Well, actually, it was my goose that got cooked.
December started off relatively quiet. We now have a sitter who comes to the house to stay with mother while I work during the day. This still means I am on duty on my days off, which include Fridays since my office has a four day work week. Being “off” on Friday is just a term, but it is a term that lulls me into a false sense of complacency. My Fridays are spent cleaning house, doing laundry, some occasional cooking and a host of other boring things to write about such as balancing the checkbooks and paying bills.
One quiet Friday I decided to indulge in a nap. I turned the television off, left mother playing with her puzzle and settled in under the covers of my bed. A blissful hour went by before I heard the dogs scuffling around in the kitchen. A yip and a bark told me something was going on. I bolted out of bed to see what they were up to. All three dogs were hovering around mother, bouncing up and down, licking the floor as mother dribbled raw egg splatters to treat them. The dogs weren’t the ones up to no good. Mother had decided to find a snack and settled on sampling raw eggs out of the carton – shells and all. There was only one egg left in the back row of the carton, which meant that five eggs had been consumed. Strike taking a nap off my want-to-do list. I had already locked up most of the food goods in the hall closet. Now I realized nothing was safe. I had already thrown out bags of frozen veggies that I discovered had been opened and put back in the freezer. In the effort to hide the open packages, mother would stick them behind something. It would rain frozen peas when I opened the freezer door. Not even the dogs were interested in cleaning them up. They rolled everywhere like little green bee-bees. At least frozen veggies couldn’t make mother sick. This latest incident with the eggs put me to taking another action – locking the refrigerator. With Christmas just weeks ahead, I knew there would be too much temptation sitting on the shelves. Even watching her like a hawk, I still had to do laundry and take a shower. I came to the conclusion that an open fridge was better than the apple tree in the Garden of Eden. I went to the garage and returned with a ratcheting tie strap. Not kidding. I wished I had a camcorder set up to film mother's first effort to break in. It would have been a YouTube moment. With the fridge bolted shut it was now safe to procure Christmas dinner goodies.
As mother’s Alzheimer’s progresses, there is one good thing that has happened…the grocery store now baffles her. She is no longer capable of getting on the power scooter and zooming away from me in the one nanosecond I am not looking at her. I hark back to a day two years ago when I took her to that well known mega store to buy a few things. She mounted the handicap scooter, slapped her cane across the top of the basket like an M2 fifty caliber machine gun mounted on an M-1 Abrams tank and turned on the nearly silent electric motor. The only sound that could be heard was the electric whine when the wheels turned. I admonished her to stay with me and watch how close she was to items as she turned the steering handle. “Okay” was the only response I got. We did fairly well until we made the first corner. I took four steps, turned around, and she was gone. I retraced my four steps thinking I would catch her in the main isle we had just left. Zip. Nada. Nuttin. She was nowhere in sight. I raced back and forth, too short to see over the massive isles of stuff in Super Mega Mart. I called her name. I asked people if they’d seen a little lady on a scooter. One person said they had seen an older woman in the make-up isle. Off I went, only to discover that this little lady had on a blue shirt and mom was wearing burgundy. I found a sales associate and gave him her description. Oh, yes. He had spotted her in the grocery section of the store. Across the 40 acres of store tiles I went. Up and down isles, around the freezer section. No sign of her. I turned and saw a curly grey head bobbing back and forth with the lurching of the power scotter starting and stopping as it traveled through the fruit section. My plan was to nab her at the banana bin. I turned and started fussing, “I told you not to turn away from…..” - not her. Man, it seemed like it was Elderly Ladies on Scooter Day in Mega Mart. I finally found a manager who put an APB out on her over the intercom system. The call came back – little lady in a red colored top discovered in isle 12. Once again I trecked the length of Mega Mart. Drat! The occupant of this scooter had a red top on alright, but she was Hispanic. I picked up my cell phone and called my sister. “Hey, I have a confession to make. I have misplaced mother in Gynormous Mega Mart.” I heard my sister put the phone aside as she spoke to her two daughters. “Aunt Cheryl just lost Granny in Mega Mart.” Next thing I heard was their three voices collectively laughing out loud. I was not amused. I headed to the front of the store to wait. There she was. Parked in the center of the area by the cash registers, her basket piled full of the spoils of her conquest of Mega Mart. I stopped taking her with me after that.
Back to present day and the grocery store. I had the Christmas dinner list I toiled over for days and knew I couldn’t leave mom at home alone after the egg incident. I took a long, slow breath to calm myself and put her in the car for the trip to the grocery store. When we entered the store I walked her past the motorized carts. She didn’t even glance their way. I placed her hands on the handle of the basket, took her cane away so she would have to hang on to the basket and steered her into the store. She looked around in complete bewilderment. I steered the cart as she walked slowly behind it. I shopped to my heart’s content in complete silence. No argument about what she could have. No running after her as she wandered away. Once home, my Christmas dinner goodies were safely locked in the refrigerator, just waiting to be whipped into fabulous wonders for the holiday meal.
I decided to try something really different this year for Christmas dinner. I elected to tackle a pork crown roast – one of the fancy smancy roasts with the bones sticking up all majestic-like accompanied by its television-touted perfect companion of baked apple herb dressing. My menu consisted of asparagus with a creamed asparagus sauce, roasted corn, baked chicken leg quarters over saffron rice, two beer batter breads - one orange flavored and one pumpkin flavored - and a fabulous dessert I saw on the show of one of the home and cooking channel divas. You know the one – she got to write the book on “How to Achieve Feng Shui with Concrete” also subtitled “Making that 4x8 Space All Your Very Own.” The dessert was a take on Bananas Foster. It was a trifle layered with angel food cake and the banana mixture of melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and dark rum. Of course there was the whole math thing to give you the right quantities for your guests. She had about 20 guests, so there were 20 bananas and two cups of dark rum. With 15 coming to my house, several of them being big sweet lovers, I used her count for 20. Now, mind you, she never showed them lighting the flambe’ mixture, nor did she say to do so as you do with Bananas Foster. By the end of the program she was swimming in a sea of compliments over her stunning dish of crown roast with the baked apple dressing. You heard lines like, “My, how superb is this dessert!” “Simply delightful and sinful.” “Why, I don’t think I even need eggnog after this.” etc. Well, let me tell you, I think her guests had long since swilled the eggnog down to the last drop, then got into the cooking sherry behind her back. They had to be toasted already to think that dessert tasted like anything other than pure gasoline. The amount of brown sugar cooked to an almost candy state with pure dark rum was a dreadful combination. It needed a kiss of alcohol, not a raging torrent at full strength. It needed the match put to it prior to loading it in the trifle dish. Prepared in real life as presented on TV did not net the same compliments. Rather, I saw my guests sniff it with eyes full of merriment, delight and expectation. Once it hit the tip of their tongues it became a spittoon hitting contest. Me no likum firewater in banana dish. It sat in its container like the newest twist on an IED just waiting to blow. Dessert was a complete disaster. Oh, and that baked apple dressing? Makes for great fertilizer. Just don’t dump the flambe' in the rose garden or those puppies are goners.
