Goodbye Mom

I spend most of my time trying not to be serious.  There is far too much serious in the world and it for the most part just needs to be broken up by a healthy dose of…un-seriousness.  For the most part I try and be that for those in my life.  But not tonight.

I have had the privilege of giving my mother a hug every day for the past six months, but each day, with each passing hug, the woman I hug is less and less my Mom.  I’ve tried to ignore that rough nugget of truth, tried to shrug it off as not being that bad.  But it is that bad.  The woman who raised me, the strong-willed, opinionated, champion of all my causes, giver of the greatest hugs in the world, giving, loving, selfish, beautiful woman who is my Mom is all but gone.  But her body is still here and inside her glazed, blank stare I still see from time to time a glimpse of the woman she was.  But those glimpses are rare now, rare and all too painful to see. 

Alzheimer’s has robbed her of who she was and I have done nothing but stand by and helplessly watch it happen.  Hugged her even as the mother she was slipped away.  I have watch as my Dad, the strongest, greatest man I have ever had the privilege to know, struggled day by day under the weight of caring for a woman who has lost a little of herself every day.  They have been together, fighting, bickering, disagreeing, laughing, crying and loving for as long as time itself it seems, but in the end it is all just a weight of memories that one can barely bear and the other can no longer remember.  

Today my father and my wife carry most of the burden.  My mother is always at my father’s side and if he is out of her sight for more than a few moments she wants to know where he is, when he will return.  It seems so strange to me now because when they we younger (when we were all younger) my Mom spent most of her time finding fault with my Dad.  But now, with her mind slipping away, he is the one thing she clings to.  He hangs on to her as well, but the burden is so hard. 

I try to tell myself that I am helping as much as I can, but in that I am a liar and a coward.  My wife bears most of the burden.  We do not wish to subject my mother to the indignity of having her son clean her up when she struggles with the simplest of routines.  Bathroom time is a complete confusion to her and whenever nature calls my wife or father must accompany my mother to the restroom.  In my heart of hearts I know that I am not strong enough to bear it and so I am grateful to not have to.

I hug her every day and tell her I love her and some days she knows it is me and some days she does not, but I hug her still.   But I don’t always meet her gaze.  I do not because I cannot.  Only yesterday she sat on the couch and I sat across from her on the other and I could feel her looking at me and I would glance her way and see in her eyes that there was someone there, behind that gaze, but it was not the woman that I knew.  It was not the woman I loved and feared and admired and hated and idolized.  It was a woman who wore the shell of the woman I loved, but still could brandish her smile from time to time, just often enough to break all of our hearts.

My 7-year-old accepts her for who she is and she laughs when she makes no sense at all and hugs her and says “oh Grandma,” or looks at me when she rambles off into uncharted territory or becomes angry at a slight that was not there. 

In the end I am led by the strength of my father, the unimaginable love of my wife and the hope of my youngest daughter.

In the end I am only a fool watching my mother slip away without ever having the chance to truly express how much she meant to me.

If you have a loved one being taken by Alzheimer’s, realize this simple truth:  You need to accept what is happening.  You need to understand time is short.  You need to say goodbye when there is still someone there to say goodbye to.  Because in the end the person you loved will be gone long before the body they called home ever is.

I love you Mom.

Uppity Dogs

By James L. Davis

We have a dumb dog.  She can’t help it I suppose, she was born that way, but there’s no denying that she is dumb.  My wife, of course, denies that the dog is dumb, but that’s because she is her dog and she says she’s cute.  Notice, I didn't say that my wife claimed her dog was smart, because to the best of my knowledge my wife has never claimed that her dog is smart.  When you call the dog dumb she says she is cute, which sounds to me an awful lot like changing the subject.

The dog is named Sage and she is an 8-year-old Shih tzu.  She is a purebred and as such she is not only dumb, but she’s a little uppity as well.  I get in trouble over Sage for a couple of reasons.  The first is because I call her dumb instead of cute and the second is because when I tell people what breed of dog she is I apparently emphasize the pronunciation of the first part of her breed name and under emphasize the second part.  If I do such a thing I’m quite sure it is purely coincidental.

I personally prefer a dumb dog over a smart one.  They’re a lot more fun to have around.  I don’t care at all for uppity dogs, however, and Sage’s tendency to feel a little superior can be annoying.  I blame it not only on her breeding but on my wife, who has convinced the dog that she is not a dog at all, but some beautifully hairy four-legged person.

Most mornings Sage gets a new bow put in her hair, either a pink, yellow or blue one.  I’m a little on the old fashioned side I suppose, but I don’t really understand the concept behind putting a bow in your dog’s hair, be it pink, yellow or blue, and I like blue.  But my wife thinks Sage needs a bow in her hair, so she gets one.

Now Sage is dumb, as I said before, but she’s not that dumb.  She knows that I think she doesn't need a bow in her hair.  She knows that I think she is in fact a dog, so she has a tendency to gloat a little bit when she is being treated more like a pampered child than a dog.

When my wife picks up the dog and talks to her like she is a newborn baby Sage will put her chin on my wife’s shoulder and look at me with those big brown eyes with barely concealed contempt.  She is spoiled, she knows she spoiled, she knows that I know that she is spoiled, and she knows that there’s not a thing I can do about it.

But in that she is wrong.  There is something I can do about it, just not the thing I would like most to do about it, which is take the bow out of her hair and put her in a dog house instead of a doggie bed more comfortable than my recliner (don’t ask me how I know, I just do).

What I can do about it is use the laser light. My daughter unintentionally showed me the joys of a laser light some time ago.  She brought a laser pointer home and, after carefully reading the instructions on where not to point it, immediately started trying to blind me with it.  So I did what any good father would do, I took the laser away from her and tried to find some devious way to use the laser in a manner not intended.

Which is when Sage came prancing in the room, having just had a new bow put in her hair and told how beautiful she was by my wife.  I looked at the dog and I looked at the laser and  I tried to figure out a way that I could use the laser on the dog.  I couldn't think of anything, which is when I turned it on and the red dot of the laser shined on the floor next to Sage.  Sage saw the light and her ears suddenly pointed up.  I gave the laser light a little wiggle and Sage suddenly went into convulsions on the linoleum floor, desperately trying to catch the laser light between her teeth and failing completely to do so.  I turned off the laser.

I looked at my daughter and my daughter looked at me and Sage looked at us both as if to say, “What was that thing and where did it go?”

We turned the laser back on and let it skip across the floor and Sage pounced after it.  We shined it on the wall and Sage would suddenly become a spring, bouncing off the floor in an attempt to get to the laser.  The laser suddenly became a highly valuable and sought after device.

The absolute greatest thing about the laser was that when Sage was following the laser she paid attention to absolutely nothing else, which made for some interesting collisions into walls, the living room couch and the children’s grandpa as Sage chased the little red light.

After 20 minutes of chasing the light the bow had drooped down the side of the little dogs face.  She was panting but she was smiling because she knew that she would catch that light if we gave her another chance.

Suddenly Sage was no longer an uppity dog.  She was just a dog and a dumb dog at that.  Which makes for a pretty good dog.

Watch Your Blankety Blank Language

By James L. Davis

I am not a man who likes to cuss. You’ll notice I did not say that I am a man not prone to cuss, because I am a man prone to cuss. I just don’t like it. But like it or not, sometimes my mouth will form a cuss word or two and spit them out before I can stop it, usually when I am trying to get something working again that has inexplicably stopped working.

“Well, why won’t you blankety blank blank…” my mouth will say and I will find myself shocked, totally shocked to hear the words leap past my lips. Of course my look of shock is nothing compared to my children’s look of shock, which involves wide eyes, gaping mouths and pointing fingers followed by the chant “You swore, Dad, you swore, I can’t believe you swore. Dad, you swore” repeated until I swear again.

It turns out that cussing runs in my family, just like our addiction to Pepsi. I inherited my cussing from my dad. When my mom told me this I thought it was strange because I do not recall having heard my dad cuss a great deal when I was young, but apparently he was considered one of the greatest colorful speakers of his age when growing up in the woods of North Carolina. It seems he reached the pinnacle of his cussing career as a small boy of not much more than 6 or 7 when he asked if he could go to work with his dad and was told no. My dad did not care for this answer in the least and so he stood up on the fence post of the corral and proceeded to pelt my grandfather with so many cuss words used in so many varied and colorful ways that even the pigs and chickens began to blush and turn away. My grandfather could not stop laughing long enough to punish his young son, but I guess my grandmother could and when she heard of the cussing my dad had given his dad she took care of the problem. I’m not entirely sure what she did to take care of the problem, but it must have worked because my dad hasn't had too many cuss words slip out of his mouth since then.

But I have. As a boy I used to practice cussing safely out of hearing range from my mom and dad. I would load my mouth with a cuss or two and let them roll around on my tongue, trying out the feel of them before letting them spit out “blankety blank,” I would say to myself, feeling somehow much more grown up because I had cussed. I even replayed conversations I had earlier in the day, only this time sprinkling the conversation with a cuss word or two to give it more flavor. “Why yes mam, I did do my blank homework, thank you very blankety blank much for asking.”

While I would practice my cussing in private  safely out of earshot of anyone who might take a belt to my hindquarters, I did not ever recall sharing my colorful speech with anyone until I became an adult. Then I joined the military. While some people might consider a cuss word or two to be punctuation marks in the spoken word, in the military cuss words are quite often used to fill the spaces between words, because the military abhors unused spaces. I learned this first from my drill instructor and then from every commanding officer I ever had.

“Airman blankety Davis! What blank is blankety wrong blank with blankety you?” I had this question asked of me more times in my military career than I have ever had any question asked of me in my entire life.

At first I tried to answer the blankety blank question sincerely, but I soon learned that it was a rhetorical question, there was no real answer to what was wrong with Airman Davis.

“Sir!” I learned to reply. “I blankety have blankety no blankety idea blankety what blank is blank wrong blankety with blank me, blan­kety sir!”

After eight years in the military my language was at times so peppered with cuss words that all I did was cuss and by the time I got through cussing I had forgotten what I was actually going to say. So I cussed and started over. It took me almost 10 years to work the cussing out of my vocabulary and as my children will gladly point out, I still cuss from time to time, but it is back to being the exclamation mark of my spoken word, not the filler between the words.

Of course, in my opinion my children cuss as well, even though they will argue the fact. They just use different words than I ever did. While my cuss words are easily identified as cuss words, theirs are a little harder to recognize  They sound an awful lot like the cuss words of old, they've just swapped out a letter here or there. So while I will cuss, “blankety blank blank” they will cuss “blinkety blink blink.” I have no idea what the real difference is, but apparently my kids feel that saying “blinkety blink” is not nearly as horrifying as saying “blankety blank.”

My wife, who doesn’t say blankety blank or blinkety blink, has informed all of us that she is tired of all of the blankety blink blink language in our house and if it doesn't stop soon she is going to take matters into her own hands.

    I think she’s talked to my dad and found out how his mom got him to quit cussing, so I think it’s in our best interests to stop all of the blankety blank blink blink cussing…and soon.

Had Enough Serious?  Sing the Turkey Bird Song

Beware the Blanket Thief

By James L. Davis

It has recently come to my attention that I am a blanket thief. It happened because one night I woke in the middle of the night and thought to myself that we had a very comfortable vibrating bed. Then I remembered that we do not own a vibrating bed.

The vibrations were coming from my wife, who was shivering violently. She was shivering so violently that her feet were on the verge of being shaken free from their frozen position in the small of my back. This is their normal sleeping position. I believe that that the normal sleeping position for most women’s feet is in the small of the back of their husband. I do not understand this and the simple fact that women can so position themselves to plant their feet in the small of a man’s back while also stealing their pillow speaks of an elasticity that no man could ever hope to duplicate.

I was mortified to discover that I was in fact a blanket thief and I threw the blankets back over my wife. She immediately curled them around her body to form a cocoon of warmth, all the while keeping her feet firmly planted in the small of my back. I gave the blankets to her because I don’t really use them for warmth, I curl them into a large, comfortable pillow to replace the one my wife has stolen from me. I would use my wife’s pillow but my wife seems to believe her pillow belongs on the floor, because that is where it always ends up.

Had I been using the blankets as blankets instead of a pillow, the fact that I had stolen them would have been of no consequence to my wife, because when sleeping my wife forms her body so completely to my own that the blankets would cover us both anyway. The fact that she does so again makes me wonder about the amazing elasticity of a woman’s body. It also makes me wonder why we have a queen size bed, because we only use a quarter of it. Depending on how we choose to rotate our bed and where I decide to position myself for sleep, we could in theory sleep on our queen size bed three times longer than the average couple.

Of course that only applies when we are sleeping on the bed together, because the way we sleep on the bed together is totally and completely different than how we sleep on the bed by ourselves. When sleeping on the bed together my wife waits patiently while I try out one position or the other and finally settle into the same position that I sleep in every night, curled with my face to the outside of the bed, teetering precariously on the edge and at risk of falling off the bed entirely. Then she forms her own body to mine, something like the face hugger in the Alien movies, but much more pleasant. Once we have melded into one sleepy mass, we fall asleep almost immediately. But that is not the case when sleeping in bed alone. When I have the bed to myself, I sleep in the center of the bed, spread eagle with both my pillow and my wife’s pillow under my head. I have observed that my wife sleeps in pretty much the same fashion when she has the bed to herself.

While I could speculate that the reason we sleep so closely together is because of our love for each other, the real reason, I suspect, that we sleep curled together like we do has much less to do with our love for each other and more to do with the fact that our stomachs are sentient beings intent on the overthrow of the rest of our bodies.

I suspect as much because on occasion I will wake in the middle of the night for reasons other than the realization that I have stolen all of the blankets. When I do I have been shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that my wife’s stomach and mine are talking to each other.

It sounds innocent enough, sure, but I believe there is something sinister at work between our two stomachs. Lying in bed I listen closely as my wife’s stomach makes a whispering demand of my own stomach.

“Orrrmmm ahhhh errr errr grrrpp,” her stomach will say.

“Uhh grrshhh ahh,” my stomach will reply.

I have tried to tell myself that it is simply the rumblings of two stomachs in the middle of the night, but I have awakened to their alien dialogue far too often to believe their conversation to be so innocent. They are plotting something, if not the overthrow of the civilized world, then at the very least, the overthrow of our own bodies.

How else can my wife and I have the same craving for chocolate chunk ice cream while watching The Biggest Loser, if not by some diabolical plot of our stomachs? Coincidence, you say? I think not.

While I may not know exactly what our two stomachs may be up to, I believe that in the scheme of things my wife’s stomach is the leader of the two. The only proof I offer is the demanding quality of the sounds my wife’s stomach makes and the subservient wails my stomach gives in reply. I have listened to them moan and gurgle long enough now that I am beginning to slowly unravel their language. I believe their conversation revolves around the theft of a blanket.

Greetings from Chicken Little

By James L. Davis

One of our chickens has learned how to moonwalk.  She moonwalks in front of the chicken coop every morning to taunt the other chickens.  I've been meaning to talk to her about teasing the other chickens, but I haven’t because the other chickens deserve it.

Her name is Chicken Little.  We named her Chicken Little a while back after she recovered from a little conflict she had with the rest of the chickens in the coop.  It seems that the rest of the hens in the hen house were under the mistaken belief that Chicken Little’s name was really Chicken Dinner.

We inherited Chicken Little from my dad, who had  raised chickens for a number of years until he one day realized that he would not, could not, under any circumstance eat one of his chickens (or anyone else’s chickens for that matter, he doesn't like chicken) and that he did not like the thought of fresh eggs.  He prefers to think that eggs come from an egg carton and are produced in a factory somewhere in China.  I have always preferred to think of eggs the same way.  But, having realized that he had no real use for chickens or their eggs, he gathered them all up and brought them to our house to put in with our chickens.

I did not realize until that time that chickens had a highly developed social class and by introducing new hens into our hen house we initially started a war based on deep rooted ideological differences, much like the Democrats and the Republicans.  A war broke out for a few days among the hens and our rooster essentially played the part of the United States.  He ran around and flapped his wings and tried to get them to stop fighting each other and they ignored him completely.

After a couple of days the hens finally decided to put aside their differences and work as a unified hen house.  And what they decided to work together on was the death of Chicken Little.  For one reason or another when the hens decided to stop fighting each other they decided to take up beaks in the destruction of Chicken Little.  It could be because she was ill in some way, as my wife theorized.  Our kids thought that she was perhaps the ringleader in the previous conflict.  I suppose there is no real way of ever knowing, but I choose to believe that the other hens began to suspect that Chicken Little could moonwalk and because of that they were going to kill her.

So when I went out to feed the chickens one morning I found Chicken Little outside the hen house, her neck a bloody and tattered mess.  The other hens had just about severed her neck and when I picked her up and took her outside the chicken coop I figured that this was one dead chicken.

But when I went to get a shovel to finish the job the hens had started Chicken Little jumped up and ran away, which told me right away that Chicken Little may be a lot of things, but she was not stupid.  So I decided to leave her outside the coop to see if she made it through the night. She did make it through the night and has been an outcast of the hen house ever since.

Chicken Little now has her own hen house outside the chicken coop.  She believes it to be a hen house anyway, although in reality it is an old doghouse.  Every morning this chicken watches for one of us to make our way toward the field and she runs toward us, wings flapping and clucking as she greets us and follows us back out to take care of our animal chores.  This kind of behavior is how she came by her name.

The other animals on our little farm don’t seem to mind Chicken Little running about flapping her wings or moon walking.  Of course that just might be because she hasn't gotten really annoying.  I’m fairly confident that if she suddenly begins to breakdance there is going to be trouble with the goats.

The cats don’t seem to mind her too much.  They apparently are of the same opinion about chicken dinners as my dad, so they don’t waste a whole lot of time worrying over her.  I also believe they much prefer having a chicken in the doghouse to a dog in the doghouse.  That could change if the chicken starts to bark and with this chicken I’m not ruling anything out.

Today there are two more hens that have joined her as part of what I call the Outcast Hens.  Chicken Little has been attempting to teach them how to moonwalk, but they haven’t got the hang of it yet.

So while we take care of the animal chores every morning Chicken Little struts in front of the chicken coop, taunting her would-be killers with the fact that the Outcast Hens have no chicken wire to fence them in.  Of course, they have no chicken wire to fence predators out either.

I haven’t told Chicken Little that little fact, however.  It might throw off her moon walking.

My grandson on his birthday...apparently his taste buds 

are on his face and the top of his head.

That Tastes Sooo Good

By James L. Davis

I think I must have defective taste buds because I just don’t seem to get the enjoyment out of my food the way other people do.  If they aren't defective they must be lazy, because they don’t give me near as much excitement as other people’s taste buds must give them when sitting down to a meal.

While I’m not sure whether a taste bud can be lazy or not, I am sure that some people get a whole lot more out of their dining experience than I ever have.  I enjoy sitting down to a meal as much as the next person (as long as I’m not the one cooking) and my bulging belly can attest to the fact, but eating is just something I do two or three times a day between events in my life, it is not an event in and of itself.

Which is why I think my taste buds must be defective or lazy, because for some people eating is not only an event, it is The Event of the day. 

You know it is The Event because they will spend long hours planning out what they are going to eat next, where they are going to eat it and how much they hope to eat.  These are the people that you will never, ever see grabbing a bite to eat from beneath a convenience store warmer.  Their taste buds might actually strangle them if they were to put so little thought into their meal.

 Another way you can spot people who consider a meal as The Event is by the way they react to eating.  They do all kinds of crazy things that well, frankly, leave me a little embarrassed if I happen to be in the same room as they are when they are dining.

One of my sons for instance must have superhuman taste buds because we can eat the same thing and our responses will be totally different.  To me it’s a meal, perhaps even a great meal, to him it approaches an almost out of body experience.  Just recently we took my parents out to dinner and on our way into town the children asked, because it is their way, where we would be eating.  Children ask this question just so they will have something to whine about for the remainder of the trip. 

On this trip however, I circumvented the whining by telling my children that we were going out for steak.  Suddenly all of their preparation for whining was transformed into praise for the Great and Wise Father, the Father of All Time, the Father Who Was Taking His Children Out for Steak.

When we arrived at the steak house we took our seats, placed our orders for steak and enjoyed each others company while we waited for our food.  All was well and good right up until the food arrived and then something strange started to happen to my son.

He started to make noises when he ate.  Strange, moaning noises that frightened me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“It’s so good,” was his response.

It was a good steak, but I wasn't ready to get quite that vocal about it.  Apparently he was and by the end of the meal his looks and moans of happiness at the meal he had eaten left me equally disturbed and puzzled.  Disturbed because of the looks the waiter and other diners were giving our table and puzzled because I have never eaten a meal that gave me as much joy as a steak dinner had given my son.

The puzzling thing is that while my taste buds are in my mouth, I believe my son's must be in his stomach, because nothing he puts in his mouth actually stays there long enough to get such an enthusiastic reaction.  

Upon investigation I discovered that my son is not alone in being a Meal Time Moaner, apparently there are a large number of them living productive lives in society, except of course when they are eating.  When they are eating they are a disturbance to society.

In my own family my youngest son is not the only Meal Time Moaner.  My middle son suffered from the same ailment, but I am happy to report that he is on the road to recovery.

He would moan whenever he chewed his food, a long, drawn out moan that would stretch from the first to the last chew and sound like either a muffled attempt to communicate or the soft moaning of a dying cow, or both. 

In the case of my middle son he was not even aware that he was making any noise at all and was convinced we were hearing things when we asked him to stop.  It turns out we were hearing things. The things were coming out of his mouth in the form of moans.  Eventually he was able to break himself of the habit without any form of shock therapy, although I had offered to provide it if he thought it might be helpful.

Of course, while he no longer moans he does apparently still possess overactive taste buds. He still has them and not being able to express his pleasure at having overactive taste buds results in a tendency toward violence.  I know this because while my middle son no longer moans while eating, he does threaten violence if anyone attempts to steal his food.

Which in the end makes me grateful for my defective taste buds.