July 15th, 2010
by Dena
Nobody blames Mom’s inability to use a phone on her age. She was the same when she was 30, 40, and so on. Phones are the only technology that she uses, unless you count the remote control. (she also has issues with it) She won’t even attempt to use a computer, GPS, or anything electronic. Mom claims that things like this just, “go crazy on her” but my sister says that mom has the ability to tear up a steel ball with a rubber hammer.
Mom has never really learned how to use call waiting. If you are talking to her and she gets a beep, she hangs up. It doesn’t matter what you are talking about, she has to go RIGHT THEN. Unless, you are her sister. Then she won’t hang up and it will beep and beep and you think she isn’t answering or something tragic has happened. Has she tripped over the dog and broken a hip? Did she pass out? My imagination goes far beyond what I can even write on here. If I can’t reach her and I know she is home, I worry.
An example of this happened yesterday. Mom has been sick and I called to check on her, knowing that she would be home alone. No answer. I tried again. No answer. I called her cell. Maybe she is talking to Peggy and won’t answer. I try later. No answer. I thought that maybe she was in a deep nap, as she is prone to do, and called a few hours later. Again no answer.
At this point I am in a slight panic and picture horrible things involving an ambulance and xanax. I call my Dad, who is only slightly more advanced and says that he will try to call her with his phone. As if I wasn’t doing it right and his would work but guess what? Still no answer.
He sends my brother rushing to check on her (thankfully he was just getting off work) and finds her with both phones “going crazy”. The landline would not ring and the cell phone would “only dial the number 3 and it kept talking to me. It kept telling me to say a command. I said BE QUIET but it never did.”
Today I called her on her landline and she answered. Only thirty seconds or so into the conversation I had a beep and it was Mom calling me from her cell. I told her that I was getting a call from her cell and she uttered a few words under her breath and then we resumed our conversation.
Mom is pretty bright and talented in many areas, but the phone wins every time.
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October 12th, 2009
by Dena
So Mama is in the hospital again with pacemaker complications, and in an effort to take her mind off things, we took her a laptop so she could finally see the website and see what we had been working on. Nobody is sure if it’s the morphine or her feeling extra sweet after chats with nuns up there, but she was upset that we didn’t really have anything about Daddy on here. I tried to explain to her that this was a site related to food and recipes and frankly the only thing Daddy knows about food is how to eat it.
This is him at his recent birthday party. If you remember from a previous post, he appears to have no taste buds as evidenced by his ability to just eat whatever is available for sustenance. He grew up in a time and place where you are what you had when you had it, and this carries on to this day. She specifically told us not to mention the time he accidentally ate cat food (too late), or the time somebody set an individually wrapped Electrosol tab too close to the Halloween candy dish and he was halfway through the “nastiest candy” he ever tasted before Mama could tell him it was a dishwashing tablet. Never in my life have I seen Daddy so much as make toast, but there is one food story about Daddy that is totally worth telling here.
In 2001, Mama had an accident where she fell down and fractured her elbow and shattered the bones in her forearm AND upper arm. She was in a cast from her hand to her armpit and was pretty much incapacitated. It was at this point that Dad had to take over the cooking in the home. Cooking is a strong word, perhaps it was his job to forage for to food is a better term. The nest was empty and it was all up to him. He prepared the only meal he was totally capable of: Tuna fish mixed with mustard, and a banana on the side. To Daddy a banana could be the appetizer or a desert, side dish, whatever. It’s his favorite thing to eat and he thinks it’s delicious, so he assumed she would too. He was sadly mistaken.
This meal was breakfast, lunch, and dinner for days and days on end. Days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into her teetering on the edge of having a total breakdown because she needs a little more variety in her life than he does. (On the plus side her cholesterol was non-existent during that time). Mama tried everything she could to drop a hint to Daddy that she needed a little more spice in her life, but he didn’t get the hint. During this time he learned how to make coffee so he figured he was on his way to being the next Julia Child. Well, after Mama had taken all she could of tuna and bananas, she called me in tears because she had SPECIFICALLY told him to pick her up some chicken. He returned home with………………..tuna fish and bananas. She called me crying like there was some sort of major tragedy taking place in the world. I believe her words were, “ALL I ASKED FOR HIS SOME FRIED CHICKEN……….IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK????” I literally had to get in the car, go to KFC and pick her up a bucket to console her. Once I made it down there, she was much relieved to actually have some grease return to her diet, and after that any time she has gotten sick, I have made sure to see to it that she has a supply of chicken at the ready (On a side note, she was totally devastated to see that her favorite KFC branch was closed recently. Fairly certain it was condemned). The moral of the story is that weeks on end of tuna fish with a banana for dessert is the recipe for a psychiatric emergency.
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