I had this fragmented, disjointed diatribe in my head about the Common Core State Standard and how it applies to teaching mathematics to young children. And then I came home and there was a Cloverland bill in the mail and that was fine except that I decided to go out to the website and pay online and I couldn’t because neither of the *service* addresses showed up. Instead, there was my dad’s name and the address of the Freighter View Assisted Living facility. My dad never lived at Freighter View but The Commander did and I still can’t figure out why or how she got the billing address changed. And to make things worse, it isn’t even the correct address for FV. Close but no cigar. So I spent about a half hour writing a letter and other related tasks. I thought I had this stuff sorted out a month or so ago when TBJ noticed that the moomincabin’s service had been shut off (because the bills were going into the dead letter box).

Did that make sense? It doesn’t even make sense to me! All I can say is that my mother could be a piece of work. Like the whole driving thing…

One of my favorite car-talk episodes ever is when a guy called in complaining about his mother’s car, which would frequently drive off the road into the ditch or worse. Of course it wasn’t the car, it was his mother. He wanted to disable the car. His brother (mom’s fav-o-rite of course) wanted to keep mom on the road. I was nervous about The Comm driving the last few years but didn’t quite know what to do. She was always on the go and I rationalized by thinking that Sault Ste. Siberia is a small city and pretty easy to get around — light traffic and slow speed limits for the most part. And The Comm was extremely careful. She had a few little mishaps but they mostly (mostly) involved inching through parking lots and having small scrapes (for example a snow-mobile ski scraped her car once as she passed it a bit too close). Then there’s that “mostly” word. There were a couple scary incidents that I won’t detail (and wasn’t told about right away).

The small stroke that began the spiral toward the end of her life ended her driving activities. Not that she was happy about that or didn’t keep trying. The first thing that happened, when she was stuck in the hoosegow long-term care was that we lost her driver’s license. We had schlepped up to Command Central and she was carrying a whole bunch of papers and crap in the seat of her *hated* walker and I remember seeing the driver’s license on the floor. I picked it up and put it on the dining table and then we couldn’t find it. Anywhere. This became a constant topic of conversation until I couldn’t stand it any more and took her out to get it replaced.

I scrambled up her passport and a photocopy of her birth certificate and we waited in line and it was pretty damn easy to get a replacement driver’s license even though The Comm was using a walker. We had lunch after that and, as we were on our way back to the long-term care facility, The Comm asked me, “Where is that car thing that we just did?”… …

I was not the best daughter on earth and I second guess a lot of things that I did during my mother’s decline into death. But one thing that I am not sorry about is that I did not try to officially remove her driving privileges. She learned how to drive on the family farm in Garden City when she was something like 13 years old. It was HUGE for her to stop driving. I got that. Besides, she needed the driver’s license for identification (yes, I know you can get a state ID). At one point, she managed to squirrel away a set of keys to her Taurus down at Freighter View. That was okay with me. She may have had her keys but she sure couldn’t get to her car without a lot of help (which she knew I would not provide) because it was locked in the Moomincabin Garage. I am talking about this like it’s a joke but, although there are humorous aspects to it, it is really sad that active people like The Comm cannot more easily get around town whenever they want to…

Still, The Commander was not quite finished with driving. She got set up with a rehab program that would evaluate whether or not she could drive again and, if she passed, they would train her to drive. I am not the best daughter but I was on board with this. Of course she failed. Better she heard that news from somebody other than me. At that point, she quite gracefully threw in the towel and signed off on the paperwork to sell her car.

When I get to be that age, maybe those Google cars will be schlepping me around town…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.