Me & Sal, & the Joy of Aging

Cecilia Mavrow

Description

"Me & Sal & the Joy of Aging" is a fiction about Deedee and her neighbour Sal in their later years. Along with the unexpected assaults of old age that Deedee has noted in her notebooks, Sally's 45 year old guitar-playing son moved back in with 75 year old Sally. Almost five years later he doesn't show any signs of leaving - much to Sal's distress.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Relations familiales
• Humor

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 06 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780987928344
• Langue: English

Extrait

Me & Sal,
and the Joy of Aging
 
(from Deedee’s notebooks)
 
fiction
by
 
Cecilia Mavrow
This is a work of fiction.
 
Copyright © 2018 Cecilia Mavrow.
All rights reserved
Revised edition © 2020 Cecilia Mavrow
 
 
Keywords: fiction, humour, aging
Print edition: ISBN 978-0-9879283-4-4
eBook edition: ISBN 978-0-9879283-5-1
Published in eBook format by Ruksak Books
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
Ruksak Books
Delta BC
[e-mail]
1.
Almost 5 years ago, there was a knock on Sally’s front door.
“Hello there,” she said.
“I’m back,” her son answered not looking at her as he tugged a huge duffle bag through the open door into the house, his guitar banging on his back and a little black amplifier box in his other hand. She looked past him and saw the Uber driver pulling two boxes out of the trunk of the car parked at the curb.
She knew her life was taking one of those abrupt and unexpected shifts in direction as the driver, balancing one of the boxes that was securely taped with duct tape, edged past her into the house.
Sal had/has 2 great kids, and two out of three is pretty good, unlike her 3 marriages, which 2 out of 3 were duds. This son come to visit was #3 of her children.
Me & Sal live next door to each other in nifty little patio homes and we have become sisters, cherished chosen sisters. I’m older than Sal and I never had a younger sister and I want to be a good older sister unlike some older sisters. Over the fence, her life was taking on a nice harmony until The Son arrived.
After the arrival she was no longer collecting the tuft of soft grey hair from her hairbrush to put out for the birds to help them make their nests – “Feel that; it is so nice and soft. Just great for the nest for the bird babies,” she told me. Life became enmeshed in the needs and behaviors of the generation that came after ours. Of course, Sally thought it would be a temporary arrangement and he would shortly get on with his life. But The Son didn’t show any signs of leaving. To her increasing dismay, she realized his visit might not be temporary when she noticed he wrote on his tax form that his occupation was “stay-at-home-son.”
He settled into the second bedroom and spread himself out around the house like faded black algae or kudzu draped around the furniture. Months passed and he played guitar and checked out guitar gear on her old computer that she has never learned to use. It was one of those changes one has in later life that without warning hits you like a full-faced slap.
She said to me, “Give me 5 minutes to talk to those parents bemoaning the empty nest, and I’ll tell them about the chopper guys, the wrestlers, the monster truckers and the gas monkeys.”
Should a 75 year old woman really know the bio of the Edge – and find out Vince McMahon is supposedly a human being? She says every time she brings up her DVR list to find something to watch on TV, she finds hours of these shows of fighting punch artists including the ultimate fighting maniacs, UFC – UFC on Sally’s DVR - greasy naked body contact, grabbing legs & heads, slipping and sliding around.
The Stay-at-home says he is going to start a UFC for musicians and his fight name is going to be Gustaf the Mahler.
Besides the UFC maniacs, there are the other deluded TV people – mostly men - spending all their money to start a restaurant or bar or driving trucks in South America or digging for gold in crazy remote places - ripping up the land, ripping off the natives and ripping off their impoverished mothers for the money to do these nutty ventures.
It is all too much for Sal’s delicate sensibilities. She has to scroll down through 2 screens to get to Last Tango in Halifax.
Before the Stay-at-home came back we weren’t in touch with the daily or weekly and often monthly lives of our family members. We had more in common with the seniors we meet at the senior’s center and the friendships we form with the like-minded retirees. And I guess we haven’t noticed how the younger people’s lives evolved since they left home.
But I have since noticed that the dress code for the Stay-at-home is ripped jeans and bedhead with his guitar slung over a faded black T-shirt, and this seems to be the prevailing style of most of the under 45s – without the guitar. The son distinguishes himself by not wearing logos on his T-shirt. He has his principles.
We are all grownups, but he still calls me Mrs. Potts even after I have told him repeatedly to call me Deanna or Deedee. “I don’t know you well enough,” he says. It has been almost five years and it is still Mrs. Potts. I suppose if he wants to be a chump about it, that’s his business.
I’ve been going through my notebooks and noticing that I have a lot of entries about him over there with Sally over the years since he arrived.
Soon after he moved in, he told me and Sal about one of his friends who was invited to a wedding, and the groom was known for his moustache, so all the guests – both men & women – decided to wear moustaches. Sal’s son commented, “Good thing he wasn’t known for his chest hair.”
Two years ago, he switched to heavy metal on the guitar, a little late coming in the music world, but he isn’t particularly concerned about the ongoing evolution of music trends. At first, Sally said, it was a welcome change from the never-ending Stairway to Heaven. Then he kept trying to get the perfect sound out of each note, over and over again. He said he was “cracking the Van Halen code.” But now the tuneless loud brang-brang-brang of the Metal is getting her down.
Sally is a little dickey-bird of a woman. She has long natural fingernails that she paints deep red. I think she could take on a raccoon with those talons and the raccoon would regret it. She’s got silver and gold streaky hair in a jumble of curls. She’s no hippie, just an original. She’s fun to look at and fun to be with, but she gets overwhelmed with her son’s Wild Man activities, and some of the twinkle is fading in those nice brown eyes.
One day last fall I was lured outside by hundreds of geese flying over honking across the sky heading south in undulating formations. I love the geese flying over and the whistle of the Northern Flicker that show up with the Oregon Juncos that bring a magical tradition back to fall every year. When the geese flew out of sight, I saw The Son out in the yard breaking cereal boxes down for recycling; he eats a lot of cereal straight out of the box. I asked him if he ever gets in touch with his higher self.
“I’m too busy talking to my inner child,” he replied.
Sally tells me that The Son feeds pet spiders outside his room. He got a wasp for his favorite Spider Boy and went to great lengths to remove the stinger so Spider Boy wouldn’t get hurt.
He doesn’t believe in toothpaste – “it’s chemistry…”
I asked her how he cannot believe in toothpaste – it isn’t like a political ideology. Consequently, she says his breath smells like unhealthy feet.
One time, Sally found the Stay-at-home sitting vacantly in a sofa chair looking in a hand mirror.
“Can’t find your toothbrush?” she asked.
“I’m looking for a long eyebrow to pluck.”
If she wants to hide money, she just puts it in the mop cupboard.
But, let it be said, and I’m saying it, he does give us something to talk about over tea. We can’t remember what we talked about in our dull little lives before The Son moved back home. I do have to be careful, however, because Sally isn’t happy with me when I say something derogatory about him, starting out with, “Your boy, Dennis,…” Well it’s okay if she crabs about him, but a mother doesn’t want anyone putting down her kid so I am very careful not to slag the man – out loud.
Sal says she very nearly called him Wesley, a name that would fit a successful entrepreneur in the world, but she always liked the name Dennis. Wesley certainly wouldn’t suit this 40-something person, hardly capturing the essential nature of the man. It would be hard to find a name that did fit, as his essential nature is hard to find – certainly Dennis is not fitting – maybe just The Son.
And what else have I got here in these notes?
Oh, yes. Last summer he got stung by a wasp.
I was sitting in Sal’s little family room where we were having a cup of tea. Sal’s rooms are painted a pale Wedgewood Blue with an off-white trim. Very cool. I bought my patio home when it was being built twenty years ago, and I had the walls done in a pale muted not-quite yellow and all the trim left in a light oak, both the door frames and the window frames. It is quite cheerful and cottagey. You would expect to find an old-fashioned quilt on the bed and a rocking chair in the living room, but you don’t. You just find the wood trims and solid wood doors. When we want cheery, we visit in my place and when we want cool, we meet at Sal’s. Anyway, when we were being cool sitting there, The Son came running into the house yelling for Sally.
“I got stung on the face by a wasp – on the FACE!”
Well, hello, he was standing in front of the shed looking a foot and a half up at a wasp’s nest -- that he tried poking with a stick to see if there were any wasps in it.
“I got stung - on the FACE.”
He says winter is the Smirnoff months, definitely a Russian season.
Sally asks me, what is a son who doesn’t have a job?
Apparently some acceptable answers are a bum with a bald spot on the back of his head a constant companion a missed opportunity the product of your husband’s gene pool.
2.
One of the things you do as a senior is notice everything that happens on the block. We have a nice variety in the neighborhood to keep on eye on. One couple that lives across the street from both our patio homes is a black 70s something couple. The husband, Blair, is often outside working on something and we see him when we go for our evening walk, either the two of us together or on our own. Blair is big, beautiful, and a lovely color of black – he is our very own Morgan Freeman. We al