Side by Side

We’ve become a couple, my husband and I. Just like that old song from the Depression era --

"Through all kinds of weather...
What if the sky should fall?
As long as we're together,
It doesn't matter at all.

Well we ain't got a barrel of money...
We may look ragged and funny...
But we're travelin' on...
Singing our song...
Side by side.

After several decades together we finish each others sentences and often come up with the exact thoughts, words or expressions simultaneously. I can’t think of a word, he can’t think of a word, but we both absolutely know what word it is we both can’t think of.

Growing up, I would laugh at Mom. She’d be peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink and all of a sudden say, “Ralph. His name was Ralph.”

Sometimes I would know what she was talking about, other times, not a clue, but each time she had an epiphany like this, it was because she had been searching, sometimes for days, for some word or name or image that her brain just could not find in its half-century store house of information. Now I am at that half-century mark and getting more like Mom every day. I’m told it is normal.

When we blurt out something totally out of context, we nod and understand. The old brain finally rummaged around in the right dusty old corner of memory to come up with the answer for which we’d spent days searching.

My husband and I cope as our eye sight fades and our hearing dims. We laugh when our conversations are punctuated with “Huh?” “What did you say?” “I didn’t hear you?”

Of course, we can get away with these types of dysfunctional conversations because it is only us and our cats that hear us. But our son and his wife will be visiting and I can just see his reaction.

He spent a lot of time with my Mom and Dad – his grandparents – and he was their go between. They got to be quite a threesome and it helped my son’s vocabulary in some ways I’d rather it hadn’t, but he got quite good at filling in the blanks for his grandparents.

So when he comes to visit and sees his Mom and Dad behaving like Grandma and Grandpa, we’ll never hear the end of it.

Although, it does have its funny moments. When we mishear, usually it involves my husband mishearing a television commercial. The other night he scrunched up his face and listened then turned to me with this quizzical look on his face, “Did she just say, ‘he has a scaly butt?’”

Aging is so much easier to handle with humor.