NAUSEOUS

...and don't know why. I've eaten, and good stuff too. Made Odd crab cakes for dinner. He is still at the butcher block here, now watching "Laura" with Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb. It was a real effort tonight. I feel like such a washout daughter to him. He must be so lonely and it's all I can do not to sling a frozen waffle in front of him at his hospital table in the den, disappear and let him watch CNN on "mute" in peace. The thought of the next two weeks with us alone here is daunting. Not looking forward to it and I could get a sitter one night I suppose, make Terri come late and stay late, get Jenkins to take me out to The Dreamaway or Alta. I'll do that. Meanwhile have Easter to look forward to tomorrow. Am planning an egg hunt for Odd. Slightly different this year, going to do fried eggs, and if he finds one it can be breakfast.
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Wendy has gone back to Vermont and I am bereft. She gave me four days out of her life and I will be forever beholden. Sadly, after she left I found three more piles in Peg's office--Blue Book fillers in plastic sleeves (fishers, Alex playing the drums at the Albert Hall age 10, Peg in a hat, others), and have been madly stuffing and adding to books I'd thought were done--and am missing Wendy madly, and Annie. The BB Team.

Peg asked me today to ring relatives to let them know the state of play. These are relatives whose names are familiar, vaguely, but I wouldn't know if I tripped over them. Was happy to do this until confronted by Peg's address book, which has about 30 entries for every name, all different, all on different pages, in pen, ink, typed, taped in--the idea of alphabetizing clearly long ago dispensed with---and unfortunately the most recent or current address or number has not been ticked or circled or delineated in any way helpful. I can't tell you the number of people I've talked to today all over the States who have never heard of me or Peg, though are very sorry to hear she's been in the ICU and now the nursing home.

One of them, Joan, pronounced Jo-Ann, who I finally found in Missouri, and Peg's first cousin, is profoundly deaf. I was shouting so loudly into the phone, first trying to get her to understand who I was, then with Peg's phone number, that Odd clumped out with his walker in a panic thinking something awful had happened.
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STAFF ON CALL:

BONNIE, who vacuumed, did laundry, did 101 other things that needed doing (she is better than I am at multi-tasking, or Annie, and that's saying something), Bonnie who did all this while Wendy and I got Odd in Wendy's SUV over to Lee to see Peg in Laurel Lake, David Jenkins following us in his pickup with a tank of gas because we drove back to Becket yesterday on "EMPTY" with lights flashing and dinging the whole way over October Mt. And there are no gas stations in Becket and Jenkins, bless him, was our fail safe so we weren't sitting on the mountain with Odd for the rest of the morning singing Norwegian songs until Triple A arrived.
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Peg and Odd, both in wheelchairs, enjoyed an hour together, not counting an embarrassing ten minutes when Peg wouldn't take her pills for the nurse and demanded a whole chocolate pudding, not just a pill-cup full. The nurse ground them up at my suggestion, like we do for Odd, because Peg has this thing about pills. She says her throat is smaller than everyone else's. It's not. I've measured. 

Odd wet his Depends and the chair in the den. Hope to Christ Wendy's car is OK.
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HIGHLIGHTS:

Mrs. Barbara Beckett from Becket who shares Peg's room, asking if I would buy her some bedroom slippers next time I'm out shopping. "Like these," she says, waggling her fuzzy feet. "Size 7." So Monday I will go buy bedroom slippers for Mrs. Beckett. Because I have nothing else to do. She'll pay, she says.

Giving Bonnie Odd's old maroon naugahyde easy chair and footstool that's been on the porch here for two years and that he can't get out of anymore, for her son, Jake--without Odd seeing. Although he caught us sneaking the bookcase down from my room that held The Great Books of the Western World. Sound asleep he was, we were tiptoeing. It's a second sense, clearly. Like when he materialized in the driveway years ago, out of nowhere, to retrieve the broken African Violet grow lamp from the pile for the dump (and is still in the attic).
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PLANS:

So I now fly home Saturday May 3 because having cancelled my Apr 23 one ($120 cancellation fee), it seems there is nothing available until then, short of a 7AM Newark one the day before and I don't do day flights when you have to get up at 3 AM to get to the stupid airport.

The IDEA--now, see how this strikes you--is the day I leave here, Carol Ann from Wellsmere Collies comes to collect my mother's (and Carol Ann's) dog Honeybear-Angel-Spurn-Me -Not or whatever in hell she's going by these days, and Odd--this is the brainwave part of the plan--goes into Laurel Lake Nursing Home in a "respite care" category, and stays there, seeing Peg every day all day, until she is deemed fighting fit to come home. 

And then they will come home together. But not before May 20, which is the date that Terri (staff) is done with her nieces's wedding in New Jersey and packed her son off to Alabama and is free to move in here with her dog. And here she will stay ($50 per night 8 PM to 8 AM) until Alex, the grandson, arrives in June. In theory. 

Odd can have 5 days "respite care" gratis at Laurel Lake courtesy of Hospice, and they will organize his installation, as it were, and after that I will pay per day. They've cut me a deal, less than half price. Full price is $500 per day. I'll be paying $210. Not sure if this is normal or because the Ronnings are such good customers there. Am thinking of booking in myself.

So. Then I fly home. And. Well. SEE WHAT HAPPENS. And also on the day now that Denis has band call in London for this new musical of his and Richard Harris', and which is already driving DK mad because there are four non singers in the cast, meaning they can't sing if they tried (so why were they hired??) and one is so bad Denis has had to take his lines away and wants him to mouth the lyrics.
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I felt like shit when I sat down here but now better. Writing this is like someone sucking the poison out.