mallorys_camera | Two Views of 82

Naught to report.

Right now, this very moment, Hideous White Stuff is falling from the sky according to the weather reports, but it is too dark to tell yet whether this is Fake News.

Alicia emailed me an invitation to Annie’s 82nd b-day party in Bend, Oregon, and instead of writing back, Choke on your own vomit, bitch! I answered politely: I regret I will be unable to attend. I was very proud of myself.

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Chris is in the hospital.

I think Linda is in total denial over how ill Chris is.

Chris lives in Albany but usually drives down to Hyde Park on Saturday and stays through Monday—an arrangement that has been ongoing for some 40 years now.

Only last Saturday, he called her to tell her that he wasn’t feeling well, had broken out into intense sweats and chills, was going to the ER.

“Oh, you know. He always overreacts to everything,” Linda chuckled.

I was going to agree, but then Linda told me he had called 911 and was actually transported to the hospital in an ambulance.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go up there, Linda?” I asked.

Oh, no, no, no. She was sure he would be fine.

Heart attack, was my first thought.

###

In the ER, they wired Chris up, did the protocol poking and prodding. No heart attack.

I was glad I’d kept my mouth shut. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? I seem to be learning discretion in my advancing years.

But whatever was going on seemed to be serious enough that they decided to keep him in the hospital.

He remains there still.

In these days of heightened utilization review, it is rare for someone who is not seriously ill to be hospitalized at all, let alone for two (or more) nights.

Chris seems to be treating the hospitalization as a vacation.

I could hear him telling Linda on the phone last night about all the different movies he’d been watching. (Linda keeps her phone on speaker mode.). “They get TCM!”

Chris doesn’t have cable at his home. He can well afford cable, but he is frugal, bordering on parsimonious. I think this started out as worry about his schizophrenic daughter Kasinda, wanting to ferret away as many resources as possible against the day when he would die, and Kassie would be left to fend solo. But then his parsimony took on a life of its own. I sometimes think more than half the reason his relationship with Linda has continued as long as it has is because she has cable.

###

On paper, I rent a room from Linda.

In reality, I function more like a Dickensian companion.

I do a lot of the heavier house chores—which I am very happy to do because I am extremely fond of Linda, she is a really blithe spirit, sunny and merry in a completely unforced way, which is remarkable given the fact that she is severely disabled: She was born with scoliosis, which—for whatever reason—her parents chose not to correct, and it has gotten increasingly worse as she’s aged so that these days, she can barely walk.

Does she ever complain?

She does not!

Does she ever think self-pitying thoughts?

Not from what I can tell.

But it has dawned on me of late that Linda would not be able to continue living in this house—which she loves—if I weren’t living here, too.

We have a mutually beneficial symbiosis, in other words.

She’s 82. (Quick contrast-and-compare with Annie!). She still drives. And drives well.

Still. I wondered this morning whether the reason she was so quick to say she didn’t want to visit Chris was that she didn’t want to drive all the way to Albany.

So, I think I’m going to volunteer to drive her to Albany. My time is fairly untenanted this week except for Remuneration—which I can do wherever, whenever.

Next week, though, my life turns busy, busy, busy.

###

I don’t know what Linda would do if something happened to Chris.

I suspect her life would completely unravel.