarette related collectibles and it's a long, drawn out pain-in-the-butt process before you can relist your items.

My last new listings were on Sunday so I’m in the wind-down phase and should have all twenty of my current e-Bay auctions closed and shipped before the post office turns into a Christmas Crazy-Land and I'm more than ready to shift gears. Next up on my downsizing schedule is deep closet purging my coat closet. I have seventeen coats and jackets in there---including one that is at least 35 years old and, yes, I still wear it. It's my go-to-coat for in between fall and winter. My goal is to end up with two coats for winter, two for summer, two for fall and two for rain.

I also have six Pendleton wool shirts in that closet---all classic cut westerns and I’d planned to sell the shirts on e-Bay. New they go for $149 and used I could get $35-45 each. But I don’t want to deal with people returning stuff for size so I’m trying to talk myself into giving them to Goodwill along with the coats. It's killing me to let go of the Pendleton’s. The $200 to $270 I could sell them for is hard to ignore plus I'm afraid if I donate them I'll see one of them on a homeless person. Don was the type of person who would have given a needy person the shirt off his back, but apparently I'm not. I'm too wrapped up in how he looked in them. His idea of dressing for fun and feeling good was a pair of Levis, a plaid Pendleton shirt, his Stetson cowboy hat and his Tony Lama cowboy boots. In his prime he was a head turner and I think of him every time I hear Dolly Parton singing:  

“Ooh, Why'd you come in here lookin' like that

In your high heeled boots and your painted-on jeans

All decked out like a cowgirl's dream…

Why you're almost givin' me a heart attack

When you waltz right in here lookin' like that.”

I’m not looking forward to the winter, hold up inside the house with lots of purging to do that is sure to take me back in time, a necessary place to go in order to move forward to my next chapter. One of the purging projects I have to do is to dispose of a lifetime of diaries. I’ve tried doing it a couple of times in recent years but I got lost in doing the “last” read-through and decided there was still value in keeping them. This time is different though, since I’ll be going to an independent living, continuum care campus where strangers could end up going through my stuff, if I have to move on to their Memory Care or Hospice building. Not sure how that works. I suppose they give your family x-number of days to clear your stuff out but who knows if my nieces be in a position to do it when the time comes. At one continuum care place I toured before picking this one out, they had an area where they sold the furniture and stuff left behind by residences. It made me sad in a way that going to estates sales never did. At least with estate sales, I always believed the family went through stuff before the public was invited in and could discover that aunt Florence kept a thirty year old flow chart of her periods. Some things aren't meant for strangers to ponder or make fun of. By the way, I don't have an ancient flow chart but I do have a list of every guy I've ever kissed. Just sayin'.

I wish I had a fireplace to burn my diaries in. Somehow that seems like a more fitting ending than sending the books off to recycling or worse yet, to the landfill with the trash. They burn old, worn-out flags with a ceremony that honors the purpose they served. There should be a ceremony when letting go of decades of your recorded daydreams, venting and jumbled thoughts. The diaries helped me learn how to sort out my feelings, how to keep secrets and they taught me how to write stream-of-consciousness style that I often do in this blog. I need a more fitting ending to my set of black books with the red spines than sending them off in a garbage truck or dumping them into the recycling roll-off at the county collection center. I’ve got my thinking cap on, trying to come up with an alternative but it must be lined with tin fold because nothing is coming though. ©

Don's first cowboy outfit. When I was the same age I was sleeping with my Gene Autry cap gun under my pillow.