Fun at the Flowers'

Last night, as the Farterson Jrs. (Joon and Mr. Joon) and I were leaving my parents' house following the birthday party, my dad all of a sudden goes like this: "WHAT WAS THAT?????"

He'd sort of startled us, because we were just doing the usual goodbye stuff; there was no reason for him to start freaking out.

He said, "I think I just saw something crawl under the refrigerator." There was nothing under the refrigerator. My dad is 53; we were sure he was seeing things. But he made MJ help him pull the fridge out anyway. There was still nothing.

By now we were pretty sure he was hallucinating. I told him that it was probably his retina detaching and now he would be blind (I like to look on the bright side). But no, he INSISTED that he had seen something, and what's more, it looked like a snake.

Now here's the thing: my grandpa is in the early stages of alzheimers. This is a very scary thing, and we take it very seriously. But, being Flowers, we deal with it through inappropriate humor. Every time someone has a lapse in memory, we are immediately peppered with "Oh! It's alzheimers!!" My dad in particular has been getting the alzheimers remarks lately, since he has gotten into this habit of repeating himself like 18 times. I promise there was one four hour period in which he told Joon and me SIX TIMES that he wanted to see that new Brad Pitt movie, and what was that called again. SIX TIMES. Finally he caught on when Joon and I stopped being subtle with the eye rolls.

Anyway, one of the symptoms of alzheimers is that you start seeing things, and my grandpa himself had complained about seeing bugs where there weren't any. So last night, in the kitchen, everybody was like, "Oh! Alzheimers!"

Also, when my dad was bent over peering under the refrigerator for the tenth time, my mom snapped a rubberband at him. If only you could have seen him jump up in the air! I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that the rest of us FELL OUT laughing, though he was not at all amused.

By the time we finally left, he had given up. We tried to comfort him, "Maybe you saw the lines in the tile." "Maybe you were looking at this backpack and turned around really fast." He began to doubt himself. I'm sure he began to think about the alzheimers.

Well, tonight, I got a phone call around 10:00pm. It was my dad. "You owe me an apology," he said.

"What for?!?!?" (I get really belligerent about apologies. It has to do with this whole idea of being wrong in the first place, which I NEVER like admitting).

Apparently, when he got home from dinner, his cat Two-toes was in a corner staring at something. What was it?

A SNAKE. A tiny little garden snake that she had trapped in the corner.

Daddy took it outside and killed it; he said he's keeping it on the porch as proof.

So I guess my dad's not crazy after all.

Well, not AS crazy.