Fun with Alcoholic Octogenarians

Auntie is a drunk, she has been for most of her 86 uneventful years on this planet. Perhaps that's why she drinks, because she has no imagination or gumptive powers to find a better hobby.
She drinks Wild Turkey, 101 Proof. By my estimation between my fingers, toes, and an abacus, 101 proof equals more than fifty percent alcohol. And she buys it by the barrel, that ginormous jug reserved for lower liquor store shelves because sheer weight alone will bring the inventory down. One a week.
I am not a big drinker so I don't know that a vat of liquor per week is considered "a lot," especially to a run-of-the-mill alcoholic, but in my own personal brain, it seems to be quite a quantity of spirits. And, ironically, it is giving no lift to Auntie's spirit; she's still dour and puckered.
The drinking of 8-10 ounces of turkey juice is not enabling proper balance and walking skill, though she has a cane. Wobbling around is a fully mental challenge for her anyway, much less when she's sauced, and so I took it upon myself to remedy the situation with a bit of tap water each evening to top off the bottle.
Did I mention she has dementia? No? That's probably a crucial detail, because otherwise I would not get away with the dilution portion of my story. She would stagger over to me and smack me with the cane for taking the sweet out of her candy instead of just opening the bottle each day and drinking a lesser portion of her beloved liquor.
At first, the liquid looks like bourbon, it's a dark amber. After the first day, it's more Long Island Tea than straight barrel-aged sauce. Second day, she's looking a bit peaked, shall we say, kind of brewed tea, turning to a weaker brewed version the next day. Day four, it looks like a bottle of urine. It's not pretty. And by day five, Auntie is downing a glass or twelve of sunshine tinted water. At least I can be certain she is getting her recommended daily allotment of water each day.
Does she notice a substantial taste change? No, she does not.
But of course, when I watch her practically licking the inside of her tumbler to get to the last drops and I realize I am marvelling that any mammal other than a giraffe has a tongue that long, it's time to get a new bottle.
Here's the fun part: you can't water down a fresh bottle. There is no room in the inn, shall we say, and the bottle would of course overflow.
So you wait, just watch.
She pours that first drink, sits at the table, eagerly lifts that glass to her mouth, and takes that first sip.
Bam!
The lips purse, the throat constricts, the eyes squeeze tightly and then bug out like a thyroid patient and here come the sound effects! Starts with a gasp, ends with a whimper.
Visualize a water buffalo submerged too long. She shakes her cranium back and forth ferociously to get that junk down her gullet. Droplets of booze fly from her lips and snot from her nose and I think, "I'm gonna need Windex."
After the initial breathing returns, she looks at me and whispers from her abraded throat: "Good."
And I go to the cleaning cabinet for supplies.

My Butt Fell Off

In the interest of journalistic truth, perhaps "fell away" is the better descriptive phrase.
Upon leaving the shower last night, I happened to catch a rear view of my rear view.
Startling conclusion: my ass is not where I left it.
When last I saw my butt, and granted, that was some time ago, it was locked and loaded in the upright position, I'm sure of it. Now...not so much.
I need scaffolding and a pulley system to get that thing back to it's bird's eye view.
So -- I have ordered from my friendly e-Bay account the latest thing in workout torture, "The Brazilian Butt Lift" DVD set, complete with First Aid Kit and a local connection to the Fallen-and-Can't-Get-Up folks.
I've been wary of anything that said Brazil in the title since I heard of the wax treatment one can purchase for one's ... nether region. Even Brazil Nuts sounded unappealing after visualizing a denuded girly part, but, hey, that was before I felt my butt rubbing the backs of my knees when I walk.
Viva Brazil!
I'll try to update you once I get this workout going, assuming I can manage to crawl to the keyboard after God-knows-how-many lunges and squats I'm committing myself to.
(P.S. I'm afraid.)

Things 80-Somethings Say

I know a gentleman in Auntie's harmonica band -- different story, different day -- who was once a volunteer firefighter in the Bethany, Oklahoma area. Ah, sweet, sweet octogenarian, preacher man.
I asked if he had any distinct memories of fires he fought and he named a few, in buildings long defunct and forgotten by most everyone around nowadays.
Casually, I asked if he had ever saved someone from a burning building. I thought I was speaking facetiously.
He spoke softly, "No, I never had the privilege."
I almost cried.

Ahhhhh...

I've been off-line far, far too long, and now -- huge breath of congested internet air -- I'm back!
And Yahoo Music playing in the background. Coffeehouse mix, thank you.
Whew. Can't beat it.
I've been out of pocket for innumberable reasons, all dramatic and long-winded and inconsequential to this writing, so suffice it to say I am pleased to have rejoined the ethereal community of fellow people!
To catch up: the aunt is still in the mix. Auntie is her own brand of weirdness undercover, a covert, stealthy brand of evil armed with an old wooden cane and an acrid tongue, but only on lucid days, and fortunately those are few and far between. The "betweens" are boring, rote, low-hum. Then, ZING! Godzilla wakes up in increasingly-rare form and I'm off and running, keeping between her toes when her feet fall so as to not be crushed between those quarter-inch thick, yellowed talons of hers. Ew. But personal habits are an entire chapter all its own.
And look at that, we're all caught up.
So check back, the adventures continue, and now I can vent via keyboard and give Prozac a break now and then!

O Pioneer: My Brush with Greatness, Before the 'Ness Set In

In the third grade I acquainted myself with a little lady who wore a Dorothy Hamill haircut (it was the late seventies, her 'do was hot, we all wanted it, that's all I'm sayin') and sang all of the words to "You Light Up My Life," a highly popular song at the time. (Google it if you don't believe me.)
She was red-headed, cute as a button, friendly, outgoing, and smiled with dimples as deep as ditches. She was my eight-year-old real-life-girl idol. Shaun Cassidy who??
I wanted to be Betty to her Wilma. (Another retro reference. Yeah, yeah, I'm aged.)
In gym one day I made her laugh, my First Stand-Up Routine. The subject: popcorn. I made her snort. That was my First Atta Girl in my "Atta Girl, a Permanent Record of Personal Achievement and Yay Me Stuff."
Also a First, I discovered the joy of making other people, those who weren't my mother, laugh. (My mother's laugh has always been an auditory drug to me. To make her laugh I will do most anything, and the elation I get from her joy is a high that's impossible to deny.)
One sunny rainbow-strewn day this lovely classmate invited me to her home for my First Outside-the-Neighborhood After School Play Date, a term that I believe did not come into fashion until recently. (Yes, yes, we were ahead of our time. Insert falsely modest downturned eyes, and applaud if you wish.).
Agog, I went to her home on my First Ever School Bus Ride, another blog entirely, one focusing mostly on odor.
In her enormous home, her room was actually two rooms: an enormous bedroom and a playroom as large as my entire home, garage included. I was in My First Mansion.
When I got home that evening, after a fantastic day of dining on the First Kid Cuisine ever invented (I'm sure it was, trust me) and floating in lovely glittery illusions only an eight-year-old with her First Heterosexual Girl Crush can invent, I wanted to move to her neighborhood.
Instead, only a few short months later, we did move. To a new school district.
Aaargh.
Crushed. Downtrodden. With hair much too thin to support my own anemic version of the Hamill bob, I moved.
The name of this eight-year-old young lady I emulated at will: Ann Marie Smith. 
When I saw her again in high school, she was Ree, and she was lithe and graceful and oh-so-popular and I had reached critical point-of-no-return geekiness, so of course I never spoke to her.
She was my brush with greatness. I thought she was great then, but now the world has been put on notice that this chick is to be heard.
Now she is Ree Drummond, http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/, an entrepreneur, a chef, a teacher, a performer, a photographer, and soon to be a fifty-foot-tall star of the big screen of moviedom
I suggest you check her website and peruse it a while.
I wish she would post pictures of her childhood bedroom. Sigh. I'm sure it's as glorious as I remember, 'cause little girls never exaggerate in their memories...right?

In Sickness and Crap Like That

Yesterday it was 74 degrees outside, a delightfully balmy, need-sunscreen kind of day.
Today -- the high has been 31 and the snow "fall" is horizontal.
I have not been feeling well for days now and I can assure you that it hasn't helped that flowers and trees are budding prettily, only to be crushed under drifts of snow, They are now rethinking the bloom to torture me with at a later date.
I have always considered my voice to sound mannish. I normally like to pretend it's more Demi Moore than Wilford Brimley, but this week I know I'm channeling Abe Vigoda. Not pretty.
A friend wants to call and chat today. Chat. With Abe Vigoda. And he's stubborn, not "listening" when I e-mail him that chatting today is a mistake, as it would inspire visions of transvestites on Lesbian Night. (That just came to me, I don't believe it to be a real entity, so no inquiry e-mails as to where this show may be seen, please.)
I don't like the phone anyway, though it's far better than texting, a much different and more vigorously argued topic than I care to handle today.  But speaking into a receiver while trying to keep breathing shallow so as to dissuade coughing fits is not a seemly thing to do today.
Long story short: I feel like crap. Please let me wallow in my self pity.
More soon.

re-Start a Heart...

I've been telling you a tad about Adventures with Alzheimer's, with a grave nod at its solemnity, and a teeny wink at the humorous side of a terrible affliction. Teeny, Really more of an eye spasm than a wink.
Today, early this morning, I was concerned about Auntie. She was pale, not completely coherent, addled. Truly addled, as in she couldn't keep a thought in her head for mere seconds. Her eyes were blank and lifeless even as she shuffled around using muscle memory to make her morning pot of coffee.
My grandfather called us, offering to take us to breakfast, and true to form, Auntie's ears perked at the sound of free food on a warm plate that she doesn't have to clean. We go to Panera bread and Grandpa and I chat while the aunt peruses the newspaper. I don't notice any abnormalities in her behavior at all. Everything is copacetic again. Yay.
Okay. Return to the casa and we're off to Sam's. We are out of Ritz crackers, the only cracker the discerning palette must have when drinking Wild Turkey 101.
Auntie goes to the blood pressure taker thingie at the back of the store, near the pharmacy. Again, this is muscle memory, as we had been taking her pressure seemingly every five minutes to see if/when medications could be balanced out to give us the quintessential octogenarian blood flow.
The test ends. 95 over 82.
I blinked. I looked in Auntie's eyes. They were glazed again. I immediately and quietly suggested we try that again. She sits ever so peacefully waiting for the new reading while I glance over to the floral department to see if the newest shipment includes calla lillies for the graveside. (I'm kidding! sheesh...I can hear your boos from here.)
97 over 84.
She must have detected a slight tremor of panic in my voice after the first test because, hey, look at that, it's risen! Darn near perfect again...if she were a hummingbird, maybe.
Yada yada yada, get her in the van without passing out, in the van, out to QDoba for the soup she loves, back to the house, break out the plastic microwave plates from the 1980's when microwaves were brand new and completely free to shed their radiation upon opening the door, and ring the doc.
He's a busy dude but the triage nurse will give him the infomration and he'll call back, "just prop her in a corner and splash her with water once in a while to insure she's conscious." (Okay, maybe I loosely paraphrased the nurse.)
Her soup is ready, and it's served up with the appropriate utensils and paper sack of tortilla chips provided by the restaurant To Go Girl. (I'm pretty sure that's an official title.)
Okay. I'm biting into my delicious Naked Burrito with Pork, every bit as delicious and dirty as it sounds, while she loads up her spoon and shovels in the first taste.
Remember that up until this moment she's been comatose, my own personal walking Stepford Aunt, doing everything I tell her without question or sideways glance. Not even a peep. Ah, golden silence.
But once she swallows her first drizzle of soup, with her neck still bent in that awkward leaning-in angle that we use when we eat soup, her eyes pop into our planet, alert and wide and shocked to be awake.
Gigantic drops of liquid immediately form on every one of the four coal black hairs over her lip, and her face instantaneously flushes a shiny cardinal red.
I find myself staring at her, waiting for her first words, as though she were an alien newborn child on the verge of earthly communication.
Her mouth ajar, steam wisps out, and sliding out on the downdraft of tomato fumes, I hear the whispered syllable, "Hot..."
"Are you okay?" I query, a bit freaked out but fascinated at the new events.
"Spicy," she mouths, as she stands. She streaks to the kitchen, an unprecedented action since, again, she's older than dirt and supposedly slightly infirm. She's coughing and sputtering and ahem-ing up a storm while she fills a highball with ice and tap water. The water is nearly gone in the three now-short steps it takes her to return to the table and sit.
She stares at the soup as if it was a volcano into which she was to be tossed.
She grabs a fistful of tortilla chips, crushing them with her spoon until they are minute and submerged. She takes a breath and goes in for the second bite. On and on like this, bite after bite, she hums and coughs and chokes down the soup! She puts an ice cube into the liquid, shoves more chips under the lava and keeps on eating, like a good scout, until she just can't take another bite.
Then comes the flatulence.
"Excuse me a minute," she says as she toots across the floor. Like an old balloon with a leaky spout she makes her way into the bathroom for minutes on end.
When she returns to the table, I have no words.
"I think I'll save the rest for later," she tells me, tucking the plastic bowl into the fridge. I'm thinking it's a terrible idea to keep eating something that does that to a person, but only moments later she is reciting verbatim things I had said to her ten hours before, she's generating new and original ideas, she's telling jokes, she's reliving anecdotes from her childhood, and she has regained the ability to play dominoes. These are all things unheard of only moments before The Soup Incident.
The cure for Alzheimer's: whatever the hell is in QDoba's spice packet. Try it. You'll see...

Life Can Be Made Better With Ice Cream

I know it's widely believed that ice cream heals all wounds. I'm just clarifying that that is indeed the truth. I forgot all of my woes today while watching my son eat a double dip ice cream cone, orange on the bottom, red on the top. Translation: orange sherbet and strawberry ice cream in a waffle cone from Braum's. Yum.
He eats out of a cone, with a spoon, and midway, he chomps the pointy bottom off the cone and smooshes the remnants of ice cream down into the bottom to get a good drip going. He watches the drip, occasionally catching some with his spoon, until he gets bored and finally eats the cone.
It's a process.
And I'm a voyeur. With napkins. Lots of napkins.
I highly recommend it.

It Was a Dark and Freaky Night...and yes, I did it to myself

I've been staying with a great-aunt who needs constant compaionship because senility has set its hooks, forcing twenty-four/seven supervision and the purchase of enormous clock faces.
That is another story.
My tale involves ghosts and the home's central heating system.
This house is haunted.
No one believes me, I know that, but still, it's true. I don't sleep well in her home because of the random noises that attack my central nervous system and make me as uneasy as if I were schizophrenic.
I've heard doors shutting mysteriously at three in the morning, and upon stealthy inspection of the living room, of course I was armed with a bottle of Keri lotion (thought patterns are illogical when ghost hunting), I found no warm bodies straying into the kitchen for midnight treats.
I feel like I am being watched when I am lying in bed facing the window, so I have begun sleeping facing the door.
More recently the noises were so freaky that I've started leaving the television on all night, muted, but the thing is so old it has an ominous hum all its own. But it also has no remote -- it's a push button television, imagine that! -- so I put up with the hum.
I've heard that when ghosts are present the air turns cooler in that area. Imagine when I woke the other morning and saw my breath! I was terrified to open my eyes as I was sure I would be ringed in ghosts like the poor dentist in "Ghost Town" (cute movie, by the way, shameless plug) and it turned out the the aunt had stumbled into the hallway and after having a normal routine of keeping her home at a balmy 82, I kid you not, she decided to turn off the heater on this particuls night in order to save a few pennies. It was twenty-eight degrees outside and the thermostat read 65 when I finally sprinted to the controls to dispel my ghosts.
BUT! And here's the crux of my tale...the other night I heard a BELL! A RINGING bell! Like a CHIMING, RINGING bell! Three tones in a row! At six a.m. Thus I was UP and AWAKE at six a.m! Not even the octogenarian aunt was awake.
Plus! Plus! I've started watching an A&E show called "Paranormal State." So now I sleep after the scary show, with the television humming, extra blankets stuffed at the foot of the bed should the old lady get stingy again, and a night light. And I'm not even ashamed of it!
Sad.