I rather wasted the day, today. I had stayed up far, far too late and was awakened by Mom who had come up stairs(!!!) because she thought she had heard me calling her. She had apparently called from downstairs but when I didn’t reply she came up. I get very panicked when she does because she doesn’t do stairs very well on her own any more and the stairs here have a turn at the bottom and the stairs are wider at one end than at the other. I am frightened that she’ll fall. When we first moved and Amber the cat was still with up, I had a baby gate across to keep him from coming up. One morning, again thinking she’d heard me calling, Mom appeared in my room. She had CLIMBED OVER THE GATE and come up!!!!! I was horrified!
Mom has, even when I was a teenager, had “heard me calling her” and wakened me to see if anything is wrong. As annoying as it is to be wakened from sleep (and now dangerous for her) I can’t get upset. When her mother was ill, Mom was on her way home from work and stopped into a shop to looks at a ring. While she was standing there, she heard her mother call out quite sharply. When she arrived home, she found that her mother had died while Mom had been in at the shop. Whenever she thinks she hears me call like that, she worries something is wrong or something has happened. Oddly enough, when something has ACTUALLY happened, she gets no such “premonition”. I just wish she would stay downstairs and not risk the stairs when she “hears me calling”.
Anyhow… Because I had been up late and wakened early by Mom (and the phone, several times) I ended up sleeping in. I woke a number of times and would read for a while (The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence) and then doze off.
About 5:30, Mom called up and wondered what I had planned for supper and I thought we might slip off down to Kemptville to see if the hotdog/ice cream stand that we like to go to had opened for the season. Before we left I got a message from one of my friends in the band telling me that two of them were going to be playing in Merrickville, just down the road from Kemptville. I was going to drive Mom home after checking to see if the stand was open and then head back out to Merrickville.
We were in luck, the stand had opened a few days earlier! The couple who run it are always so nice to Mom and look forward to seeing her as much as we look forward to seeing them. We are down there at least once a week during the summer. The drive is nice and the incentive of a hotdog and an ice cream is always welcome, especially since Mom can’t drive herself down there. Since it was getting late, I asked Mom if she was up to an evening listening to the guys play… She was! It’s just a short drive from Kemptville to Merrickville so we’d have arrived early. As it got darker, we could see that the stars were REALLY right tonight so we took a detour down a favourite drive and stopped to have a look at the Milky Way and the various constellations which we don’t often get to see. Unfortunately, I was afraid to get Mom out of the car because we were right on the shoulder and I was afraid of her falling — especially into the ditch with fast-moving and FREEZING water! It was lovely, though. No chill in the air and we were able to sit for a few minutes with the windows open. There were even a few moths out this early, which surprised me.
We made it to the pub where the guys were playing and Mom was able to make it through two sets before she began to get tired. Rob and Ken played a lot of her favourites (songs by Fred Eaglesmith, Ton Russell, and John Prine, as well as a number of other musicians). They did Tonight We Ride (Tom Russell) especially for Mom (It’s our driving around theme song and whenever we go to see Tom Russell, he sings it for Mom). Mom had a terrific time, as usual. She loves to see the guys play but hasn’t had much of a chance because, since the Ashton Mill has changed hands they guys don’t play there and there isn’t anyplace which has an early enough show for her to go to. Now that they have a regular gig as the trio at the Mooney’s Bay Bistro I’ll be taking her there. But it was great that she felt like she could manage a one-off at on of the other places they play, even if Ray, her former student, wasn’t there.