by Julie Prince
The scooter sat idle for two weeks as I emptied closets, took pictures off walls, and folded dishes into bubble wrap. Deciding what should go and what to save, I was working mightily to keep the remembrance pile from growing larger than the “to go” pile. The battery had died, and I couldn't figure out where the charger plugged in, so I couldn't move it. While it remained in the far corner of the bedroom at the back of the apartment, I still felt I was working around it wherever I was. I walked around it, reached across it, tripped over it.
It was always, somehow, right in front of me.
Dad had polio as a child, which paralyzed his right leg from the knee down. He had surgeries and recoveries throughout his teens and twenties, but he was hale and hearty otherwise, not to mention handsome and smart, so while one couldn't say that Polio didn't affect his young adult life at all, one could say that he adapted plenty well. Dad was limited in speed, but limited in little else.
Dad could go to work in the city. He could build furniture, mow a lawn, climb a ladder, and swim in the ocean better than any other dad I knew. He didn't drive; he couldn't flex his ankle to control the foot pedals. He could have had a car rigged to accommodate his special needs. But, “Mom drives,” he reasoned, and "I have no desire to go anywhere without your mother, anyway."
Dad's lower right leg was missing muscle. It was spindly and lifeless. It was compensated for by his left leg, the leg of a football tackle, muscled from all the extra work it had to do to make up for the sick right one. His left heel was hard like a billiard ball.
When he reached his fifties, that good left knee started to cause him trouble. Without wasting time, he went to the orthopedist and straight into physical therapy. He'd sit on the kitchen counter every afternoon to do his exercises, the lifts and the flexes.
"This is the only leg I have," Dad said. "If I lose this one, I'm sunk.”
He started to use a cane on occasion. He downplayed it, and indeed only took it out once in a while at first, on a longish walk or if the terrain was uneven. "It's just a precaution,” he would say. “I don't catch my balance as quickly as I used to.”
Soon enough though, he was using it all the time. “So what?” I told myself. “Lots of dads use canes. And grandpas too. Even more grandpas use canes, and Dad's a grandpa now.”
Then there was the surreal and disorienting period of Dad's life, of all our lives. Mom was diagnosed. There was surgery, a temporary "recovery," and a few blessed good months before the ultimate recurrence and of course, the ultimate conclusion.
Dad entered that chapter with a cane, and came out of it with a walker. And a decidedly slower step.
We moved him near us in the city. We had to. He couldn't live in the country without a car. There was no car rigged for him to drive, and in any event, he was too old to start learning. And he had never wanted to go anywhere without Mom, anyway.
Now, I would have to do.
And after a spell, it was OK.
There was nothing else for it to be but OK.
“My knee's not working anymore,” Dad announced one summer morning. Abruptly and definitively, as was his wont.
“Huh, Dad? What do you mean? Your knee is acting up?” I looked down at it.
“No, not that one. The other one.”
The left knee.
The good knee.
"I'm calling the doctor right now, Dad, he'll refer us to an orthopedist, and we'll…"
"No. No. Let's not," he said.
"What? What do you mean? You can barely walk. You can't go on like this, we have to see what can be done to…"
"There's nothing to do," Dad said. "I'll just do my best with it. I consider myself damn lucky my knee has taken me this far." I couldn't convince him otherwise. He wouldn't listen. No, actually no…he did listen. Dad would always listen.
There was just no convincing him.
The good leg could still prop up Dad's weight, if he planted it carefully. He established a new rhythm with his walker, and an even slower pace.
Mom had always liked those Scooter Store commercials on TV. Low-budget; straight-forward. The always-earnest owner of the Scooter Store was featured. “He looks honest,” she'd say. “And it looks like a good product.” Mom always had a soft spot for the guys who hawked their own goods. She liked Frank Perdue, and she liked that Dave Thomas on the Wendy's commercials, too.
It didn't take a Scooter Store commercial to make me think of Mom, but the next time I saw one I thought of her words. I suggested it to Dad. A scooter.
“A scooter?? Don't be ridiculous. Do you expect me to go tearing around town on a scooter like some kid??”
“SIGH. No Dad, a mobility scooter. You know, to go down the block, to go to the store, to go….wherever you want to.”
I called the local rep. He came and had Dad try out all the models in his apartment and up and down the hallway. Dad liked them. We selected the scooter in short order…the right model, the right seat, the right payment plan (“I'll just pay for it now and be done with it.”) Ten-year-old Zack took a salesman-sanctioned run up and down the sidewalk in front of the building. Within a few days the brand-spanking new scooter arrived. Bright red, with the deluxe padded seat and arm rests. Perfect.
Perfect. And there it sat, in Dad's living room. We were all a little stand-offish at first. Actually, we were all a little stand-offish for a few weeks. Dad wasn't sure he'd be able to maneuver it properly. I wasn't so sure I would be able to take it apart and put it back together as easily as they did on TV and as I did with the salesman. It just sat there, all pretty.
“Oh, let's just take Dad somewhere for a couple of days with the scooter so we can get used to it, what's the big deal?” my sister Kat demanded with the certainty and confidence afforded to someone who addressed these issues from afar, only occasionally, and totally at her will. But it was a good idea. We went down to Cape May. It was the off-season. It was easy to get rooms, and easy to get around. No crowds to dodge on the street or in shops or restaurants. We all got to know the god damned contraption, this thing that we'd brought into our lives.
It mostly came in handy when Dad came to visit us, and when I took him to the supermarket.
I'd learned how to take it apart and put it back together with a minimum of fuss. It was pretty heavy, even in its parts, but I could handle it, perfecting a “snatch” maneuver, as I liked to think of it, common to weightlifting. Picking up that heavy base and tossing it into the back of my van all in one semi-graceful move, and landing it in there with a thump that would always cause my dad to grunt just a little bit. “Careful,” he'd mumble.
“Dad,” I'd say. “There are two options with the scooter, me throwing it in there, or you staying home.”
Max the Cat especially enjoyed Dad's visits to our apartment, and would always be the first one to greet him when he rolled through the door for an evening of General Tso's chicken and Jeopardy! Max would rush under Dad's feet to jump into the scooter seat as soon as Dad vacated it. Max liked to luxuriate for a couple of minutes. “Damn cat's life's mission is to trip me up,” Dad would grumble, but once he made his way to the sofa, he would call out to Max, and Max would go and sit in his lap.
The scooter transformed both our lives, though there were times when I wanted nothing more than Dad's permission to just let me go to the store for him. To not have to do the
“scooter thing—the in and the out, and the in-again and the out-again—l required in taking Dad on any simple errand. To not have to calm his muttered cursing and embarrassed flustering when the scooter, in the course of constant stopping and starting, would beep, beep, beep, instead of move forward. A jiggle or two of the key would remedy it, but Dad hated that. To not have to worry if he darted off ahead of me in the parking lot, ignoring my concerns that a harried mother of three, backing out her mini SUV out of her parking space might not see an old guy in a hat puttering by behind her.
But even the rain or snow had to be pretty bad to keep Dad from going. Never mind my occasional pleas.
“No,” he'd say. “It's important I get this shopping done right.” Even though he had the same shopping list every week, a list that only varied in the most minor of ways. It might, for instance, call for one carton of orange juice instead of two, or four bags of Snickers fun size (“not the minis!”) instead of three. We might still be “OK” on the Preparation H wipes, and not have to pick up any of those at all.
The basket. I had to make sure to always put the basket on the scooter. Dad never wanted to go anywhere without the basket, though as the hooks bent it became harder and harder to attach to the scooter handles. I tried to “conveniently” forget it sometimes. But even if we were traveling just down the block, Dad would insist on his basket. He also insisted on keeping his winter gloves in it throughout the year. I thought it made him appear the tiniest bit demented, at least between the months of May and September, but Dad never cared. “The gloves raise the bottom of the basket,” he explained. “If I have to reach down in there to get something out, I don't have to reach quite as far.” As if he were reaching down into some great abyss.
I tried to emphasize “quality” over “quantity” in our get-togethers. “Dad, wouldn't you rather spend the time we have today visiting with the kids, than dodging old ladies and their shopping carts in the supermarket? Let me drop you at our apartment, and I can do your humdrum errands for you.”
I couldn't understand why he never seemed to go along with the concept.
I wasn't thinking hard enough.
“I can't live here anymore,” Dad announced to me in his apartment one day. Suddenly and definitively, as was his wont.. “I'm very tired.”
“What? Tired? You're not feeling well, Dad?? You want to go to the doctor? Are we overdue for a check up?”
Why was I always thinking doctors had all the answers?
“No, I don't want to go to the doctor, I'm not sick. It's just all I can do to get out of bed in the morning. I'm just tired and I don't think I can do it here much longer. That's all.”
That's all.
Kat came over, and the three of us discussed the option of a housekeeper, or even a health aide. But he didn't want anybody in his home. “It doesn't have to be a live-in person, Dad. It can be someone who comes in for a few hours a day to help you. But he wasn't comfortable with the idea of someone having to cook for him and clean up after him or help him in the bathroom. “I think I should move into a nursing home.”
He sat there on his red scooter, adamant.
And sad.
“Dad, a nursing home is for when you are on your absolute last legs.” Your very last legs. “It's not like when Grandma was in one years and years ago. Now, a nursing home is for sitting in a chair and watching TV with the sound off, or for just sleeping in your bed all day.”
“Well…that's what I think I need.”
“No, Dad, no. No. No it isn't. How about we look at some assisted living places? There's life there, and they don't let you lie in bed all day. You can have as much help as you need or as little help as you need, but the help is always there. You can have privacy, or you can sit out in the lounge and read the paper or have a conversation with somebody. Let us look into that, Dad. That would be better.”
He was dubious, but he went along with it, and on one of the hottest days of the summer we took him to visit a nice place that wasn't too far away and sat on pretty grounds and had a competent staff, an array of comfortable apartments to choose from, and a fast-moving waiting list. That you never had to wait for too long for an opening in a place like this went without saying, I supposed. Some ladies were playing cards in the lobby. It was somebody's birthday, so there was a small celebration going on in a lounge area. “We bring in a barber once a week, and we have entertainers and lecturers on the weekend,” the nice representative told us. There were “neighborhoods.” “We have several neighborhoods in the facility. It keeps our residents from getting lost.”
I pictured Dad in one of the “neighborhoods,” with the elaborate oriental carpets and the curly-cue furniture. All the neighborhoods looked sort of alike to me.
Dad buzzed along on his scooter. He was pretty quiet the whole time, though nowhere near lost and disoriented. He was never a social animal, so I knew he would be unmoved by talk of the organized bingo games and the book clubs. He was polite to the lady, like the gentleman he was, but less than thrilled with the dining hall options, as he preferred his ham sandwiches and canned peaches and fun-size Snickers and occasional Chinese takeouts with us.
What impressed him the most was the big old golden retriever snoozing in the lobby. “That's Rufus. Our business manager, Joe, brings him in with him a couple of times a week.” Rufus woke up as Dad pulled up next to him. He shoved his wet nose into Dad's outstretched palm, and Dad scratched his head. Only then did Rufus seem to think, that as a dog, he might have to put on a bit of a proper show, so he barked at Dad a couple of times. “Oh yeah? Oh really??” Dad asked Rufus, completely unflustered as he continued scratching. “Is that right? Well, there you go…there ya goooo…”
I thought, if nothing else, Dad could enjoy hanging with Rufus all day.
And we drove home in that awful summer heat and got him back up to his apartment on his scooter, and then he became faint, and then we called an ambulance, and then…
The next two weeks of our lives.
The ambulance came. They brought Dad to the hospital. He was dehydrated, which they rectified quickly. They contacted his GP and fussed over his kidney functioning, and got the numbers where they thought they should be over the course of a few days. Dad complained bitterly over the dark, angry bruises on his spindly arms from “all the damn needles.” He bantered with the nurses and enjoyed the sight through his window of the Columbia University crew team working its way through Spuyten Duyvil. As his release approached, I arranged for a short term rehab. In a “good” place, near us. He was moved there for what we thought would be a couple of weeks, at the end of which we'd have that assisted living place all set up.
Perfect.
But not perfect. Things are rarely perfect when you get to a certain age, so there is no predicting.
Unless you predict that things will not be perfect, in which case, you would be spot-on.
They could barely wake Dad up one morning in the rehab facility, and by the time I'd arrived, it was clear something was very wrong. A trip back to the hospital in an ambulance, this time with all lights and sirens blaring. A blood infection. No.
A “raging” blood infection. Probably from one of those “angry needles.” Decisions made with seconds to spare.
I thought about, of all things, what to do with the scooter during those last hours on the cold vinyl couch, when it was becoming increasingly clear what was going to happen. I thought if I just accepted the fact that Dad died before he actually did, and started worrying about all that we'd be needing to do, it would somehow soften the blow. The blow that came late that night when the impossibly young doctor finally came out the double doors to tell us that Dad was gone.
He was tired. It was how he wanted it, I convinced myself.
There was nothing else for it to be but OK.
My old friend Katie told me a few days later about the “Handy Dandy Man.” The Handy Dandy Man had helped her family through some difficulties when her mom was very ill. What had started out as the man himself mowing lawns and repairing steps for those who couldn't do it themselves, had grown into a group of over a thousand volunteers who, with donations from local merchants, helped those in various types of need throughout a large swath of New England. “Do you think he would know someone who might need my Dad's scooter?” I asked Katie. She thought it was possible, so I emailed him, and sure enough, he did. I offered to drop it off at his Connecticut home, and he was grateful for that.
My husband charged it up and Zack rode it and put it in my van for me, for riding it out was the only way to go. Riding it out into the hallway and into the tiny elevator with the manual door and then backing it out into the lobby. I knew I would never be able to do it in that smooth, single move that Dad did. No, I knew I would bump into the walls and have to pull forward the inch or two I could to try again, and there would be no one to hold the door open unless a neighbor came along, and if one did, then he or she would say, “Oh how's your dad?” if they hadn't heard, and then I would have to tell them, and then they'd be all, “Oh, ohhh, how sad, I'm so sorry, what happened??” and then I would have to explain about that and when it all boiled down to it, I just didn't want to be there and I just didn't want to talk to anybody at all.
I drove to Connecticut by myself, the scooter rattling in the back. I drove through a tony hamlet of antique shops and restaurants, and a general store advertising overpriced—though certainly delicious—peach pies. A left turn onto a road that wound up a gentle hill took me past homes lining either side of the street at a genteel distance from one another. Nice big comfortable homes, with nice big well-manicured front yards with basketball hoops at the ends of the long driveways and probably swimming pools in the back. I found the Handy Dandy Man's address in artfully tarnished brass numbers, and pulled between the two brick pillars and up the driveway to the doors of the double garage.
He said he'd probably be out of the house, and to please leave it in the garage. I saw no cars, but I rang the doorbell just in case. It wouldn't do to dash in and dash out without at least trying to shake the hand of a man who had been voted “Connecticut Volunteer of the Year.” To shake the hand of a man who, from the looks of it, who could be sitting on a beach somewhere, or touring Europe, but who chooses to spend his time with a hammer in his hand, fixing somebody's roof. But no one was home.
Let's just do it.
I opened the back of the van. I took out the base, that oh-so-heavy base which you could separate into two parts and put back together again, but which I never had quite the panache to accomplish. I walked it into the open side of the garage. I had parked several yards away, and thought for a second to reassemble it where I was, and drive it in. One last little spin.
No.
I put it in the garage and went back and got the heavy lead battery, and planted it onto the base.
Beep, beep, beep.
I worked the ignition key.
Dammit…don't talk to me.
I hauled out the deluxe padded seat with the arm rests and inserted it into the stand. I checked to make sure there wasn't an inordinate amount of Max the Cat's hair on it. No, not too much. Just a few pulled threads on the upholstery. We don't clip his claws enough.
The battery charger. I laid that on the seat. I thought about leaving a note about how it plugged in, then remembered I didn't know. Never mind, the Handy Dandy Man could probably handle it just fine without my penciled instructions hastily scribbled on the back of an old envelope.
The basket.
The winter gloves were in there this fine July morning. I took them out and put them back in the van. If the new owner needed to raise the bottom of the basket…well…he'd need to find his or her own gloves. And I hoped, if the scooter took to beeping in the supermarket, that there would be someone along to help it get going again. And that that someone was strong enough to hoist that scooter into and out of a vehicle without putting undue wear and tear on his or her back.
I walked the basket over with much ceremony. It was silly, I knew, and I was glad no one could see me. I fought one last time with the damn thing and its bent hooks. I affixed it properly in its place.
I stood back with my hands on my hips and a satisfied huff.
And then that was it.
I kissed my finger and touched the seat. I kissed my finger and touched the base and I kissed my finger and I touched the battery.
I kissed my finger and touched that damn empty basket.
“Goodbye, scooter.”
I said to the thing.
I know it's just a thing.
I climbed into my van and I backed carefully down the long, winding driveway, careful not to mess up the edges of that nice lawn.
I didn't look back at the house.
No. That's a lie. I did look back, that's just my way. But the angle was wrong; I couldn't see the scooter anymore.
I looked to the road and I had to think for a second or two which way I was headed, as I lose my sense of direction sometimes.