First thing's first:
This is Cinderella, a British piglet, who won't walk through mud unless she's wearing her wellingtons. Eat your heart out, Kate Moss.
Okay, now down to business. I realize that this sort of soppy emotional shiz is probably better reserved for one's own blog, with that said, I'm going to press onward here anyway due to mental block.
When my mother's family immigrated to the States, they picked out English names for themselves. Now this is quite a proposition. How fun would it be to have a say in your name? What would you have named yourself as an adult? My mother chose Cindy because it was "easy to write." My mother's youngest brother chose Johnny, as in Johnny Walker. A few years back, Uncle Johnny (whom I affectionatley referred to as Drunkle Johnny) prophetically drank himself to death and left behind an adult son and a wife with dementia.
As she got progressively worse, my mom and I would take turns going over to her house in the evenings to prepare dinner for her. Her two loves in life were watching Wheel of Fortune and feeding her already sausage shaped dog, Buddy. Her entire existence seem to revolve around that 6:30 time slot.
As soon as that spinning wheel came on and the narrator announced, "It's time...for..." and the audience chanted back, "WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!" She would bubble over with giggles. We'd eat McDonald's cheeseburgers at the table and crane our necks sideways to the TV in the living room. Her eyes, transfixed on the spinning, glowing images on the screen. She especially liked it when people would land on the black Bankrupt slice, because people would get extremely animated and there'd be this big "waahh-wahh" sound effect. It made me happy that Pat and Vanna could make her so happy.
After a few incidents, she was no longer fit to live alone. She was in a nursing home for a bit, where she turned into a walking zombie-vegetable-shell of her former self. This past June, the nursing home was shut down and she moved in with my parents. She wears a diaper now and needs to be changed and fed. I stop over there whenever I can. Her face lights up when she sees me, and I swear I can make out a glint of recognition in her eyes. I always sit with her and pretend to be the narrator from her favorite show and say, "It's time... for... WHEEL! OF!" and she shakily musters, "F-f-f-fortune."
Painfully ironic that "fortune" is the only word she can say, innit?
Love,
Gracie
