Visiting Betty

Grandma has a friend named Betty who lives in a retirement community nearby our house.  When I was a child Betty took my sister and I to the Lincoln Park Zoo along with her husband and their grandchildren.  This was one of the singlemost traumatic eperiences of my childhood because, at the time, I didn't know these people.  I wasn't supposed to talk to strangers!  Stranger DANGER!  And here was my grandmother dropping us off with these people for the whole day.  We were terrified.  I didn't poop for two weeks.

Anyway, Betty lives close by but Grandma hasn't seen her in a while.  We're going to visit after Grandma has those three cavities of hers filled.  She doesn't see a problem with this, we'll see how it plays out. 

Betty seems to have a bit of dementia or senility or alzheimers, Grandma hasn't been able to specify, but she has been searching for photographs to give to Betty to "jog" her memory.  After dinner I brought up several baskets of loose photos from the basement (most of Grandma's snapshots are in albums) and we went through nearly 700 pictures of me and my cousins and my dad and uncles as kids.  We were damn cute!!  All the birthday parties and dresses and halloween costumes (I found several pictures of an adorable reused yellow bunny costume) and smeary faces (broccoli, and cakes of all kinds) and skinned knees and tousled hair (nobody should have let me do my own pigtails... ever!)  It was a fabulous time.  Picking out which uncle is which is always a fun game, and I saw more pictures of their father than I ever have in my life. (Grandma has been widowed, twice now, and I never met my dads dad.)

We never did find the one particular photo we were looking for, but we found some real treasures along the way; a photo of Grandma and her first husband in fancy party clothes under an arch that read "Fifty Thousand French Men Can't Be Wrong!" with totally dreamy looks on their faces; their formal wedding photo, which is totally charming; a photo of a drawing of Grandma when she was a total babe; photos of Grandma as prom queen AND Wisconsin dairy queen... the list goes on.  My FAVORITE discovery is a love note that Grandma's first husband left her one time.  He would travel internationally and bring her back jewelry from Panama, and Japan (today she wore a to-die-for pair of double pearl earrings from Japan) and before he left for these trips, she told me, he would leave little notes all over the house for her to find.  The note I found reads: "Hankie-pankie, pot of stew/Lovely lady, I love you!"  I'm completely charmed.

The idea was to stimulate Betty's mind through memories, but it appears tonight the memories have stimulated other minds, instead.