Friday, September 14, 2007

Ahhh old people

Yesterday, my mom asked me to bring some fruit (a musk melon (blech) and some grapes) over to our neighbor's house. Our neighbors are Joe (92) and Martha (85). When I knocked on the door, Martha answered with yellow stuff all over her fingers. I didn't question, just followed her to the kitchen where Joe was sitting. Apparently they were fixing a broom. Now, for those of you who don't know, Joe recently, last week, had a stroke. On top of that, he can barely see, and can only recently hear because of a fancy hearing aid he just got. I kept forgetting that he could hear me now, and continued my yelling at him. "LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE DOING A GOOD JOB WITH THAT BROOM!" Stuff like that.

Anyway, watching them work on this broom was awesome. Joe was sitting. Martha was standing. Joe was holding the broom, but Martha would basically set him up with everything. She put the screw in the hole, lined the screwdriver up into the screw, and then let Joe start his attempt at screwing in the screw. Every so often, the screwdriver would slip out of the screw, and Martha would have to put it back. About every 5 seconds Joe would ask, "Is it working?". Martha would respond with "Yes, it is. Slowly." Seriously, they said those exact sentences 15 times.

The entire time I had to keep myself from laughing, because I kept thinking about what I would do if I had a broken broom. I would throw the old one away and go buy a new one. I think most people under the age of 80 would do that. It's kind of sad, I guess, but true.

Oh yeah, in case you're wondering: the yellow stuff on Martha's fingers was carpenter's glue that they had used to glue the broom head back into the thingy, so that it could then be screwed in place.

2 comments:

ross said...

From little kids to the elderly... way to span time.

Jonathon David said...

I didn't know Joe had a stroke!