2001-06-07 - 10:43 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "O Little Town of Bethlehem"

Okay.

The last five days or so have been ... overwhelming, to say the least.

Well, first news first, I guess.

Pop-Pop died on Tuesday.

Ninety-one years old. Up until three years ago, he was working in his yard every day and taking the occasional bus trip to Manhattan to walk around all day, with a stop in at McSorley's Old Ale House for a beer. Up until just over a week ago, he was reading the New York Times every day. He was one of the most appreciative people I have ever met, all the way up until the very end.

I had thought that I would be relieved when he died, because he was suffering so much. Instead, after I heard, I just fell apart from the stress and worry of watching him suffering, and felt horrible that he had been alone when it happened. I saw him less than two hours before. I showed him the red shirt I had worn for him (red is his favorite color), kissed him, told him Poindexter sent his love, and told him to rest. My parents took me to the train station, then went back, and he was gone.

In retrospect, he actually did really well up until last Wednesday or so. He didn't become bedridden until then, which is more than a lot of cancer patients can say, I'd imagine. I've heard of people being bedridden for up to a year. And he was only in a wheelchair for about a month. Up until then he was still walking and taking care of himself as much as he could.

But it was so horrible the last few days, to see him lying there, looking so frail and tiny, and having such trouble breathing. He needed to cough but didn't have the strength to do it. He needed to take a breath with every syllable he tried to speak, and you could see that it was excruciatingly difficult for him. I worried about him constantly. I was so afraid he'd be in some kind of pain and they wouldn't be able to help him.

I don't think this ever happened, though -- the nurses where he lived were wonderful people and cared a great deal about him. Probably more than they should have, actually, but he was nothing if not charming and considerate so I can't blame them one bit. Geraldine, the head nurse, was especially attached to him.

They really were wonderful. The day he died, we moved him from assisted living to the nursing home section in the same building, because they were unable to effectively meet his needs in assisted living anymore. I was worried that there would be no one there to take care of him the way Geraldine did. But when we arrived, the head nurse in the nursing home was talking to him, and she was smiling at him and holding his hand and stroking his cheek, and just the sight of it made me burst into tears.

There are angels in the world, I think; they just haven't got wings.

What I need to do is put all that out of my mind, and remember how he was when he was healthy. I'm trying.

I was talking to the assistant administrator at work today, who said that when her neighbor's father died, the neighbor and her best friend went out drinking and brought her father's picture with them, as he had requested they do to celebrate his life. I love it. Sounds like a pint at McSorley's is in order.

I'll tell Poindexter's favorite memory of my grandfather:

My cousin Stacey used to be married to a man I'll call John. To say that John was a football fanatic is putting it mildly. He was simply unavailable if his football team was playing, and that was that. Although he had been in the family for over five years, I don't think he had ever spent much time with Pop-Pop and didn't know him very well. He didn't seem to know, at least, that my grandfather was a football fan and even my grandmother liked to watch it with him.

One day at a family party, John, Poindexter and Pop-Pop were in the rec room watching a game. There was a time-out, a commercial came on, and Pop-Pop said,

"How do they know to stop playing when it's time for a commercial?"

Poindexter got the joke, but apparently John didn't, because he began explaining the game of football to Pop-Pop, discussing time-outs and change of possession and such in a Very Serious Manner.

Every time John would finish an explanation, Pop-Pop, with a glint in his eye, would ask another question, sending John off on another explanatory monologue. Meanwhile, Poindexter is sitting off to the side, trying desperately not to laugh, with Pop-Pop occasionally sending him a mischievous glance.

He was like that. Those "debates" we used to have were probably partly just Pop-Pop playing devil's advocate to my position, to see where it would go.

And he could never kiss me less than three times at a pop. He'd kiss me hello, hold me at arms length and look at me with a proud smile, as though memorizing my face, then kiss me once on each cheek, and then on the lips. He loved how I always curled up and leaned against him and looped my arm through his when we sat on the couch together, and would always discuss whether "tactile" was the word to describe me.

He loved words, and would sometimes arrive at our house with a word to discuss -- I still remember when 'supersede" was the word of the day, and have never forgotten how to spell it. He would often cut articles out of the New York Times and bring them over for discussion.

I think if he had grown up in my time, he'd have a weblog. :)

So, anyway. In the midst of all the stress and worry, something happened that has to be one of the weirdest events in my entire life.

On Tuesday morning, around 10 or so, I'm sitting at the kitchen table doing a little work before we head over to see Pop-Pop, and the phone rings. Mom answered upstairs, and then Dad got on the cordless, and began wandering around the first floor talking.

After a while I realized he wasn't talking business, and I said, "Who's on the phone?"

My dad says, "It's Poindexter. Your house was flooded, but don't worry, the insurance will take care of it."

This really didn't register too clearly. "My house is ... my house is what?" (We don't live near any bodies of water.)

"It's flooded. The pipe connection between the hot water and the dishwasher fell apart. Don't worry, it's all taken care of, the insurance covers it. That's what homeowner's insurance is for. And Poindexter says the projector is fine. You were making fun of him for covering it with plastic but that may be what saved it."

(Poindexter is very, very fond of the projector.)

By this time I'm just aghast. Fuck the projector -- that's what the homeowner's insurance is for. Poindexter is down in Virginia bailing out the kitchen?

You think I'm making this up, don't you?

I thought my Dad was. I said, "Are you joking?" He said, "No, I'm not joking, your house really is flooded. The water shorted out the smoke alarm on the rec room ceiling, which woke Poindexter up at 3am, and he's been dealing with it ever since. I wouldn't joke about this."

I said, "You've got that little grin on your face that you have when you're joshing me."

He laughed, and said, "I know, it's because of you asking me that."

I went upstairs to get the girls' version of the story from my mother, said, "Poor Poindexter is down there dealing with this all by himself," and burst into tears.

Since Pop-Pop was almost always asleep at that point, I decided I really, really needed to go home and be with Poindexter, who needed lots of love and care and snuggling after dealing with all this.

Or as my Dad put it, "Poor Poindexter's slaving away down there and he's not even getting any poontang!"

Here's how it happened:

Two weeks after we moved in, we realized that the dishwasher was not working properly. The dishes were being washed in cold water and were not getting dried. The electrician came in, tightened a loose wire in the heating element, and told me that the dishwasher was connected to the cold water pipe.

Plumbing was not his department, so I had to stay home another day and wait for the plumber to come and attach the dishwasher to the hot water instead.

Apparently he didn't do a very good job.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning. Not long after Poindexter went to bed, sometime after midnight, the connection came apart. We were to discover later that the plumber person used a plastic part where he should have used a metal one, or something like that.

How long the water was gushing out, I don't know. It had to leak through the floor down to the first level, where it shorted out the smoke detector. When one goes off, they all go off.

Poindexter, asleep, heard the smoke detectors but was so soundly asleep that he actually tried to ignore it for a while. Eventually he got up, head ringing from the noise, and headed downstairs, sniffing for smoke all the while. No smoke.

He got to the kitchen/living/dining level, still no smoke. But he heard water. He figured it was raining really hard, but a glance out the kitchen window (the only window with open blinds) showed him that it was only damp.

He headed into the kitchen to get a better look, and discovered himself ankle-deep in water.

After trying to shut the water off under the sink and being unable to do so, and after trying to reconnect the piping, he was soaked from head to foot. With cold water, since the hot water heater had long since emptied by then. He went downstairs to shut off the whole house water supply. The carpet was soaking wet, water was coming out of the ceiling, and it was all headed into the drain in the laundry room.

Long story short, we have to replace the hardwood in the living room, the plywood underneath, and most of the drywall in the rec room. They sucked 30 gallons of water out of the HVAC ducts. There are holes in our rec room ceiling where they cut to let water out.

Our. house. was. wet.

It's drying up nicely right now, and doesn't look too bad except for the warped wood and the stained walls and the holes in the ceiling. Could be worse, really.

Once we got over the shock of it, there was nothing to do but laugh. It's gonna be a bitch to deal with, basically remodeling the floors and walls of the first two floors, but it'll be okay.

What are the odds?

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