Helicopter

Now, as many of you doubtless recall, I'm pretty old. I'm not older than God, as commonly attributed to me, but I was certainly around when Christ was a corporal, and that's aways back. As it happens I know "older than god" as my parents are both still alive, a rather low-probability event however you cut it up.

Neither are remotely capable of driving anymore, although my mother occasionally tests this proposition by driving down to Walmart and/or to church, these infrequent expeditions convincing her yet again that she's as good as she ever was, a conclusion apparently based on the fact that for no apparent reason she hasn't managed to kill or get killed while picking up the weekly supply of milk or doddering through a crowded church parking lot.

My father is rapidly falling down the hole of dementia, which frequently causes him difficulty in sorting out where he is, why he's there, and who all these people are anyhow. He's still up to 90-100% on recalling immediate family, but outside that circle gets pretty shaky. One thing he's really strong on is that my mother has no business driving anything. Now my feeling is that when even the guy who gets lost between his bedroom and his office says you're too incompetent to be driving, it's probably time to pay attention.

This, of course, matters not a whit to my mother who has resolved the whole issue by deciding that she's still a terrific driver, but has finally reached an exalted enough age to not have to put up with it, "it" being other traffic and rude people, which seem to have multiplied lately. These days no one seems to be able to keep their temper when being run down by a near-90 year old woman driving a Chevy Expedition, if you can imagine, and their rudeness is now a factor in her no longer crawling up into the driver's seat three times a day for one reason or another. I haven't a clue how she managed it in any case, as she can barely step over a doorjamb without assistance. Getting up into that friggin' Chevy's driver's seat has to be a pure act of God, or possibly Satan, a point of view largely dependent on whether she's coming around the corner after you or not.

In any event, this all came to play the other day when my father had to get to an eye doctor's appointment in The City. Neither of them would drive to The City at gunpoint even back in the day when they were driving everywhere, and even less so now. So, I wound up loading them into my car. The trip was uneventful except for her nonstop chatter concerning some relative or another who had done some damned thing or another with someone else and that's why my 2nd cousin twice-removed Elbert didn't make it to Aunt Hortense's funeral last year, and my father's periodic inquiry as to where we were and where we were going and what we were going to be doing when we got there.  Just another day with the 'rents, y'know, except trapped together in Friday traffic in a pretty small car.

The glass door into the doctors' offices had a very large sign that said "TURN OFF OR SILENCE YOUR CELL PHONE" so I did, and we went into the large waiting room that services the offices of a half-dozen or so doctors. It was full of people who were tottering on or near the "century" mark in various states of decrepitude along with whoever got conned into bringing them in that day, mixed in with the occasional kid and his mother trying to get the school physical crap finished before they chucked him off the team. And every single freakin' one of them had a cell phone. In fact, the entire room could be divided into four classes:

1.  People shouting at other people on their phones because these raggedy old farts can't hear anything at the best of times, never mind on a tinny cell-phone speaker in a roomful of shouting people;
2. People whose cell phones were ringing, combining into a gawd-awful cacaphony of absolutely horrible ring-tones, songs, bells, clicks, buzzers, and "cute stuff", all turned up full blast (ref: Deaf Old Farts, above) and buried in the bottoms of their purses, medical bags, pockets, or lost in their Coat Of Many Pockets, which means they just keep on ringing for upwards of a half hour until retrieved and answered (moving them into "Shouting People" category #1) or shouting disgustedly at whoever brought them or their neighbor about asshole telemarketing robots;
3. Nurses stepping out into the waiting room to shout the last names of whoever the gods have chosen to to actually go see a doctor, usually two and three times (ref: Deaf Old Farts, above, as compounded by shouting ring-tone people);
4. Only two people, actually, are in this special category and mentioned for their heroic individual efforts:

a. A scrawny old bird roughly 175 years old who was playing the loudest phone game in the history of Android and losing a lot, based on the crashing/glass-breaking sounds the game was coming up with combined with "Fucking Thing!" emanating periodically from the corpse playing it;

b. The ginormous old girl who, embarrassingly, didn't look much older than me who pushed past us  breathing like she'd just run a 300 meter sprint accompanied by her beat-down late 30s - early 40s daughter guiding her walker. The gasping tub-o-bad-news used what little breath she could suck down to berate the daughter for her incompetence at getting her to an empty chair. Tubolia (as I named her in my head) finally sloshed to a stop, hauled out her phone, hit about 37 buttons (it being pretty clear that she had no clue what she was doing) and put it up to her ear, which somehow invoked the daily news and an address lookup. I know this because the phone began loudly proclaiming the day's headlines periodically interrupted by Siri booming out the address of the Winchester County Election Commissioner's Office, followed up by the phone number and hours of service, and then resuming the news at the word where it left off. As the phone yelled at her, she stabbed at buttons and screens randomly to no apparent effect and she finally just dropped it on the end-table next to her and began reading a book, apparently assuming that sooner or later the batteries would run down and take care of the problem. The beat-down daughter said "Jesus, Mom!" and grabbed it up, glancing around the room in a panic, and shut off the noise, which caused Tubolia to crisply inform her she had her own phone, and to leave hers alone as she dropped it into the bag dangling off her walker.

Mom, sitting on my right, continued to talk one of my ears off, working her way up through family history into the mid-fifties, and Dad was utterly mystified as to where/what/why we were here. Each time we'd inform him that we were here to see his doctor to get his eyes checked, he'd finger the jacket he brought with him and ask me if it was ok if he left the jacket with me when they called him back, which I assured him would be fine. After approximately 50 repetitions of this, they finally called his name, and he and my mother went back. Shortly they returned, having had his eyes dilated and preliminary work done, to sit around another hour or so to see the doctor. Another 50 or so repetitions, except now including noticing that his vision was blurry.

"They put drops in your eyes, they'll be blurry for awhile."

"Oh, OK….when did they do that?"

"About 5 minutes ago."

"Oh, OK. So what are we waiting for now?"

"For you to see the doctor."

"Oh, OK. Can I leave my jacket here with you when I go back?"

"Yeah, that will be fine."

Rinse, wash, repeat.

Meanwhile my Mother had moved on to the subject of my granddaughter's trip to Alaska, saying she'd loved Alaska when she and my Dad had gone, and the granddaughter's pictures from the bush-plane she'd been in looked like fun.

"Seeing it from the air is the only way to go," she said.

"Helicopter," said the total stranger two rows over, looking at us knowingly, as if we were all old friends sharing secrets.

"Right," I said.

"Help me up," said Tubolia through the blizzard of ring-tones, "I gotta go to the bathroom."

"Jesus, Mom!" said Beat Down, schlumping over to her and grabbing her arm.

"What are we waiting here for?"

"Helicopter," the stranger said again, smiling and pointing us out to the disinterested corpse next to him.

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The doctor finally saw Dad and told him nothing had changed much with his eyes, which Mom took as a good sign. She got the prescription for the new glasses, and we left. Mom informed me that Dad was pretty much blind in his left eye, and his right was deperately blurry due to the macular degeneration, but they seem to have stabilized for the moment.

"That's one of the few upsides to his dementia," she said. "His vision was 20/15 his whole life and in the last 10 years it's gotten so horrible — but now he doesn't remember when he saw any better, so he's happy enough with it."

We got to their front door, and Dad was fumbling through his keys trying to sort out which one he needed to get back into his safe/controlled space. Mom told him to let her do it, as his eyes were so blurry from the eyedrops that he wouldn't be able to see the keyhole. He was completely mystified.

"Ain't nobody been doing anything with MY eyes," he said.  He told me how much he appreciated me giving them a ride around, and I told him no problem.  And it wasn't really. I was vaguely curious where he thought we'd been, but didn't bother.

"I think people with loud cellphones should be drug behind a team of horses," he said. "But, I mean it, we really appreciate you taking us," and with a smile, went into the house.

On with the rest of my day…