Age, Part 2

So, I've been thinking. Perhaps when people say "Oh, you're so cute," they're actually opening the lid of the box they have put me in because of my age. Something I've said or done surprised them coming from an old person. I mean, I think we do not expect much from our senior people. They're done. They're relegated. This is actually a complaint I have had for a long time, and it is as much with getting old as with how people regard the old.

Part 2

In the last year of his life, his 90th year, Daddy wanted Mama's '67 Dodge back from my teen-age son.  He was going to move to Watsonville, California, and buy an artichoke farm.  He would live the rest of his life there.                   

            Watsonville.  One of the many places Daddy fell in love with in his earlier travels up and down California as a soft-sell life insurance salesman.  Wherever Daddy would go, he'd get the paper and check the Want Ads for real estate buys.  That's why he had property here and there--not vast holdings, but a house or 5-acre farm.  "Income property," he called it.  He had a place in Santa Cruz, near the Begonia Gardens; a small farm in Oceanside, southeast of the Rosecrutian retreat; and a cluster of rental houses in Lancaster, on the Mojave desert.  Daddy didn't own property in Watsonville, though I often heard him and Mama speak of the place fondly.  And he loved artichokes.

            But my dad had no driver's license in the 90th year of his life.  Cataract surgery on both eyes had left them only partly seeing.  (Those terrible thick glasses he wore made his eyes look bigger than eyes ought to look but did not make them see.)  He couldn't sit, rise, or walk unaided.  He didn't dress himself.  We all knew he couldn't move to Watsonville or drive or raise artichokes or do anything but stay right where he was and let us take care of him.  And when we told him, he knew it too, likely had known it all along.  He said, "I know.  But I want to."

            Maybe these were his attempts to keep living.  Death was near, he surely knew.  These were ways to turn his back on it, ignore it.  Maybe then it would go away.  Maybe then he would be young again.