And Swarmed by Birds, Too

My mom’s mother’s birthday gathering a couple of Saturdays ago was interesting. The trip started with my parents and I driving to Lexington, where I parked my car so ride the rest of the way down to Eastern Kentucky with them.

My grandmother is very ill and not handling her status well. While she is not physically capable of cooking for a huge crowd, it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to. Her children conspired to make it an impossibility for her birthday.

So, my grandmother sat in the giant recliner and complained that her children had forbidden her to a) no longer cross the two lane road to get the mail – this is the same road that coal trucks barrel down at break neck speed loaded or empty; this is the same road that my grandmother knew we children were dying to run out into just to be flattened like pancakes by one of the aforementioned coal trucks.

My grandmother sat in the giant recliner and complained that her children had forbidden her to b) walk down the steep steps to the basement, especially if she were home by herself.

My grandmother sat in the giant recliner and complained that her children had forbidden her to c) cook her own birthday dinner. What she did not say was that by forbidding her to cook her own birthday dinner, her children deprived her of the joy of calling all her friends to tell them that she cooked for 50 people for her birthday.

After going to the kitchen to see the progress of the dinner, Grandma sat beside me. I asked her about her boyfriend. She told me that they had broken up. After telling her how sorry I was, Grandma told me that it was because he was “serious”.

OK. This is one of those times when the stitches you are knitting become so very, very interesting. I sat there staring at how lovely, neat, and even my stockinette stitches were, while the little person in my brain ran around like a maniac screaming, “Don’t ask what she means by serious! It could mean he wanted to marry her, which is okay to know. It could also mean that he wanted sex. You don’t want that image in your mind. It will blind your mind’s eye for the foreseeable future.”

I sat there by Grandma. She had this smile and an expectant look on her face, the look that said, “Please ask me what I meant by serious.”

Instead I said, “Oh, will you look at that. I forgot a yarn over in this lace pattern. Better concentrate on ripping this back a row to fix it.” Desperate times call for more extreme measures than just making a yarn over from the slack between two stitches.

After her stent of complaining, my grandmother stated after I had commented that “Mr. McGoo has nothing on grandma”, that we did not believe how BLIND (!!!!) she was and how she couldn’t see to do anything. My response was, “Grandma, perhaps that is why they don’t think it is a good idea for you to cross the street to get the mail or try to go down to the basement by yourself. It is dangerous if you don’t see all that well.” Of course, she argued that she wasn’t that blind. Too late I realized I had been sucked in. I had deftly avoided the Sick Olympics only to be drawn into the Who Wants to be the Most Misunderstood. I am such the amateur. Thankfully, I was able to avoid Guiltpardoy, but just barely.

Then there was a bit of external drama. This all before dinner.

People could save some serious health insurance bills for diagnostic testing for irritable bowel just by coming to one of these gatherings. There is the high emotion of my grandmother being so ill and the knowledge that this might be her last birthday. Add a bit of conflict and a pinch of drama. If you don’t get a flare of IBS then you probably just need to do a better job of washing your hands, produce and avoiding cross contamination in your kitchen.

I rode back to Lexington with my parents, strung out with emotion and grateful that I would have the drive from Lex to Cincinnati to process all I had experienced.

When we pulled into the parking lot of the Crackle Barrel to get my car, we heard them. This flock of black birds calling and flapping as they settled into a nearby tree for the night. I don’t have a phobia about being flailed by birds, not even after seeing Hitchcock’s movie of good birds gone bad. Then again, a trauma induced while in a highly emotional state is ripe for inducing a phobia. I should learn to knit while driving.