Sarcastic Ghosts

The day after Gilbert died, in 1986, I was driving his family around San Francisco to make funeral arrangements and do some sightseeing.  San Francisco is a notoriously terrible place in which to find parking.  Over the years of our friendship, whenever Gilbert and I went somewhere, I was in charge of looking for parking for us.  So as I got into his car to start the drive on that awful day, I said "OK, Gilbert, I've been finding you parking for years.  Now it's your turn."

Amazingly on that day I found parking everywhere, especially in the middle of Chinatown and in front of Ghirardelli Square, two paces where you can NEVER find parking.

At first it became a joke but as people discovered that no matter where I went there was available parking they began to believe me.  For the first several years after Gilbert's death, a bunch of us met on the anniversary of his death to have dinner  together in one of his favorite restaurants.  Invariably, there would be a parking place directly in front of the front door when I arrived.  Over the past 30 years it has just been generally accepted that Gilbert has become my parking angel.

I figured this was Gilbert's version of hell--spending the rest of my life finding me parking.  The last Lamplighters funeral we attended was held in a beautiful church in a very, very busy part of town, but even though we were not early, we had a place to park directly across the street from the door.

After David and Paul died, I started talking to them too about parking, especially when going to Atria.  I figured it was their grandmother and they should not expect Gilbert to do all the work.

This morning was a brunch for the memory unit people and their loved ones.  I figured it would be difficult to park, so I reached out to all three of my parking angels and when I got to the Atria parking lot there were three vacant slots lined up next to each other.

I told them that the blatant sarcasm was not lost on me!!!

 

It was a difficult morning.  Walt has been having problems with incontinence, so has been sleeping downstairs, where it is easier to get to the bathroom.  As I opened my eye this morning, he called out, "I'm sleeping in a pool of my own blood." 

And a good morning to YOU too!

However, he was right and the amount of blood was a bit alarming.  Ned was coming over to have brunch with us at Atria and he called his friend Jessica, who works with old folks like Walt and me, to come and do an assessment while waiting for him to arrive.  She did not feel there was cause for alarm, which was reassuring.

When Ned got here we called Kaiser and the decision was made to have him come to Urology to be checked out, both for the bleeding and for the incontinence.

But what to do about Grandma?  Though she doesn't know Christmas from last Tuesday or next Monday, I still felt bad blowing her off, so we decided Ned would go to Kaiser and I would go to Atria, which meant maneuvering my walker into the car...and finding a place to park.  I loved my Christmas present from my three parking angels.

Brunch, it turned out, was in the Memory unit dining room and she was not there when I arrived.  One of the aides told me she was in her room.

I went to her room and not only was she still in bed, but she was so soundly asleep she was snoring.  Knowing what an ordeal it would be to wake her up, get her dressed and get to the dining room--and how crabby she would be for being awakened out of a deep sleep, I just left the box of See's candy I had for her and left.  I'll be back next week.  It won't make a difference to her anyway.

When I got home Ned and Walt were gone and I took advantage of the alone time to watch last night's Outlander.  Walt had been sufficiently upset about his incontinence (before the blood) that he was in and out of the room every few minutes while I was trying to watch it.  Nothing like trying to watch a graphic love scene while someone is asking you about Depends.

The show was just ending when Ned and Walt returned.  Walt was much mollified to learn that nothing was unusual and that his body was doing just what it is supposed to do...and probably will be doing for perhaps as long as a year.

It appears he will be sleeping in his recliner for possibly a long time to come, so Ned is helping me choose wireless ear phones so I can listen to the TV at a volume that is OK for me and doesn't drive Walt nuts. 

I can hardly wait to see what personal aberrations will be caused by MY surgery on Friday!

Losing My Title

I have mentioned here several times, I believe, that I grew up on one of the steepest hills in San Francisco.  We were on Leavenworth, between Union and Filbert.  The Filbert street hill, from Hyde to Leavenworth, is "the" steepest hill in the city.  (In fact, I don't know why people spend so much time going down the crooked street two blocks away when going down Filbert is MUCH more scary!)

When I was going to high school, there were no such things as drivers' ed classes, at least not in Catholic girls' schools, so when it came time for me to learn to drive, I had lessons from my father.  Our sessions frequently ended with neither of us speaking to each other, but I did learn how to drive.  And park.

We never had an automatic transmission so I learned on a standard transmission and since a good deal of my time in the car would require me to park on our hill, I had to learn how to parallel park on the hill using our standard transmission Chevy.

I was damn good at it.  I was master of the clutch, often parking perfectly with only one pass, lining the car up perfectly.

(Now  the city has changed parking on the hill to diagonal parking which I feel is cheating!  Wimps!)

Now I live in a town where the steepest hill is the overpass over the freeway (and there is no parking  there), so I should be a wiz at parking anywhere in town.  But the older I get, the worse I get.  I can't get the car straight, even with maybe 10 different back and forths.  I get out of the car and there is a good 12 inches from the car to the curb.

It's downright embarrassing to someone who was such a master of parking in San Francisco.  I chalk it up to age, poor vision, a less flexible neck, and the taller seats in these modern cars.  But whatever the reason, I can't park well to save my soul any more

Today I outdid myself.

There was no parking available at Atria, so I went looking on the street where there was also almost no parking available except for those tantalizing vacant Zip car spots.

But then I spied a spot that might work.  It would be tight, but maybe I could squeeze in.

Less confident than normal, I tried angling the car right but it wasn't right and it required lots of back and forth, back and forth until I was well and truly stuck and could no longer move.  My back tires were against the curb and my front tires were right on top of the back of the car in front of me.

To make matters worse, two servers I recognized from the dining room at Atria told me that I had hit the car in front and was now hooked on its bumper.

(left shot is from the street side, right from the curb side)

 

It really didn't look like I had hit the car, but merely that I was wedged against it (the dent is from another accident) but I was afraid to try to move.  Thank god for AAA.  I called for a truck and while waiting called Walt and told him I was never, ever going to leave the house again.

In due course, my savior arrived.

 

and he did what I was GOING to do until the servers from Atria convinced me I would further damage the other car.  He got in my car, put it in reverse, backed over the curb, and I was free.  The "fix" took about 2 seconds.

It used to be that if I couldn't find parking in the lot or a BIG spot on the street, I would run an errand and come back later, but it was so late in the day that wasn't possible--and I had not gone to see her yesterday because of the picnic.

I did manage to find a BIG on-street parking slot that just opened up, with only a huge pile of tree clippings in front of me to damage.  

I had an hour visit with my mother, most of which was discussing who was in the 8x10 photo on her dresser (it's my sister's graduation photo).  As soon as I told her and we talked about how she died >50 years ago, she would look out the window or at one of her artificial flowers and tell me how beautiful they are and then point to Karen's photo again and ask who it was.  But otherwise it was OK and it was a nice way to wind down after the parking fiasco.

Parallel Parking

I know a lot of people who have never learned to parallel park, and I don't mean it in that way.  I used to be the queen of parallel parking.

My father may have had a lot of faults, but there are two things that he did very well.  He taught us to swim, and he taught us to drive.  Often we came home from driving lessons not speaking to each other, but I learned how to drive quite well.

Learning to drive in San Francisco can be tricky. Hills.

Rome is said to be built on seven hills.  

Pikers. 

San Francisco has at least 47 named hills, and among those hills are individual streets which are very steep.  The street on the left here is Filbert Street, the steepest in the city with a 31.5% grade.  If you turn left at the stop sign you will head up Leavenworth Street, which is the street on which I lived.  Not a 31.5% grade, but definitely nothing to sneeze at.

(I've outlined the windows for the bedroom where my sister and I slept)

Nowadays, you park diagonally, but when I lived there, it was parallel parking.  Before I could get my driver's license, my father insisted I had to be able to parallel park on the hill...and we did not have automatic transmission.  By the time I went for my driver's license, I could stop and start on any hill in the city...and I could parallel park perfectly on any hill in the city.  

Interestingly, in 1959, the DMV office was on a flat section of the city.  To get my license, I had to be able to park in the yard of the office and drive around a couple of city blocks, all flat.  Then they gave the 16 year old me a license without any clue whatsoever if I could handle the hills of the city.

So I've never blinked at having to parallel park, but lately I can't parallel park a car to save my soul.  Maybe it's the new car with the raised seat backs that are so tall I can't see over them (and I haven't mastered parking using the rear camera to guide me).

It's downright embarassing to have to pull forward and backward a dozen times to get into an END parking slot with only a car behind me, and nothing in front of me, as I frequently do when visiting my mother at Atria and the parking lot is full.  

It's because the street has a slight curve in it and I somehow can't seem to be able to factor the curve into my maneuverings into that slot.  But today I was on a straight section, parking between two cars and while I was able to fit between the cars, there was a good foot between the car and the sidewalk when I finally finished.

I dodged a bullet this morning, though.  Last night my mother called and said she needed to have me come over in the morning because she had "errands to run."  I asked what errands she wanted to run and at first she couldn't remember, but she finally said she needed to get to the bank.  "Why do you need to go to the bank?" I asked her.  "Well, I have bills to pay!" she said.  I asked what bills and she said she couldn't remember but she knew she had bills to pay and she had to go to the bank because she was out of checks.   Trying to tell her that she had no unpaid billsl only made her angry.  She always does her banking at the end of the month and she needed to get to the bank.  I pointed out that it was the beginning of the month, but it was clear that she was only getting angry, so I just said I would come to get her at 10 a.m.

I hoped that her dementia would click in and that she would forget when I got there in the morning.

At 10 a.m., I knocked on her door and she greeted me and didn't say anything about the bank.  I sat down and she asked what I was doing today.  I told her I was working at the book store.  Still nothing about the bank.  She finally did mention the bank and I asked her which bills she needed to pay.  We must have had the came conversation twenty five times, about how she needed to pay her rent and she had to do it at the bank.  I would remind her that she wrote a check for her rent two weeks ago, she said she didn't remember, I told her to check her checkbook (which she never did).  Then in a couple of seconds she would  start all over again, forgetting we'd already had the conversation.  She needed to go to the bank because her rent was due and she always pays it on the 3rd of the month.

Ultimately she decided to take my word that her rent was paid, that she wouldn't be thrown out of her apartment, and, when I told her how windy it was outside, she decided she didn't want to go out in the wind, but preferred to sit in her apartment, where it was warm and cozy.