Stairway to hell...

Some days you just shouldn’t get out of bed. This was one of them. Following the perverse course life can sometimes throw you on when you are least prepared , I got up extremely early…just couldn’t sleep. I am not an early morning kind of person…grumble, grumble. Of course I can’t really complain because Dear Husband’s day got off to a much worse start than mine.

Considering we didn’t succumb to sleep until about 2 am to begin with, we were already facing a sleep deficit. I awoke even before the thoroughly obnoxious alarm clock went off and Dear Husband awakened shortly thereafter. He wasn’t able to hit the snooze alarm this morning either because The Old Guy, my new term for our formerly endearing dog, was hyper restive and complaining about impending diaster if we didn’t give him his ‘potty run’ now.

The Old Guy is getting forgetful and like a lot of old guys, he has a tendency to wander around the house all night as if he’s forgotten something important and needs to figure out what it is and where it is. I think he’s forgotten where his bed is and how to use it. Thank goodness we broke down and finally got that wall-to-wall carpeting in the hall and on the stairs, otherwise the constant clicketty-clack of his toenails would have driven us around the bend by now.

The Old Guy is not a whiner by nature and seldom, if ever, barks. (By the way, have you ever heard the bark of a deaf dog? It has a weird quality to it…) To his credit, he usually maintains a very cheerful disposition but this morning he was positively annoying.

Dear Husband usually gets up and after taking care of his own pressing bathroom duties, goes downstairs and starts making a pot of the strongest and most delicious coffee this side of the Mississippi. Then he meanders back up the stairs and cranks up his computer to quickly check and find out if the rest of the world is still there. When the coffee is ready he goes down and fetches up the pot and a couple of cups.

The Old Guy usually just sleeps through these preliminaries. In fact, he sleeps all the way up until Dear Husband is ‘coffee-ed,’ dressed and ready to leave for work. Then he opens his eyes, lifts his head and more often than not, lays it back down and we have to do something to get his attention and coax him into becoming ambulatory.

This morning however, the whole routine, human and dog, was quite altered. The Old Guy was already up wandering from room to room to room and periodically coming in to scratch the side of the bed and poke Dear Husband in the arm. When he went deaf (the dog, not the man) he started the practice of lifting his paw and poking us until we pay attention to him and yield to his needs and desires.

Dear Husband hadn’t even made it down the stairs to start the java brewing when the telephone rang. “Now who would call me at this ungawdly hour(?!)” he asked. This paragon of virtue is not usually so irascible but he hadn’t had a chance to titrate his body with the elixir of wakefulness yet so a few less-than-civil words escaped his lips as he went to answer the insistant ring. It was his sister in another state who had, herself, been awakened at 4:30 am by her telephone and was passing along some important and difficult to digest news. Their dad, who has been in the hospital in New Jersey for the past week with some serious problems had taken a critical turn for the worse.

We have some big decisions to make now. Almost nightly for a month and a half we have been making a 102 mile round trip to visit older sonny in a hospital and now, 300 miles away in the opposite direction, we also have a dad in the hospital and it’s imperative for us to visit him as soon as possible before we lose the chance. Dear Husband once heard a line in a cartoon which has become a mantra of sorts around this household. We have no real idea what it means but it resonates perfectly for a lot of our travails. “If you want to make singing shoes, you have to suffer…” Our shoes are currently singing louder than Aretha Franklin.

To cap the morning off just right, The Old Guy’s doggy alzheimers kicked into high gear on the way down the stairs on his way to relieve himself in the appropriate place (outside!) and he was totally unaware that he was leaving large tootsie rolls of death in his wake…all on the light green wall-to-wall carpeting. But Dear Husband, after having dosed himself thoroughly with the morning brew and taken on yet another motive for conducting the music for those shoes, was able to see the silver lining that every cloud is supposed to have. At least he didn’t step in it...