Man in Demand: August 2005

My Mom is too heavy to lift.

At 6 ft, 260 lbs, Mom is a little more than I can handle when she falls down like she did at 6am this morning.

She rang the alert bell (pressed the button by her bedside that rings a wireless doorbell in my apartment upstairs from hers) and woke me up... I ran around cursing myself for not leaving my keys in one set spot... eventually I got down to her apartment to find her on her knees beside her bed and unable to move.

She asked me to help her up. That was just not on.

Then she asked me to phone the police (!?!) for help. So I dialed 911 and requested an ambulance. While I was waiting, Mom started complaining that she couldn't breathe, couldn't talk easily, turned pale, and went into cold sweats. I panicked and called 911 a second time but by the time I had EMS on the phone again, the boys were at my front door. One of them was familiar from a previous call.

So the EMTs, working together, moved the bed, got Mom up on her feet, and sat her on the bed. Thus began a protracted verbal power struggle between the lead EMT and Mom, as she kept insisting that she had to lie down and needed to do that before she would tell them anything, while he kept insisting that they had to check her sugar and blood pressure before they could let her lie down. I felt a bizarre sense of relief as it was suddenly someone else's job to argue with her (difficult as she is normally, she gets even more fixated in a crisis).

Once she was sitting up her colour--and voice--came back.

It turned out that her sugar was relatively high (she'd had a drink of juice just before she fell) and her heart was at 120 ("better than mine!" said EMT #2) so once EMT #1 had successfully extricated himself from the usual one-sided conversation with Mom, they were able to leave. I stuck around for a couple of hours and made sure she was ok.

"Think for a moment of another kind of culture, where nothing is edited..."

"...A culture where we're all so logorrheaic we haven't time for each other's words or books or blogs, where everything goes into the ether - and there's no sign that anyone reads it all. A culture that doesn't care about editing is a culture that doesn't care about writing. And that has to be bad."

- Blake Morrison, "Black day for the blue pencil" (an article in The Observer that deserves to be read beginning to end, if anything in the papers does this week).

After a throwdown like that, I proceed to post, why? There's something viscerally squeamifying about a word like "logorrhea" thanks to its obvious logocousin. Immodium will do nothing about the blogorrheaverse.

It's August 10 but really my summer has come and gone. The shadows are longer, the sun lower, on my bike rides to and from work. I've seen all of the people that I expected to see. It all went better than I could have imagined. Which makes think that August can have nothing left for me save every task I've been putting off.

Like this.

Yesterday the woman on the cash at Tim Horton's saw me coming and said to her co-worker: "Hey, 'Earl Grey' is here." And then she realized with palpable self-consciousness that she'd used their code name for me, in my earshot.

Note: I certainly don't object to being referred to as 'Earl Grey'. For one thing, it puts me one step ahead of Scotiabank in the CFL championship title sponsor racket. (Yes, that's the Earl's cup they play for.)

For those of you wondering how exactly to order me my hot beverage of choice, it's a large Earl Grey, single milk, no sugar.