Schwinn bicycle.

When I was nineteen I had been married a year, moved far from home, attended college and hardly knew a soul.  My husband was always on call at his job. I was a music major and spent four to six hours playing the piano every day. When I wasn't studying, I was bored and needed some exercise.

I bought an orange Schwinn bicycle with a 10-speed Derailleur gear. It cost $115, a fortune for newlyweds. During nice weather it was nothing uncommon for me to ride ten miles around town. For a town with a population of forty thousand, Aurora had a small town feel and traffic was usually light. My favorite routes took me past the Frank Lloyd Wright house and the round house with pie shaped rooms which was featured in Look magazine. One summer afternoon I was returning to the apartment, pedaling along the edge of the pavement because there was quite a bit of traffic and I didn't feel comfortable sharing the two-lane road with motorists. The condition of the shoulder deteriorated with obstacles such as chunks of pavement, broken glass and holes. I decided I'd be better off riding on the pavement. I had a rear view mirror attached to the handlebars (a $12 accessory). I could watch for approaching cars.

If you ride bikes or motorcycles you'll know right away I shouldn't have done what I did next. The pavement was a couple of inches higher than the shoulder. I should have got off my bike and walked it up on the pavement. I could have demonstrated my athletic abilities by yanking up on the handlebars and lifting the front tire onto the pavement without stopping. I didn't go that, but I did have a live-and-learn occasion.

I might mention right here that it was a nice day and I was wearing shorts and a halter top. That's what nineteen year old girls wore in 1974.

By now I bet you can guess what I did. I turned the wheel toward the pavement. The tire didn't hop up on the road. It scraped along the ragged edge. By the time I realized I'd made a mistake and the bike was off balance, a car was passing me. In the next instant I was sprawled on my back in the middle of the lane. Simultaneously, car tires squalled against the pavement as another car came to a stop a few inches from my head. Not taking time to assess whether I was injured I scrambled to my feet and dragged my Schwinn back to the edge of the road.

The driver jumped out of his car and left it abandoned in the street. I don't remember what he looked like. Nondescript, I guess. Panicked, for sure. He insisted on taking me to a hospital to be checked for injuries. I was pretty sure I wasn't hurt worse than a scrape on my bare back. No way was I getting in a car with a stranger. I could see my apartment building across a large vacant lot and started pushing my bike toward it. There was something wrong with my bike, but I couldn't figure out why the front wheel didn't want to go where I was steering it. The guy ignored his running vehicle and side-stepped along beside me. He rapidly assured me he was a married man and had two little girls. I'd be perfectly safe with him.

I scarcely looked at the man. I'm sure he was quite nice. The realization that I had missed being run over only by his quick reflexes swept over me as I imagined someone informing Ed his bride had been killed or seriously injured. Tears stream down my face as I repeatedly told the well-meaning motorist that I was fine. He finally left me struggling with the bike and returned to his car.

At the apartment building I carried the damaged bike up a flight of stairs and parked it inside our door. I still couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. Too shook up to do anything else, I sat down to wait for Ed to get home.

He had a little chat with me about the laws of physics and why he always slowed his motorcycle down and steered straight across railroad tracks if they cross the road at an angle. I admitted I should have known better. It turned out there wasn't anything wrong with my Schwinn except for a gouge in the protective orange wrap on the handle bars. Why couldn't I steer it?  The wheel was turned around almost 180 degrees. Duh.

The Lost Country

In Star Trek, the future is the Undiscovered Country. The future is the Lost Country for people with memory or cognitive difficulties.

 

My father moved to the lost country. The arduous journey was slow and filled with anguish, especially for my mother. For the first five years, I wasn't sure he was going anywhere. He and Mom sniped at each other about what they had heard on the evening news. We assumed he didn't understand the commentary because he refused to wear his hearing aids. He made mistakes playing his favorite card game. We thought it was because he wouldn't wear his glasses. He stopped calling us by name, and my brother and I compared notes. He told the same story over and over like a pre-recorded loop, and his friends began to avoid him. He stopped using the telephone. He drove to the coffee shop every day like he had a job and had to get to it. He stopped recognizing people and could no longer differentiate between past and present. He would become obsessed with a memory from his youth or childhood and talk about it exclusively, endlessly. He failed the mental cognizance tests at the doctor's office.

He sold his beloved Watusi cattle and got ripped on the price because he couldn't remember which animals were Foundation Pure, 15/16ths or some other lesser cross. What a sad change for a man who loved his cattle as much as his family. When my brother was born, he had told Mom the baby was "as pretty as a newborn calf." A rich compliment from him.




He adopted methods to cope with failing memory. If someone came to visit, he didn't have much to say, but what he did say made perfect sense. "Good to see you." "Glad you dropped by." "Come back again sometime." If he contributed to the conversation at all, it was in the context of an old memory.

When it became obvious he wasn't the same man he used to be, Mom gave me a clipping to read:

   'Don't try to make me understand. Let me rest and know you're with me. Kiss my cheek and hold my hand. I'm confused beyond your concept. I am sad and sick and lost. All I know is that I need you to be with me at all cost. Do not lose your patience with me. Do not scold or curse or cry. I can't help the way I'm acting, can't be different though I try. Just remember that I need you, that the best of me is gone. Please don't fail to stand beside me, love me til my life is done.' Author Unknown

He became belligerent and couldn't be reasoned with. He ridiculed us for saying he shouldn't drive in a blizzard. He didn't notice that his clothes were dirty or foul smelling and refused to bathe. He became incontinent. He declared he was perfectly content with the situation. We were the ones with the problem.

He didn't take that journey alone. My mother was right beside him. She treated him kindly and gently. She kept him presentable. At the proper time, she took the car keys away from him. If he wanted to go drink coffee, she took him. She did everything in her power to maintain a semblance of normalcy and routine. She gave him little chores to do, like setting the table or taking out the trash, and stopped expecting him to be able to mow the grass or change the oil.



With her own strength rapidly fading, my mother made the heart-wrenching decision to move him to long-term care. He adapted well to the new country where they allowed him to wear his cowboy boots and listen to Johnny Cash on Alexa. He thought he was in a hotel with a great restaurant. He was never able to find his room by himself. He watched Lawrence Welk on TV but didn't know how to change the channel. Someone had to remind him to use the toilet. He was easy to get along with.

In the dining room, he hesitated to eat the food placed before him, because he knew he didn't have cash on him. If someone sat with him and said the restaurant was running a tab, he ate with gusto. He always offered his food to someone else if he noticed they weren't eating. He observed that the restaurant catered to the elderly. In fact, he became more talkative and occasionally knew my name.  

Mom spent every day with him. Since she didn't drive after dark, they had a daily argument when she left. He wanted to go with her. When she pointed out that she wasn't able to care for him any longer, he reasonably suggested that she stay there and he would go home. The nursing staff finally asked her to stop telling him when she was leaving.  

I expected the end of the journey to last longer. Two and a half months after entering long-term care, he died of a massive stroke. The personality, mannerisms, and wit of the man I called Dad died years earlier.

NOTE:  If someone in your family can't remember what year it is, the name of the President, what they ate for breakfast, stops liking their favorite activities, or exhibits any of the behavior above, I urge you to seek medical help for them.   https://alz.org/

The Man Who Was Born Twice

My father was born in 1933 in Opelousas, Louisiana. His birth certificate says so. His parents, the ones who raised him, lived in Iuka, Kansas. They didn't meet him until he was five years old. In that five year span there is little known of his life. Somehow a woman named Williams brought him to Kansas. There are two likely scenarios. Either his birth mother up and gave him to this woman, or an agency something like today's social services removed him from the home and placed him in the custody of the Williams lady.

Once he was in Kansas, he ended up at the orphanage at Newton with a different name from the one on his birth certificate. This is a mystery.  

My grandparents already had a five-year-old daughter. She was as cute as a bug and had won a pretty baby contest. But they yearned for another baby and they weren't having any luck. Eventually, they made an appointment with the orphanage and met with the administrator.  Grandma told me she could hear babies crying while the woman lied and claimed there weren't any babies available. However, there was a little boy she'd like for them to meet.

Back in the day, the orphanage was situated on a working farm which provided meat, milk, eggs, and garden produce for their sustenance as well as an income from livestock and crops. She and granddad walked around the area with the shy child. Eventually, they came to a pen of cattle, and the little guy climbed up on the fence.

"I like those cows."

That's all it took to convince Grandpa he had found his son.  One look had melted Grandma's heart and kicked her nurturing instincts into overdrive.

Even after reading the adoption decree it is unclear how or why the orphanage had custody of my dad. However, they swore out an affidavit in court that they had the legal right to release my father to my grandparents. I wonder, now that there is no one to ask, if anyone thought to ask that child if he would like to go home with these strangers.

His new parents immediately changed his name to one of their choosing. For several years the family was subject to visits to make sure the adoptee was being treated correctly. Dad was a rough and tumble child and sometimes he was a little banged up. My grandmother lived in a constant state of anxiety that she could lose him.

When dad was nineteen, she had a new birth certificate filed with the State of Louisiana. Nearly all the vital statistics were the same except for the names of the parents. Finally, she had written proof he was her son and no one could take him away from her.