The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

 

A friend of mine, Ginny Johnson, down the road whose mom had died recently after a three month stay at the Mabana Sunset Villa asked me who’d be taking care of us when we needed a rocker and a drool bucket. She didn’t have kids and neither does yours truly. Me, I don’t have much in the way of paternal instincts and anyway, most of my so-called adult life I never felt fit to be a parent. Course now that I’m well past child rearing age, I look at most of my neighbors who did raise children and think if all those dope-smoking yahoos could manage it, how much worse could I have been?

Well … probably a lot worse. But we make our beds and now it’s time to lay in em. Hopefully with a little time left to bounce in em too.

Nevertheless Ginny has a point. Who’s going to help us when our teeth loosen up and our joints harden and erectile dysfunction is the least of our worries?? She was thinking maybe a favorite nephew, offer a hefty cut of the will as a carrot. Carrot? We barely got turnips. Our nieces and nephews, ma and me’s, they got their own lives thousands of miles away. Last thing in the world I’d inflict on them is our health care. No, my suspicion is all us old farts will have to take care of each other down here on the crusty South End. Give us something to do between Gilligan’s Island reruns and the next adult beverage, if nothing else.

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I agree, but it takes one too to care for the elderly. Used to be we could send gramps off on the next iceberg when the ‘time’ came, but with global warming, that option’s melted off the table.

I know it gets harder the older we get. My own view is you just have to get tougher too. We didn’t move to the end of a once remote island to live the life of Riley. We moved here to live like pioneers. Some of it’s been hard. We never thought it would get easier. And like my pals down at the Diner like to intone when one of us codgers is complaining about the last operation or wants to show his newly minted surgical scars: old age ain’t for sissies. Gonna be a lot of headstones with that chestnut engraved in granite.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2015 at 3:43 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.