I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from*
(* Musically-inclined Rust readers may be familiar with the above lyric line from Not Dark Yet off 1997’s Time Out Of Mind, one of my all-time Bob Dylan favourite albums).
Today I thought I’d begin my offering by sharing with my readers a snap of Perkins, the male pheasant who over the past few months has been a regular visitor to my father’s garden on the south coast. Initially he was very wary of humans, but after a few weeks of us regularly leaving bird seed and other tit-bits out on the lawn he has become a bit of a fixture. One of the plus sides of this little set-up is that it provides a healthy topic with which to leaven any mundane conversation taking place.
Here’s an example which took place yesterday. After breakfast my father came out on the terrace and flopped into his sit-up style of deck chair.
PARENT: Have you seen Perkins yet?
SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED: No. I put out some of his favourite food about forty minutes ago and seen nothing of him yet.
ME: I last saw him just before tea yesterday as I was driving to the garage, on the church side of the road.
SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED: I feel sorry for him sometimes because he hasn’t got any wives …
PARENT: Do you think he’s gay?
We’ve been staying with my father for the past three days. Prior to that due to other personal commitments I hadn’t been down for about a week and a half, which is slightly unusual for me. Not that I felt remotely guilty about this for two reasons: (1) taken in the round, I come down quite a lot; and (2) these days it’s practically down to a toss of a coin whether my father will remember it if I do.
The first time this happened to me – a year or two ago now, just after I’d just stayed with him for ten days – was a bit of a shock. His next visitor (one of my brothers) had asked my father how my stay with him had been and received the reply “I don’t know what he’s been up to, I haven’t seen him [i.e. me] for at least six weeks”.
When my brother mentioned this to me in passing during a phone conversation, with tongue in cheek I quipped “Yippee – you know what this means, don’t you?! If Dad can’t remember whether we’ve been down or not, that means we no longer have to visit him – we just can tell him we’ve been and he won’t know any different!”, which (if you wish to look it that way) might be thought of as a trifle ungallant, but then again (if you look at it another) how insulting is it if you spend ten days with someone and 24 hours later he can’t even remember it?
The thing is, when you’re dealing with aged parents, this sort of thing happens regularly and you just have to get used to it and avoid taking umbrage or offence. It is an obvious thing to say, but it can be a little frustrating sometimes when the person concerned can (to all intents and purposes) seem fully compos mentis in one half hour period … and then nine-tenths ga-ga in the next. At any given moment, you’re never quite sure which version you’re talking to.
When my Canadian cousin, a GP doctor, was over in the UK for a family wedding about nine months ago she dropped in to see my father and had a couple of chats with him.
Later I mentioned to her that, after two years of trying and failing to get my father to accept that he needed live-in carers, we were shortly to have the conversation yet again but this time more assertively.
She replied that we’d already made our first mistake, albeit that it was one that was understandable and common amongst family descendants of very aged parents. There was no point in reasoning with them, expecting them to follow logic and/or even later ‘go away and think about what had been said during a meeting’. Why? Well, firstly, it was highly unlikely they’d be able to concentrate hard enough to follow a line of reasoning and, secondly, probably within a couple of hours they wouldn’t remember that a meeting had taken place anyway.
Which, now I think of it, is just about where I came in today …
