Some days it is a crow wanting your lunch, and some days it is a Slovak home care lady wanting you to help get Omi onto the toilet.
Some days the rain stops and it clears up and you take a walk through golden leaves, buy lotto tickets and salty fruit-nut mix (with rhubarb pieces), take pictures of the sky and the roads are quiet, abandoned, and the sidewalks empty except for a crazy man screaming and another crazy man slinking back and forth up the street and, later, a small lady you cross the street to avoid because you try not to scare women if possible.
Some days the small lady crosses the street too, though, back over to meet you, and walks up to you and asks for help and you realize she had been on the street looking for help but the street was empty but for you.
And you say, sure, what do you need?
I need you to help me get Omi back up. I dropped Omi. There’s nobody else in the house and no one else on the street.
She just slipped through my hands and I (here she gestures to herself, a gesture that emphasizes her lack of size) am small. Too small to pick her back up.
Ok, you say. Sure. You follow her into the house, one of the mansions that line the street. Briefly you think, there could be robbers.
No, vampires.
If you were a vampire and got hungry during the daytime, you’d ask your minion to go invite someone into the house.
You imagine David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve inside the house.
She ushers you up the stairs and into an apartment and into the living room and you wonder, how does one lift an old woman in a hospital gown with no pants on without hurting her or her dignity or your back?
You take one side and the helper takes the other side and you try to do what she does and you get Omi onto the toilet, which is a chair with a cut-out part for a bedpan.
You aren’t sure how much of what is going on Omi understands, to what proportions she is confused or mortified or flustered or resigned or what.
The helper thanks you and you step around the diaper and wish them a nice day.
The streets are still empty, still no crows, all the way back to the office, not a one, nor a dog.
Tag Archives: toilet
Some days Omi is just on the floor
Posted in Das Gehirn, ferner liefen, Metamorphosism
Tags: ageing, floor, gerontology, toilet