LARGETONY Blog

I have sort of a sweet story to tell tonight. Every day when I get home from work I take a shower and afterwards I sometimes still have little flecks of paint in the creases of my hands or fingernails. So, then I’ll give my hands a good scrubbing at the sink and take time to scrape away the remaining paint and such.

So, this evening, I had done my shower and and put on some fresh clothes and I saw I still had some paint on me. So I went back in the bathroom and spent some time scrubbing. After a little bit, my grandmother came shuffling by and she seemed very concerned. Now she suffers from dementia at times and she isn’t always in the same place, so lord knows what she was thinking about. Anyway, she looks at me like I’m a sick child or something and says, ‘Anthony, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?” When she called me Anthony I knew something was up because that is what she called my grandfather (who I was name after). There have been several occasions where she has thought I was him. I guess its an easy jump to make when you’re 87 years old. They lived in the same house we are now in, and grandaddy and me have similar features.

So, I told her nothing was wrong. I just had some paint on my hands. So she looked at my hands, then took them and said, “Oh, my….you sit down.” I don’t know what she was seeing. She never said. So I put the lid down on the toilet and sat down with my hands over the sink. Then she took my hands and washed them.

It was sort of a weird picture. I have pretty big strong hands, so it was funny to watch her little frail wrinkled up hands working over every inch of mine. She had a look on her face like she was on a mission. Her total concentration was on my hands.

Now, I can’t say she got all the paint off. Whatever her goal was with my hands, it wasn’t about removing paint. I wanted to ask her what she was doing, but I was afraid she would just get confused and embarressed. After she finished, she took both my hands and laid them on a towel, then wrapped the towel around them and sort of patted them dry. Then she opened the towel and then, one hand at a time, rubbed lotion into them, almost massaging my hands. She said,”I’m worried Anthony, you’re working too hard. You can’t go on like this forever.” I guess she was trying to massage my hands, but as weak as hers are, I really couldn’t feel it.

When she finished with the lotion, she wrapped my hands in the towel again and said “That ought to be better.” Then she led me by my towel-wrapped hands into the kitchen and sat me down and started like she was going to start dinner.

Now, my grandmother still cooks sometimes, but she’s too weak to handle the skillets and larger pots and pans. I can’t get her to use the more modern lightweight stuff. So she went for a cast-iron skillet. I just wiped the excess lotion off my hands (she didn’t get it all) and said, “Granny, let me get that for you”. She said OK and I put the skillet on the stove.

I asked her what was for dinner, and she said “Whatever you want. I’m not fussy.” She was back in 2004 again and thought I was cooking. So I did.

I put back the skillet and threw some chicken breasts in the oven, and about halfway through added some red potatoes and green beans. Nothing special. She’s not fussy.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2004 at 2:52 am and is filed under granny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.