MINNESOTA HERE WE COME

This is her latest desire. Something she has now rung me five times already today to discuss, starting at 3:15 AM her time. 

"I want you to take me home," she said, "to Minnesota--" then dissolved in tears and hung up. I was thinking she wanted her ashes taken there, to the cemetery where her parents are but, no, seems nothing as easy as that. She rings back right away.

"Sorry. I just want to go see my friend Peg Harold, she's a hundred this year, I just spoke to her daughter and to Elsa's daughter Sallie and they say Peg still lives in the same apartment across from those two empty ones. I want to go see her, will you take me?"

I've never heard of this Peg Harold but I say yes because, well. Because it gives my Peg something to look forward to. Mama has always said that as soon as you stop having something to look forward to, you might as well die. Besides seeing this friend who's a hundred and whose husband by the way or father helped discover penicillin she said and shared the Nobel prize with Fleming (I can find nothing to document this on the net however, no Harold or Herold or Herrold anyone having zip to do with penicillin, so wires are, yet again, crossed somewhere) --my mother also wants to see her old house where she grew up in Kasson and go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester where she once worked (and where I may well leave her).

"Okay, Mama. If that's what you want, I'll try and make it work. I'm not sure January would be the ideal time to go to Minnesota though."

"Oh no no no--certainly not! We'll go in the spring."

So. Right. Spring it is. About the time the builders start on the Peg Hutte in the garden and I will need to be here or Denis will answer Builders' Questions incorrectly and I'll come home to say "Honey, why's there a door opening onto the hedge?"

Anyhow, by Phone Call Number 4 Peg  has had this "marvellous idea": Alex and Denis should come with us to Minnesota! Because "it will be a lot of fun" and "be the making" of Alex.  

I nixed this idea right off. 

Though admitted I would indeed need help, that it's difficult enough on my own negotiating Peg into Price Chopper let alone the Mid-west. Her thinking, incidentally, is to go by train to Chicago, from I suppose Penn Station in NY, and in Chicago we change trains (already wishing you were coming too?) and then rent a car in Minneapolis. Having schelpped her walker(s) and nine million bags in and out of taxis and trains for two days. The other possibility is of course to fly, mostly because airport security is fun to wheel old people through. Or we could rent a semi and drive there, stopping en route to visit "fans" and use their bathrooms.

By the fifth call she's asking my permission to ask her friend Steve to come along. I said sure. Having looked after his own mother for ten years he's a whiz with catheter bags. What I'm hoping is that by 2015, which is in about ten hours, we will have invited enough Minnesota enthusiasts along to fill a Greyhound and we can all sing "The Wheels On The Bus" and Simon & Garfunkle's "Homeward Bound" the whole way.
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Seems she dismissed Dominick and in fact all the staff yesterday. "I've had it!" she said. "I run this place!" She stayed alone all night. And survived to tell the tale of Old Peg Harrold and Her Penicillin Connection.

More worrying, is she keeps referring to my father as if he were still there--which of course he is, in ash form, 80% of him in the garden where I scattered him last August and the other 20% still in the brown plastic box from the funeral home, something I hear is currently being used on the dining room table to prop up the centrepiece, a model of the house I grew up in in Fairfield, hope this didn't put too many dinner guests off their Xmas pudding.

"You know what Daddy said to me last night," she asks,  "when he got up to go to the bathroom?"

"Er…no. What, Mama?"

"Well, when I said 'What am I going to do without you!" he said, laughing a bit, "Well, I suppose you should get married again!' Wasn't that cute?"

WISH ME LUCK OVER THERE NEXT MONTH.