His kiss is sweeter than an apple pie

[austin_dern]

My father's been in the rehab clinic for a couple of days now. He's been honestly thrilled with them, apart from the separation from home, and thinks that the physical therapy he's been getting is doing a world of good. He also insists part of his motivation here is that my sister-in-law's father had a stroke a couple years ago, and relatively rushed through rehab, and hasn't been the same since. The circumstances are different, certainly, but my father felt scared, I think, by the experience and he's been diligently doing all the exercises they tell him to, at least to hear him tell it. Nobody seems to mind.

The clinic is about a half-hour away from home, since everything we might go to is about a half-hour away from home, including the Wawa just down the street. There's some spatial distortion at work here and I'm sure it's tied to how there's no cell phone service. It's more or less east, so I'd actually be in a good spot from there to swing over to the Silverball Museum, except that it's usually too late in the day for that. He's been busy at fair intervals from about 9 am through 3 or 4 pm, pushing me to coming over after that, and with visiting hours ending at 8 pm, well, the Silverball Museum isn't closed that early, but I wouldn't want to spend a couple hours there at the loss of time with bunny_hugger or other people online after that.

Sunday, though, my mother went up around lunchtime and saw that my father's meal of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and side salad was underwhelming. The meat loaf was there and loafy enough, but they forgot the potatoes and the side salad was reduced to a couple cherry tomatoes because they're cutting back on leafy greens. So she packed a tub of pasta left over from Sunday night, as well as an orange our neighbors-who-went-to-Florida sent up, and I snuck that in just enough ahead of his dinner that he was able to finish it and hide the evidence. Well, we hid the evidence apart from the rush of blood sugar following the orange. They came to test his blood sugar just after he'd finished eating and phoned my mother to thank her for it. The reading came out high, somewhere around 217,785 or so. He fessed up to it so as to avoid anyone getting too anxious.

While my mother hasn't changed in her belief that the rehab is just the clinic bilking insurance for the cost, she does seem to be more accepting of it. And I may be seeing more of a romantic, kids-getting-away-with-something, in the sneaking of the pasta and orange in than was meant, but I feel like it's a sweet and touching little moment.

Trivia: Mark Twain's short story ``Sold To Satan'' has the presented devil made of radium. Source: The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean. (If a copy of the story I found online is accurate, his skin was polonium, but the rest, radium.)

Currently Reading: A People's History Of World War II, Editor Marc Favreau.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Salads really don't get enough respect. Perhaps the cook studied their craft at a Little Chef in the UK? I'm sure I've had a similar salad there, back in the day.

And even when there are good salad ingredients, so often, especially in the US, it'll be drowned in a dressing made of concentrated lard and imitation glitter, rendering it about as nutritious as an oil spill, albeit whiter.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

He had been getting better salads --- I saw at least one of them --- but most of the basic salad ingredients were ruled out over the Vitamin K bits, and they were probably at a loss for what to do.