love me while I'm young

This little ball of spikes is the manifestation of accumulating months of maternal instincts. I pinpointed maternal instincts after several dreams about protecting trembling slugs, getting ducks made of melting snow to water sources, and so forth.  I haven't met this ball of spikes, it's as abstract as any instinct, but I have met two hedgehogs in the last two days and I am overwhelmed by the feeling of all-encompassing love for a helpless thing, unrolling from a little ball and snuffling around in my hands.  After leaving the Zany Zoo in Eugene, I asked my mother if she has ever held something helpless in her hands and felt overwhelming love for the creature and fortunately she said yes, but I guess that doesn't necessarily mean me.  The reasons I used to describe why I love the little guys to my boyfriend - nearsighted, nocturnal, defensive until they know someone and then they unroll their soft bellies to be petted - also basically describe my boyfriend, so that explains the attraction to him and hedgehogs.  Several hours of research and speculation later, I learned that in addition to being rather expensive for small rodent type pets (but not rodents; Erinaceomorpha) they are also illegal in the state of California.  Some would say those are the end of my dreams but some wouldn't.

This is my third day in Junction City with my mom, visiting the old folks, wearing the same jeans and jacket.  Everyone seems to eat a lot of cake and cookies and peanut butter bars.  In fact I was the opening act for the Hill Billy Band/ ice cream social at the Junction City old folks home and I get the idea an ice cream social's nothing to holler about, especially when the Zany Zoo petting zoo, with live hedgehogs, lemurs, alligators, and sugar gliders that crawl in your shirt, happens at the exact same time. 

I made the board!

Some of the nurses are my age, but there's probably only 5% of us in the building still menstruating.  I hope no one kills me to drink my young, rejuvenating blood.  Tonight there was a high pitched alarm, making constant intonations equal in duration to the interval of silence between.  Why don't they turn that god damn alarm off, it makes this place so stressful, I wondered aloud.  Do the residents scream because of the alarm or because of the claustrophobia of senility?  How does anyone sleep?  My grandparents and mother wanted to know which alarm, and I realized I was the only one who could even hear it.  An alarm to keep away young people.  I asked the nurses about it and they said it goes off when someone has pressed their assistance button and someone has always pressed the assistance button so it is always going off.  They want to destroy it.
      My 89-year-old grandpa is in the rehabilitation center which is across the street from my 84-year-old grandmother in the assisted living center.  She eats breakfast and walkers herself over there by nine and leaves by 8:30 pm to be in bed at nine.  They're very slow.  My grandpa has Parkinsons, and there's a lot of speculation that with his lifetime as an athlete he'd be running around and climbing rocks except for the Parkinsons.  Instead he's so decrepit, he has a canvas crane that lifts him into bed (he has to hold on to the supports and he's terrified he won't have enough strength), and his tongue is so swollen no one understands a word he says.
        He's a funny and sharp old man, and makes any joke he can make without words and quick movements. My mother told me he was absolutely never a bigot, that he was a great fan of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that he invited black singers into his ministry in Kansas when my mom was a little girl.  It's interesting to learn that my propensity to want to learn something from any kind of person is family legacy.  (Along with hot-headedness, restlessness, and preference for sweets over alcohol, all from Grandpa Helms.)  89 isn't necessarily so old, but decrepit is old, so old is old.  He doesn't have a ministry and he doesn't have a house and he can't hold his wife.  If he has opinions he can yell about him but my grandmother just assumes he is thirsty or wants to go to bed and she hollers at him (good naturedly) to hush and be still!  He has memories, surely, but then there's senility to interfere. And then there's the fact that you can't have every memory at once, they come out with some kind of stimulation - scents, pictures, visiting a place - and the Junction City rehabilitation center tries its best but ranks low in being stimulatory.  My grandfather has lost almost everything in its optimum form while he's still alive and can mourn it.  In the lifetime arc of accumulating things like independence and esteem and love, being old seems to be the business of losing property and friends and future.
         I have felt young my whole life and I have even been young my whole life.  I have also been me my whole life and other people have just been other people for my whole life so they seemed kind of like people with the same opportunities as me that made the mistake of getting old.  Is it obscene to walk into an old folks home and be so vital? Do they resent me and close off, the way my fat landlord does to me because she's insecure (the same way I am with pretty smart girls because I'm insecure)?  Do they crave young people to surround them and no mirrors, so they can forget for a while?  Am I romanticizing the whole business?  Will young people find it hard to take me seriously?  Will someone turn my wheelchair to the tulip painting on the wall and forget about me?  My grandmother has few memories, either.  She doesn't hoard them like me, so she's apparently unafraid of having nothing- a lifetime of plusses and minuses that sums to zero.  JT texted me, "Yep. As far as I can tell, life is about experiencing limitation and loss.  When we die enough times we'll eventually be free and limitless again."  He offers a tempting salve that I won't accept until I have greater pain.
        I know fear is the wrong response, I know it doesn't serve me, but all I have is fear for losing my function, for losing my youth and luster.  I'm young, I see that much more clearly now, but I spend an awful lot of time feeling old and talking to people my age about how old we are.  I fear my parents getting old because they're the definition of stability, and because when they're old I will have taken their place.  I will have to be patient and visit them and it won't be as fun as now, running around Eugene all day, eating mexican food and petit fors, petting hedgehogs, thrifting, arguing about silly things.  Fruit gets ripe and then goes bad, hedgehogs die, I know this, but they are not your mother.