The car
We had to fill the tank this morning. $41 for 12 gallons! A year ago it was less than $30. And let's not think of what it was 20 or 30 years ago. But when it's $114 per barrel of oil how can we expect to fill our tanks cheaply? Of course, everything else will go the same way: UP! Forget flying anywhere. Summer vacation by driving a couple hundred miles? Forget it.
When I was a kid only one family in my neighborhood had a car. I don't remember ever being offered a ride in it but my friend and I were allowed to sit in it. It had shades on the back window which we delighted in raising and lowering. I don't remember anything else about the car but that windowshade! Of course, a car was not a vital need anyway. We lived in the city and had trolley cars and the subway to ride so there wasn't anything about having a car that intrigued me, certainly not to go from one place to another. Even our summer holiday in Atlantic City was reachable--by train!!
Ah, me. The good old days.
Uh-uh.
Everything is so negative. We had a good discussion yesterday (which he said he appreciated) about how he is always seeing the dark side of things: no joy in anything, nothing is fun anymore, can't travel, etc. Well, I can agree about the traveling--I'm willing to admit that I can't do lots of things anymore, just because the physical part of me is wearing out. But now it's getting to be mental. There's nothing I do that suits him (big ruckus at supermarket because when we're loading the car, he asks if I got his margarine and then said I never did anything for him, anything that he wanted I ignored, etc.) and I'm so fed up I don't want to say anything beyond 'yes' or 'no' to whatever he says.
He also HAD to go up to the doc to pursue the matter of his prescription and whether or not another doc had been in touch so that they could agree about his medications. HAD to do this as soon as he'd brought in the groceries, no stopping for a bite to eat, despite the fact that we'd passed up on lunch out, mostly because I couldn't get him to say if he wanted to stop.
It's all so pointless, living with this new man. Not that I shouldn't have seen some of it coming. He always was prickly about some things and I just learned how to work my way around them but now a 24/7 pattern of behavior that sets my teeth on edge is getting to be too much to handle.
But what do I do about it?
This New Life
I'm calling this my "new life" but it's not one I'm enjoying. The Way It Used To Be was far preferable to the way it is now. My mate of 50+ years is going down a road without me. He's still around physically but life for him (and me) since August has changed so radically that I can hardly remember The Way It Used To Be. Although the family doc hasn't come out and said as much it would seem that Alzheimer's symptoms have entered the picture. He forgets things, he asks me if he can eat this or do that, he sits and stares at nothing sometimes, he often reads only one or two pages of the paper. It's hard not to lose patience with him, when he suggests doing some grocery shopping but doesn't remember how full the freezer and fridge are.
Waking up every day is waking up to another life.
Ride Upon A Trolley
Before I rode a subway underground, I traveled around the city on trolley cars. I could ride all the way from my home in uppen Manhattan to the Battery, with a change at 125th Street. In the summer time the cars were open with metal screens at the end of the seats to keep you from falling out. It made for a very cool, comfortable ride but when a storm came up, you could get rather wet. Once my mother and I rode all the way up to Riverdale when a severe rainstorm came up and we didn't want to get off and get soaking wet. I guess I always was a street-watcher, as opposed to being a people-watcher and I enjoyed the street scenes along the way. The neighborhoods changed, from an almost rural, certainly a less built-up neighborhood than mid-town or downtown, to the bustle of the Times Square, 34th Street and Wall Street. At 125th Street where one changed cars, the stop was close to a Jewish kosher butcher company. Beyond it being quite large I don't recall anything special about it. At the end of the line, the Battery, we'd get off and walk around a bit before taking the next trolley all the way back home. Sometimes we'd get off at Astor Place and go to the Wanamaker Store. Surely this voyage took several hours but what a great way it was to spend the day.
More winter fun
There weren't any lakes that froze over in the winter and the rivers surrounding Manhattan wouldn't have been suitable for ice-skating anyway so we kids turned to a tennis court that flooded their courts for ice-skating. So many of us turned out for an afternoon or evening of fun on the ice. The waltz king's Tales of the Vienna Woods always brings these times to mind. I don't recall how long we would skate but there was nothing greater than going round and round the courts with friends. How cold was it? I don't know but whatever it was it was glorious!
Just walking through the neighboring woods was fun as the snow piled in drifts just made for making snow-angels. Places that, in summer, were picnic grounds were now covered in snow, often more than inches deep.
Once Upon A Time A Long Time Ago
So, this sounds kind of like The Wizard of Oz or Star Trek, eh? Well, not quite. But as I look back on eighty years, yes, that's right, eighty years of living I'm surprised and sometimes appalled by the changes in all of life around me--my personal self included, perhaps most of all. I'm so far removed, physically, from the world I thought I'd never miss that sometimes I can't quite figure out how it all happened. Of course, eighty years does encompass quite a bit of living and I can't be sure I've remembered every single thing. But there are lots of memories that are as clear and vivid as if they happened just yesterday. Naturally, they say this about us senior citizens, that we have a better long-term memory than short-term, that we can recall the long-ago days but forget what we had for breakfast.
My recent years, the twenty since retiring, are just as clear as the others. But there's something about those older ones, which are--what? happier? Well, maybe not as there's a mixture of the two any way you look at it. No matter. I prefer the older ones which, in retrospect, do seem happier. It's the last twenty that are less than satisfying.
I often thought my parents had lived through wonderful changes in their lifetimes: radio, movies, airplanes, you name it. But hasn't that taken place in my lifetime, too? Television, space walks and stations, cell phones--there's so much more about to happen.
What was so appealing about those times, a long time ago?
Winter, for one. The first snowfall meant getting out the sled, an American Flyer. I was a city child, big city--New York to be exact. You think snow in the Big Apple wasn't a great thing seventy years ago? I lived in the upper reaches of Manhattan where there were lots of hills to ride a sled down and very little traffic to interfere with the local kids' fun. Snake Hill--not its proper name but one we gave it because it snaked down a curving hill, onto a city street, even across the trolley tracks, when the snowfall was a good one--was perfect, a ride that could give you thrills and chills. A long ride, a lot to drag the sled back up and do it all over again. The other side of this street ride were woodsy areas, one which had a running-rail fence at the bottom. I was daring enough to do it, remembering to keep my head down so as to clear the lowest rail on the fence. But one time a friend tried it and didn't get her head down--she went home crying with a bump on her forehead. And I got blamed for leading her astray!!
When the snow was really deep, we climbed atop a shed that normally housed paraphernalia for the baseball fields and pretended we were exploring the Arctic regions as the snow covering the ball fields stretched into the distance (a great distance to our young eyes).
And how great to go home as dusk fell to hot chocolate and dinner with Mom and Dad.
