|
The Crunch Generation.T
There are a lot of men and women, like me, who are dealing with elderly parents, who aren’t quite as independent and capable as they once were, while keeping an eye on children who are almost but not quite official adults.
The straddling act: Coping with the myriad of problems that aging parents have and their increasing dependency on their children who still have kids that are not quite unattached at the hip.People are living longer than they ever have before. People who otherwise would be dead, and maybe even should be dead, for all intents and purposes, aren’t.
Add to that the fact that many Baby Boomers weren’t exactly spring chickens when they started reproducing =’s the Snap, Crackle CRUNCH Generation.
My dad is stone deaf although he is still capable of hearing some things. Mom can’t breathe. But they’re still kicking and have all of their faculties.Or … so I thought.One day when I was visiting my parents, my dad announced, “The toilet it talking.”What?He reiterated, “The toilet is talking. There are voices coming out of the toilet.”Mom was listening to this exchange. She jumped in, adding, “Yes, Cindi, the toilet is talking.”Oh, lord, I thought, they’ve simultaneously lost their marbles.So like any obliging daughter, I headed for the bathroom, plopped down on the floor, and waited for the toilet to talk.It didn’t.I waited and waited.
“So,” I called out to my parents in the next room, “what precisely is the toilet saying?”
They weren’t sure, no specifics, they just knew that it was talking.I figured, surely, there had to be a plausible explanation for this. Perhaps someone was working in the sewer system and talking and that’s what my parents were hearing.
Dad confided that he was forced to use the upstairs john because he just could not sit on a toilet that was talking.
I could see his point.
I waited and waited. The toilet did not talk.
I got up, went back into the kitchen, reported to ma and pa that it hadn’t talked to me but I believed them, sort of, yet I was kind of thing: Dial 911-WHACKO.
And then … I HEARD IT! Voices!
The toilet was talking!
I scrambled back into the bathroom and waited, excitedly.
A talking toilet! How novel!
Come on, come on: talk to me commode.And then I heard it, the voices; again, except … they weren’t coming from the toilet but I could see how my parents had mistakenly thought so.About four feet from the bathroom is the med-alert I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up speaker contraption.The people at the I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up headquarters were talking to each other and for some reason it was coming through my parents’ speaker.My parents wear these necklaces in the event that they fall or there’s some kind of emergency. They press the button the necklace and the med-alert people call back and ask, “Mr. Pearce? Mrs. Pearce? Are you okay?” And they can hear my parents’ response.I dragged dad into the hallway. “It’s not the toilet, dad, it’s this speaker.”
I think he was kind of disappointed even though the talking toilet had inconvenienced him a bit, having to go upstairs and all.
Case solved. No need to dig up the sewer or call in Ghostbusters.
And my parents thought I was a handful!
Ha!
|
