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My full time occupation these days is caring for my 85 year old father, now in his 10th year of Alzheimer's Disease. This is pretty well a 24/7/365 + job, even with all the medical support I can hire to keep him out of a nursing home.
Now, combine that with a couple of workrooms full of CW reenacting plunder, and you get some funny results.
After several days in the hospital, I brought him home the other day, and our normal life resumed--long about 2:00 am he gets up, starts rambling through things, looking for *something*.
One always handles these Alzheimers incidents in a non-confrontative manner: "What can I help you find Dad?" "I want that big long poem" "Poem?" "That long poem, the one we've been working on memorizing for weeks and weeks, there's a lot of pages"
I'm utterly at a loss. I have not a clue what he's talking about and he's taking the house apart. Finally, I hand him an ice cream and a huge stack of random papers off the desk and birthday cards because I know that opening those and reading them again will slow him down for at least an hour or so.
Some time later he sits up triumphant, waving the Poem in his hand. What's he got?
Last summer, in preparation for In The Van, Silas Tackitt provided me with a printable file of his Uncle Coffee's Ethopian Songster. I ran up several on rag bond paper and scattered them among the participants. My stained and used copy was clutched in MyDaddy's hand.
I've been working on these. I already knew some parts of this poem. But there's parts I don't know.
Now, MyDaddy can not carry a tune. Never has. He's sung in an enthusiastic monotone all my life.
But the beat of Keemo Kimo is unmistakable, and the words pretty close, even with a stroke-slurred voice.
I know this part, he says, that was my Uncle Sant's song........
Thanks Silas!!
Now, combine that with a couple of workrooms full of CW reenacting plunder, and you get some funny results.
After several days in the hospital, I brought him home the other day, and our normal life resumed--long about 2:00 am he gets up, starts rambling through things, looking for *something*.
One always handles these Alzheimers incidents in a non-confrontative manner: "What can I help you find Dad?" "I want that big long poem" "Poem?" "That long poem, the one we've been working on memorizing for weeks and weeks, there's a lot of pages"
I'm utterly at a loss. I have not a clue what he's talking about and he's taking the house apart. Finally, I hand him an ice cream and a huge stack of random papers off the desk and birthday cards because I know that opening those and reading them again will slow him down for at least an hour or so.
Some time later he sits up triumphant, waving the Poem in his hand. What's he got?
Last summer, in preparation for In The Van, Silas Tackitt provided me with a printable file of his Uncle Coffee's Ethopian Songster. I ran up several on rag bond paper and scattered them among the participants. My stained and used copy was clutched in MyDaddy's hand.
I've been working on these. I already knew some parts of this poem. But there's parts I don't know.
Now, MyDaddy can not carry a tune. Never has. He's sung in an enthusiastic monotone all my life.
But the beat of Keemo Kimo is unmistakable, and the words pretty close, even with a stroke-slurred voice.
I know this part, he says, that was my Uncle Sant's song........
Thanks Silas!!
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