Author: Paul

We seem to always catch my mom when she is eating. They get her up early for breakfast and of course she has a full lunch, an afternoon snack and then a hearty dinner. After that it’s time for bed. All part of “the program” as my mom calls it. My mom doesn’t like the program and asks us if she is almost finished with this program.

She usually sits at the same table but they mix it up. Each table has at least one aide, sometimes feeding residents on both sides. They say they try not to have too many “feeds” at one table. My mom doesn’t eat as much as she used to but she needs no assistance and works her way through the meal in an orderly fashion. Some residents are given each item on the menu separately. I assume they would go right for the dessert if it was all put down at once. And we watched the woman sitting next to my mom try to steal her cookie.

Some people have all their food ground up. Their plates have the same items on them as the rest but each item on the menu is shaped like a scoop of ice cream.

The woman sitting next to us yesterday never woke up while she was at the table. The staff tried to shake her a few times but just let her sleep. Near the end of the meal my mom asked us if the woman was dead.

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We used to play this card game called “Indian Poker,” a politically incorrect name no matter what kind of Indian it was named after. You would pick a card and not look at it but stick it to your forehead so all the other players could see it. I think you then bet on whether you thought you had he highest card or something. It was kind of hard to keep a straight face while watching someone go of broke with a two or a three on their forehead.

When we stopped up to see my mom yesterday she had a dark sign of the cross on her forehead. Even though her home is non-denominational they have a record of your religion and I was surprised to see about half of the residents with smudge marks on their heads. My mom’s was the darkest. I said, “I see you got your ashes for Ash Wednesday.” She said, “What?” like she had already forgotten about it, so I just let it go.

“So the only thing to do was to drive up and watch the city from Observatory Crest“

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They had to pull open the dividers in the big meeting room tonight at the library in order to accommodate the overflow crowd for a presentation called “The Eastern Coyote” by Scott Smith of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation. Channel 8 was there with a video camera. Channel 10 showed up about halfway through the presentation. Peggi estimated a couple hundred people in the room.

We have 2 to 3 coyotes per square mile here, two times more than they have in the Adirondacks. There are 25,000 in New York State with the highest density in the Mohawk Valley. Of course Scott talked about coydogs, a cross between a coyote and you know. They have apparently been bred out in the colder northern climates but they are quite prevalent in the Carolinas.

I always thought wolf, coyotes and foxes would coexist as similar species but wolf eat coyotes and coyotes eat foxes and foxes eat rats, rabbits, chipmunks and so on down the line. Coyotes mate for life but fool around. Seventy per cent of their diet is deer but they don’t kill most of them, they are good at finding dead or injured deer.

An email had recently circulated among our neighbors, one that started with a women who spotted a deer head near her house when she was walking her dog. A deer hunter was the first to reply and he thought it could have been left by coyotes because they don’t like the head. Other neighbors chimed in with their recent coyote sightings.

Scott’s slides show all different colors of coyotes. I spotted what I thought was a red fox this morning. It was slinking through the trees in the woods across from our house. Stella, our eighteen year old, all white cat, was out while I grabbed the paper. I’m thinking the coyote got her. At least, I’d prefer to think that’s what happened to her. We had to have the vet put her down this afternoon because she had stopped eating.

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As of this afternoon my mom is living in the Rochester Home for the Friendless. At least that is what it was once called. Founded in 1849 as the Rochester Association for the Relief of Homeless and Friendless Females, the organization eventually outgrew its location in an old tavern on the corner of East and Alexander. In 1918 they changed their name to the Rochester Friendly Home, moved further east on East Avenue and began to accept married couples and single men as well as women. It is a skilled nursing facility and perfect for my mom’s needs. I really believe this but once we got my mom in the car it took a really hard sell on the drive out there. By the time we left I think she was in the groove.

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