I Blame the Barometer

I forked the last little glob of tuna salad onto the last little curve of bread crust, then tore sweet orange slices with my teeth. With a clean plate, save two skinny, naked orange rinds, I had finished the healthy lunch prepared for us by my mother’s caregiver. Normally, I’d be satisfied, but today I brought my mother’s silver candy dish from the living room to the dining table. Mom and I took a few chocolate-covered almonds, and I would have inhaled all the rest, except just then my mother commented, “This is the last of my chocolate.” Knowing I’d feel guilty if I ate the poor woman’s last chocolates, I switched my attention to a jar of M&Ms. These candies were also getting low, but by some inexplicable oversight had been at about the same level in the jar for the last three weeks. I’d be doing Mom a favor if I made more room in the jar for the new M&Ms I’d buy her next week, wouldn’t I? Haha. After popping half a dozen M&Ms, I persuaded myself to stop. People sometimes exhibit unusual discontent when barometric pressure shifts, or so they say, so I blame my rationalization and lack of self-control on the barometer. Oh no, I’ve sunk to rationalizing my rationalizations!

Trying to concentrate on the benefits of a breeze, oppressively humid as it was, I made my way after my excessively indulgent dessert to the nursing home to visit Dad in the Alzheimer’s wing. Wheeling him from a common area to his room, I parked and braked his wheelchair in front of the CD player so that we could listen to his favorite music. His CD player sits atop a three-drawer nightstand. I snapped fingers and he rotated wrists to saxophone sounds and trumpet toots. I pointed out the window to treetops wildly gyrating in the storm brewing outside, and Dad said, “That’s very happening.” Opening a nightstand drawer, I pulled out a small plastic container Mom keeps there for him. I offered him its contents—a few M&Ms, a few Hershey’s Kisses, and a chocolate peanut butter egg left over from his Easter basket. He plucked out a Kiss, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.

This is the point when he normally sits back and never thinks about candy again unless I extend the dish over to him. Today, however, he seemed to have candy on the brain. He stretched out his bony arm toward the dish on the nightstand. He couldn’t reach. His fingers strained and swam in the air toward the dish. I unbraked his wheelchair so he could roll in to get more chocolate. After he had almost polished off the chocolates, he rolled in, opened the top drawer and withdrew a jar of licorice my sister had left him. He started in on fat, black licorice chunks. Then, in another surprise move, he rolled in and pulled yet another container of licorice candies from a drawer. By this time, his lips and chin were smeared black. He pointed his face upward so I could tissue off the smears. After each foray into a candy dish, he replaced it atop the nightstand and rolled backward. A few minutes later, he’d ask, “What’s in that?” and point to one of the three dishes, then roll forward and help himself.

My father has late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. He remembers hardly anything. Yet today he remembered where to find his candy cache. Although he has always had a sweet tooth, in recent years he has been completely passive about satisfying it. I don’t know what was different about today, but I blame the barometer.

Postscript: I originally wrote this in a humorous mood in 2013. As I look back on the sweet tooth history of our whole family in light of recent science that now calls Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes, I realize with soberness that a lifetime sweet tooth may well not be a laughing matter.

Francine Prose and George Saunders ~ extraordinary writers

Francine Prose has the perfect last name. I wonder if her middle name is Evocative. Francine Evocative Prose. Anyway, I feel inspired when I read her prose. Just finished her novel Goldengrove. The summer Nico is thirteen, her sister Margaret drowns, and Nico, Mom, and Dad grieve, each in his own way. Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from narrator Nico:

My mother never got a harpsichord. Maybe she forgot, or maybe the trouble she’d had trying to pronounce it had dampened her desire. Now, at meals, she played with her food, extracting one shred of cabbage from the tangle of coleslaw, one curl of pasta from the mac and cheese. Then she’d lose interest and grow abstract, listening, as if a voice, inaudible to my father and me, was calling from another room. A dim gleam, sort of fish-tank glow, would flicker in her eyes, and, waving her fork like a baton, she’d say something like, “I’ve just figured out the whole thing about Mozart.” [page 175 in my edition]

The family’s fragility is palpable throughout this novel.

Also recently had a George Saunders collection of short stories home from the library. Tenth of December is a great introduction to this imaginative writer, satirist extraordinaire. Innovative formats such as diary entries and corporate memos are perfect settings for his pearls of pointed humor. Some stories I chose not to finish because of violent content, but generally I enjoyed how much fun Saunders seemed to be having.

Francine Prose and George Saunders—two writers who inspired me this summer to be a better writer.