Notes from Maine - 2020/10/14
My mother is visiting now. She’s a wonderful houseguest, as long as you make sure she has plenty to do. If she doesn’t feel like she’s accomplishing things, Mom will get really… unpleasant. This year, she arrived with a bit of an agenda. She wanted to finally paint the ceiling in the dining room, which is fine with me. When she has finished that (she started this morning, so maybe later today?) I’ll try to point her at renovating my father’s room. That’s the one issue with Mom, she can be difficult to direct. One year she wanted to come work on something so I suggested the living room closet. She ended up working on the front porch. Another time, she was frustrated that I wasn’t moving quickly enough on a project so I told her that the next step was to dig holes for footings. My mother was out there digging holes, four feet deep, that afternoon.
She’s unstoppable.
My father, unfortunately, is stoppable.
His ability to move around easily came to an abrupt end over the weekend. We don’t know how, but Dad broke his ankle on Saturday night. I took him to urgent care on Sunday (they gave him a splint), and he got a cast today. He’s not allowed to put any weight on the foot, and that’s going to make it really difficult for him to spend time alone at home. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’m just worrying too much, but I fear that we will have to look for assisted living soon.
When he was living here, Dad often asked how old he was (he’s 84). Then, a lot of the time, he wanted to know how old his father was when he died (he was 90). His mother made it to 94. He was using their ages as a benchmark for how he was doing. He kept lamenting that his body shouldn’t have broken down for another four or five years, based on his father’s experience.
That’s a hard thing to understand. I don’t know if he feel entitled to get as many years as they did, or if he was trying to compete with them. They lived such different lives, it would be impossible to compare.
I wonder how else my dad tried to judge himself with my grandfather. Dad often talks about what a sour, strict, and mean person his father was. He’s not wrong about his father being strict, but I don’t think he was mean. Dad was comparing his father to his uncle, Donald. That man (my great uncle) was invariably kind, sweet, patient, and he died relatively young. You can’t compete with that.
When my father was a little kid, Uncle Donald was building his own house near the lake. He would bring Dad along to babysit his kids, Ricky and Geoff. Dad loved playing with his cousins. One day, Geoff found an enormous spider that was so big that it barely fit inside the Dixie cup where Geoff had trapped it. He was forbidden from bringing it home, of course.
It wasn’t until the car rid home that Uncle Donald discovered that his orders had gone unheeded.
They were driving along when Geoff said, “Hey! What happened to my spider?”
Uncle Donald just laughed. Dad said that his own father would have made someone sorry that they brought a spider in the car, but Uncle Donald was a different type of dad.
October in Maine is maybe my favorite month. I enjoy the crisp mystery in the air so much that I wrote the book Migrators to try to capture some of that feeling. I’ve made it free for the next few days so you can enjoy it in the appropriate season (if you haven’t already). If you’ve already read it, please feel free to share this with a friend.
