Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Three Beautiful Things 06/27/17: My Day with Mom, Errands and Lunch, Fish Taco Dinner

1. Christy and I just didn't think Mom was strong enough to ride in a car or a van to Post Falls and then have an eye exam at the opthamologist that would last an hour and a half to two hours and then to ride back to Kellogg. So, I canceled her Thursday appointment. Later in the day, Paul agreed this was the right move.

Mom's eyes are bothering her, she said when I told her I canceled the appointment. She asked me if I rescheduled and I told her that I didn't. She flashed me a look of immediate disapproval -- and for good reason. "It's very hard to get an appointment there." She's right. But, I just don't think a visit to the eye doctor in Post Falls will ever happen. I hope I did the right thing.

Shortly after noon, Scott Stuart came to Mom's room to pay a visit and Mom enjoyed remembering the time Scott and other of our friends made wapatuli in a plastic garbage can in her front yard to take to Prichard Days in the summer of 1974.

She also remembered the day back in the early summer of 1965 when Christy and I were cleaning out the garage, in our bare feet, and were hosing the cement floor when Scott came to visit through the Warneke's yard and the gate behind our house. I bounded out of the garage, overly excited to see Scott, and stepped on a shard of the broken neck of an Olympia beer bottle and cut the ball of my foot, requiring a trip to the clinic to have it sewn up. First, though, Mom clipped my toenails.

When Mom said she remembered this happening, I asked her to tell the story and she started out saying that we were about to go on vacation so we needed the garage cleaned out and before long her retelling morphed into another tale about a dance she went to in her youth and who picked her up and that Scott went to the dance. Zoe, Scott, and I listened to this story and I said something like, "Wow! That's great Mom!" and we continued our visit.

That was the last I talked to Mom for the day. I returned to be with her for a couple of hours later in the afternoon. She had fallen into a sleep, a hard sleep, so hard the nurse wouldn't wake her to take her pills and no one could wake her to eat dinner.

Christy went over after dinner and woke Mom up so she could take her medicine, get changed into her pajamas, and be tucked in for the night.

2.  I started out the day getting the tires changed on Mom's car at Silver Valley Tires. She's had the Malibu for eight years and the original tires had finally worn down. I also had a fine pint of IPA at Radio Brewing uptown over lunch with Scott and a few hours later went to the Shoshone Medical Center to have my monthly blood draw taken and sent to the transplant center in Baltimore.

3. For dinner tonight, I refashioned last night's black bean and rice and sweet potato, etc. salad into a main ingredient in fish tacos. I baked some tilapia that I peppered and lemoned, put pieces of the fish on the flour tortillas I had already heated with grated cheese on them, added some cabbage, added the salad, and made a lime wedge for each taco in case Christy or Everett wanted to squeeze lime juice over their taco. I wish I had prepared the tortillas last so that they would have been warm and I wish I had let the salad reach room temperature so that it wasn't so cold in the taco. But the flavors were really good and I liked the crunch of the cabbage.

No comments: