Here I am on what I expect will turn out to be a very boring Saturday. I just don’t feel like doing much of anything other than what needs to be done like the laundry. It’s a beautiful day of 73º out there so it’s ideal for hanging clothes, especially the heavy stuff like jeans and towels.

My allergies don’t appreciate that it’s springtime so I had to take a Benadryl which will probably knock me out for a while.

After Tom got home yesterday I told him of my strange discussion with my mother. He thinks that because she’s old she misunderstood me and that while she can think just fine, it takes her time to think. And so if I talk too fast she can’t keep up with me. He thinks she thinks I was saying we might move to Florida soon, not when he retires in about 12 years, and just like I don’t want company pestering me every week, neither does she, and that’s why she was trying to deter me. And they’re not moving either, he says.

Nah, I think she got it. She may not be big on company any more than I am and they may not be moving, but I think she got it. I just don’t get what it is they’ve come to dislike about Florida, but it doesn’t matter because if there’s something bad about it it may not necessarily be a problem 12 years from now. So we won’t write Florida off completely. If ever the time comes when it’s possible to move there, that will be the time to really do our homework. Not now.

“I’m not saying she’s senile, but Alzheimer’s runs in your family,” Tom also added, and this is true. My grandfathers died suddenly of heart attacks, but my grandmothers were both flat out of their minds in the end. One screamed that she didn’t want me to get what she had when I visited her one last time in the nursing home she was in, another kept waking me up every hour insisting it was time to go to work when I spent the night with her shortly before she died.

Despite our past differences, it’s so sad to see them grow old and know they don’t even have a decade left to live. I know that regardless of every bad decision they ever made pertaining to me if my father had to kill someone to save my life even if it meant spending his final days in prison, he would do it. Just like my mother would refuse to treat a deadly disease she may acquire if she knew it would save me.

They swore they’d never let themselves become dependent on their kids, which is understandable, but that’s sometimes easier said than done. Wondering what will become of them in the end is a sad thought, but one I can’t seem to escape lately. Maybe that’s why I don’t like to talk to them more than once a month or so; because it only leaves me feeling sad and there’s just no way to avoid it as it is. My mother may’ve been a bitch for most of her life, but it’s still sad to see her wither away.

Thoughts of death have my mind flashing back to 1985 when I overheard my mother talking on the phone just 6 months after Pa died. Most people call their grandparents grandma and grandpa, but for us, it was Nana and Papa, or just Nan and Pa. For Tammy’s kids, it’s Bubby and Zadie which is Hebrew.

“Art, we have to go over to my mother’s now,” Ma was telling the person. “Why, he asked. Because something’s wrong, I told him.”

I listened as she explained that the storm door was locked and he had to smash his way in. My mother, who had waited in the car, didn’t need to ask him if she was gone when he returned to the car. His face said it all.

Nana was a bitch too, unlike her husband, and no one cried as hard at her funeral, but it was still a sad time laying her next to Pa in Beth Israel Cemetery that cold November day in Springfield.