Kid Stuff

By Harvey Silverman

I’m still a kid but all my friends grew up.

David R. sometime in his fifties.

I was probably seven or eight the first time I heard it. My mom’s older brother, my Uncle Jack, called my mom a name that sounded to me like Qweny. I asked her why he did that and she told me that it was a nickname from childhood.

“Nobody calls me that anymore.”

I heard him use that name once or twice more and then never again. Meanwhile, life proceeded as it should. I grew up, left home, got married, had a family of my own. My folks remained an important part of my life as they slowly grew old and then elderly.

As my mom approached the end of her eighty-seventh year she had slowed markedly. Further, she had months earlier finally accepted the inevitable and allowed my dad, with profound dementia, to be admitted to a nursing home. Her heroic effort over years keeping him at home had necessarily ended.

When her niece invited her to visit in Florida, allowing my mom to escape a bit of the New England winter that frosted the city in which she had lived her entire life, I enthusiastically encouraged her to go. I promised to look in on my dad whose absence from home remained a sorrow for her. I bought the airline ticket and drove her to the airport in Boston. It would be good for her to get away.

Over the years many folks from town had moved to the area in Florida she would be visiting. She had hoped one day to do the same only to be thwarted by my dad’s deterioration. There were enough people down there now, either full time residents or seasonals, that an annual “reunion” of the original northerners was held. It would occur this year while she was visiting and my mom was eager to attend.

Her arrival in Florida was uneventful but one night in the dark she took a wrong turn en route to the bathroom and fell down a steep flight of stairs, sustaining a huge scalp laceration. My cousin called me that night to report the event even as my mom was in the ambulance.

A career in emergency medicine automatically and immediately caused me to consider the likely outcome. If my mom did not lose enough blood to cause a major problem – scalp lacerations always bleed like crazy and furthermore she was on an anticoagulant for an irregular heartbeat, the anticoagulant certain to make her bleed even more – then surely she sustained a head injury that in the elderly, even without the added complication of the anticoagulant, meant bruising or bleeding atop or within the brain.

I flew down the next day, met my cousin and went off to the hospital. And there my mom sat in her bed, her scalp wound closed with multiple staples, her intracranial injury nonexistent, annoyed by having turned the wrong way at night and complaining about the food.

A few days later she was discharged and I made arrangements to fly home with her the next day. She was anxious to get home but first had two requirements. She demanded that she get to a hairdresser and have her hair done.

“I’m not going home looking like this!”

Well, the staples were pretty obvious and her hair was a mess. Still, it hardly seemed like a priority to me but she was insistent. Happily my cousin was able to beg and bribe an appointment for her that afternoon and when she returned her spirits were considerably elevated.

Her second requirement was a call to a lifelong friend, their close relationship begun as young schoolmates, who now resided in the area. My mom wished to explain her absence from that reunion she had so anticipated but had missed. She found the phone number and called as I sat reading something or other.

“Hi, Ruthie. It’s Qweny.”

Her nickname from so long ago, something I had not heard in more than half a century. I turned to look at her, at my mom. A little old lady, hunched over, worn out from what should have been a fatal injury, staples shining between the teased and colored strands of hair.

No matter how old or tattered, some folks, the lucky ones, can still see at least a part of themselves as kids.

Originally appeared in The MacGuffin.