Notes from Maine - 2020/06/20
A lot of people have asked for an update on Dad. He’s doing well—improving at least—and his spirits seem good. The current rehab facility is coaxing good progress out of him. At eighty-three, a couple of surgeries and infections took most of his strength. He’s fighting to get it back. His goal is to go back to living on his own in his house. I’m not confident that he’ll get that far, but I’m happy for every step he takes in that direction. I know that soon enough his era will be over. Maybe he’ll get one more stretch of independence before then.
My mother couldn’t be any more different. She is a torrent of energy, always pointing herself at another task or chore. When she comes up to Maine, she gets angry if I don’t have enough projects going. Last summer, she was up on a ladder half the time, either painting the exterior of the house or the vaulted ceiling in the living room. I had to build a scaffolding over the couches because it frightened me too much to see her up there. She’s fearless (maybe even reckless). My first instinct is to just let her do whatever she wants but then my brother said, “Boy, that’s really going to mess you up when Mom dies because she leaned too far out to scrape that window.”
He was right—she was barely clinging to the ladder. She just turned eighty. I’m not going to let her die from scraping paint (at least not at my house). Down in Virginia, nobody can talk her out of risking her life. There is one gutter that she likes to clean out by pulling a small ladder up on top of the porch roof and then climbing up from there. All you can do is shake your head and try not to make a loud sound that might startle her.
Inside her house, she’ll start up in the top bedroom, paint it (again) and then work her way down to the bottom floor over the course of a couple of months. When she finishes the last of it, she declares that she won’t be picking up another brush or roller for a, “long, long time.” That amount of time usually ends up being less than 60 days. A few times a year, the state sends someone out to reappraise the house—her square footage is constantly shrinking due to layer after layer of paint.
Back in Maine, when the rehab workers explain what they’re about to do, Dad rolls his eyes and tunes out.
“Sometimes, Bruce, when we don’t use our muscles, they get weaker,” a helpful therapist will say.
He replies, sarcastically, “Oh yeah? I thought the rest would make them stronger.”
They say, “I know, right? It doesn’t seem to make sense, but it’s true—you have to use the muscles in order to strengthen them.”
Horribly obvious facts like these, stated with earnest enthusiasm, take the energy right out of my Dad. My mother, if she ever got to such an incapacitated state, would probably give the therapist a piece of her mind.
I took him a bunch of magazines today. Reader’s Digest and such. When Grandpa was in the hospital, Dad would sneak gin martinis in for him. Down on the first floor, Dad would procure crushed ice and take it upstairs in one of those pink pitchers. Grandpa was sipping away one evening when they came in to give him pills. With the pills in his mouth, they handed him the nearest cup. Through a full mouth, Grandpa said, “Oh, no, no, no!” It was too late. They were already tipping a big swallow of precious martini into his mouth. It was wasted, in his opinion, washing down the pills.
At home, drinking is my father’s most coveted hobby. Now, it has been almost three months since alcohol passed his lips. “So it goes,” Vonnegut would say.
The book I’m passing along today is Instinct, the sequel to Extinct. These books remain the most popular that I’ve written. I can’t give away free copies of Extinct because it’s for sale across different retailers so the normal rules don’t apply. But, if you can, I recommend you find a copy of that before you begin Instinct. I didn’t spend much time recapping. Hope you’re well, and if your weather is anything like mine, I hope you’re staying cool.
