Thanks to Red for blogging for me yesterday. I got back from my Georgia weekend with the folks around 9 p.m., and it was either blog or watch True Blood on HBO. So…..

Wynk Hicks, aka Mama, aka Grandmother

I think I’ve mentioned before that both of my parents have Alzheimer’s disease. We’ve been lucky to be able to keep them at home, and late last year we moved to round-the-clock help. One of the five daughters (or Casey) spends every weekend with them, so the help gets a break and we get to visit with our parents. On Sunday, as I was helping Mama get dressed (while singing “Put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right in…”, and thereby proving, once again, that there is a bluegrass song for every occasion) I told her, “This is my day to wait on you hand and foot.” She immediately replied, “I wish I could think of something strenuous for you to do.” At 84, she’s still got an occasional snappy comeback.

After she got dressed, she was feeling so perky that we decided to play a game of Scrabble. She was playing well until the end, when she put down the word (and I use the term loosely) “goasth.” “What’s that?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just put it down ‘cause I had those letters.” At with that I figured it was quitting time!

Earlier, she’d tickled me with her definition of “cardiac arrest.” (We’d been talking about the death of Michael Jackson.) Trying to get my doctor dad involved in the conversation, I asked him what cardiac arrest was. He declined to answer so Mama piped up, “It’s when a policeman comes in and arrests your heart!” I thought that was so funny I wrote it down.

I’m always writing down things she says now and when I was asking her if any of us had been fussy babies, she replied, “No, you were all quiet.” She then added, with deadpan humor, “It was all my fault. I affected you beautifully.” And she must have. We love her dearly.