U Can't Touch This

For the record, I have never dallied in the stock market. Still, like a preteen waiting for the prom, I collect good advice about the market and store it away for the big day when I can. As for stocks, I have been advised to buy what I buy. For some people that means Home Depot, and for others that means stints.

For me that would be paper towels. There is a great future in paper towels. I am betting that seniors across the globe are trading useful tips about paper towels. In large part, Jack has lost the ability to use her hands. A paper towel serves so many needs. With those gnarled fingers plastic wrap is too difficult to negotiate out of the box, so when the leftovers need covering, a paper towel does the trick. Out of dessert plates? Grab a paper towel. The dog made a mess, you’ve dropped the coffee cup, your bagel and cream cheese needs a cozy? I have seen it all remedied with great lengths of paper towel.

I haven’t witnessed this first hand, but my husband tells me that Jack opens her bottles of seltzer with a nutcracker. Ingenuity? Forgive me for being so presumptuous, but I am thinking this is really about fierce independence. Nothing pains Jack more than to ask me to do something for her. She’d rather crawl to the computer, and find and hire someone from Craigslist before she’d allow me to sweep up something she has spilled on the floor.

We all have boundaries. I get it and try to respect them. Sometimes it is just too absurd. Last week my husband and I left at dawn to escape into our version of normal. Breakfast at a dive diner, a great dog walk, furniture shopping. We stopped back at the house in the late afternoon hoping to drop off the dog and carry on with the chores. My husband parked and waited in the driveway and I walked in through the back gate and walked into Helter Skelter . Her empty wheelchair was wedged just inside and just outside the sliding glass door. The down jacket that she wears even in hot weather was crumpled on the porch floor, and the watering hose was wrapped elaborately through the spokes of the wheel chair wheels. I am numb to fear and simply followed the hose through the hallway and halfway to the living room.

I heard her craggily voice. She had, I imagine over several hours, managed to inch out of the wheelchair, over the hose and dragged her body the six feet to her bedroom, and had dressed herself into some crazy-ass, hippy skirt and was talking on her cell phone to her daughter. I looked in and she furiously waved me back. “I’ll fix that LATER,” she growled.

Enough said.