I am at that age where the tables of life are turned and I
am, along with my brother, becoming the caregiver for my daddy.
He’s doing pretty well, actually, to be 85, but he’s needed
some help recently because of medical issues. This helps consists mostly of
driving him to doctor’s appointments in Atlanta. He still drives, and would
probably drive up there by himself if we would let him, but I would not feel
comfortable with him driving on the interstate unless they closed the whole
thing down first, like they do for the president, and installed bumper guards
on the guardrails.
He has officially entered cute old man stage. Women love cute
old men and flirt with them shamelessly. He of course plays into this by
flirting back and saying pretty much anything that pops into his head, to
anybody, at any time. Nurses and waitresses and office workers just laugh and
smile at him. Part of the charm seems to be that he wears suspenders. Us
average-looking middle-aged men get no attention at all when a cute old man is
around.
I took him to the hospital recently for a procedure. He was
talking to a woman who was checking him in, and somehow it came out that her
grandmother and he grew up in the same town. She wondered if maybe my dad knew
her grandmother. I don’t know to politely say this, but in a small south
Georgia town in the 1930s – well, it’s just not likely that daddy and this
woman’s grandmother hung out much, you know?
But then the nice lady says “Here, I’ll show you a picture,”
and hands a photo to my daddy. I held my breath, waiting to see what he would
say.
He perused the photo and said, “She’s a nice-looking woman.”
Phew.
Then as he handed it back to the lady he said, “She was a
big woman, just like you.”
Oh Lord.
The nice lady just laughed and said, “Oh, Mr. Williams,
you’re just too much!”
She seemed to not mind that he had just called her fat. I
guess it was the suspenders.
These long car rides to the doctor’s offices are not so bad.
It gives us some time to talk. He had a great interest in the price of gasoline
despite the fact he probably only has to fill his tank up once a month, as
little as he drives now. We talk about the Braves and the weather and our respective
dogs, etc. When I’m taking him back home, he’ll point out where I need to turn
to get to his house, which is helpful, because I only lived there for about TEN
YEARS and I might have forgotten.
I am hopeful that my kids will help me out one day when I
need them, though they’re still at that cute age where you pretty much have to
pull a gun on them to get them to turn on the dishwasher or bring in groceries
from the car. I imagine they’ll be nice to me until they figure out their
inheritance is going to work out to about $17.50 apiece.
Well, here’s hoping I have a good, long time left to take
Daddy to the doctor or to the Cracker Barrel or wherever he needs to go, and
that someday, when I start wearing suspenders of my own, I’ll have somebody to
take me.
