Today when I went into Grandpa's room/space at Mom & Dad's house, I was a bit groggy from a fitful night's sleep. Grandpa was extra perky. "That," he said, pointing to his book of word search puzzles, "almost fell out of bed." Grandpa likes to tell silly jokes, so I thought this was one of them. "It did?" I said. "How?"
"Huh?" Grandpa said.
I put the book on his tv tray. "Are you still working on #10?"
"Yeah. Can you count that high?" (giggles)
"Ha ha." I shove Grandpa and open the book to puzzle #10 and point to it, "So how did this almost fall out of bed?"
"Huh?...No, this," he said, holding up his mechanical pencil, "is almost out of lead!" My brain's so big it clogs up my ears. It's fun to make a non-senile elderly person wonder if he's becoming senile (eye roll).
Grandpa talks to himself when he's working on his puzzles. Today he said, "I can't find 'DEEP'...it's so deep I can't see it...(checks word list)...D-E-E-P. P-E-E-D. Peed." "There you go, Grandpa," I said, "just look for 'peed.'" Grandpa giggled.
Grandpa asked me to get out his remote-control car the other day. I turned it on and handed it to him, and he immediately did a beautiful parking job then made sure I knew how talented he was. I say he got lucky.
The other day he was looking at the "Kansas Most Wanted" pictures in the paper. Just as I opened my mouth to say, "Are you in there?" Grandpa said, "You know, you should be in here." We did find two Andersons, though, so we decided the paper must've printed the wrong pictures.
As Grandpa's physical health has declined over the past year, the list of things he can no longer do continues to grow. But yesterday he told a visitor, "I am really fortunate. I have people to bring me meals and I get to fill up this trash can every day (pointing to one by his chair) and someone else empties it."
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