Slack

I wish I had better numbers to report for this week but I just don't. Plain as that. Lots of biking but that's implied by now, right? That's my main mode of transportation so...yeah. Lots of biking.

My excuse for this week is that I had family in town visiting: my cousin, her little baby girl and my aunt. They are a lot of fun and I spent more time with an 11 month old than I think I ever have in my life. Seeing her almost makes me want to have babies of my own. Almost.

School continues to rock my socks. My writing professor is giving us lots of prompts and mine yesterday was a prescription bottle. This is what came out of my noggin:

Prescription bottles always remind me of my grandfather. I have 12 medications of my own that I take every day, however whenever I see an orange see-through bottle with a white cap, I don’t think of the 12 of them I have lined up on my nightstand at home; I think about my grandfather’s veiny hands struggling with the childproof cap. The pharmacist often offered to replace the childproof cap with an easy-open snap off cap, but my grandfather wouldn’t hear of it. My mother, his caretaker, would sigh and continue to be available to him at all times in case he couldn’t get a bottle open. “Why, I do believe they’ve given me a broken bottle,” he would say. He would tell my mother to call the pharmacy and complain, but she never did. Instead, she would read the auxiliary labels to him explaining what each one meant as she went along. “Take with food or milk.” “Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while taking this medication.”

My mother bought him a pill organizer one year for Christmas. It was a large rectangle box organized by day of the week and time of day. Each individual plastic day, containing four separate boxes (Morning, Noon, Evening, and Bedtime), could be popped out so that he would only have to carry one day’s worth of pills around with him. Each morning he selected the appropriate plastic day and placed it in his breast pocket, along with two gold pens and a comb.

Every Saturday night my grandfather would meticulously arrange his pills for the week. Each pill was dropped into its correct box in precisely the right order. One day he dropped his heart medication in before he dropped his thyroid medication in and had to start all over from the beginning. When he eventually became unable to perform his Saturday night ritual on his own, he instructed my mother, watching her with a scrutinizing glare in order to make sure every pill went from bottle to box in precisely the right order. After several weeks of practice my grandfather felt confident enough in my mother’s pill dispensing abilities to relinquish control over his pill box.

When my grandfather died I took the pill box for myself, not that anyone else in my family particularly wanted it. I saved it from the “Throw Away” pile and took it home to my nightstand where it sits empty. I have 12 prescription bottles lined up on my nightstand table and a pillbox in which to organize them, however I have yet to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps and create my own Saturday night ritual. The boxes have not been opened since his final Saturday night ritual and I’m afraid opening them now would allow tufts of him to escape, tufts of him I want to keep on my nightstand table.