January 8, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 4

January 8, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 4

IM and I spend the Tuesday morning in conversation with my mother and father. It’s the first chance we’ve had to engage them without the distractions of other visitors. My younger sister DD left for Boston yesterday and my other two sisters have gone back to work. My mother is scheduled to see her doctor today about adjusting her drug combinations to return her sodium and sugar levels back to their normal range. We’re also expecting her to be treated for the persistent cough associated with the bug she picked up from sick patients in the waiting room during her last visit. The television reports are calling the ailment the California Flu, the flu variant first isolated in 2004. It evolved into the strain that attacked denizens of California and the western states in 2005, and resumed its assault this year—ironically the strain first began in Nepal according to a notice on the recombinomics.com website.

Mom and Dad have both had a flu shot and a pneumonia vaccine and their symptoms are not that of the flu—no fever or muscle aches. About the only thing they’re experiencing is a persistent deep cough and lethargy. In their ailments is yet another example of the struggle that is life. From the time we’re born we are besieged by predators, some clearly visible, others microbes relentless attacking any host they can attach themselves to, in this case my aging parents. The human condition resembles a castle that is continually fighting off a persistent unending siege. As with all sieges, ultimately the walls will be breached and the castle overrun. But, my folks are pretty resilient and repelled the onslaught this year.

The four of us are sitting around the breakfast table in the dining room and are joined by EV, long-time care giver to both mom and dad. EV is a bubbly personality with a continuous twinkle in her eye. My mother and father love her as a daughter and the feeling is mutual. She can make herself understood in English but is far more comfortable in Spanish, which she speaks to my mother who acts as translator. We had been introduced to EV’s son MK, yesterday when he came by to borrow his mother’s car. EV is proud of her son, who has a burning desire to expand his knowledge of computers. He is fluent in English and works in the customer relationship department of one of the maquiladora manufacturing plants in Juarez. “He wants to attend the University of Texas at El Paso,” my mother explains as EV describes her son’s ambition in Spanish.

I’m taken with the exchange that my mother is carrying on—translating our English questions into Spanish and EV’s responses to us in English. My mother exhibits signs of dementia, asking the same question several times after forgetting the answer and that she asked the question earlier. Now, as we are conversing, I’m witnessing a woman with all her wits about her managing a fairly difficult task of converting from one language to another and doing so effectively. How much of old age dementia is the result of being deprived of intellectual stimulation for long periods of time and only having a television for company? Clearly when my mom is challenged to perform intellectually, she’s still up to the task.

My father has no signs of dementia. In fact, his memory for details is far better than mine. He remembers dates and details of past and recent events with relative ease. My father’s curtailed mobility is what is most worrisome to me. Here is a man used to getting up and going whenever the urge came upon him and now he’s feeling confined by his physical infirmities. He has been longing to drive back to Mississippi to visit relatives he hasn’t seen in a decade or more. He has a big 1950s vintage Airstream Landyacht trailer that he used to haul behind a 1970s Lincoln Continental with towing package. I have an 8-mm film I had digitized that shows him and my mom at a rest stop on Interstate 10 near Van Horn, Texas. He’s decked out in cowboy boots and wearing a cowboy hat. He is either on his way to or coming back from a trip to our family homestead in Brooklyn, Mississippi.  Another strip of digitized 8-mm shot by my niece and her girlfriend in the back seat of the Lincoln, shows my dad driving along Brooklyn Road through the main part of the town en route to our place. Still another film strip shows him wandering through knee high and chest high brush with his metal detector on the family place. He’s dressed out in a one-piece jump suit with a Caterpillar cap on his head smiling at us from the past, a man at peace with himself and the world in the place he once wandered as a young boy.

I need to take him and my mom back to Brooklyn and I have to do it while there’s still time. It will be good for us to see the old place again. I may have to rent a small RV for the trip. I doubt we could get the Landyacht ready to make the trip. I doubt I would know how to handle the behemoth if we did.  Still the trip would do my folks a world of good and it would probably give me a better appreciation of my own fast receding past.