One Tough Old Soldier
There’s so much to make fun of always, like the Royal Family for example, and now Liza Minnelli with the whole front of her head all re-sculptured, but these are thing I’ll have to get back to because I just spent the day with someone beginning on his tenth decade.I see Uncle Ed two, sometimes three days a week, having inherited him from David and his brothers who are his nephews.Well no. ‘Inherited’ makes it sound like they gave him away. Far from it. One of my brothers-in-law comes Tuesday nights to have a belt with him, one swings by all the time with groceries and fresh meds, one is always sending lively notes from Tucson and San Diego.Me he uses me for our Journeys to Nowhere in my sweet red van. That and the acquisition of hot delectables either from my kitchen or the kitchens of the pros at Whole Foods and Boston Market.Anyway, I'm his special one. He just likes girls better, as he readily admits and I was the first girl to join the Marotta family back at age 19. Thus am I the one who takes him the doctor too and sits with him by the pond, and comes for our special toast on Charismas Eve just at that blue twilight hour of early winter.He had a bad spell in June of ’06 when his doc told him he couldn’t live alone anymore."Pffffft!" said Ed to that and carried right on in his little flat, scrubbing the bathroom floor on his hands and knees.It’s true his arthritis gave him an almighty spasm one day and he slipped and couldn’t get up and it took him more than an hour to inch on his back toward the phone. He does have a Lifeline that he wears like the dog tags of his Army days but he somehow didn’t have it on just then. For this he made no apologies.“But what if you fall and you can’t get to us and you.. you… you die here in your apartment?” I said chokingly when I first heard this story. We were standing in his kitchen at the time.He fixed me with a long doleful Armenian look, then stumped closer with his cane. “Don’t you see? That’s what I’m trying to do,” he said, meaning 'go', just like that , snap!, go quick and neat and not like his poor wife Fran went, over the course of a decade, marooned with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home.It's nearly five years since that bad spell, and as I say, at the time it seemed crazy to me for him to carry on alone.I see now that it was just the thing for him because here he still is, with us. And really who but a 36-month veteran of the fighting in the Pacific could tough it out this well?So here’s to you Ed at the start of your 91st year. My red van and I would both be lost without you.
