Hold the phone....

Another holiday has come and gone... there was no Christmas tree at our house again this year. Actually there was no Christmas. No baking, no wrapping of presents, no holiday season.

Oh, no one is a grumpy old 'I hate the holidaze' person, it's just very different when the kids are all grown up and no one gets excited for Christmas anymore. Eric and I haven't exchanged gifts for any occasion for years and years. And the children who live here aren't children at all. There's no magic.

Of course I get my kid fix and see a lot of magic in the eyes (and the really loud voices and huge amounts of enthusiasm) of my work kids. We made a ton of crafty things for the season, would have made four or five more projects if I hadn't gotten sick at a crucial time. Dammit. The kids love making things. I love watching them make things. It's messy, but it's fun.

I actually forgot to call my parents, hadn't really considered that it was Christmas and even though *I* don't care about the holiday, they do. (I talk to my mom nearly every evening via messenger or text, by the way. And my brothers keep me updated with whatever's going on, too. So we don't just communicate on Christmas. In case you were wondering.)

So Mom called me about 9 on Christmas night.
We chatted for a few minutes. A voice conversation with either one of them is humorous in a 'my family is really odd' kind of way.

It's usually Mom on the phone while Dad bugs her from the background. He talks over her (ha, does that in person, too) and has something to say about all our conversational topics. She listens to him at the same time, but of course can't focus on what we're saying to each other, so there's a lot of, 'What? What??' from her. I start to get aggravated after a few minutes of it and I'm ashamed to say, impatient, too. Our communication isn't helped by the fact that she's usually not wearing her hearing aids. She doesn't use them around Dad, it's easier to ignore his grumpy rambling if she can't hear him do it.

So we talked about fifteen minutes, then her voice changed and she adopted this weird, diffident tone that sort of slides off into the land of baby talk (she can't just ask me in a regular voice) "Wudjoo like tuhtalktoyer day-ad?"

She doesn't speak that way in regular conversation, and most of the time it just sort of makes me laugh. It has its funny side. She does this every damn time.

I did want to talk to him, although it's sometimes difficult.
He's always been, um, grumpy and adversarial.

But now his mind wanders and he doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes.

He had surgery almost three years ago and the not necessarily competent medical staff and doctors put my 80 year old father under general anesthesia not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES in less than a month. First they did surgery to remove his gall bladder, but when they got him all sliced open, the doctor said, "Oh gee, this is too complicated for me, close things up, we're going to have to bring in a different doctor tomorrow."

That's what they did. And the next day, they filled him full of the same drugs, cut him open again and took out his gall bladder and some other stuff that was all entwined with ducts and other tissue.

For the next 8 days he was in the hospital and nothing like himself. Combative and confused. He was so angry, too. At everyone.

He told me on the phone that the two story rural hospital had 'an entire floor' for their legal staff. "Up on the 10th floor," he said, "A bunch of goddamn lawyers who won't let me out." He insisted to his caregivers that "President Trump had personally assured him," that he could go home. He swore at them and called them names and in at least one case, told them he hated them. And although it's not like my dad to behave badly in public or to be mean to people who are trying to help, he told at least one of them to fuck off. It was stressful for him and because it was during the height of the pandemic, he was alone in the hospital. Mom wasn't even allowed to see him.

Two weeks later, they had to take out some drain or something and did the anesthesia AGAIN. This did not improve his mental condition.

I'm actually surprised that he recovered as well as he has. He's still not back to the same person, I doubt he will ever be. But he acknowledges that all that stuff really wrecked him for a time. Hasn't improved his impression of the medical profession, either.

So my mom gave him the phone.

Things started out okay, we discussed the gift cards he sent us from Amazon. I had told him several times over the last couple months that there was no need to send anything for me or for Eric, as we have everything we could possibly want or need.

He sent us gift cards anyway. I thanked him. He sent a card for Lyssa and Mason, too. And one went to Matt and Amy. He sent actual plastic cards via Amazon. They came in cute little gift boxes the day before Christmas. I don't think he quite understands the idea of online gift cards, but that's okay.

It was a very sweet gesture, and my thanks were sincere.

He was doing fine during our talk, then he suddenly commented on Bill Stevens. "That son of a bitch!" he pronounced. "I can't stand that bastard!"

Bill made a comment that pissed Dad off back in 1971, the year we moved to the town where my parents still live. I don't know what he said, but Dad is still angry about it 50 years later.

That's a trait I share with my dad, by the way.

Show me you're an asshole just one time and no matter what happens after that, I will continue to carry a grudge. Oh, I can be civil, but I will never trust you again or believe anything you say. And if someone brings up your name, I will be pissed off at you all over again.

Bill died in 2003, I think. Possibly 2004.
But Dad's mad at him now.

He went on to talk about a more recent grievance, his dentist made him angry about eight years ago. He ran into my parents downtown,  made some kind of smart remark, which some other guy laughed at and my dad decided it was the dentist 'making fun of him because he's old' and has never gotten over it.

I asked him, "Dad, wasn't that several years ago?" and he said no. "It was just last week," he told me. "They pick on old people here. They make fun of us."

He rambled from topic to topic, none of them related, none of them very coherent, until at last he handed the phone back to Mom. Then he hollered addendums and additions to everything else we had to say until I was finally able to get off the phone.

I know they're getting old.
I know I will be sad when they're gone.
It will be my turn to be the curmudgeon before I know it. I'm already heading down that path, if I had to be honest.

Someone should probably take my phone away before I reach the actual state.