Hear Me Roar!

NOTE to long time readers: Entries between December 22nd down to January 11th were moved here from an old blog I wanted to close. If something seems familiar, that's why.




I went swimming at the YMCA this morning. Jeez, I hope no one calls Social Services and the SPCA. I left Don and the dog alone in the house for an hour and a half while I did deep water aerobics. They were sleeping when I left and a delicious bowl of Kellogg’s was waiting on the kitchen counter for which ever one of them got to it first. This little wifey-poo is through mollycoddling the men in her life. Freedom is sweet.

I swam around with all the other senior citizens and only felt one tiny twinge of guilt over poor, dear Don asleep in his bed. It happened when I saw the lift the Y uses to get people who can’t walk down into the pool. But then I remembered that this was ‘Jean's Time' and guilt has no place taking up space in my head. I am woman. I need to roar! I also need to purr even if I have to scratch my own stomach to feel satisfied enough with life to find something to purr about. Yup, I’ve paid my caregiver dues. Years of putting Don’s stroke related needs first has earned me two sessions a week in the pool where I don’t have think and do “stroke” 24/7. Life is good.

When I got home from the Y, someone had eaten the cereal but neither one of my guys was awake to fessing up to who did it. Nap time together in the Lazy Boy aways comes after breakfast. It doesn’t really matter. I already know that one of them started out with the bowl and the other one ended up with it on the floor. Don’t tell Miss. Manners! I doubt she’d approve of dogs who try to lick the patterns off the china. She’s probably from the school of dogs-are-just-dogs. But the earth doesn’t belong to man alone. We share it with a diversity of God-created creatures. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Besides, we have a good dishwasher with a high-heat cycle.

Tonight we’re going to the old people’s club for grill night. Don will be trolling for friends while I stand at attention ready to slap him down if he starts yodeling his favorite one word song. Thankfully, most people at the club are hard of hearing and won’t know if he’s belting out the opening stanza of the ‘Operetta of the F-word in C Minor’ or if he’s making a statement about someone who is smoking at the next table. Yup, it’s still his favorite operetta to perform at the top of his lungs.

After we leave the club we’ll stop at the pet store to pick up some Mother Hubbard treats. Don’t tell Cooper. He’ll be mad enough that we didn’t take him to grill night and shopping at the pet center. Picking out his own merchandise is one of his favorite things to do. Lord, will I ever get the guilt bug-a-boo out of my head? It came with the packet they hand new caregivers when their spouses are about to leave rehab.

Also in the packet I received were several pamphlets from the American Stroke Association. The one on aphasia says: “Unfortunately, there is no general rule about how much improvement to expect. Some stroke survivors who are very disabled in the first few days make a full (or almost full) recovery in a few months. Others are left with serious and permanent language problems. Caring for a person with aphasia can be especially challenging.” No dog do-do, LeRoy! Another pamphlet says: “Being a primary caregiver may change your role in your family. How others in the family see you, what they expect from you, and your responsibilities and freedoms all may change.” Thank goodness, someone had the forethought to point out the obvious.

Okay, I’m through roaring. I’m through pandering for tea and sympathy from my internet friends. I’m through wondering why Don and the dog are in the living room sharing a bowl of Pup Corn---yes, PUP not pop corn. I pitched a fit. I really did, but they both like those little cheese-flavored puppies.

Jean Riva ©

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Friendships

My dad had a lot of little sayings. One of them was this: "With true friends, you can lay your billfold and your wife down side by side and a good friend won’t touch either one of them." It always got a big laugh when he said it, but he was also dead serious.

My dad had the same best friend for over seventy years. Growing up, our families spent a lot of time together, and in their retirement years Dad and Harold went out for breakfast together almost every day. In terms of their characters, their temperaments and values, they were as different as day and night. Harold was lazy, his house was falling apart around him, and his favorite actives all involved having a beer in his hand. My dad didn’t drink often and there wasn’t anything he couldn’t build or fix. Dad was always busy and often he had a gaggle of little kids following him around. Harold treated his wife like a slave and wasn’t much of a father. My dad was a warm and affectionate father and husband who was always my best cheerleader. Harold was not the kind of person I would have wanted for a father or husband, but he sure did add a lot of laughter in our lives. He was a colorful character, unique in every way…and my dad loved that guy through out most of his life.

One time I interviewed my dad for a family history book I was writing and I asked him how he was able to maintain so many warm friendships for so many years. His answer went something like this: “If you want perfect friends, you’re never going to have any friends. If you are always trying to change your friend’s way of thinking or acting, you aren’t going to have any friends. If you want your friends to all be just like you, you aren’t going to have any friends. Friendships are about respect for each other’s uniqueness. Friendships are about sharing good times.”

My best friend from kindergarten thought my second year of college is still in my life. We live far apart now so we only get to see each other often. We were like two peas in a pod for seventeen years, and then our lives took different directions. She’s a typical Washington D.C. wife; if you’ve ever seen the movie Birdcage, my girlfriend has a lot in common with the senator’s wife. Me? Let’s just say that ‘prime and proper’ and throwing lots of dinner parties is not my style. She’s got five complete sets of good china. I’m using 1930s Buffalo diner ware that I picked up one piece at a time at flea markets. But we still maintain our friendship because we do respect each other’s path to happiness and we can still make each laugh after all these years.

Tonight we went out for dinner with four friends who’ve been in Don’s life since their teenage years and in mine for the past 35 years. One couple lives out of state now, but whenever we’re able to get together, we can all pick up right where we left off. Tonight was one of those rare times filled with warmth and laughter. The kind of night you wish didn’t have to come to an end. None of us are alike in personalities. Our politics and life styles are all different, but as I sat there I realized that one of the reasons why we all get along so well is because we all have respect for each other’s uniqueness. And as far as billfolds and mates go, any one of us could lay ours down on a bed and the others wouldn’t touch them.


Dad, wherever you are...you can still make me smile.

Jean Riva©

painting by Adriaen Brouwer

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Tale of Two Bad Boys and a Song

I call her lollypop, lollypop, lollypop, oh lolly-lolly-lolly
Lollypop, lollypop, oh lolly-lolly-lolly
Lollypop, lollypop, oh, lolly-lolly-lolly
Lollypop

Handicapped, handicapped, oh handi-handi-handi
Handicapped, handicapped, oh handi-handi-handi
Handicapped, handicapped, oh handi-handi-handi
Handicapped

Same tune, different lyrics. Guess which set of lyrics belongs to Don and which set belongs to Daddy Cool---at least I think it was Daddy Cool, I could be wrong.

It’s not one of Don’s favorite or most frequent one-word aphasia songs but I hear it often enough to recognize that singing it is my husband’s way of dealing with stroke-related frustration. Last night The Handicapped Ditty was the last thing I heard before drifting off to sleep---the second time. I had gone to bed several hours before Don and when he came to the bedroom I woke up with the snapping sound of his hearing aid box closing.

“Did you remember to let the dog out?” I muttered, half asleep.

“Oh,” he replied as he backed out of the bedroom in his wheelchair.

Some where in between the bedroom and the outside door something happened with the dog that had Don singing his version of Daddy Cool’s song. “Handicapped, handicapped,” Don vocalized all the way back to the bedroom. It was like a lullaby that wooed me back to sleep.

When I'm a wake and listening to his song I'm often struck by the surreal-ness of hearing such a happy little tune sang with such a sad word repeated over and over again for the lyrics. It's inventive of Don's aphasic mind to be able to put the two together and have a tirade of sorts. But last night I was too sleepy to think these thoughts or to play twenty-one questions to find out what brought it on.

It wasn’t until this morning that I figured out why Don was singing The Handicapped Ditty. The dog either put up a fuss and wouldn’t go outside for him or he was a no-show because the half deaf mutt couldn’t hear Don calling at the door. Or Don could have been calling out "Jean" instead of "Cooper" as he often does and the dog took him at his word. Whatever happened, the evidence was clear that he couldn't get the dog to go out i.e. the darling dog had left his calling card on the carpet, in a nice little pile for the entire world to see or me to step in in the wee hours of the morning. Darn! What do you do at the exact moment of discovery? I couldn’t bawl the dog out. He was still asleep. I couldn’t bawl my husband out. He, too, was still asleep. So, I hopped into the bathroom to give my foot a shower as I contemplated whether to cut the two guys in my life a break or wake them both up with a rousing rendition of my own frustration song:

Shrew-Lady is raising cane in the place
Says you’re both in the dog house again
So wipe those smiles off your guilty faces
And listen to the words of her crazy song.

Jean Riva ©

Painting by Edwin Landsee, 1840, Trial by Jury

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Water for Elephants

It's hard to remember a time in my life when I've felt more disheartened than I do right now. I've always been a glass-is-half-full kind of a person, a take charge of my emotions kind of gal who was never down or depressed for very long. Part of it---it not all of it--- is probably the by-product of having a total knee replacement July 23^rd. Spending a couple of weeks depending on someone else was like seeing a preview of my life 10-15 years down the road when it's entirely possible I'll get shipped off to a nursing home with smelly residences, sticky floors, and where Jell-O is considered a major food group.

While I was immobile after the surgery I made the mistake of reading a bestseller titled "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen. It's a gritty, well-written novel about an old man in his early 90s living in a nursing home---physically at least---but mentally drifting in and out of memories of the days when he was young, naive and working for a circus that traveled from town to town by train. The descriptions of the condescending way some the staff at the nursing home treated him really hit home. How sad it is that someone can live a life as interesting as this old man's and yet be treated as if his simple desire to sit at a different dinner table from the one assigned him was too much to ask. To have your free will taken away in such little ways has got to break your spirit. At one point he spent a long time trying to get his wheelchair close to a window only to have a staff member come along and wheel him back to sit in front of the door to his room. I've never understood why nursing homes do that, line people up and down the hallways as if drooling down your chin as strangers walk by is some sort of treat.

It's been warm here in Michigan but I've been so cold that I'm wearing sweats all the time. Now if that doesn't make you look and feel old I don't know what does. I'm probably cool from the blood thinners I was on and the loss of blood. And this, too, shall pass. They tell me the extreme fatigue I feel will pass, too, but I wish I could curl up into a ball, sleep until 2008.

Physically, my knee is doing fantastic. I'm off the pain medications and driving again, still going to therapy and making good progress. But in the past few days I've developed hip pain. It's been a chronic problem off and on since my snow plowing days and has put me in the ER several times including once late last year. I don't need that again so I'll start the muscle relaxers again when I can get a refill tomorrow and hope to nip the hip pain the bud. I don't need to feel guilty over snapping at my husband, but I do. I hate telling him we can't go here or there because dealing with his wheelchair makes the pain worse. I don't need to feel this old! Someone, come hold my hand and tell me that I'll pull out of the funk I'm in.

The old man at the nursing home had a great ending. He escaped the nursing home to run away to a circus parked across the street. There he found an owner who loved his stories of the old days and who harbored him from the police when they came looking for the elderly run-way. So if you see an old man selling tickets at a circle, say "hi" to Jacob. At least in fiction the life can end as it should.

Jean Riva ©

P.S. I really did like this book. Its circus history was well researched and kept me turning the pages. I read it in three days. It did feel good to be reading again, even though it did make me sad in places due to my own health issues. At one time in my history I read 3-4 books a week as part of a review job I had at the time, but since my husband's stroke seven years ago I've read very little fiction.

painted by Adolph von Menzol

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I Miss Dancing!

When I was seven-eight years old, I got the Gene Autry gun and holster set for Christmas and I worn them to bed more than a few times. I was in love. I even crawled up on my daddy’s lap once, sighed deeply, and told him that when I grew up I was going marry Gene Autry and his horse. My dad had the good graces not to laugh. It could be he was trying to figure out which one I was lusting after the most---the horse or the man. I still have that gun and holster and all of my Gene Autry fan club memorabilia. I never did anything half way, even my first crush.

I don’t know where I’m going with this trip down memory lane. Perhaps I’m looking at my life as if its film that I can edit and splice together into a movie titled: How to Grow up in Ten Easy Lessons, Plus One Really Hard One. Until I became a caregiver for my dad---in the five years before my husband’s stroke---I really hadn’t grown up and I was in my fifties at the time. My life was carefree and fun in my pre-caregiver days. Oh, I’d had my share of disappointments and pain. Who could get to be a half a century old without having a few monsters in their closet? But I try to learn my lessons and move on. Always wear the white hat. Mr. Autry would be proud.

Do you know what I miss? Dancing. I was never good on the dance floor. I have no grace, no natural rhythm, even though the Arthur Murray Dance Studios did their best to chance that when I was a kid. Never the less, I miss it all. Especially the tap dancing lessons I took when I so young that I still worn under pants with the days of the week embroidered on the fronts. Light bulb moment! If I were on the board of directors at Hanes, I’d expand that embroidered panties idea into a days-of-the-months set of cotton briefs for seniors. That way, when folks like me are at the store writing a check, and we can’t remember what day it is, we’d always know where to look to find out.

I also miss the square dances of my pre-teen days; my petty coats swinging and swaying with our do-si-dos and falling on the floor in a fit of the giggles. I miss the rock-and-roll record hops that came a few years later. (Those late night Time-Life R&R commercials are aimed at my generation.) I miss the rhythm and blues clubs and slinky dress dancing of my twenties. And disco. Don and I did some serious courting during disco. How could I not fall in love a guy who once told me, as I roller skated by, “You look like a refrigerator on a dolly.”

Most of all I miss the dancing that Don and I used to do in the 80s, the western stuff that came straight out of the movie, Urban Cowboy. Oh, we were never like John Travolta and Debra Winger struttin’ their stuff at Mickey Gilley’s. We just watched that stuff from the side of the dance floor. But we had our moments when I felt like there was nothing more fun than belly rubbing around a dance floor, thighs brushing from time to time, words passing back and forth---Gosh, I have to stop typing and go get a few ice cubes!

Don was far from a Gene Kelly or Patricia Swayze, and I was certainly never a Ginger Rogers, but I miss the magic and energy that dancing inspires. I miss the honky-tonk bars out west on vacations. Had I known the last time we danced that it would be the last time we dance, I would have taken a mental snapshot. But the sad fact is I don’t actually remember when that was.

I do have a mental snapshot of the last time my dad danced before he passed away. It happened in the parking lot of a KFC. I had been chauffeuring him and his girlfriend around on a date and the tape deck was playing a song from the 40s when my dad asked Martha to dance. He had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. We all knew he was dying. We all knew it was the last time they’d probably dance together. It was such a bitter-sweet moment, so private and personal---the way they looked at each other---that I had to look away. I’d like to think that if I had a snapshot of Don’s and my last dance, it would be like that---too intense and personal to share with friends.

My dad was a special guy. Even in the last years of his life, when our relationship was often more like mother and son, than father and daughter, he could still make me laugh. One time, when he was being tested for cognitive abilities---something that was done frequently because he was in the first wave of people getting a new Alzheimer’s drug---the psychiatrist had asked him what year it was. Dad gave the wrong answer and when the doctor corrected him, Dad said, “My daughter tried to tell me that in the parking lot, but I didn’t believe her.” Caregiver humor, you’ve got to love it. Another time, in a restaurant, my brother asked my dad if he was taking the noodle on his shirt home for a midnight snack. My dad, picked the noodle off his shirt, threw it over his shoulder, and said, “Hell, no!” and kept right on eating.

What is it I read in an old clipping from Ann Landers? “Old folks talk about the past, because they have no futures. Young folks speak of the future, because they have no past.” When did I get old enough to understand the full depth of that statement? Okay, so I’m having a cry-baby moment. But I know how to fix that. Tonight, I’m sleeping with my Gene Autry gun under the pillow!


Jean Riva ©

painting by ZilleHeinrich

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The Long, Hard Road to Happiness

Have you ever wondered why it is that some people who have so little are able to sincerely appreciate what they do have while others who have so much can’t appreciate it at all? We all have an occasional blue day from time to time when the pity pot seems to be the most comfortable chair in the house. I’m not talking about those fleeting times where at the end of the day we stand up and realize we’ve worn a big red ring on our butts from sitting too long where maybe we shouldn’t have taken up residence in the first place. I’m talking about the general approach that some people have towards life itself where their negative disposition mistakenly makes them think that their pain and disappointments are always worse than their neighbor’s pain and disappointments. I’m talking about falling into the trap of using pessimism versus optimism as a general philosophy for living.

I’ve always been an optimist. Even in my darkest hours I’ve been able to recognize that wallowing in negative thoughts won’t help me climb back out of the muck of any given life crisis that all humans, at one time or another, go through---death of a loved one or a falling out with lover or friend, major disappointments and depression, loss of good health. For me, getting back up after a punch in the gut comes from being able to see that my metaphorical glass of life is half full---not half empty. It’s a personality flaw that I have to struggle to have sympathy for those who spend their entire lives describing their glasses as half empty. Sure, I understand that we’d all like to have our glasses over-flowing but more importantly I also understand that those times when they are over-flowing are as rare as penguin eggs in the desert. The optimists will tell you that the adversities we meet while we’re striving towards that goal is what makes a person strong and that our heartaches are what makes love---when it comes along---all the sweeter. The pessimists, on the other hand will throw in the towel the first moment things don't go their way and they walk around in circles like both of their arms are tied behind their backs. They delude themselves into believing that they have no control over their own happiness.

It must be hard being pessimistic, to aimlessly drag those woo-is-me thoughts and resentments around where ever they go. Optimists, on the other hand, achieve more in life---have more, are loved more---not because some divine intervention sprinkled magic fairy dust on some of us and not on others. Optimists achieve more because they don’t give up on themselves the way people with a defeatist attitude do. Pessimists don’t see each new day as a ‘do-over’ that can change the course of their personal history. They are so busy cataloging yesterday’s losses and tomorrow’s grim predictions to realize that they are stealing their own futures in the process. Pessimists are chickens, plain and simple. They are too afraid to roll the dice, take a chance and give up their defeatist attitudes long enough to work as hard at being happy as they work at being miserable. Nothing comes without a price tag, happiness included.


Life is full of hardships, challenges and heartaches for all of us and I am very proud to be married to a stroke survivor who never gave up on himself even when the medical community did. We---not just him alone as some survivors would have you believe of caregivers--- WE worked hard and proved the diagnosis of ‘vegetable for life’ wrong in every sense of the phrase. Some people out there in the stroke community don’t believe that it’s possible for someone who can’t walk, talk and use one arm to truly find joy in living again. That, to me, is both a sad and an arrogant attitude because it says that those non-believers value perfection to the point of being prejudice towards anyone who isn’t physically or mentally perfect in their eyes. I won’t deny that it’s often been a long, hard road getting to the happy place we reside in today and if that happiness annoys the pessimists of the world then I say, “Either follow me or get out of the way."


Jean Riva ©


No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. So what if my stroke left me with a speech impediment? Moses had one, and he did all right. ~ Kirk Douglas

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit. ~ Helen Keller

Optimism is a happiness magnet. If you stay positive, good things and good people will be drawn to you. ~ Mary Lou Retton

Winning is a habit. Unfortunately so is losing ~ Vince Lombardi


painting by Henri Rousseau

Fly Swatters & Old Friendships

One of the nice parts about going to all the June graduation parties is that we get to see people we haven’t seen in a long time. Now that Don is wheelchair bound, we’re obligated to be one of the first cars---if not THE first---to arrive. Otherwise there is always an unloading problem, of being able to thread the chair through cars that might be parked too close together. Being the first to arrive has other advantages. We get to see everyone come in, one by one. What a wonderful awakening that was this year.

We see ourselves in the mirror every day and maybe we think, “God, I’m getting older or fatter or looking dowdier than usual.” If you’re female, like me, you might also do a chin hair check and wonder if you could stand on your head would gravity pull your breasts back to where they belong. Then we might pin that woo-is-me look on our faces and wish we could find an exorcist to make that person in the mirror go away. The only thing good about looking old is that people offer you senior discounts and your dog doesn’t seem to care so long as you can still open that treat bag.

At a recent grad party was a relative I hadn’t seen in a couple of years and the physical change in her was quite noticeable. She’d put on twenty-five or thirty pounds, was wearing a wig, and she had that old-lady-with-sore-knees gait. And, like me, she’d also given up the pretense of trying to look prettier with the addition of make-up---what’s the point? With the failing sense of color that people get into in their sixties who really knows what our faces look like when they’re viewed through younger eyes? A circus clown? A cadaver on a slab? At a certain point in your life you have to give in to the fact that you can’t win the war against time with a bleach or dye bottle and a lot of make-up. Even the plastic surgery addicts and Botox mammas are easy to spot. Just crack a joke in their presences and their faces look like frozen Popsicles, unable to move.

Another relative we ran into at a grad party also had to let out a few seams in her underwear but her sense of humor and quick wit were just the same as they were back when we were kids. It was good to laugh again until my sides hurt. And no one else but someone you’ve known for fifty years could have gotten away with saying: “I LOVE THIS! ---watching Jean trying to teach Don to say words! Don talked so much before his stroke that she didn’t get a chance to say anything for thirty years.” Don, he’s always game for a good laugh, even if it’s on him, so he soon followed up her remark with, “Oops!” and everyone starts laughing all over again.

But the most heartwarming, awakening of going to the grad parties this year was seeing the relatives I didn’t even recognize because they’ve changed so much in the last few years. I can’t tell you how good that made me feel! Like duh, why didn’t it ever occur to me when I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror that I’m not living in a vacuum? My peer age group is proceeding through our life-cycles right on schedule. We’re all wrinkling up and plumping out into a sea of gray-haired wonders with a wealth of history behind us. The young, under forty-ish kids might be able to move faster or look cuter, but when it comes to making up a list of all the things you can do with a fly swatter, we old duffers will win in a landslide. Don’t ask! But I’ll tell this much. Six old people with vivid imaginations don’t need a bar and a case of Bud Lights to have a good time.

Life as been good and looking back can really recharge your batteries.

Jean Riva ©

Painting: The Way You Hear it is The Way You Sing it by Jan Steen (1665)

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