LET'S PLAY OUTSIDE!

     Taking care of old guys is like raising kids. As soon as you figure out what they need, they need something else. I figured my father-in-law, Mike, needed to go outside. What he needed was protection from a fool like me, but I didn't know that till later.

     Mike was a rambunctious bastard, nearly indestructible. Twenty years ago, in his spry seventies, he cleaned gutters, shoveled snow and dragged a chainsaw up a ladder if a tree branch hovered too close to the house. He gashed his left hand once, and sewed it with his right. Sewed it closed with needle and thread.

     His response to the infirmity of age was to ignore it and his resilience was astonishing. We moved them in with us in September, 2007, and started to find Mike on the floor in the mornings, having crawled over the bars of his hospital bed. We set up a baby monitor, the only device of its kind to transmit such creative Italian cursing. I was up at some point most nights thereafter. I'd lower the bars on the bed and monitor his nocturnal wanderings. I just didn't consider it my job to say 'no' to the guy all the time.

     Adele and I often took them out together. But I considered it risky to take them out when I was by myself. Mike insisted one warm day he had to mow the lawn. I agreed to take him outside. By the time we got out there I figured he would forget about mowing the lawn. What's the worst that could happen? 

     Our house is a tri-level. The Boys spent all their time in the bottom floor, a roomy den with a bathroom and shower. So to get outside we had to navigate stairs. I figured Mike could walk up the back steps, and we would use a wheelchair for the rest of the trip.

     I filled Uncle Jerry in on the plan. If he wanted to come out with us, he would have to wait for me to get Mike situated. I would then come back and help him. I was relieved that he declined. Jerry had urinary issues and took comfort in being able to see the bathroom from his chair. He didn't move around much.

     I wheeled Mike through the laundry room to the stairway leading up to the garage. I stood him up and he grabbed the bannister with his incredibly strong right hand. I had to fold up the wheelchair, slide around him, and set up the chair at the top of the stairs, forgetting, of course, to lock the wheels. I got an under-armpit hold of his left side and guided him up five concrete steps.  The bannister doesn't go up past the top step, so he needed to let go of it and grab onto me. If he let go, I could get him up one more step, then just turn and plop his rear end into the chair. 

     He lunged forward toward the unlocked chair. It rolled away. I slid in front of him before he fell forward and steadied him with a bear grip under each armpmit. But I was at garage level and he was down a step, 150 pounds of dead weight out in front of me. I squeezed and dead-lifted up and back, finally dragging his feet over the last step. This left us in an uncomfortable slow-dance position, but I made the best of it it and waltzed him around and into the chair.

          I rolled  him out the door onto the back porch, which is just a pallet with a sheet of plywood screwed into it. Two problems. One, the yard isn't flat. It slopes down away from the house. Two: I covered my yard with gravel. This in response to my dogs ripping up every blade of grass chasing squirrels and each other back and forth all day. Unfriendly terrain for a wheelchair. Mike may tip over. But I bent my knees and lowered our center of gravity and we moved smoothly 50 feet, at which point I sat Mike up in front of the deck and caught my breath.

     (Most sensible decks are attached to a house. Ours is not. It is at the back of our lot line attached to an eight-foot wood fence, better to block out the sight and sound of my neighbor, the highway.) 

     As we parked, the dogs came pounding out the door into the yard,  bashing into each other as they careened toward us. But wait! The last thing I wanted was to have these big lugs underfoot as we negotiated the back stairs. I made sure to shut the door into the laundry room before we came out. So how did the dogs get out?

     The answer wobbled out the door. Jerry had decided to join us, after all. He tottered onto the pallet-porch before realizing there was nothing to hold onto out there. He looked like a guy walking the plank in a pirate movie, the gravel slope as intimidating to him as the ocean below to an insubordinate deck hand aboard the H.M.S. Bounty.

     I locked a wheel on Mike's chair and jogged over. I took an arm and walked him off the pallet. We began to baby-step our way over to the deck. We were forty feet away, about five minutes in walking-Jerry time, when Mike stood up. This left me with the choice of dropping Jerry in the gravel and saving Mike, or doing what I was doing and hoping for the best.  I know Mike has the harder head, so I stayed where I was.  Mike reached for the deck, still six feet away, and crumpled forward into the gravel, his face inches away from the edge of the bottom step.

     He moaned as Jerry and I completed our trek. Jerry insisted on helping. He had been picking Mike up for years. I had to shout because Jerry was as deaf as Mike was blind.

     "You gotta sit down, Jerry. I can't let you fall, too."

     "We...godda...gedim...up."

     "No!  Stay here." Like to a dog. "Stay!"

     I kneeled over Mike wondering if I shouldn't have called 911 some time ago. He spit.

     "Dio con!

     I did my second dead-lift of the day and got Mike up. He grabbed the handrail, walked up the steps and sat down as if nothing had happened. A fly bit hard on my neck. I recalled the open laundry room door and ran back inside to prevent more flying beasties from infiltrating the house. I went upstairs and made coffee as I watched them through the kitchen window. The scene was exactly as I had imagined it months earlier. I was proud for having helped bring it about, despite the day's misadventures.

     I had to wake them to serve coffee. Mike's layers of flannel prevented his getting scraped and bruised by the gravel, though he had some scratches on his face. I gave him some Advil with his coffee. All that remained was to await my blushing bride, who would be filled with warm gratitude because her husband was doing such a fine job looking after her folks.

     Another fly bit me. It wasn't the annoying kind of fly that buzzes around your head interminably. It was the big, fat hyper-aggressive fly that seems to attack just before a summer storm. I heard it before I felt it, slamming against the canopy of oak tree branches before hitting us like a wave. It rained buckets and boatloads. It pounded us and soaked us. It chilled us and choked us. It blackened the sky and battered us. It pulled leaves and twigs from trees and shot them at us. I was scared. Real scared.

     I grabbed Jerry and pulled him toward the house. You have to be  careful rushing an old guy around. You can't just pick him up and carry him. Those bones are brittle and they will break. He seemed to move better than he had coming out, forcing his arthritic hips and knees into action. I got him onto the pallet-porch and into the garage. I found a folding chair leaning against a wall and got him into it.

     "I gotta get Mike," I shouted above the storm.  "You stay here."

     "We... godda... get... Mike," he croaked.

     "I know. DO NOT GO DOWN STAIRS."

     "I'm okay. Where's Mike?"

     Mike had gotten out of his chair on the deck. He held the stair rail and moved haltingly down the steps. I got to him in time and swung the wheelchair behind, but he waved me off, indicating he could walk by himself just fine. I pushed against the back of a knee, and as it bent involuntarily, he folded back into the chair. I spun us around and began pulling. His jeans and flannel shirt and jacket had soaked up water and added another twenty pounds to the load. And when the big wheels on the wheelchair bit through the gravel they found not dirt, but mud. The chair sank and slid sideways down the slope. I tried to lower my center of gravity and my feet slid under the chair. I pushed up hard against the chair as my ass hit the gravel. That may have saved my shinbones from getting fractured, but it sent Mike pitching forward and up out of the chair for a few inches before falling back into it.

     Who would get them inside if I got hurt? I needed help. The chances of me getting both these guys downstairs and dried off without someone suffering pneumonia, a stroke or a shattered skull were increasingly remote. Adele was due home any minute, but I didn't want her to see this: Ralph Kramden, lovable lunkhead of the vintage TV series, "The Honeymooners." Another grandiose plan in tatters at his feet, undone by a peculiar combination of stupidity and arrogance.

     "Why'dya do it Ralph? These guys are 93 years old. You can't take 'em running around outside. What were you thinking?"

     "I did it for you, baby.  I know you get sad watching 'em get worse all the time. I thought...I thought if you came home and saw us sittin' on the deck, playin' with the dogs...I thought it would make you smile... I didn't know it was gonna rain.  And Jerry! Jerry said he didn't wanna go. He was supposed to stay inside. It was gonna just be me and Mike..a little stroll..."

     I finally wheeled Mike up onto the pallet. I steered him through the doorway and saw Adele leading Jerry downstairs, a blanket wrapped around his shivering shoulders. We lit the fireplace and got The Boys into nightclothes. Some hot soup helped. They seemed tired but not hurt. I told her the whole story.

     "I took them out myself a few weeks ago," she said. "We all held hands and walked across the gravel. They loved it. I guess things are changing."

     We agreed no one would bring them outside again unless both of us were home. We never did.