Good evening, and welcome to a second Pittsburgh edition of 500 Words Before Bedtime. I’m sure most of you are interested in mom’s condition, and I will get to that, I promise.
But first, let me complain about Aldi.
Aldi is the world’s most ridiculous grocery store. In fact, I’m not sure it even merits the title. Aldi is a store that occasionally deigns to sell groceries. I would not be totally shocked to walk into Aldi one day and find they’d filled their shelves entirely with lima beans, horse feed, and Bulgarian chocolates.
Go to Aldi seeking bananas on a Tuesday in January? “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Bananas? Why would we sell those? We’ve got ginger root! Unidentifiable squash! Would you care for some Asian noodles made of seaweed? Oh, we’re sorry. Did we waste your time, and now you have to go to a completely different store to get the single item you needed *like we always do*? Haha. Er. We mean, ‘sorry.’”
And I’m sorry to the Aldi fans. I know you love it. Truly, I do. But man does that store irk me.
Let me get back to the point. Things are better. Good? Not really. She’s still in a ton of completely inexplicable pain. Do we have even tentative answers? Absolutely not. But better? Yes.
Today, besides going to Aldi for bananas (like a fool), I worked while keeping an ear out for mom’s needs, chatted with the caregivers, and borderline harassed whoever happened to be at the nurse’s station for test results.
At one point, apropos of nothing, mom said, “I wonder if I could still ride a bicycle.” The truthful answer to that was, “Are you insane? That is the worst idea I can possibly imagine,” but instead I said, “You used to be able to, for sure, mom. Let’s just not try it tonight.”
Our pinnacle achievement was getting out of her apartment to have supper in the dining room. I’m about as proud of that as I was of my dissertation defense.
Now she’s is propped up in her recliner, her friend Mary is visiting, and we are watching Law & Order at 14 million decibels. With my noise-cancelling earbuds it’s almost the level of that one Metallica concert I went to.
Yeah. OK. I bet some of you would probably like to hear about that, but it’s a story for another…century, really.
In the meantime, the temperature is slowly rising to Elderly Comfort Levels in the mid to high 90s.
It’s almost enough to make one wonder if Aldi is open. They at least keep their frozen aisle frozen, right? Possibly? Maybe there would be some soothing German music playing at low tones while families gather in Aisle 4 to discuss a dinner made of two cans of sardines, spicy Moroccan cheese and a half-priced jar of expiring marshmallow fluff.
Maybe it would be therapeutic.
But you know what? No. I refuse. BANANAS! Seriously? I’d rather die of heat stroke.
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