Let’s Just Go, Honey.
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admin // Category: Boardman Views, Care Giving, Family, Health & Wellness, Humor, Pay Less for Gas, Politics Well, now that the country’s been “bailed out”, I thought it’d be a good time for something a bit lighter. After all, the sky never fell so we should all be able to laugh a little still…right?
The other day I was feeding dinner to my new friend, Roger. As usual, we were listening to the evening news and, as usual, this got us both in a laughable mood. We always laugh at the majority of the news since we realize full well that the “bad” stuff that the networks continuously vomit into the airwaves is somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% sensationalized just to keep folks watching. In other words, it’s almost never as bad as they try to make it sound! Someday soon I think I’ll write a post about the use of some of their favorite words: Skyrocket, Plummet, Meltdown, Shock, Threat, Bush Administration, etc.
Since Roger has cerebral palsy and I have to be careful about the timing of telling him anything funny so as not to cause him to spit food across the table or suck something into his windpipe, I decided to wait until after dinner to tell him this story, but as soon as he finished up I launched into the following ancecdote:
My late mother-in-law, June, and her daughter, Beth came to live with Carrie and me in January, 2000. June suffered from more than just the leading edges of Alzheimer’s disease and we all had to pretty much stand by and watch as it slowly removed each of our names from her memory bank.
There was one thing though at which she always seemed to leap and that was, “Hey, June, you wanna go for a ride?” She and Beth loved to ride shotgun whenever I had to run errands.
Neither one of them ever wanted to go inside any stores with me. They were perfectly content to sit in the back seat of my Dodge Caravan, listen to the music on the radio and watch whatever was going on in the parking lot. On the day this story occurred they had probably logged hundreds of trips with me since we were out and about almost daily.
On this particular August day I figured I’d kill a couple birds with one stone, so I pulled into the Lynnwood Costco store and parked in my usual spot at the south end of the building about 5:30 p.m., realizing that after I shopped I’d need to go fill the tank at the pumps on the other end. This, of course, was back when I might still have afforded to actually fill the tank. I’d at least squirt enough in to get that gas gauge to quit dinging.
Costco closes at 6:00 p.m. and as I exited the car to go in, I spouted to my two seatbelted relatives, “Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a bit.” The southern gospel music disappeared from hearing as I shut the door.
One of the main things for which Costco is noted is the pace of their checkout lines. No, not how quickly you get through them. This day I happened to be behind a Korean convenience store owner buying cigarettes - lots of cigarettes.
At about 6:15 p.m. I wheeled my brimming shopping cart around the southwest corner of the store heading for my usual parking spot which I suddenly realized was…empty!
Have you ever hurt your neck turning your head too fast? I twisted mine almost beyond repair as my brain went into panic-control mode trying to process the barrage of thoughts that were instantly overloading it. You see, it wasn’t as though the van was gone and June and Beth were standing there waiting for me. Yes, the van was gone…but so were June and Beth!
It would take many pages to convey to you a transcription of the horrific flood of thoughts and emotions that were mine that sunny evening as I raced with my shopping cart from one end of that Costco parking lot to the other and back and forth, hoping and praying that somehow, someway that van containing my disabled in-laws was still on Costco property and I simply wasn’t seeing it.
It would take additional pages to communicate the utter terror that seized me as the reality of the fact of their absence crushed me.
Suffice it to say that this had just become the worst day of my life.
As the police were called and the APB was issued and I prepared to call June’s other daughter, the one to whom, thankfully, I am still married, the line kept issuing through the recesses of my mind which is the revised version of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!” How in the world was I going to tell her that the “kids” were gone?
Well, I did manage to tell her and, as would certainly be expected, the woman-hunt ensued. Friends, neighbors, anyone we could think of were enlisted. We drove, we looked, we searched, we called and then we did it again. Brains were racked for places they might be.
I was pretty sure that they had left under their own power as opposed to some sort of foul play. Although June hadn’t driven a vehicle since she had moved in with us, I was fairly confident that her ailing mind had merely gotten tired of waiting in the back seat of the van for someone to finish buying cigarettes and decided it was time to leave. What I had no idea about was where to look next. None of us did. We were out of ideas and we were scared.
About 10:30 p.m. I had just pulled into the driveway of our Lynnwood home to regroup and try to think of somewhere to look next when…my cellphone rang.
“Is this Mr. Boardman?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sergeant So-and-So with the Washington State Patrol. Are you looking for a gold van and a couple women? Yes, they’re okay and I have them here on the side of the…freeway.”
Now, you can’t very well spank a seventy-five-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s even if she does scare the crap out of you. But as Carrie and I raced the one-hour trip into the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle to that pitch black spot on the side of Interstate 90 where there was not so much as a firefly’s worth of light and where Sergeant So-and-So sat babysitting the two wanderers, I wished relentlessly that June still had her mind so that I could have given her a piece of mine!
Fortunately, once we pulled up behind the squad car and ran to my gas-starved van, all I could do was hug them both and be ecstatic that they were alive.
All June could do was say, “I’m tired.”
Beth, on the other hand had plenty to say, but it all related somehow to the fact that she was hungry or to how much trouble her mom was in.
The next day, having learned my lesson about not leaving the key in the ignition so the girls could listen to their music, we were on the road again, this time in my old Ford pickup. We were leaving Lowe’s Hardware and were the first rig in line waiting for the traffic light to change. June sat between me and Beth on the bench seat of the truck.
As we awaited the changing of the red light for what apparently seemed to be too long for June, she reached over with her left hand and patted me on my right knee, and as if to let me know how she had behaved in traffic the previous evening, said quietly, “Let’s just go, Honey.”
June, Beth and Annie
Were it not for his seatbelt, the snorting, hysterical Roger might just have come out of his wheelchair laughing, but at least his mouth was empty. As he ate his dessert, I recounted a number of the things I’d learned through the experience, not the least of which was just how far a Dodge Caravan will go on an eighth of a tank of gas.
You’re in Boardman Country!
Make yourself at home,
Brad
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Along the way, there were also a number (I can’t remember the number, so it must have been significant) of foster children that lived with us for varying lengths of time.
