Daddy Day care

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.