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How wrong can a guy be?
On his sixth day in the nursing home, I asked Pop whether the nurses had convinced him yet to change his registration from Democrat to Republican.
“No,” he laughed, and he is laughing a lot these days. “They said I was smart. I told them I thought so, too.”
By the most reliable signs, my 93-year-old father will go to his grave as an unrepentant liberal Democrat.
By the most recent signs, Pop is not going to his grave anytime soon.
Love, for the first time in too long, has returned to his mind — he or we should leave it there — and he is back to noticing the length of skirts.
What, Me Worry?
When a family member told him last week, “You are coming with me,” I feared my once vibrant father would shrivel, vegetate and fade to black.
However, just as he did in the wake of Mom’s death 27 years ago, when he was a stripling of 66, he has blossomed gloriously, as if he were living again in forever springtime.
With my hostile stepmother remanded to the rear row of his life for keeps, the heat and stress have been turned off, and his daily routine is fun again for the first time in years.
When I telephoned yesterday, Pop was sunning himself on the front porch, watching the traffic whiz past on the east-west highway leading to the home. It has been a week of reunions. In a long life never populated with strangers, Pop was shmoozing with a fellow resident, Sue Smith, who lived down the block from my childhood home.
Love in Bloom — Are You Listening Jack Benny?
I asked 3 times to make sure I heard him correctly. Love has made a comeback 10 months before his 94th birthday.
“I really love her,” he said of his new favorite nurse, who sees that he, a diabetic, gets the food that he wants, that he stays clean and fresh at all times.
Does he know what she is doing after her shift ends?
“No,” he said grinning, with a twinkle in his excitedly elevating voice, “But since I don’t have a car and I can’t walk, she’ll have to come and get me if she wants to go out.”
Now About Religion
Forty years ago in his prime, Pop worked alongside a gentleman named Walter, who is so religious he helped found a church. Walter’s grandfather also is one of Pop’s caretakers, and he wants her to know, diplomatically, that he is filing a critique.
With the clunking sound of disappointment, Pop reported, with a small tear in his voice, that she is as religious as Walter, and that probably is the reason she wears an extremely long skirt.
“I don’t know why it has to be so long,” he said, sadly. “Wouldn’t hurt anything if it were shorter. But I don’t think I better say anything.”
With love, short skirts, irresistible food and a cast of new friends in his suddenly sunny life after less than a week at the nursing home, he can’t wait to wake up tomorrow morning.
He might actually find out the name of the nurse he is in love with.
