Entropic Force

I am thinking my grandmother wants me to do something.

She came into the living room that also doubles as my home office and stood beside the chair, waiting for me to acknowledge her. When I didn't, she meandered over to the middle of the living room floor and started playing with poker chips littered across the floor. I don't know if she is picking them up or if she is just messing around with them, but she's making a lot of noise. It bothers me that she doesn't say anything when she comes in and instead waits to be acknowledged like a student raising her hand in a classroom or a courtier in the Queen's court. I am afraid to look over at her because she has this habit of prattling on at me when I do with incessant chattering about nothing in particular, even though I do feel slightly guilty for not seeing what it is that she wants.

My grandmother has always been that way. She won't tell people things, but think that we can magically know what she wants by osmosis telepathy. She expects my father to know when something in her house needs to be fixed, even though she will not pick up a telephone and dial it to tell him. She expects me to know when she needs to go out and pay bills or pick up something from the grocery. I am supposed to read her mind as to what she wants me to fix for dinner and throws a fit when I don't fix the pot roast instead of the chicken.

It is terribly difficult living with my grandmother. It seems she has forgotten the rules of conversation and interaction with other human beings. When she was younger, she did nice things for us, cooked all of the holiday meals and Christmas was always at her house. She was good to talk to because she always had a solution for everything and talked more than she listened. Once grandpa died when I was seventeen, though, she lost part of her mind. She gave away my grandfather's belongings of worth to my aunt's family while my mother and siblings got the old junk like a pocket watch that didn't work and a box of old belt buckles. I ended up with nothing that belonged to my grandfather because I was the oldest grandchild and had spent the most time with him. While I don't believe that possessions are more important than the time you spent with that person, I would have liked to have a little something of my grandfather's to remind me of him whenever I looked through my jewelry box. Instead I made do with the silver unicorn necklace he gave me on my sixteenth birthday as my remembrance of him.

I think part of her died with my grandfather and never came back. Maybe that's what happens when your loved one dies and what ties you back together again in the afterlife. You leave a piece of your soul with them.

Since his death eight years ago, her mind has slowly started to slide. She doesn't leave the house as much as she used to. The only reason she leaves the house is to visit with my aunt in the next state. While there I become the villain maniacally twisting my moustache as she tells my aunt I waste her money even though I do not have any access to any of her finances.

Although I am not sure what goes on while she is visiting and I am left to tend the house and pets, she relates her stories on my weekly calls to check in and see when I need to drop all of my plans and come pick her up. Even though my grandmother makes overtures at being put out by taking my youngest cousin to his various sporting events, it is very thin and overly dramatic. She asserts she is a completely capable driver, even though she refuses to wear her eyeglasses and has a cataract growing over her right eye.

That changed, though, when she shaved the passenger side mirror from the door and left a streak of black mailbox along the side of my aunt's new car. My grandmother had sworn she would never drive after that, even though I had been telling her for three years that she really wasn't fit to drive, especially when she wouldn't wear her glasses. Considering my grandfather drove her everywhere from the time he stopped working in the sixties, she was severely out of practice. She didn't comprehend proper following or stopping distance, ran stop lights more than once, and clipped three or four curbs. That was only in the one time I allowed her to drive before telling her to pull over and let me drive, terrified she was going hit someone. For three years she had asserted she was capable of driving and nothing was wrong with the way she operated a vehicle.

I guess that is the way with people, really. They are born; they spend their childhood trying to assert their independence. Once they have it and are adults, they wish for the carefree days they took for granted as children, only to become those children when they get older. Although they are not apt to admit it, they can't see as well as they used to, their minds begin to fail, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to assert the independence and capability to take care of themselves they no longer possess.

After she cleaned up the poker chips she just left. She will sit in her chair in the recliner she has in the dining room watching television and silently brooding about my "dismissal" for three days to get a good boil under the cooker, then she will bitch and moan about how no one ever listens to her.