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11:33 a.m. - 2004-12-14
A day in the life of a 100 year old

Precious Moments

At 100, Granny's world has gotten smaller. She spends most of her days in her little house, not because there is no one to take her anywhere, but because the world has just gotten too big. Just as the neurons inside a baby's brain continue to connect in response to stimuli, those same neurons start to fire more slowly and ultimately begin to disconnect little by little at 100 years old.

She can go down the stairs in her own home and at church but forgets how to go down stairs in places she is less familiar with. Trying to keep up with conversation between two younger people gets frustrating. People talk too fast and the subjects talked about are not always familiar to someone who's grasp of technology stopped 20 years ago.

She knows the term Internet but I am not so sure what she thinks the internet is. She knows the term e-mail and even uses the word, however I think she believes that email is "junk mail". She is always cautioning me not to put her name on that "email" because when it clogs up her mail box she only throws it away.

Time flys by fast for Granny. If you go somewhere for a couple of hours she feels like you have only been gone for 10 minutes. She spends her day sleeping when she wants to and eating when the food is put on the table. Going to the bathroom takes up 1/2 hours time. She can spend an hour at the kitchen sink picking the coffee cups out of the drainer and reading the markings on the bottom of them. A hand written letter, read with a giant magnifying glass is days worth of entertainment. Everything is on slow speed.

She enjoys looking out of her window. There is not much to look at but she can stand there for a half hour looking out at the side yard and the house next door. The windows fog up and block her view.

I was talking to my Aunt Jo in the kitchen and the conversation must have gotten too fast for Granny. She took her cane and walked off down the hallway. A few minutes later I heard a sound like chirping birds.

"Squeek....squeek..squeek." the noise sounded like it was coming from her bedroom.

"Do you have birds in here?" I asked Aunt Jo.

"No...that's the squeege I bought Grandma so she could clean the fog off the windows and look out." she laughed.

During my visit I heard that squeege going quite often. Aunt Jo says that sometimes they will hear that sound in the early morning. It is the first thing Grandma does...clean off the glass and look out the window. Aunt Edie was driving by on her way to work one morning and saw her little head underneath the closed draperies just looking out expecting to see something interesting.

I brought a little tape recorder along to see if I could glean any new stories from her. We sat at the kitchen table and I prompted her with some questions to get her to start talking. I nonchalantly placed the little palm sized recorder on the table so she wouldn't be inhibited in any way. She had no idea she was being recorded. It wasn't long before I realized that there were no new stories to tell. She was telling the stories she had already told me when she was younger and capable of telling them coherantly and cohesivly.

It was nice to get her voice on the recorder telling these stories and since I heard them before, I could steer her back on track when she went off on a tangent before the story was finished. There was a few things I had not heard before though and on those I just had to try to use my common sense to make out what she was trying to get at.

She started talking about barrels and barrel hoops. I got the impression that barrels and hoops were made by immigrants fresh off the boat. She said something about calling them "Hoopies". The story of the Hoopies went off on some tangent and before I knew it she was talking about the rain barrel on the front porch of the mining camp shack she grew up in.

"We used to have to clean the tadpoles out of that old rain barrel." She said.

"What did you use the rainbarrel for." I asked.

"We had to throw away all of those old steel milk cans."

"Where...did you throw away the cans?"

"We had to clean those gnats off of the roof."

"Gnats....what about the rainbarrel...what did you do with the rainbarrel."

"I told you." she got a little irritated, "We used to throw them in that rainbarrel."

"With the tadpoles?"

"Wait a minute now." she thought for a minute and then said "I don't know." She got up and took her cane and wandered down the hall.

A minute later I heard the sound..."Squeek....squeek..squeek..." I just waited quietly in the kitchen and eventually she came back.

She sat back down in her rocker and rocked silently. I sat there looking at her sweet old face. A minute later her head nodded heavily and slumped over, her chin hit her chest and her mouth dropped open.

I heard her rythmic breathing and thought, "The poor thing's tired and just went to sleep."

A minute later her head popped up and her eyes twinkled and she went on.

"Those tadpoles would be in that rainwater and we'd have to get them out."

"What would you do with the rainwater Grandma?"

"Well, Pap (her father) would go out and get drunk and then he'd shit himself. My sister Lizzie kept house and she would throw them in there."

"So you used your rainbarrel for washing clothes then?" I asked.

"I told you...we threw those milk cans in there when we were done with them."

I just let it go. The best I can figure is that there must have been two barrels, one for rainwater for washing and one for garbage. How the tadpoles got in there and what the gnats on the roof had to do with it was something I will never know. However I am quite sure that the people who make the barrels were called "Hoopies" and that somehow being a Hoopie was not a good thing.

Her little head dropped over into another short snooze. I realized that conjuring up memories was quite a tiring activity for the 100 year old brain. The stories started in one decade and peices of other decades got thrown in with them. Each time it would get to be too much, she would simply shut down and take a 1 or 2 minute nap, mouth hanging wide open, chin on chest.

After a couple of hours, I realized that she was all tapped out.

"Want to go watch some TV Grandma?" I asked.

"Yeah." her eyes brightened at the thought of not having to conjur up anymore confusing memories.

"What do you like to watch?" I asked.

"I like that Emeril" she said

As luck would have it Emeril was on with his hour long Christmas special complete with choir. She sat and watched the whole thing, eyes twinkling, smile on her face. I wonder if Emeril knows that he is just as entertaining to a 100 year old woman as he is to his young viewers.

Even during Emeril though, those little cat naps would come and go. 1 or 2 minutes at a time.

I was not paying too much attention to Emeril, I was just sitting and watching Grandma, trying to drink her in as much as I could, trying to fill up on her because one of these days that little head is going to nod on over, her chin is going to hit her chest and it won't come back up.

P. I. Yarnsmith


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