Babci: Taking the Walker to the Packie.

This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while.  Not sure why I didn’t post it sooner.

I have so many pent up stories in my head I don’t know where to begin. As a quick update, Babci is living with us. Her house is for sale, we’ve had one offer on it but it fell through and we’re waiting to get it sold before we move the rest of her stuff in.

She is sleeping upstairs in a spare room until her first floor bedroom is done but that requires major changes like moving stairs to access the “gimp room” as we call it. The gimp room is a windowless storage room you can only access from the garage, but it would make a perfect bedroom if you could access it from the back apartment and put in windows.  Right now, it’s the smelliest room in the house due to lots of things living there and I think the cows lived there at one point too. It has a very barny, musky smell but I digress. A house post may come at some point but I still haven’t figured out how to fix the glitchy issue I’m having with my captions not aligning under my photos.

It’s been a while since I told a Babci story.  With our long winter, she has been going a little stir crazy and doing stupid things.  Back in March, when it was 10 degrees out on a Saturday night, I got a call from one of my neighbors.  She’s like..”Um, I just saw your mom walking down the middle of the road in her walker and it’s dark and I almost hit her. Do you want me to get her?”  “No, I’ll get her.”   So, I figured she wanted to go to the store for something. Why, at 8 at night, she felt the urgent need to go to the corner store, when I had just taken her shopping that day, I don’t know.  I also knew she was getting cabin fever, so that very day, I bought her a dozen baby chicks to keep her occupied.  So, I get in the car and am like..what the hell, and at the same time thinking..at least if she lived with us, the fire and police station are on the same street.  If she keeled over, someone would be more likely to see her on our new road.

I first stop at the corner store (us New Englanders call corner stores that sell alcohol “the Packie”, short for the Package Store). “Have you seen an old lady with a walker?”  “Yup, but it was like 20 minutes ago.”   The store takes my mom about an hour to walk to, so sometimes she goes to the biker bar across the street from it and calls a cab.  I’ve never had her do this in the winter though…or at night.  I walk into the bar with my ski clothes still on. Even though I was a biker babe 20 years ago, I look grossely out of place.  “Did a little old lady with a walker come in here?”  No.  Everyone’s looking at me, like, what are you doing in our bar, but luckily, the most tattoed patron sitting at the bar said he saw her walking down the street about 10 minutes ago.  I thank him and leave.  I find Babci.  She is moving at a snail’s pace.  She’s got a 6 pack of Heineken in the little basket that hangs off the front of her walker.

What the hell are you doing?  “I needed exercise.”  “At Night, in the Cold, In the middle of the street?”  Get in. She’s mad that she’s been found out.   “I’m fine. Nothing was going to happen.”   And that’s the thing with Babci (and a trait I also inherited).  She still feels invincible even though she has a heart condition.  She never thinks about the worst case, but the best case.   Sure, go for a walk and get some exercise, but do it during the day when people can see you if something happens.  Turns out she started her walk when it was still daylight but it took her a lot longer than anticipated to get there with her shortness of breath.

So..even though we are spending a fortune fixing this 2 family, I’m SO glad she’s living with us now, so her antics will be a little more closely monitored.  There is also lots to do here but that’s a whole other set of posts.

So, with every Babci story, I try to get to the heart of why/how she chooses to do something.  I think I understand why sometimes she fails to see the risks of doing certain things. If she only thought about the worst case scenario all the time, her already dreary life would have been unbearable.  When you grow up in a war torn country, the worst case is death and/or starvation.  You can’t go there mentally or it would destroy you. Hope is what keeps people going in the most dire of circumstances.  She also would have never come to America in her late 30’s.  The hope of a better life by taking a leap of faith was the way she ended up where she is today…and although my dad wasn’t all he was cracked up to be, at least she got me out of it, which probably was worth all the suffering after all.

So that’s a quick Babci Story for the week.