Monkling’s Blog

Because I’m uh… you know - not nice, when we go to the nursing home to visit my mother in-law, I take a seat on the opposite side of her roommate. That’s because, what with not being a generally chatty person, I don’t like being close enough for Olga to carry on a conversation with me.

Frank, however, is way more friendly than I am, although not to the extent his sister is. She knows every person in the entire nursing home, their families, their extended families and their relatives living in other countries. She’ll leave her mom’s room, talking to everyone. Wait. That was a tangent. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So Frank will sit and talk to Olga. As long as it’s not me doing the talking, I love listening to the conversations. They are usually pretty amusing. Not that it takes much to amuse me.

Today she was talking about the chairs in the room. If anyone has even visiting a hospital, you’ve seen these chairs. I’ve been to quite a few hospitals and they’re all the same - usually blue, high backs, 2 to a room unless someone swipes one. It’s that way in the nursing home, too. The same chairs are always in the room. Except, apparently today. Olga’s conversation with Frank went something like this:

“They took my black chair and replaced it with that one. I don’t know what they did with my chair. I bought it with my own money. I don’t take any money from the government. And suddenly my black chair was gone and this one was here. I am going to close my eyes and go to sleep and maybe in the morning, my chair will be back again.”

For some odd reason, Frank misunderstood what she was saying and thought she was talking about her sweater being missing. Now how you can mistake the word ’sweater’ with ‘chair’ even given the Spanish accent, I’m not quite sure. But listening to her go on about her chair and him taking about the gray sweater that was draped on the current chair was enough to make a person think they were maybe in an asylum rather than a nursing home.

Meantime, my mother in-law is complaining to me about how her son & her daughter are off talking to everyone. Ah, yes. Fun times. And I haven’t complained yet about how someone invited themselves over to my house for Thanksgiving. Someone who I don’t really know & who I am not thrilled with having here with my family. Long story. She’s a friend of my sister in-law’s and I was backed into a corner so it’s a done deal. But that doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it, eh?

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