You make me feel so young…

I spent today doing something that I dread. Shopping. I’m not the typical female I guess. While I did get a lot of savings (I saved $197 with sales), I still just detest the chore. After arriving at the second store, I started yawning and felt like I could fall asleep. It was only 11:00 a.m., but I decided to come home.

There is so much I should be doing that I don’t want to.  I meant to take a nap, but didn’t. Instead I took a bath. In the new house my requirement was that it had to have a garden tub. And it does. So I just let myself sink into it as I read a book. I’ve been wanting a bath for a few days, but had been fearful that if I were pregnant, I shouldn’t take a hot bath. I had to settle for hot showers instead. But now that I don’t have hope, I decided to go for it.

 So I read for an hour. Then as I was looking through my new clothes, I noticed the CD in our bedroom. When we went through grandma’s things, I was given all her CDs. She LOVED country music and I took her to many a concert. She bought a CD to represent each concert we had attended. As the rest of the family won’t listen to country, and as they knew she went to the concerts with me, they let me have them.

 One CD stood out. Because it’s attached to a specific memory. Grandma LOVED dancing. Grandpa and her used to go out and dance every week. Grandma once told me that I would dance with grandpa one day. I looked at her, as a really young child, and responded, "he’ll be long gone by then!" Alas, he wasn’t. But his mind was long gone by the time we might have had the dance. I remember one time having a "party" (grandma’s excuse for eating chocolate and chips and crackers in the middle of the day), and grandpa came into the room. His mind wasn’t there (he had Alzheimer’s (sp?) ). Grandma grabbed him to dance and started moving him across the room, wanting to be in his arms. He yelled, "Get off of me woman!" and shoved her away. She looked sad. Grandma needed a new partner.

Grandma couldn’t walk very well starting when grandpa went into the nursing home and then later died. So she was content living in her memories. One time I took Rich with me to see her. She was listening to Regis Philbin’s CD, listening to all the old classics. Songs she used to dance to.  I think Rich must have commented on them and I told her he loved to dance. She grabbed right onto that idea and sang along to the CD, telling him that she was going to get better so that she could dance with him. That afternoon, we listened to the songs. We had to leave, but she kept us there, saying "one more, one more…" until we had listened to the whole CD. Again, she told Rich that she would get better so that she could dance with him.

 I don’t think he wascompletely happy with the thought of an older woman hanging off of him, sashaying to the songs of long ago, but he went along with it for her benefit.

After that, each call she would mention that she was getting better so she could dance with him. She never quite made it to the point where she actually could. And every time I hung up the phone, I would mention to Rich, "grandma’s getting ready for you!" Because she was.

So when I saw that CD sitting in the room, I was reminded of that afternoon with grandma. The first song is "You Make Me Feel So Young," and as she talked to us, she did feel so young. I know she did.

God, it’s so hard to think that she’s gone. In so many ways she was the light in our family.