Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault Read online

  I wince and look at Dad, which is even worse. World War II Veteran, Eagle Scout, Man of the House, Rock of the Family, Provider Extraordinaire, Protector and Defender of Everyone.

  “What do you think we can’t handle in our own home?” Superman asks flatly.

  “Um . . . it’s just that you and Mom have worked so hard taking care of a big house by yourselves your whole lives,” I try. “It might be wonderful to live someplace where you could have some help now.”

  “We don’t need help,” he answers curtly.

  “It could be fun to look at some options.” One sister finally rallies and opens a pamphlet on the table.

  “We don’t want options,” Mom answers without even glancing down.

  I look at the pretty pamphlet my sister spread out. It’s logical and colorful and uncomplicated by emotion. The residents in it are happily doing group craft projects in one shot, gratefully hugging the children who helped them relocate into such a nice safe place in another. So easy. So worry-free. So not how our situation is unfolding.

  “There are so many resources for older people!” My other sister comes to life and accidentally blurts out the worst possible thing.

  Without a word, Mom stands, gathers everyone’s trash, marches inside the ice cream shop with it, returns with a squirt bottle of multisurface cleaner and paper towels, and cleans the tabletop. Dad rises from his chair without any of his usual effort, his arthritic back, knees, and hips suddenly as strong and flexible as a young man’s. He grips his Grand Finale! folder in front of him across the table from where I grip our Next Adventure! folder. We stare at each other’s cheery bright red words.

  Caregiver standoff at the ice cream parlor.

  And then our dear parental units, who’ve spent the last twenty years preparing themselves and us for the end of life, who’ve made us sit through hours of agonizing reviews, who’ve hauled us to the Plot . . . Those beloved college sweethearts head back to the handicapped spot in which their car is parked and make their discussion-ending victory statement over their shoulders:

  “We’ll get back to you when we’re older.”

  9.

  CORDS

  Bring your laptop to the dining room, Dad! I’ll help you set up bookmarks!”

  Having verified that our parents will not be moving to an independent living community any time soon, my sisters returned to their homes in different states. I’ve stayed behind to try to help Mom and Dad at least be more efficient in this house.

  “Are you coming, Dad?” I call again.

  No response. I walk down the hall to the home office Dad shares with Mom. Command Central for all the critical business of their days. It’s half the size of a spare bedroom, with two desks, two swivel chairs, two file cabinets, two computers (one desktop, one laptop), reams of paper, multipacks of tape, staples, pencils, file folders, and many “pending” piles. A room so full of meticulous records from the past and supplies for the future that if one parent’s sitting at one desk and the other wants to get to the other desk, they both have to stand and sort of twirl around for the second person to squeeze through. The dance they’ve done a million times in their sixty-five-year marriage. The dance I would have done with my husband a maximum of two times before renting office space across town.

  I look in the doorway.

  Mom’s staring at the most recent 50 of 25,384 messages in the email in-box on her desktop monitor. Deleting an electronic note from someone—even a nice invitation to a shampoo sale at Walgreens drugstore—seems as rude to her as throwing a thank-you note from a grandchild in the trash. Filing an email is out of the question—I’ll never find it if it’s in a file! It has to be right here in the in-box!—which partly explains why so many of their careful record-keeping systems are out in the open, covering every surface of the room.

  Dad doesn’t trust his computer’s memory to remember anything, so he’s writing notes to himself on the back of a used envelope. Two seniors squashed into their mini-headquarters with sixteen gigabytes of available disk space and zero inches of any other kind of available space.

  I’ve learned to appreciate the hustle and bustle that goes on in this little office that gives my parents purpose: Get the birthday card off to the nephew! Double-check the arithmetic on the bank statement! Confirm dental appointments! Start worrying about holiday dinner reservations in June!

  I’ve even learned to appreciate the unfinishedness of it all. My proud mom and dad are surely not going to pass away any time soon and leave this big mess for someone else to see. I smile at the piles that must be helping keep them healthy enough to avoid that. But there are a couple of things I can upgrade . . .

  “Bring your laptop to the dining room table, Dad!” I say, stepping into the overflowing room. “We’ll have more space to work in there!”

  Dad stares at me. Stares at his computer. Stares back at me.

  I reach to pop the power cord out of its magnetic port on the side of his laptop.

  “DON’T UNPLUG THE COMPUTER!” he cries out, looking as horrified as if I were about to disconnect life support.

  “It’s a laptop, Dad.” I laugh, reaching for the plug again to demonstrate. “Remember? It doesn’t have to be plugged in!”

  Dad swivels to block me with his full five-foot-five, 130-pound mass, arms outstretched. “THE BATTERY WILL GO DEAD!” he declares.

  “The battery can last for seven hours!” I shake my head with another little laugh.

  “THE BATTERY MIGHT NOT BE CHARGED!” he insists.

  “It’s been charging for three years!”

  “IT’S ALL HOOKED UP TO THE PRINTER!”

  “Look, Dad,” I say, leaning in again, “you can simply unplug the . . .”

  Dad rises up now, all ninety years of How Things Should Be aimed right at me. “DON’T UNPLUG THE PRINTER!”

  Without even turning from her email screen, Mother plucks the portable blood pressure monitor off the shelf next to her and hands it behind her back to Dad—a gesture as familiar as passing a tissue after a sneeze.

  I take a step back and continue as gently as possible. “The printer doesn’t need to be plugged into the computer at all, Dad! It can be wireless! We could change the settings and you could print from anywhere in the house!”

  Why I think expressions like wireless, change settings and print from anywhere are appropriate to use with a ninety-year-old already taking his blood pressure, I’ll never know. I must be so pleased to be the computer expert in the room, instead of the computer idiot I am when I’m with my daughter, that I’m interpreting Dad’s frozen look as rapt attention, not the panic that it actually is.

  “You and Mom don’t even have to have your own printers for your own computers!” I continue. “You could both be connected to one printer that’s not even in the office! You could print wirelessly from the hall closet!”

  This causes Mom to grab the OS X 10.3 Made EZ library book she checked out off the shelf and start furiously flipping through the pages trying to look up what on earth I’m talking about. Dad’s retaking his blood pressure.

  His laptop isn’t merely plugged in; it’s locked down. He “installed” the laptop on his desk by anchoring the power cord to the desktop with duct tape fifteen minutes after my sisters and I presented it to him three years ago. The laptop hasn’t moved an inch one way or the other since. Certainly has never gotten near Dad’s lap. We bought it for him when he was sick a few years ago, thinking it would lift his spirits to be able to track weather disasters and stock market plunges online right from his bed.

  “Look, Dad!” we said, placing the laptop on the bed next to him, “you can track weather disasters and stock market plunges online right from your bed!”

  “THE BATTERY WILL GO DEAD!!” Dad exclaimed, eyes wide and worried.

  We plugged the laptop into the outlet behind his nightstand.


  “IT WON’T WORK IN HERE!” he announced, propping himself up against the pillows and gesturing down the hall. “THE INTERNET IS IN THE OTHER ROOM!”

  We patiently explained that the Internet is flying around in the air somewhere.

  “THE NEIGHBORS COULD GET ON OUR SYSTEM AND LOOK AT OUR PRIVATE FILES!” he protested.

  We closed the bedroom blinds to trap the Internet indoors.

  “THERE’S NO PLACE FOR THE PRINTER!” He waved his arms hopelessly. “THE PRINTER HAS TO BE ATTACHED!”

  Dad finally became so frustrated by our lack of knowledge about how things work that he rose from his sick bed, marched down the hall to Command Central, planted his new laptop on his desk, and secured the cords in position with duct tape, and that was that.

  And now this is this. Dad has taken his blood pressure four times in a row, which he knows full well—but has forgotten—will give false readings and make his blood pressure actually go up when he sees the inaccurate numbers. Mom accidentally hit some key with her elbow that made her entire email in-box disappear and is flipping even more furiously through OS X 10.3 Made EZ, trying to figure out where it went. I’m about to assert myself and take charge when the phone rings.

  When the phone rings in Mom and Dad’s house, everything stops.

  Meals. Conversations. TV shows. Naps. Baths. Dishes. Everything. They’ve never once “let the machine get it” if they were home. Superman can’t stand to not pick up in case it’s an emergency and he’s needed to save somebody. Mom can’t stand to inconvenience the answering machine when she’s perfectly capable of answering it herself. Also, she doesn’t like to “fill up the tape” in case someone needs more space in the future for a longer message, should she ever let anyone leave one.

  Mom leans over some papers to grab the telephone receiver attached with a curly cord to the base unit attached to the landline cord attached to the phone jack on the wall behind her desk. Dad jumps up and hurries down the hall to grab the phone that’s screwed into the wall in the kitchen. They like to both be “on” at the same time. My sisters and I have bought and returned four different cordless phone systems over the years. We’ve presented each one with love and rationale.

  US: Look! You could each keep a receiver near you! You could both be “on” from your chairs in the living room! So much safer than jumping up and running to another room when the phone rings!

  THEM: THE BATTERIES WILL GO DEAD!

  US: You could answer calls from the bathroom!

  THEM: CALLERS ARE NOT ALLOWED IN OUR BATHROOM!!

  US: You could walk around doing other things while you talk! You wouldn’t have to stand two feet from the wall or desk to have a conversation!

  THEM: WHY WOULD WE DO OTHER THINGS WHILE WE TALK ON THE PHONE?

  And there we have it. The great big disconnect.

  I stand in the hall between the office, where Mom’s on, and the kitchen, where Dad’s on, and try to remember the last time I was on a phone when I wasn’t also doing other things. I used to keep my friends’ phone numbers and birthdays in my head. Now I keep a mental list of which friends will and won’t be offended when I’m washing dishes, doing errands, or checking email while we talk. At least I know the people I irritate.

  My daughter is friends with a universe of strangers, people she’s never met in countries she’s never been to: great big global groups of Facebookers, bloggers, and gamers. Attachments are fragile and fickle, and all in the air. Landlines don’t exist. Single-tasking is ancient history. Human contact is to be avoided whenever humanly possible.

  Mom and Dad make weekly pilgrimages to the bank to visit the people guarding their money. They know their bank tellers’ names and wedding anniversaries and how it’s going with the recent foot surgery. My daughter never goes inside a bank. Has never even spoken to a drive-up teller. Money comes out of an ATM on the sidewalk; money goes in by snapping photos of birthday checks on the kitchen counter and clicking deposit.

  Mom and Dad shop in stores, eat in restaurants, and buy tickets for upcoming plays and ballets at the theater box office in person. Dad doesn’t even like to drop mail in the mailbox that’s in front of the post office. He likes to park, go inside, and hand his letters right to a U.S. Postal Worker he knows by name.

  My daughter shops, returns, buys tickets, pays bills, and orders takeout online. She scans and bags her own groceries in the self-check-out area at the supermarket. She’s been in a post office once, when I tried to force her to learn how to buy stamps for the thank-you notes I forced her to write by hand. Never even made it to the counter. “They have machines, Mom!” She pointed and, before I could stop her, ran to the self-serve machine in the lobby and came back waving a sheet of generic metered first-class postage stamps over her head like a millennial victory flag.

  “But you can pick out pretty stamps at the counter!” I implored, trying to pull her toward the long line of people my age and older who were waiting for a person to wait on them. “The postal worker can show you all the pretty stamps and you can pick the ones that match the sentiment of the notes you’re sending!”

  My daughter looked at me with the same sick disbelief as the day the credit card reader wasn’t working on the gas pump where she stood trying to fill the tank of her car.

  “The credit card thing isn’t working on the gas pump!” she wailed through the window of the passenger seat where I sat.

  “Walk inside the gas station and give your card to the person behind the counter,” I answered as patiently as I could.

  “WHAT?!” she recoiled.

  “There’s a person inside! Give your credit card to the person!” I said less patiently.

  “WHAT?! I’m not dealing with some random dude!” She got back in the car, slammed the door, and started the engine. “I’ll drive to a different station where things work! Seriously, Mom? The person??!”

  Mom and Dad are brick and mortar. Face-to-face. Grounded. When Mom and Dad are with friends, no one’s twitching to check text messages or Instagrams. People are fully there when they’re there, plugged in to the moment and one another. Relationships are anchored, connected by all those visible and invisible cords. Is that why the friendships, marriages, and sort of everything else, including all the cars and appliances made by their generation, seemed to last a lot longer?

  I think a little wistfully that the last cord that connected my daughter to something that really mattered was the umbilical one. What will keep the people in her world attached to each other or anything else when the people in my parents’ and my world are gone? I want my daughter to know the strength and clarity of not wandering that far from the base unit that’s helped make my parents’ relationships so solid and my life so secure. I want her to stay connected to the power source of principles, values, faith, and family that will help her be grounded and safe.

  But I also want my parents to experience the thrill of unplugging. They might not ever be ready for the wonder of carrying the Encyclopedia Britannica in a smartphone in their pants pockets and aprons, but they could at least experience the freedom of taking a phone call on the front porch with the World Wide Web on their laps.

  I want, for one minute of my life, to not feel right in the middle.

  Mom and Dad are off the phone now and have returned to their respective posts in Command Central. I watch them get back to work, resuming the business of the day with the tenacity of busy young executives, a ten-year supply of paper clips, rubber bands, and manila envelopes stacked on the shelves beside them. I’m moved to tears by all that’s come out of this little room and the great big plans for the future still being dreamed up by the two people working away so diligently at the items on their lists.

  I take a moment to collect myself and to gather a couple of things I suddenly need. I walk back in and reach toward Dad’s laptop again.

  “Here, Dad,” I say, cutting a lon
g piece of duct tape from the roll I picked up on my way in. “It’s been a long time since you got those cords anchored down. Let’s give them a nice fresh layer of tape.”

  10.

  AT LEAST I DIDN’T EAT A DONUT

  Morning. 10:00 a.m.: Walk to the kitchen and open the refrigerator, where I keep my bag of organic raw almonds. Carefully count out fifteen almonds and place them in a little treat cup to carry back to my desk for the good-for-me snack that will keep me focused and productive for two more hours until lunchtime.

  10:01: Toss all fifteen almonds in my mouth and eat them before the refrigerator door closes. My feet never even move.

  10:01:30: Hate myself.

  10:01:35: Forgive myself. The recommendation is for “a handful of almonds per day,” and I have smallish hands, so I probably should have had twenty almonds, not fifteen. I help myself to five more.

  10:01:45: Pause to consider the possible meanings of “handful.” A small pile in the middle of a small hand? A medium pile in the middle of a small hand? A large pile in the middle of a medium hand? Might my hand be medium, not small? I eat ten more almonds to make sure I’m nutritionally complete.

  10:03: Hate myself.

  10:03:15: Scrutinize the Nutrition Facts panel. The label says Serving size 33g. It’s a 16-ounce bag. 13.7 servings per container. I throw six more almonds in my mouth to compensate for the aggravation of having to read numbers that make no sense.

  10:03:45: Pour the rest of the bag on the counter and divide the remaining almonds into 12.7 small piles, since there are supposed to be 13.7 servings per bag and I probably already ate one serving this morning. I subtract the number of almonds I might have eaten in the previous days I’ve owned the bag, and eat any almonds which could affect the math: