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Wednesday is food shopping day at the Senior Housing complex; they have the bus that takes the residents weekly, carries their groceries onto and off of the bus and sometimes makes a pit stop at the pizzeria for lunch. Dad had his riding privileges suspended when he kept taking Mrs. Eckermans clementine’s out of her bag and eating them on the bus. There was also the time he tried to give the bus driver fifty dollars to make an extra stop at the convenience store for his lottery tickets. The store is three towns away; he stopped going to the local store years ago after not winning and putting the “horns” on the owner.
I am now his method of transportation for the weekly grocery outing until he is allowed back onto the bus. We can go to the store any day or time; however, dad insists on running with the pack and going at the same time. He is in denial over the whole blacklisted bus thing and acts like he is still on the field trip. I have to drop him off at the entrance and pick him back up in exactly one hour. He is usually outside, bags in tow tapping his foot like he’s been waiting in that spot for hours and when I pull up, he nods and climbs in the car and instructs me to load the car with the bags and be careful with the one with the eggs in it.
As I’m loading his bags in, I hear a beeping sound………..coming from him. I say “ Dad; you are beeping.” He gives me that crazed look like I’ve just told him the Can Can sale doesn’t include pitted olives and tells me it’s just his phone.
“No, dad, your ringer is Calypso that you insisted on since the last one was Elvis Jailhouse Rock and you wouldn’t answer the phone until the song was over.” Dad bellows at me once again to continue to load the groceries and insist now that the beeping is coming from my microwave. Although with four children home on Spring break that is possible, however since we are presently standing in the grocery store parking lot, it isn’t probable.
We begin to drive away and again he is beeping. “Dad, could it be your pacemaker/defibrillator battery going low? Did the Heart Institute call you?” I ask. With conviction, a splash of sarcasm he refutes this idea and proceeds to scan the grocery receipt looking for an error.
Once home I call the office, and a lovely woman informs me that indeed she has been trying to call dad for the past week to tell him he needed to come in that his batteries were low. I ask her if she tried to call his secondary number (which is mine), to which she gingerly replies “ No we sent a letter out letting him know we’ve made an appointment for him to come into the office next week.” I inquired as to the satellite signal the pacemaker has embedded in it to monitor the patient and sends an alert to the company is something is awry. The nice lady informs me that there is a delay in the signal which adds to my overall sense of lack of well-being for the patient. The letter and the delayed bat signal made about as much sense to me right now as farmers waking up to crop circles in their front yards.
Luckily, she was kind enough to enlighten me to the contents of the letter which informed us we had an appointment this coming Tuesday. We get home and are putting away the groceries when dad pulls out an eighteen pack of triple-A batteries. Once again, I should know better, but I ask anyway what the motherload of batteries are for. Dad stops in his tracks, looks up at the ceiling and tells me the batteries are for the smoke detectors in the apartment; they are beeping every night.
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