Slacking...

Yikes.

More than two weeks?

I visited my grandparents (92 & 90) at their home in Durham, NC last week. In case you haven't hung around anyone that old in awhile, lemme tell you - that's pretty f*cking old.

My grandfather can't hear a thing. Trying to talk to him is a cornball gag on a bad sitcom. You yell, as close to his ear as you can get, and if you annunciate perfectly and your voice is in the narrow register that penetrates his eardrum, he yells right back. He has difficulty talking in long stretches, running out of breath easily and unexpectedly.

For the last ten years he has hobbled around on the instep of his right foot, planting his weight, now down to 130 lb., on his ankle. A simple self-test will give you an idea of the sort of discomfort this has been causing him.

Every morning that I was there, my grandfather took an hour or more to shave, shower and get dressed. Much of this time he spent sitting down catching his breath. On more than one day I called out for him, realized he couldn't hear me in a million years, looked down the hall to the bathroom with its door closed, and opened it to find him sitting on his stool, both hands firmly planted on its sides. He'd look up and smile and say, "I'm fine."

There is now oxygen in two rooms of the house to help him catch up, allowing him to take eight to ten of his cherished naps in comfort. It is a testament to the strength and will of a great man (a great railroad man) that he undergoes his trials every day, humble and without complaint, to preserve the simple dignity of putting his pants on one leg at a time. Of being a man.

Unable to use any Wi-Fi access points because of my port and router configurations (don't ask), no blogging was to be done. However a couple walks to the Duke campus got my ears pretty good. In no particular order -

Late Registration - Kanye West
Axis: Bold As Love - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Decoration Day - Drive-By Truckers
Fear of Music - Talking Heads
This Year's Model - Elvis Costello
Damn The Torpedos - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

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