By Jean Riva

Today was get-out-of-the-house day. We’ve been snow bound. Oh, not really but it makes a better story than saying we had no place to go since Friday. Today was different. We had a mission. We had to get haircuts and lunch and visit the bookstore before they were tempted to take us off their speed dialer.

After our haircuts, we were in Cracker Barrel waiting for our chicken fried steak and biscuits when over the sound system came a guy vocalizing, “I’ve got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle as I go ridin’ merrily along and they sing, oh, aren’t you glad you’re single and that song ain’t so very far from wrong.”

“Don,” I asked my husband, “Is that Bill Wills singing?”

“Late, late night. Girl, girl, boy,” he answered.

“Okay, what does that mean on the Planet Aphasia?” I thought. Will someone tell me why it takes fifteen minutes to translate something like that? But it did finally come to me. Don’s enigmatic reply was telling me that the cowboy singing was Tex Ritter. It’s really quite clever how my husband can find ways to communicate with so few words at his disposal. 3’s Company comes on TV late at night and John Ritter (plus two girls) starred in the show, and John was the son of Tex Ritter. This is what it’s like living with aphasia; my husband speaks in aphasic tongue and I translate it into earth English. It’s daily, mental gymnastics.

After we got our coats on to leave Cracker Barrel, Don did one of his famous ‘roll ups’ to our restaurant mates’ table. “Handicapped. Six---no. Five---no. Four! Vegetable,” he said as an introduction. I quickly translated: “My husband had a stroke four and a half years ago and we were told that he’d be nothing more than a vegetable.”

“You sure fooled them,” the woman beamed and Don beamed right back at her.

Out in the parking lot, I got ready to load Don up and move him out. I peered across the street, judging the distance to our next stop to be less than a city block. I saw the bungee cords in the back of the Blazer and not for the first time I speculated that I could hook them up to Don’s wheelchair (with him still inside) and just pull him along behind the car. This would save me a lot of work if I could do without a few chair-to-car and car-to-chair transfers. But it’s January and the wind chill was a serious factor so I decided to put that experiment off to warmer weather.

On the way across the street Don was getting sleepy and I thought, “Oh, boy, I get a vacation!” So, I booked a suite at Linens & Things and left my man in the car while I went inside to shop. I was having a good time, too, pushing a cart and doing my best imitation of a Stepford Wife. I wasn’t wearing the classic sun dress, luminous lipstick or spiked heels but I did have an imaginary book on my head so my posture was perfect. As I lusted over a stainless steel toilet brush holder a song from long ago came over the sound system. It could have been Dianna Ross and the Supremes crooning, “Baby, baby, where did our love go wrong? Baby, baby, don’t leave me alone.” That’s when I remembered poor Don out in the car.

“Oh my gosh,” I thought, “I’ve been here so long that the floor boards on our three year old Blazer have probably rusted through and he’s gotten over come by exhaust fumes!” I rushed to the cashier and wrote her a check. The date I put down was two days behind and I wondered how many days I’d have to forget before I’d cross over from ‘flakey’ to ‘senile.’ She asked for my driver’s license, I mistakenly handed her Don’s picture ID. The girl looked at me then down at the card, studying it carefully. Quickly I pulled the right card out of my wallet before she could tell me that I looked better with the beard and the mustache.

The bookstore was our next stop and by the time we were ready to go home from there, I was so tired that thoughts of bungee cords and thrill-riding Don all the way home seemed pretty darned do-able.
 

Jean is Message Board Administrator for The Stroke Network