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She Went

Mar12

The waitress placed a cup of tea on the table in front of me. Vapor from the hot liquid rose and I leaned forward, appreciatively inhaling the comforting scent of black tea. Carefully guiding the cup close to my lips, I realized the tea was as hot as molten lava and set it back down again on the table.

Two young women walked past and sat down in the booth next to mine. Once they were given the Coke they’d ordered, they began to talk about a party one of them had attended. Party girl eagerly confided, “Amy and DJ got into a big public fight at the party. In front of everyone he went, ‘I saw you flirting just now with Matt! Don’t you realize I’m twice the man he is?’  Amy was like, ‘Oh Yeah? You really think you’re something! But I want you to know, you’re no prize.’” Party girl’s friend concluded, “Geez! That sounds like an old married couple fighting!”

The waitress placed the salad I’d ordered on my table and refilled drinks before returning to the kitchen. As I ate, I thought about the conversation I’d overheard and wondered when people had started to use the word ‘went’ instead of the word ‘said’. This has been going on for several years, and it’s easy to fall into. I’ve caught myself using this word myself. Other words people use instead of ‘said’ are ‘goes’, ‘like’ and ‘all’. For example, he ‘goes’, or, he was ‘all’, or, he was ‘like’.          

The English language is rich. There are over three hundred words that can be used instead of ‘said’ such as ‘mused’, ‘questioned’, or ‘demanded’. The words ‘went’, ‘goes’, ‘like’ and ‘all’ will probably eventually be added to that list.

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Oh, look!

Mar5

Using the computer mouse, I clicked on an arrow icon. A new window popped open. I saw the picture of a beautiful, dew-kissed strawberry and heard a woman’s pleasant voice saying, “Oh, look! A strawberry.”

In slide projector style, the picture changed to a slightly shriveled strawberry. The pleasant woman’s voice slurred, “Oh, look! A strawberry!” The next picture was of a strawberry starting to mold. The woman could barely enunciate the familiar words. Finally, there was the picture of a strawberry in the process of becoming a gooey puddle. The woman only made a few feeble sounds. It was as if her tongue had turned into wood.

Frowning, I wondered, “Was this meme showing the effects of a stroke?” Having worked all my working years in a hospital, I would have instantly called for a nurse if I saw this happening to a patient! When I asked my daughter about it, she laughed and assured me the meme was just putting a voice to things deteriorating. In the days that followed, I noticed that similar memes used the same words, but instead of rotting strawberries, they showed progressively uglier dogs or cats.

My skill in navigating modern technology is growing. However, there is so much about online culture that I will never understand. Also dampening my growing pride in my tech skill is the realization that my skill is very elementary: it could be compared to a baby’s first, wobbling steps. Most ten-year-olds today have more tech savvy than I will ever have.

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Getting A Schtee

Feb26

My throat was very sore; so sore that it hurt to swallow my spit. I didn’t even want to think about swallowing the soup Mom had given me to eat. Leading me over to a window where there was better light, she ordered, “Open your mouth. I want to see what your throat looks like.” I whined and cried. “Now stop that,” Mom demanded, “I’m just going to look. My looking won’t make your throat hurt worse.”

Opening my mouth, I allowed Mom to turn my head this way and that, so the light from the window could help her to examine every inch of my throat. Daddy, still sitting at the kitchen table asked, “How does her throat look?”

Mom sat down at the table to tell Daddy, “We need to take Kathy to see Doctor Kroeplin again. I think she has strep throat like last spring. Her throat has white spots, and her tonsils are so swollen they are almost touching each other.” Hearing this, I began to howl and sob. Last year when I was in third grade, Dr. Kroeplin prescribed penicillin pills for me. He said I had to take them because the strep infection in my throat could damage my heart.

I suffered from the family curse: the inability to swallow pills. Even when my throat was normal, I couldn’t get pills past my back molars without gagging. I knew Daddy had the same problem. On the rare occasion that he needed to take a pill, he struggled to swallow it. Mom would scold, “It’s just a little pill. I’ve seen you swallow huge bites of raw potato dumplings with no problem!”

To make things worse, the penicillin pills tasted and smelled worse than anything I’d ever known of. Mom tried to hide them in apple sauce. She bribed me with the rare luxury of a glass of orange juice. We even tried to push them down with homemade bread thickly slathered with creamy peanut butter. Nothing worked.

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The Tapioca Incident

Feb19

Holding her largest mixing bowl, Mom vigorously stirred the batter. As if making cookies wasn’t enough work, she was multitasking by making our evening meal at the same time. Glancing at the stove top, Mom grumbled under her breath, “Tisk, why isn’t that burner heating up?” Impatiently, she put her right hand on the electric coil and instantly pulled back with a yelp. It was hot, just not glowing red.

Jumping up from where I had been sitting at the kitchen table, I questioned, “Mom! How badly did you burn your hand?”

Running cold water over her hand at the sink, my mother ruefully commented, “That was a stupid thing to do.” The imprinted rings of the burner could be seen on her fingers and palm, but other than the skin being tender, the burn was surprisingly superficial. Allowing the cold water to continue running over her hand, Mom instructed, “Put the pot of potatoes on that burner.”

I usually never cooked or baked with Mom while I was growing up. I always had the feeling that she preferred to work alone. She never asked for help, even when she was rushed or trying to get other things done at the same time. For years I sat at the kitchen table watching her work and assumed this would help me know what to do someday when I had to make meals.

I know for certain that I did learn a few things. With Mom’s hand burn incident, I learned two things. One was how to injure yourself without saying a single bad word. The second thing I learned was to never touch the stove top, even if it didn’t look hot.

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Dust Bunnies

Feb12

I glanced around my neat living room wondering where Tammie’s gray kittens were. I hadn’t seen them for hours. Worried, I called for them. Suddenly, one of the kittens popped her head out from under my sofa. Surprised, I questioned, “How are you doing that? The opening under the sofa is smaller than your head!” The kitten wriggled out and then the second kitten peeped out at me and sneezed.

One thing Tammie had missed and desired all through her four years of college and two years of grad school, was a kitty for a pet. Since she lived in dorms all those years, this was never possible. Dorm pet policies generally say something along the lines of, “If you want a pet, it has to be able to live underwater.”

Shortly before Tammie graduated from grad school, a stray cat living in Niki and Mike’s backyard gave birth to a litter of kittens. The surprise delivery took place on their back deck during cold, inclement spring weather. Niki felt compelled to take the mother and babies into her house. Her young children loved the unexpected fuzzy play mates and immediately named them based on food and random names they heard.

Having secured a job and apartment to live in immediately following graduation, Tammie asked her sister if she could adopt two kittens from the rescued litter. Although her children protested, Niki didn’t want to keep all six kittens.

Tammie picked a pale gray tabby named Carla, and an orange tuxedo kitten named Macaroni and Cheese. They were wonderful companions for Tammie for the next 16 years. Carla was the first to pass away. After grieving for several months, Tammie went to a Humane Society Shelter and picked out a two-year-old gray and white cat. This kitty had a white bib, paws, and star on her nose, which made us think of the song, “Lucy with Diamonds in the Sky”. Although she was very friendly with humans, we were told Lucy didn’t like other cats, but to our surprise and delight, she peacefully coexisted with Mac until he died a year later.

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Sky Rooms

Feb5

My sisters wanted to paint stars on their bedroom ceiling around the time I was leaving behind my infancy. Like all babies I had spent my first two or three years floating about in a nebulous world. The events and activities of my siblings were indistinct and vague to my perception because little of it had to do with my three most basic needs: nourishment, dry diapers and cuddles. Slowly, I began to understand words, and I began to sort out the tangle of my two arms and two legs, making independent locomotion possible. At that point, I became “the shadow”, following the siblings I could keep up to, while firing endless questions at their backsides.

Agnes and Rosie insisted they had to paint the bedroom they shared a rich navy blue. Mom said, “That color is too dark. A home decorator in one of my women’s magazines recommended that bedrooms on the northside of a house, like yours, should be painted bright colors.” The two girls insisted that they needed the room to be the color of a night sky because they were going to stencil silver stars all over the ceiling.

I was told years later that the girls worked day after day for weeks that summer on their bedroom décor. Arranging the various sized stars so they were evenly spaced was time consuming work. Reaching high overhead to neatly paint the stars using a small detail brush was neck-breaking. They also wanted coordinating room accessories such as a wastepaper basket. To supply this, they found a square five-gallon fuel can, had the top cut off, cleaned it, painted it navy, and stenciled silver stars on it as well.

Despite having two windows, the bedroom was dark like a cave after both the ceiling and walls were painted the rich, dark blue. The advice found in Mom’s woman’s magazine had been correct. A bedroom on the north side of the house needs lighter paint. The ceiling stayed as it was, but my sisters soon repainted the walls a bluish white.

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My Daily Bread

Jan29

If I was a cartoon character, the artist drawing me would have pictured my hair standing on end and droplets of perspiration flying around my head as I gasped, “But what will there be left for me to eat, if I give up everything made with wheat, sugar, corn and soybeans?!”

The slim, very pretty nutrition specialist sternly stated in a voice edged in ice, “Kathy, you will have plenty of other things to eat! If you don’t want to try this plan to make your arthritis less bothersome, you can just forget about it and not bother coming back to me for dietary advice.”

Blushing, I mumbled, “I’ll give it a try.” Feeling like I had been sentenced to a prison where food was severely restricted, I went home wondering how long I’d have to give up all the things I liked to eat. As time passed, I slowly came to realize that certain foods would always be verboten.

The most common form of arthritis is osteoarthritis, and it can be debilitating. A Mayo Clinic rheumatologist says that what you eat may help reduce some of the inflammation associated with this joint-destroying illness. There are dozens of websites that list the best and the worst foods for people suffering from osteoarthritis.

I had a hard time at first, giving up certain foods. I felt deprived, dissatisfied, and often meditated on whether I ate to live, or lived to eat. Eventually I reconciled myself to my restrictions, because after all, my restrictions didn’t forbid me to eat, they just directed me to eat different things.

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Bathing A Cat

Jan22

Scrolling through Instagram, I came across a video of cats being bathed in water by their owners. Some of the animals were docile and cooperative. I commented to my daughter Tammie, “Are these cats for real? And why do the cat owners think cats need baths?”

Tammie defended cat bathing, “Hairless Sphinx cats need to be bathed. They have body oils that need to be washed away. They don’t have hair like other cats, which wicks oil off the skin. There are also other cats with hair like Turkish Vans that enjoy being in water.”

 Unconvinced, I pointed out, “Some cats might like baths, but most turn into screeching, shredding, high-speed rockets whenever someone tries to put them into water. Didn’t you and your sister Niki try to bathe one of our cats when you were kids?”

Nodding, my daughter admitted, “Yes. We tried to bathe Berry.”

Remembering our cat Berry makes me smile. My eight- and twelve-year-old daughters and I found him as an older kitten along our country road one late summer afternoon. We named him Berry because he had been hiding under an elderberry bush.

Our ten-year-old tom cat named Flicker made very little fuss when we added this new feline to the household menagerie. After a while, the two cats grew to like each other so much that they often slept curled around each other. Both cats were tuxedo cats, so it was hard to tell where one cat started and the other left off. They resembled one big furry kitty puddle.

Someone once asked me how I could tell Flicker and Berry apart. While they did look alike from a distance, with a closer look it was easy to see that Flicker had black fur on his nose and muzzle, while Berry had white fur in those places.

One day when Berry was still a new member of the family, and we were playing with him in the backyard, he showed us his belly for scratches and pets. He was happy and comfortable, so he stretched and rolled around on the dusty driveway. His crisp looking white fur picked up dust and grass clippings from the lawn. Niki and Tammie decided their new kitty needed a bath. I stated, “Cats don’t need baths.” The girls insisted that the cat would love being washed clean in a bath. I retorted, “We never bathed cats on the farm I grew up on.”

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Frog Monster

Jan8

My daughter Niki snuggled down under the covers in her bed. Her younger sister, Tammie, reluctantly crawled into her bed. I turned on a small nightlight on the dresser, then leaned over to pick up clothing from the floor that had been cast off in favor of night clothes. Tammie sat upright to point out, “You forgot to shut the closet door.”

I thought, “That’s nice. Tammie likes having the room look neat at bedtime.”

Niki dismissed that idea when she sleepily commented, “Tammie wants the frog monster to stay in the closet.”

This was the first I’d heard about a frog monster! I looked closely at my youngest daughter. She didn’t look too worried. I asked, “Where did the monster come from? Tell me about it.”

Tammie shrugged as she outlined what she knew about the frog. “I don’t know where the frog came from. He wears a crown and is six feet tall.”

Sleepiness gone, Niki rolled on her side and added with a giggle, “It carries a large trident like Neptune.”

I was impressed. How many children have closet monsters that are six-feet-tall and carry the three-pronged weapon of a Roman sea god? I inquired, “Are you afraid of this giant frog monster?”

Both of my daughters denied being afraid. Tammie informed me, “The frog doesn’t bother us if the closet door is closed.”

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Improving Myself

Dec31

Activity on the nursing unit had slowed down. Afternoon sunshine peeked into the rooms on the west side of the building. The early in the day hustle-bustle of changing beds and bathing patients, combined with doctor rounds, breakfast and lunch tray delivery and pick-up was over. By two in the afternoon the atmosphere in the halls was mellow as patients either napped or had visitors. Few patients put on their call lights during this time.

The charge nurse looked up from the clipboard in her hands and said, “Kathy, I’m giving you a patient in room 25. Admitting just brought her up.”

I collected supplies to give to the patient, then I wheeled my computer and blood pressure machine into the room. The patient was a well-dressed older woman who was scheduled to have surgery the following morning. Having conversations with total strangers has never been hard for me to do, so we got along very well. Just as I was preparing to leave the room, she asked me, “How long have you been a Certified Nursing Assistant?”

When I tell people the answer to this question, they are usually surprised. I started when I was eighteen. I smiled and confessed, “At the end of September, I will have worked at this hospital for 45 years.”

The newly admitted patient looked shocked. She blurted, “Didn’t you ever want to improve yourself, to become a nurse?”

Her question seemed strange. How was I supposed to respond to questions like that? She most likely considered being a Certified Nursing Assistant to be a low value, unimportant job. I decided to treat the situation with humor, so I chuckled, “Improve myself? Why would I want to do that? I’m so nice the way I am!”

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