THE SONIC BOOMER
Lucidity continues to elude my 96-year-old mother, and I have to admit, it’s as amusing as it is sad.
On the phone, she told me, “I never realized how wet these floors are. All my floors are covered with a half-inch of water.” Her floors are carpeted, but a month ago, I had told her about the water covering the carpeted floor at my store when the creek behind it overflowed. Hmm.
“Bend down and touch it, mom. Is your hand wet?”
“Oh.”
One time when I was visiting, she found a basket of laundry that someone had left on the community jigsaw puzzle table and, instead of leaving it there for them to discover later, she told me she was going to “find out where it goes.” Against my protestations, she went into another apartment (completely out of character for her) but it was, thankfully, vacant.
Then she tried another door — locked — went into the trash chute room to look around and eventually found the laundry room. When I said that would be the second-best place to leave it (the puzzle table being the first), she told me not to put it there, that she wanted to go through it first. What?
She pulled out a few towels and dishrags (“I’m going to bring these home…”) but when she came to a sweater and shirt that she didn’t recognize, she realized it belonged to someone else after all and let me put everything back.
Then she said, “Oh, Debbie! You’ve forgotten your little dog!” I told her I had never owned a dog, and we eventually figured out she meant my sister’s dog, out in California.
At 4 p.m. on Thursdays only, her assisted living place — located so close to “Beer City” Milwaukee — serves drinks. Promptly at 3:30 p.m., mom wanted to go down and sit in the lobby and wait for them. My insistence that the day was Saturday fell on deaf ears, so we sat down there until 5:30 p.m. — one of us, expectantly. We left only because dinner was being delivered to her room at 6 p.m., and she’d worked up an appetite.
By 6:45 p.m., we were back at the puzzle table with sodas (small consolation) and one of us (sigh) spilled her soda all over the place. An honest mistake, but now puzzle pieces were quickly coming apart in three layers. I rushed to mom’s apartment to get two towels and began blotting. As for mom, she spent the next 35 minutes arranging and rearranging 20 assorted pieces on her towel — some wet, some dry. I also couldn’t help but wonder if she’d had some sort of laundry premonition earlier about needing extra towels.
All this being said, I don’t want you to think that my mother is not intelligent. She’s brilliant. Immediately upon her graduation from high school, she was offered a job by the FBI. So she’s just having a little trouble with her brain right now, trouble that is not expected to get better any time soon. Yet, to this day, she does an amazing job of summing things up. “Debbie, you have no idea how much information is spinning around inside my head.”
My guess is: all the information she’s ever learned. All the time.
Except when she needs it.
