The Widow's Nightgown

It occurred to me this week that every other night I’m wearing my nightgown inside out. I take it off in a manner my mom used to call “skinning the kitty” but somewhere along the line I quit turning the nightgown right side out before hanging it on its hook. Then at night I’ll grab the wrong side out garment, put it on and when it comes off in the morning, skin-the-kitty style again, it turns right side out. This is another old people thing or I’m I just getting lazy or are they one in the same? My nightgown is actually an old, v-neck t-shirt of my husband’s. It’s extra-long and reaches my knees and it’s getting so worn and holey I really should throw it out. Boohoo, I don’t want to do that except I feel the breath of an anonymous social worker on the back of my neck, making judgments and deeming me ready for a nursing home. Someone has to save old people from the dangers of appearing sloppy and as poor as a church mouse, she'd be thinking. Note to self: Don’t start getting the mail in your nightgown because one of the neighbors could have social services on their speed dial.

My husband wasn’t much taller than me but because he was in a wheelchair and in charge of dressing himself he could never get his pants pulled up high enough on one side thus the extra-long t-shirts did a good job of hiding his fanny. This is a common problem with people in wheelchairs and it’s always bugged me that others don’t understand they can’t help it. It’s just the way it is. Disabled people usually do the best they can to dress themselves and the rest of us need to do our best to ignore an exposed fanny from time to time. That’s hard for one particular acquaintance of mine to do. She’s so judgmental on this topic that it makes me crazy, but that’s a rant I should probably turn off and go on to other things. Sometimes I forget I’m no longer an advocate for stroke survivors. I have widow and old people issues to fry now that my husband is gone.

A few days ago I took an older cousin-in-law on a little road trip to have lunch with another cousin of ours. The cousin I picked up has gotten so frail since I saw her last at my husband’s funeral but she's still as sharp and as much fun to be around as she's always been. I hope people can say the same about me when I'm her age. Back when the three of us were young I spent a fair amount of time with each of them and at lunch we had a good time talking about our families past and present. It’s a shame we lost that closeness over the years. But the miles separate us physically and our lives all went in different directions separating us in other ways. It’s the way of the world when kids grow up and leave their core families behind.

Have you ever played the what-if game where you daydream about how you would have been different if so-and-so had remained in your life? Usually we do it regarding someone negative---an x-spouse, a nasty parent or even someone we loved who didn’t love us back. Rarely do we wonder what influences a do-gooder type would have had on our life trajectory, but I did just that after our cousin’s lunch. I suspect I would have turned out to be a better person if the influence of my younger cousin had reminded in my life all these years. Let’s just say she got all the Mother Theresa genes in the family. She’s probably the most charitable, do-good person I know---genuinely sweet and giving where I’m pickier about my do-good causes and more protective of my free time. She’s touched so many lives that when she dies they'll have to hold the service in the local high school auditorium. When I die my service could take place inside a Volkswagen. In other words, she threw rocks in the pool of life, I threw tiny pebbles.

One of the most interesting things about growing older is we get to see how the choices we made early on in life panned out over the years, we get to see how the people who came in and out of our lives have enriched us or torn us down, and we get decide if we’d take a do-over if do-overs were humanly possible. I’m putting on some rose colored glasses here but I like to think that most of us by the time we enter our “Golden Years” are happy with the way we turned out---or at least we’ve made peace with our personal histories---and we wouldn’t change much in our pasts. Our collective good, bad and the ugly experiences all had a hand in building the kind of people we’ve become. Take something ugly out of the mix and more than likely we wouldn’t have the same level of appreciation for the good stuff that came along later. Bottom line: I like myself and how I turned out but I sure admire my younger cousin. She’s so much like my dad in character and personality you’d think we were switched at birth if not for the two years that separate us. Get out the fiddles, there might be a country western song in there somewhere.

My house cleaning service comes in a few days and the girl assigned to my house is in college part-time, working towards a degree in social services. She’s a sweet, compassionate young woman but I’m starting to think I should buy myself a new nightgown so I don’t end up as Exhibit B in a term paper she has to write. When to Get Involved: Signs to Look For In Our Aging Population. One of these days she’s going to hit the chapter on protecting senior citizens from themselves and she’s going to start pushing numbers on her cell phone if I don’t shape up and get rid of my shabby, widow’s nightgown beforehand. ©

P.S. This is the 200th blog I've written since my husband passed away. I don't know what that means but I thought I'd mention it.

Maybe........

MAYBE it’s because I spent seven years of my life visiting a nursing home twice a week that I’m not looking forward to going again. Or MAYBE it’s because it’s not unusual for people my age to be living in a nursing home and I’m scared they’re going to lock the doors and not let me leave. Whatever the source of my apprehensions, it felt weird being in a group of women ages 55 to 80 as we sat around a table stuffing assorted Halloween candy, spiders and gummy worms into bags for the residents of a nursing home. But that’s what we did at our Red Hat Society business meeting. Fifty of them---bags, not ladies. Apparently, we’re going trick-or-treating in reverse. We’ll be delivering candy room-to-room instead of getting it by going door-to-door. Worry wart that I am I can visualize half the recipients of the bags ending up in ER. I know I would have a heart attack if I opened a bag and found two big black spiders mating inside. And the person I visited twice a week, my mother-in-law, would have eaten the plastic arthropods. How smart is it to include non-eatable things in candy bags going to people who have been known to pick lint off the floor and pop it in their mouths? But I’m a newbie in the group so I kept my worry wart thoughts to myself.

Also at the meeting the “Princess in Charge of Veteran Affairs” reminded us all to start accumulating stuff to put in shoe boxes for homeless vets that our chapter will be packing in November and giving out at Christmas. Jeez, I hope we don’t have to deliver those boxes in person---although it would be “character building” if we did. (That’s what my brother used to tell me and his kids whenever we didn’t want to do something.) Ya, ya. I know. I’m a liberal and liberals believe in helping people who are down on their luck. Save your heckling for someone else. I’m good at writing checks and sending them periodically to the soup kitchen and the homeless shelter in town. In years gone by I was even good at talking to the homeless when Don was at my side because I knew he could handle any threatening situation that might come up. But a swarm of old ladies dressed in purple and red climbing under bridges and viaducts looking for refrigerator box condo communities? How’s that going to work out? My new Red Hat chapter, I suspect, is going to be taking me out of my comfort zone a lot. MAYBE peer pressure will finally catch up to me after all these years of avoiding it.

My social calendar this week also included a lecture at the Historical Society. The lecture was about an old amusement park that used to be in town in between the 1890s to 1954. It was Disneyland huge and it drew in a string of well-known entertainers at the dance pavilion, playhouse and vaudeville theater---one venue alone could seat 1,700 people. The park also had a roller coaster, Ferris wheel, four story toboggan run/roller coaster and a roller rink where I skated more than a few times. The park sat in between two lakes and you could rent canoes that came with picnic baskets so you could lunch on the water. Like people who have reached their expiration dates, it’s hard to believe an amusement park so big and popular could disappear as if it never existed except for the pictures left behind in a book.

MAYBE it was the romanticism of a by-gone era or the pure talent of a cameraman to tell a story, but I went home from the lecture longing for something I can’t have. I want more candid photos of Don and me together! We took photos of each other, of the dogs, of scenery and flowers but any photos of us together were usually taken at someone’s wedding and they were formal, line-ups and stiff. “You stand over there by the bride.” “Line up by height.” “Say cheese.” I want the kind of photos where we were having a quiet or romantic moment while hundreds of people were having the time of their lives in the distance background. I want pictures of myself and Don lounging in a canoe or feeding swans along the shore on a sunny summer afternoon. Iconic photographs of an iconic era like those at the slideshow/lecture. The current generation with their cell phone cameras sure won’t have to long wistfully for more photos when they get old. Judging by what they post on Facebook young people pretty much document every moment of their days. Do they think if it isn’t captured in a photo it didn’t happen? If so, I’m beginning to wonder if they might be right. Am I just imagining the smiles that passed between Don and me so long ago? Did he really hold my hand when I needed his support? Was he real? Were we real? MAYBE I’m not so sure anymore and it hasn’t even been two years yet since he passed away. What’s it going to be like in ten?

Time marches on. The pines outside my window are thinning their needles. The cattails are losing their color. The season is changing and Halloween is just around the corner. MAYBE if I can remember not to eat any plastic spiders when I visit the nursing home with my Red Hat chapter they won’t want to keep me locked inside. MAYBE, like the main character in Water for Elephants, I'll find a way to escape the nursing home and run away to join the circus if that does happens. ©

Old People Problems, Puppets and Politics

When a neighbor tells you she saw some nice beans at the farmers market and you think she said she saw some nice queens, it’s time to get your hearing checked. When a friend tells you he’s going downtown to suck on a beer and you think he said he wants to suck on an ear, it’s time to get your hearing checked…unless, of course, you enjoy being fodder for old people jokes. Oh my god, I hate telling on myself but recently another friend was talking about getting her son’s horse some new tack and I actually spent a few moments wondering how you get a horse a new rack. Do they have veterinaries that do boob jobs on fillies? Why on earth would a horse even need a bigger rack? It’s not like horses are judged on the size of their mammary glands.

So today I spent two hours getting a hearing test. I honestly thought they’d find a big hunk of wax down in there to explain why I’ve suddenly developed old-people-itis. No such luck. I’ve lost a “significant” amount of hearing in the higher frequencies, according to the audiologist. The test was through one of those big chains that do free testing, hoping to suck you in to buying their product. The set of middle-of-the-road aids he was trying to sell me would cost roughly $5,000 or $2,700 on top of what the insurance will cover. Cripe, I hate having an old people problem! How do you go about buying a set of hearing aids so you don’t get ripped off? In my case, I’m taking the easy way out and I booked an appointment for a second test at my husband’s audiologist who is connected to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. I know they are not snake oil salesmen, I’m not so sure about the chain hearing aid place.

Old People Problem #2: Why in the world do young people think it’s so funny to lock the doors on handicap bathroom stalls, then crawl under the door and leave? It happened to me again today. In a pinch I can use a regular stall but back when I used to take my wheelchair bound husband to the restroom that wasn’t an option. Now, that's a REAL problem in situations like that and one that's not so easy for old people to solve. On several occasions little kids have crawled under the door to unlock the stalls for us and we were grateful for their help while at the same time trying not to let the ‘yuck factor’ show on our faces. You gotta know there’s cooties living on that floor! Not all kids are evil, I know that, but one evil kid who locks handicap bathroom stalls, and then leaves the building makes you forget about the next 100 good ones.

When I got home from the hearing test and the annoying bathroom experience I had a call on my answering machine from a guy with a smooth, sexy voice. Oh, my! It was the director of the museum wanting to know if I could voluntary this weekend at a park party helping with some children’s activities. All the proceeds earned at the park party are being donated to the museum and they were understaffed. I was glad I wasn't home to pick up phone as the call came in because I was in no mood, today, to be nice to cute little kids with sticky fingers and candy cotton in their hair. I had to call the guy back, though, and I was actually glad I had a prior commitment. I don't have a lot of experience with little kids. I do know they've done things like pee on my shoes, tie me up and put earth worms in my purse---and that was my nieces and nephew who love me. What will strangers do? The museum is going to be doing a lot of puppet shows so I can see where I'll need to over come my fear of little rug rats. I might actually like shoving my arm up the town’s founder in effigy. Or I might claim the Indian princess puppet. I think my voice is too high to take on the role of a lumberjack. When I declined the volunteer invitation the director said, “Don’t worry, we’ll hook you into something else. Now that we have you, we won’t let go.”

I’m going to a political rally fundraiser this weekend---my excuse for not helping with the park party. The last one I went to Don won a Michelle Obama doll in a raffle and the next week I sold it on e-Bay for a cool $150. I don’t even know who is speaking at the rally but, what the heck, don’t we all need a team to support? I hate football, baseball, basketball and hockey so it’s either politics or polo and since I don’t look good in garden hats, polo is out of the question. I try to keep politics out of my blogs but I’m really angry over what is going on in D.C. right now with the shut down, so if you’ll excuse me I’m going over to a website where debating politics is not only welcome but encouraged. And we all get to fight anonymously. ©