Cover Art
By Fay Risner
William and Sylvia Bullock 1947
All Rights Reserved by Fay Risner
Hello Alzheimer's Good Bye Dad
By Fay Risner
Smashwords Edition
Cover Art
Copyright (c) 2011 by Fay Risner
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is sold with the understanding that the author is not engaged in legal, accounting, medical or professional advice. If such advice or other assistance is required, the personal advice of a competent professional should be sought.
This book is dedicate to the memory
of Sylvia Bullock for her tender
loving care to her husband,
Bill Bullock and to my two brothers
Bill and John Bullock
Because family was important
To Sylvia.
Prologue
Why would I choose to relive ten painful years of my life by writing this book? I could have let the memories fade and continued on with my life, couldn’t I? I’ll tell you why I didn’t think I should do that. It's because I know there are other people going through the same situation my family did, caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a lonely disease for the people who have it and for their caregivers a nightmare. My story is not unusual. Anyone who has been through this has the same kind of stories to tell. This book isn’t just about what happened to my family. I wrote the book to show you how we handled the situations we found ourselves facing with caregiver tips included to help you.
Hopefully, my sharing our story will help give caregivers unfamiliar with Alzheimer’s some ideas about what to do when the same things happen to you. Maybe there will be or have been times when you looked back and wished you would have, could have, or should have done things differently. Just remember hindsight is 20/20, and we do the best we can at the time. That’s all we can do for most of us have very few skills and little education to help us deal with Alzheimer’s.
I kept a journal for part of the last ten years of Dad’s life. I kept track of the events that changed my father’s life and affected the rest of my family. It isn’t likely that I'll forget most of the details real soon. That is unless I develop Alzheimer’s, too. So just in case in the future, I get this dreadful disease which steals a person’s independence and takes away a person’s mind and dignity, I've decided to tell you about Bill Bullock and Sylvia, his wife/caregiver. This story is about their battle and mine with Alzheimer’s disease. I hope anyone who has the same problems and reads this book will somehow take comfort in the fact that you are not alone so hang in there.
There isn’t a cure for this disease yet, but we always hope research will make a breakthrough some day. Until then, there is help if you know where to find it, and you do need to ask for all the help you can get. Take my word for it. Start by calling this phone number 1 -- 800 -- 272 -- 3900 to ask for the office of the nearest Alzheimer’s Association in your area or look in your phone book for a local office. The Association will give you information on any questions you have about the disease, and tell you how to get help to fit your needs. I wish I’d known about the Alzheimer’s Association when I was struggling with some of the problems that all families face when dealing with this disease. As it turned out most of the time, I was able to make what I felt were the right choices on my own because of my training as a certified nurse aide.
Education about Alzheimer’s is very important and the best time to start reading about the disease is before you or someone you love has it. For some who are dealing with the disease, the reason they aren’t educated is they are isolated from their community. For those who haven’t yet come in contact with someone who has the disease, the reason is indifference. For those people I say, statistics show one out of three families have someone in them that has Alzheimer’s. If it hasn’t hit your family yet, the disease may strike near you soon, because statistics show a drastic rise in Alzheimer’s is coming.
The disease strikes most often at age 65 just when you have retired from your job and think you have your golden years ahead of you. If you haven’t gotten the disease by then over half of the people who reach age 85 get the disease. Right now sixty percent of the residents in nursing homes have Alzheimer’s. Five and a half million people have the disease, and four million of those people are in their homes. That means there is approximately that many caregivers out there. The amount of people estimated to have the disease in twenty five years will be twenty two million when the baby boomers reach retirement age. By the year 2050 if there's no cure, forty five million people worldwide could have the disease. Doesn’t those facts make you want to find out more about Alzheimer’s disease?
Hillary Clinton once said it takes a village to raise a child. It should take a village to care for people with Alzheimer’s, too. My mother could never have done the great job of caregiving she did if she hadn’t had help. I, their daughter, was there for both of my parents as much as I could be. I’ve been told helping care for a parent most often falls to the daughter of the family. When things were tough, I often wondered who made up that rule. My thought was it had to be a man, but in our case, whoever came up with the daughter being the caregiver was right.
My two brothers were there for me when I needed a sounding board and to help my parents. John would take Mom to his house when Dad was in the hospital, and he'd be at the hospital to oversee what was going on when he was needed. John and Diana hunted gifts that would help in the care of our dad -- the bar on the bathtub and the new digital bathroom scale we used so often to keep track of Dad’s weight loss.
My brother, Bill, took Dad to the hospital at times I wasn’t around. He kept the repair work done on our parents home, and put the double lock on the outside door so Dad couldn’t get away from Mom.
My son, Duane, when I was at work, watched Dad for signs of shortness of breath when he needed a nebulizer treatment, or his oxygen concentrator turned on. Duane saw to it that these things were done if Mom forgot to do them.
What would I have ever done without Aunt Jean being there all the time just a phone call away when I needed to talk or have her help me persuade Mom to go along with one of my ideas. With her strength and presence, she helped to brace all of us to accept what was coming at the end.
Our volunteer helped Mom to get away from all the stress for three hours every two weeks. As the primary caregiver, Mom needed that break.
The Home Health nurse made routine visits that kept us from having to go through the difficult task of getting Dad into the car to go to the doctor until it was absolutely necessary, and she kept us informed about his condition.
The homemaker aides tried to lighten Mom’s household chores and gave Dad a shower once a week were very much appreciated by me. The oxygen technician came on a routine basis to check the concentrator and the nebulizer also checked Dad’s vitals and oxygen saturation. He taught me how to help Dad cough up the phlegm that was plugging his airways.
Very important, the family doctor who cared enough about Bill to make house calls when he was too sick to go to the office and gave Sylvia his home phone number when she couldn’t figure out how to use the instructions on his answering service. Plus, this doctor cared enough to keep Sylvia stirred up as a way to keep her fighting when she was weary, and though he increasingly brought up the fact that Dad needed to be in a care center, he admired Mom's will power even though he watched her stamina decline. His objective in all of this was the same as ours -- to keep Bill alive and with his family as long as he could.
If everyone would become educated about this disease, they'd be able to help the person with Alzheimer’s stay in his home longer. Right now, most caregivers, taking care of someone with Alzheimer’s, become overlooked in the community, because they are confined to their home, too. So people look around you and become aware. Have you wondered why a family member, friend, or neighbor no longer seems friendly and stops participating in community events? Alzheimer’s might be the reason. Call the Alzheimer's Association phone number and ask for information on the disease so you understand what is happening to that person and learn ways you can help.
Volunteers are needed to give the caregivers, who take care of people with Alzheimer’s 24 hours a day, a breather to run errands and to get away from the house for a brief time. Those who volunteer need to be trained to know how to help someone with Alzheimer’s so they are prepared for the unexpected turns a person’s mind can take if the person tends to be difficult.
The administrator, at the care center where I worked, told me when Dad’s health was declining that my giving a speech to a clergy conference for the Alzheimer’s Association would be cathartic for me. I hope, in some way, this book is as cathartic for those of you who choose to read it as it was for me when I wrote it.
Most of all I hope it gives you some ideas and helps you choose the best care you can possibly give the person who needs it. We are known as the sandwich generation with families and elderly parents to care for. What seems like a doable challenge can become the reason for caregiver burnout. Declining health and mental stress can slip up on the caregiver before you realize it. I watched it happen to my mother but didn't recognize it in myself. Eight out of ten caregivers die before the one they take care of.
Chapter 1
Retirement and the Golden Years
Already into the middle stage of Alzheimer’s disease, blank eyes, expressionless faces, and painfully thin bodies, describes the residents that I took care of at the care center. With only the bits and pieces I picked up from the family members and the pictures in healthier days that I see on the walls, I sometimes look at the residents and wonder what they were like before they became sick. So maybe I should begin by giving you some background about my parents so you have an idea what they were like in their younger days and up to the time Alzheimer’s disease became the focal point in their lives.
The Indians would have called my father a dreamkeeper. I’m sure this humble man would have liked that better than the adjectives I’d used such as honorable, unassuming, a good father and a loving husband. Of course, I’m basis. Not that Bill Bullock’s stories came from dreams and visions, but tales about earlier life experiences when he was energetic and adventuresome. He liked to relive the happy times in his life. As he really got into telling a story, you’d swear that was what he was doing. In his mind, he was right in the middle of days long gone. The listeners were on the outside, looking into a time warp to the past unfolding in my father’s head.
For instance, take the morning in the late eighties when I dropped by my parents for our usual coffee break. Since I lived on the same acreage with my husband and son, I had grown accustomed to stopping in every morning. But sometimes, Mom thought of something for me to help her with. Usually it was a task she didn’t want to tackle herself.
In an off handed way with her back to me as she washed breakfast dishes, she mentioned that she’d like to have the pictures in one of the small drawers of the old buffet behind me put in photo albums. She had picked up a bunch of scrap books at yard sales during the summer to use for this very purpose. Was I busy at the moment? She knew I wasn’t when she asked.
I tried to open the drawer and had to slip my hand in to press down the pictures so I could bring the drawer all the way out. What a mess! Years of school, birthday, wedding and holiday photos added up. I could say one thing for this family. We sure do take a lot of pictures, but then we have a fair amount of relatives on both sides that contributed to that drawer.
Looked to me like one of those forever jobs that I wouldn’t get done in a day. I groaned to myself about the task. First off, I started to pile each picture according to year so there would be an orderly sequence to the albums. Even that might not have been such a time consuming project if each of the pictures had names and a date on them, but most of the older black and white ones didn't. I’m talking about people that had died before I was born or shortly right after. Mom had to stop doing dishes several times to tell me what to write on a pictures.
Next in the pile was a 8 x 10 brown folder, a bit scuffed around the edges. Inside, the picture was a brown and white, young, happy version of Bill and Sylvia Bullock, my parents.
“When was this taken?” I asked, studying Mom’s soft smile and Dad’s sleepy eyed look and mischievous grin.
Mom looked over her shoulder from the kitchen sink where she was finishing up the breakfast dishes. “That's our wedding picture.”
“Good grief! Why isn’t it in a frame instead of mashed between all these other pictures?” I find a date on one of the smaller pictures -1947. That was 13 years after they married, but probably the first time they could afford to get a professional picture taken.
“Never seen the need I guess.”
Not exactly a traditional wedding picture, but they way most couples looked in the depression. Mom had on a dress with little swirls running helter skelter. Dad wore a suit jacket over his shirt, but no tie. He must have felt it a special occasion since he never ever liked to wear a suit. I peeked under the edge of the picture. The back was blank. “I should put your wedding date on the back. What is it, Dad?”
He looked up from his coffee cup at the end of the table, snorted then replied casually, “Dang if I remember. Seems like it was November in the early thirties.”
“Pretty close,” Mom said and laughed. “November 23, 1935. It was your brother, Max's birthday. Remember?”
“If you say so,” he agreed.
“What is this book?” A gray scrap book lay next in the pile, tied with a nylon string much like a small, round shoestring.
“That's my first scrapbook,” Mom replied. “A teacher gave it to me.”
I sat down at the table next to Dad and opened it up. Some of the first pictures were of grinning young men and women in black and white glued to the black pages.
“That one was your ma's boyfriend,” said Dad, tapping a young man’s face.
“That was before you came along. You should tell her that,” chided Mom.
“Here’s some people I recognize, Mom. I think. Looks like Grandma and Grandpa Bright and some of your brothers and sisters standing in front of an old truck.” I turned the picture over. Nothing on the back so I wrote John and Veder Bright, and family with 1930’s and a question mark.
“That’s the truck we drove from Montevallo, Missouri to Arizona to pick cotton back in the 30’s,” shared Dad, with a far away smile at Mom as she sat down on the other side of me with a cup of coffee.
Oh, oh, he’s getting wound up for a story, I’m thinking. That meant putting pictures in orderly piles by dates would be at a stand still while I politely listened.
“Times were hard during the Great Depression. Your Ma’s folks had a big family to feed, and at the time, we and your brother Billie were living with them, too. John and I decided to take off for Arizona to pick cotton to get a nest egg. We figured to bring the money we’d make back to Missouri to live on for awhile.”
“That old truck made it all the way to Arizona?”
“Sure did. We fitted canvas to the sides and put a bunk all the way across on each side and one on the end so everyone would have a place to sit. We had two tents, one for us and the other for John’s family to use at night on the side of the road to sleep in.
John, and I took turns driving. Once we got the truck started. It had to be pushed to get it going, and the brakes were faulty. But it was the only transportation we had large enough to carry all of us. John didn’t want to leave Veder and the family behind. The kids weren’t old enough to fend for themselves yet and we expected to be gone several months.
Never thought much about how bad the brakes were on that old truck until John stopped just before we started into the Arizona Mountains,” Dad said and laughed. “I reckon John knew what would happen when I got to driving on narrow, winding, mountain roads. Not having been more than a few miles from home, I didn’t know what mountain driving was like. Sometimes the road looked like it was going to end at the sky. Then at the top, we’d start a downhill rush. At first, I tried to ride the brakes but then they got to smelling and weren’t much good after awhile. Yep, John knew what he was doing all right. He wanted someone besides him driving that old truck with its bad brakes, because he knew how treacherous driving over the mountains would be.”
“You must have made it. You’re here,” I teased.
“Wasn’t easy, but I did er,” he said proudly.
“The front bench is where we packed a hundred quart of peaches, I canned that summer,” Mom shared.
“You canned a hundred quart of peaches at one time?”
“Yep. That old tree was loaded the summer before and I couldn’t let them go to waste. With all of us in that truck, it took several jars for a meal.”
“Besides,” Dad added. “If we had left them at the house, the peaches would have been gone just like everything else was when we came back.”
“Someone stole your things while you were in Arizona?”
“Yep, but times were hard. What we had didn’t amount to much, but we’d put all we could in an old underground cellar. Sure enough when we came back the cellar was empty.”
“Good thing we took what we could. Such as bedding and the peaches,” Mom said.
“This scrap book must have been in there somewhere,” I guessed.
“Oh, I had a small box full of things that were special to me under one seat,” said Mom.
I like to think of these people as my family’s version of the pioneers who headed west in the wagon trains except they did it in the 1930’s in an old truck with bad brakes. The difference was they weren’t looking for gold, thinking about getting rich, or homesteading land like the pioneers of the 1800’s for they didn’t intend to stay out west very long. They just needed a nest egg so they could get by back home in Missouri, waiting for better times. As soon as they could, they went home which amounted to a year.
A few years later during World War 2, there was a second trip west to California to pick oranges and grapefruit. This time it was more like the Beverly Hillbillies when they started home. Mom's brother, Buck, went along. He got a draft notice and needed to get back to Missouri. An elderly, neighbor lady who had been visiting relatives in California needed a ride back to Missouri. When she found out that my family was ready to go home, she asked if she could travel with them in their truck. Dad didn’t have the heart to tell the lady that there wasn’t a place for her to sit so he put her rocking chair in the back of the truck. She rode just like Granny Clampett, sitting in her rocker all the way home. I can picture this determined, older lady, somebody’s grandma, holding on to the arms of her rocker with her bony, white knuckled hands to keep from getting pitched out while Dad drove up and down the steep mountain passes, hitting one pothole after another.
My family returned to Montevallo, Missouri for a time than made another trip back west to California to work in the fruit groves again. After that, Dad farmed his mother’s farm, but the war was opening up factory jobs that made more money. Once again, Dad packed his family up and with his brother, Max, his wife and child, they went to Clearwater, Kansas. Dad and Max worked in an airplane plant, making and repairing bombers for the war.
By the time the war ended, Dad saved enough money from that job to buy an 80 acre farm near Schell City, Missouri not far from where my parents grew up. That farm was where Dad’s heart remained long after he moved his family to Iowa. My younger brother, John, and I were born on that Missouri farm. Those years for us were a Tom Sawyer existence, but it wasn't an easy life for my parents. Farming that small farm was hard work with cows to milk, chores to do, field work and repairs to be made. There was never an income big enough to lay away money for later, only survival.
In 1961, Grandpa John Bright, Sylvia's father, decided to retire from the Standard gas station he operated on highway 30 south of Keystone, Iowa. He asked Dad if he’d like to take over the gas station. That meant moving his family 800 miles away from his farm. It wasn’t what Dad wanted to do. He was giving up a farm that had been his dream. He'd worked very hard to buy and to hang onto that little piece of land, but Mom convinced him that it was for the good of the family. She knew she could count on Dad to always put the family first, and Mom hoped this would be a move that would afford them more income and an easier way to make a living.
They rented a U-haul trailer to hook up behind the 49 Chevy Dad bought for the move. He gave Mom’s brother, Buck, the 35 Chevy we drove at the time. It had originally belonged to my mother’s grandpa, Luther Bright, until he died in 1954. For years, my Uncle Buck had that old Chevy. A few years back I had a chance to look at it, hidden behind the piles of lumber and other things stored in his garage. The old car looked much smaller to me then it seemed when I was a child.
We packed the U-haul trailer packed with as many of our meager belongings as it would hold and headed north. We each wanted to take something with us that held memories of home. Mom held a Christmas cactus on her lap that a neighbor woman gave her in the 50's. She had that plant until she died and not I have a portion of it. Without my mother's green thumb, the 100 year old cactus has survived but it never blooms for me. John and I put our two dogs in the back of the car at our feet -- Ginger and Rastus. We were nervous about being uprooted, and the one demand we made was that our pets could go with us. My parents didn’t have the heart to refuse even though they dreaded the 8 hour trip with two, medium size, outdoor dogs mixed with two kids in the car. I still don’t know why Mom and Dad grumbled about taking the dogs. It was our feet that got tromped on for 8 hours, and we didn't mind the smell.
By this time, my older brother, Bill, was married and lived near Keystone so we looked forward to seeing more of him and his family. He was 11 years older than me and had been gone from home for a long time.
At first, Dad rented the farm, then he decided to sell it. Of course, his timing was bad. Dad sold it for $100 an acre just before land prices began to rise, but then a small amount of money seemed to go farther in those days than a larger amount does today. He used some of the money to buy his first new car -- a 66 Ford. The rest of the farm money paid for the 5 acres the gas station and house set on. Now Dad realized there was no going back to Missouri, but he would always miss his farm. When his memory was failing that was the home he was always trying to get back to when he didn’t recognize the house in Iowa that my parents had lived in for 40 years.
Running a gas station turned out to be as hard an occupation as farming, the way my parents worked at it. They kept the station open from daylight until 10 P. M or later. Dad pumped gas, fixed tires and did minor repairs on cars. He was a good mechanic. When he first started farming, he built his first tractor from parts off junked tractors, and he always kept our old cars in running order. One time at the station, Dad used the spring out of a ball point pen to fix something on a customer’s car motor and sent the traveler on his way. It’s just as well I don’t remember what the spring fixed, because I imagine it wouldn’t work in the motor of a computerized car today.
Mom stayed busy inside the gas station; selling groceries, sandwiches, homemade pies, souvenirs, pop, candy and ice cream. Also, she did the bookkeeping. They turned that Mom and Pop station into a small, quick stop, convenient store long before Casey's existed.
For the 28 years, Bullock’s gas station was open it was a popular, neighborhood hangout for all the farmers. Of course, the station's history went back to 1937 when the station first opened on the Lincoln Highway. Farmers over the generations had always dropped by for an early morning coffee break after their chores and stayed for a couple hours, discussing area news and farming.
In Dad's day, he sat behind the long, wooden counter that looked like a throw away from an old west saloon. He perched his five foot nine inch frame on a red metal stool in the front corner of the room near the cash register, listening to the conversations between running outside to put gas in a customer’s car. He passed the area news he had heard on to any customer who drove and asked, “What’s news around here?”
Patiently, Dad waited for the farmers conversations to slow down. When he saw an opportunity, he took his turn. He’d push up the bill of his blue cap with the Amoco torch on the front, and remove from his mouth his old pipe with the crooked stem that he puffed on continually (the one that had the stem held together with a piece of wire). With a twinkle of good humor in his hazel eyes, he relived in his head what he was about to tell and spoke in his warm, mellow, baritone voice, “That reminds me of the time ---- .” Heads would turn toward Dad as he was off on one of his humorous, adventure tales that captivated his audiences.
Dad had a wonderful sense of humor and a way of livening up his early life escapades that kept the customers listening and laughing. They enjoyed Dad’s stories. One friend told me he didn’t mind hearing the stories over again and again since they got better with the telling. Dad embellished on the tales as he retold them which happened often since after years of storytelling, Dad didn’t remember to whom he had told what story.
One customer said he liked to stop at the station for gas because it was like going back in time to enter that old building, and he enjoyed visiting with Dad. I, on the other hand, was so used to hearing Dad tell stories from my earliest memories through growing up that I tuned him out. I remember as a child thinking to myself, Oh no, here he goes again. Now I wish I had listened and remembered more of those stories, because the time came that Dad didn’t have enough memory left to repeat his stories. We’d never hear them from him again. Too late, I realized that hearing them repeated from anyone else just wouldn’t be the same as listening to the way my dad livened up the tales about his early life.
I did sneak in a tape recorder at one of the family get-togethers and recorded Dad telling a stories. I’ll always treasure that tape as much for the fact that it brings back the comforting sound of his voice as well as it being a sample of Dad’s storytelling. That time, Dad told about when he was a kid, his brother, Uldric, and he had decided to take a stick of dynamite over to the creek near their house and toss it in the water to kill the fish so they could bring a mess home for a quick supper. After arguing who would get the pleasure of throwing the lit stick in the water, Uldric won out with the argument that he was the older brother so he should do it. Dad gave in. Uldric, who’s aim was bad, wound up his arm, and threw the dynamite. It lit in the top of a tree near the creek. The dynamite exploded, and the tree became toothpicks. The boys only had the one stick so there went the idea of a quick meal.
Dad declared he knew he had been right. He should have been the one to throw the dynamite, because his aim was better.
If you get a chance to tape your loved one or take pictures of that person, capture the characteristics that make that person who he or she is that endears them to you, because later on like a thief in the night, Alzheimer’s will steal that person’s personality. Believe me, you will be too busy being a caregiver to notice in time to say good bye.
In the late 80’s, the Environmental Protection Agency sent my parents a letter to tell them in two years they would have to dig up the underground gas supply tanks that had been there for years and replace them with above ground tanks. Dad rented the pumps and tank from another dealer who couldn’t afford to put thousands of dollars into a failing operation. The dealer realized because of Dad’s age and the emergence of new self serve pumps that could afford to sell gas cheaper, it was time for him to retire. Dad was bitter about being forced to stop work. Underneath it all, he may have been worried about getting older with nothing to do. This was a big change in his life. He had to blame something for his being forced into retirement so he often said it was the government that forced him to quit before he was ready. At that point, Dad was a spry 75 year old man filled with energy. He didn’t want a change in his life while he thought he was still able to work.
This forced retirement happened to Bill and Sylvia in October 1988. Frankly, their family and friends felt it was about time they took life easier. After all, they had worked hard their whole life from the time they were children growing up in large families.
The Belle Plaine Union came out to the gas station to take pictures and write a story about my parents retirement. The paper related how the station had been a neighborhood fixture ever since highway 30 had been called the Lincoln highway back when the road was dirt. When they saw the big picture of themselves in the paper, my parents joked about making the front page of a newspaper for the first time in their life. They were pleased with the story.
The neighbors helped my family give my parents a super retirement party at the Keystone Legion Hall. We had a potluck supper complete with a decorated cake. There was a picture on the cake of an elderly couple sitting in their rocking chairs. Mom’s dark brown hair, though streaked with gray, wasn’t as gray as the lady on the cake, but she held a rug on her lap to symbolize her rug weaving hobby, and the man, like Dad, was wearing a blue cap and smoking his pipe. Clouds of smoke rose above his head.
The gas station, their house and several outbuildings were on my parents acreage. This place had been a working farm at one time. Being able to walk to work was a plus for my parents especially in winter months, but there weren’t as many customers then as in the summer when tourists were traveling through the state so their income in the winter was much lower.
Also near the house was an empty mobile home, Mom’s mother, Veder Bright, had lived in for a short time. After my husband took a different job, we moved into the mobile home, and lived there for 18 years. My husband and I like country living, and we felt it was a good way to raise children. We have one son, Duane. So while Harold went to work for the Iowa Department of Transportation each day and Duane was at school, I made use of my parents farm buildings by keeping a menagerie of animals in them. Harold and Duane helped me take care of all the animals in their spare time.
Raising our own food had been part of our rural upbringing so besides raising our own meat that consisted of pigs, sheep, milk goats, bottle calves, and rabbits, we had 3 gardens, and I had flocks of chicken, ducks, turkeys, a few geese, quail and 3 guineas.
The first few years we lived there, Harold kept the gardens tilled, and Dad helped when he could. Mom and I pulled weeds and picked the vegetables, but running the gas station kept them tied down so it was hard for my parents to find much spare time.
When retirement came about they had plenty of time on their hands. It wasn’t hard for Mom to fill the spaces. She loved raising flowers and reading, plus she had a hobby -- weaving rugs. All Dad had done for twenty eight years was operate the gas station. He did like to read paperback westerns, and he watched the educational and news shows on television which usually bored Mom. She’d rather watch soap operas. Dad was always trying to educate himself, and it seemed to me that he knew a little about almost every subject, but he needed more than reading and watching television to keep him busy. He didn’t like to sit still too long.
After Dad retired, he took over Harold’s job of tilling the garden, and he enjoyed working in the soil. After all, that was as close as he was ever going to get to farming again. He liked a clean garden and a well tilled one. In fact, he tilled and tilled until Mom and my feet sank ankle deep in the soft soil when we picked vegetables. We mentioned to him that he was tilling the moisture out of the soil, but that didn’t deter Dad. He hooked up the garden hose, and watered the garden until he came close to running the well dry. A few times, he did just that. However, the shallow well always recovered by the next morning, and we’d have plenty of water again.
Several year in the fall, I had a part time job for two months at the local tree nursery, making pine wreaths for Christmas. I enjoyed getting out to do something different with my day for that short time. Also, the job made me spending money for Christmas. I worked with the same ladies for a long time and looked forward to joining them, because we visited as much as we worked. Then as I acquired more livestock and in turn more chores I found it hard to get up early enough to get the chores done before I left for work.
One morning, I asked Dad if he would mind feeding the chickens for me so I wouldn’t be late for work. He not only wanted to, but that was the last time that flock of chickens was known as mine. Even after my part time job was over, he'd have the chicken chores done before I could get to it. Those chickens never had it so good before Dad took over their care. In the winter, he gave them warm mash and oats to eat and kept the water warmed for them to drink. I teased him that the hens were going to be too fat to lay eggs, because they ate so well. Several times a day, Dad went to the hen house to gather the eggs as they were laid, and he left the hen house light on 24 hours a day. When I mentioned the cost of electricity, Dad said the hens needed to think it was daylight all the time so they would eat more and lay more eggs. As much as I missed taking care of the chickens, I knew that it gave Dad something to do and that was a good thing, especially for the chickens.
Chapter 2
A New Job For Bill
For years, Mom wove rugs on a loom for other people. In between customers, she’d weave rugs for herself to sell at the station and craft shows we went to in the fall. Rug weaving is a dying art, and one that is very time consuming, but Mom liked to keep busy.
In the summer of 1990, she had several customers come at the same time. A church group wanted rugs made for a fund raiser which amounted to a big order. The rugs had to be done in time for their fall bazaar. Mom always liked to get the customers rugs wove quickly. The fact that she had this large order to get done to meet the church ladies deadline in September, plus weave small orders for other customers and get rugs ready for herself to sell at craft shows made her anxious.
Dad helped Mom with the rugs by winding the rags into balls while she sewed them on the sewing machine. He wound the cloth strips on the shuttles for her while she wove, and he helped rethread the warp on the looms which took two days to complete. When some of the boat shaped, wooden shuttles, the rag strips were wound on, fell apart, Dad carved new ones. He never tried weaving, because he thought of that as woman’s work, and perhaps he didn’t want to interfere in what Mom liked to do since she had never asked him to help her weave.
One day, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table having their mid morning cup of coffee when Dad asked Mom, “Got anything for me to do today?”
“Like what?” Mom asked right back, figuring he’d tell her no to any suggestion she made.
“Anything. I need something to do. It doesn’t take long to feed the chickens, and the garden doesn’t need tilling yet.”
No kidding, Mom thought, as she pictured herself sinking in the garden’s soft soil. Then she had an idea. “You want to help me weave rugs? I'd like to get caught up on the church group’s rugs, and it’s taking me a long time to get them done by myself.”
“I don’t know how,” Dad told her.
“I’ll show you,” she said. “Come with me.” Quickly, Mom got up, headed for the loom room before he had time to change his mind.
Mom had two looms. She was going to let Dad sit down to weave, but he didn’t do well at weaving on the wooden loom. It has 6 pedals close together. Dad’s high topped farmer shoes were too wide for him to step on just one pedal at a time. He would catch two at the same time and mess up the pattern so Mom put him to work on the old steel loom. Dad had to stand up to weave on that loom, but it didn’t have pedals so all he had to do was push the shuttle filled with cloth strips through the blue and white warp and pull the boom forward to tamp the rag strips tight. He could do that so he went to work with enthusiasm for something useful that was going to keep him busy.
In the summer of 1991, the rug weaving business was still going well when I read a notice in the Vinton Cedar Valley Times. The newspaper was looking for stories of interest about people and businesses around Keystone. I wrote the newspaper a letter about my parents weaving rugs and mentioned that they were in their 70’s. To get the paper’s attention, I added that rug weaving was a dying art.
“Hello,” I said into my phone one morning.
“Fay, I just got a call from a man at the Vinton paper, and he wants to come out to talk to us about our rug weaving,” Mom said.
“Great! What did you tell him?”
“I said I guessed it would be okay. What do you think?”
“Sounds like a good thing to me,” I answered cautiously. I couldn’t tell if Mom was excited about the idea or not.
“He said my daughter was the one who suggested he come out to see us.”
Oh, oh! I’ve been caught, I thought. “Yes, I did,” I admitted, thinking it would be better to keep my answers brief until I saw how she was going to react to this idea of mine.
Over the years, Mom usually resisted new ideas in one of two ways. By remaining silent in hopes I’d forget the subject, or in an angry outburst, she’d tell me she was not going to do whatever it was and end by saying, “That’s all there is to it!” I never liked her angry outbursts, especially the ones aimed at me when I had an idea I thought would help one of my parents. I toughed my way though each time and won the disagreements with Mom, because I was sure I was right. Then I always worried about what I had done and hoped I was right, because I was making decisions for someone other than myself. At least, I considered that I had won the disagreement when things turned out like I wanted. However, I could never be sure that Mom thought she lost the disagreement. Rather, I worried that she was plotting a new way to go around me to do things her way. This is not uncommon in older people who have taken care of themselves all their lives. Though their judgment might not be as good as it once was, they have been independent for a long time and set in their ways. That makes it hard to change their minds.
“Well, how much is this going to cost me?” Mom demanded always worried about the little money they had to spend.
Oh, oh, here it comes, I’m thinking. “Not anything. It’s free when they write a story about you. Look on the good side. This will be free advertising.” I had to think fast often at the nursing home, and I can thank my mom for giving me plenty of practice.
“I don’t know if we need any advertising. We can’t keep up with the customers we have now,” Mom lamented.
“It'll be okay." I realized she was probably more worried about a stranger coming and having to do something that was different then any new onslaught of customers. “I’ll come over when the reporter gets here. I probably know the one who’s coming since the paper has written stories about me before for the lamb promotions I used to do.”
Nervously, I watched out the window the day the reporter was to arrive. I was right about knowing him. I led him to the house and introduced him to my parents who were as usual having their morning coffee at the kitchen table. Right away he asked to see the looms so my parents led the way to the loom room. While the reporter followed them, I slipped out the back door. They were getting along all right, and this was their interview. I wanted it to stay that way.
“Hobby of Weaving Looms over Bullock’s Retirement” the headline read complete with three large pictures of Mom and Dad weaving at their looms. A great story followed. Mom and I purchased several copies to give to relatives. After all it wasn’t often that Bill and Sylvia Bullock made headlines, but come to think about it, this was the second time in a few years. Harold’s niece had copies laminated for us so that the newspapers will stay in good shape forever for the next generations to treasure.
“Time really flies now that we’re retired, and if I’m not careful it will pass me by without me knowing it,” Dad philosophized to the reporter.
“It’s kind of nice to be able to work together after all these years,” Mom said as she looked at Dad. “He’s really a good help if he sets his mind to it.”
I imagine not many married couples spend their whole married life together working side by side at a job like my parents did or even want to work together for that matter.
Mom went on to tell the reporter about me taking her to craft shows in the fall. “It’s quite a sight when we go to shows,” Mom laughed. “We load up Fay’s stationwagon and fill it up to the top with all our stuff. The poor car just sags.”
“They got it so full you can’t even see out the back window,” Dad chimed in.
I later sent a thank you note to the reporter for capturing my parents so well in print. Also, I added that he didn’t have to print everything they said word for word. He could have left the part out about my car being so full that it sagged, and the fact that Dad thought I wasn’t able to see out the windows when I was driving, too. I was worried that the neighbors may have read that article. The next time they saw me coming to meet them on the road in my red stationwagon, they would be afraid that I was overloaded and unsafe. I imagined farmers veering their pickups over to the shoulder of the road to keep from passing too near me.
Mom and Dad agreed in the article that it didn’t take them long to weave a rug. However, Mom joked that it took Dad a little longer than her, because his feet were too big to use the pedals on the wooden loom so he had to use the older, slower loom.
“I still do pretty good though. It just takes me longer,” Dad said in his defense.
The reporter wrote that for the most part the couple admitted the business was very enjoyable, because it allowed them to spend time together.
“We never get bored. We always have something to do, if we want to,” Dad said, “and if you don’t want to get up early or you want to go to bed early, it’s going to be there when you are ready to pick it up again. That’s the nice thing about retirement.”
It helps me to read this article over again, and remember there was a time in those days that Dad was content and happy, but the golden years didn’t last nearly long enough. Perhaps, it’s because the bad days are so fresh in my memory that I tend to dwell on them instead.
The golden years weren’t all work for my parents. Most evenings in the summer, they went fishing; a sport they both loved. Sometimes, Harold, Duane and I took them with us. I have fond Missouri memories of my parents telling John and me when we were small that they were ready to go fishing. As quick as John and I could, one of us would hunt a shovel and the other an empty can, and we’d head out behind the barn to dig up small, red worms to use for bait. All of us used cane poles with a hook on the end of the line. Since we walked through the pasture and a timber to get to the stream, Dad didn’t carry a big, heavy tackle box. Now I don’t know where the stream is. I can’t even remember catching fish, but I remember the feeling of excited anticipation at getting to go fishing with Mom and Dad. We were doing something we all loved to do together.
Mom, for some reason always caught more fish than Dad. Dad didn’t seem very patient. When he didn’t catch as many fish as Mom, he’d grumble that fishing wasn’t as much fun when Sylvie caught all the fish in the stream. Secretly, I don’t think he minded as much as he let on, but he did like to tease Mom to see if she would growl back at him which she usually did. She knew he was trying to rile her up.
One of the last times we took Dad and Mom fishing on a warm, summer day we had to sit in the sun, because there weren't any shade trees around the pond. From across the pond where I sat, I noticed Dad flat on the bank with one arm over his eyes. I walked around the pond to find out what was wrong with him. When I asked, Dad didn’t seem to know except he said he didn’t feel good. He was weak when we helped him up and back to the car. All the way home, Dad laid his head against the seat and kept his eyes closed. We wondered if he had gotten too hot like the summer before when he had stayed in the garden too long on a hot day and became overheated.
It took several days for him to get over that episode. After that he was more careful about not staying out in the sun too long, but this day, it didn’t seem like we had been sitting on the bank long enough for Dad to get overheated. Having spent so much of his life outside, Dad had a permanent suntan that made his face and arms naturally dark. Underneath his clothes, he was very white. It was hard to believe after all those years of being outside that he couldn’t take being in the sun anymore, but maybe I was having as hard a time as he was remembering how old my dad was. He did seem okay by morning, and refused to go to the doctor. However, that episode scared me enough to keep me from asking my parents to go fishing with us again.
Mushroom hunting in the spring was a fun time for me from the time I can first remember my family going when we lived on the farm. My parents took John and me every spring. Sometimes on weekends the city relatives went with us. It was fun to scatter out in the timber to see who could find the most mushrooms.
After Harold and I married, we rented a pasture for years for our cattle that had a timber connected to it which was an ideal place to hunt mushrooms. After a long winter of being housebound, it was refreshing to walk under the green, leafy canopy of trees, smelling the rich humus air as we stirred up the fallen leaves underfoot. We took my parents with us. While Harold, Mom, Dad and Duane hunted mushrooms, I watched as much for the dainty wild flowers in bloom as I did for the mushrooms that I was there to hunt.
A fleeting kaleidoscope of colors transpired when the different species of song birds, that had migrated back, flitted through the tree tops. We made loud, crunching sounds as we walked on the dried carpet of brown leaves beneath our feet. A menagerie of surprised squirrels, rabbits, turkeys, and an occasional deer came to life as they heard us approach them, then they would scattered off through the underbrush.
I inherited my love of nature from Dad. He had been a nature lover since he was a small boy when his father let him skip school to go fishing and hunting with him. That was quality time for Dad, because his father died young. Dad held on to those happy memories of him sharing that long ago time with the father he adored.
Besides in the early 1900’s, being a successful sportsman was what put food on the table, and wild game was Dad’s contribution to help feed his family. Being a good hunter made the difference between having plenty to eat for a family of 6 and going hungry, a good incentive to bring home game.
However, this was the early 90’s. My parents were in their late 70’s, and I discovered hiking up and down the timber’s steep hills had become too much for them. They decided to stick to the top of the hills on the flat land while Harold, Duane and I spread out to cover the more difficult terrain. Finally there came a time when Dad and Mom weren’t able to follow us over the timbered hills to look for morels so when we found plenty we shared our find with them.
In the spring of 1999, Harold and I went mushrooming, and when I got to a certain spot in the timber near the gate opening, I had a flashback of that last time years before when we had taken my parents with us. Tired of walking up and down those steep hills and discouraged because I wasn’t having any luck spotting mushrooms, I doubled back to the gate opening to wait for the others to return. There stood Dad leaning against a tree. Looking up at the sky through the holes between the dense tree tops, he seemed to be taking in every inch of what he saw as the spring sun's transparent beams of light filtered through the spaces between the leaves to warm him. Dad committed to his memory the sights, sounds, and smells, savoring the moment like he knew this would be his last trek into the timber. I am truly my father’s daughter, because I didn’t want to interrupt him since I knew how he felt at that moment. I sat down on a fallen tree and quietly enjoyed the moment as we waited for the others to interrupt both of us. If Dad was to be frozen in time, that would have probably been the moment for him, but his life’s clock ticked on for a few more years.
That summer, Dad spent a few days in the hospital. He had a bladder infection, and the medicine he took reacted on him so he couldn’t urinate. A catheter was inserted until the medicine left his system, then he was sent home.
Dad had to do without his pipe for the time he was in the hospital. Mom decided it might be good if he'd stop smoking after close to 60 years. Just quit cold turkey. He was getting careless with lit matches, dropping them onto the carpet when the flame burnt the wooden stem short enough that Dad felt the heat on his fingers. Often, he went to sleep in his chair. He relaxed enough that his lit pipe fell from his hand, and burning tobacco spilled out on the carpet. Mom hated the mess, and she was afraid Dad was going to cause a fire. So while he was in the hospital, Mom hid his pipes and tobacco in the box her new sewing machine had been in which sat on the stair steps in plain sight. She didn’t think Dad would look there.
After that when Mom and I were out of the house to get groceries or to the craft sales, we later found out that Dad was very busy at home. One day, Duane went over to visit with Dad and found him hunting through everything in the house. When Duane asked him what he was looking for, Dad replied, “My damn pipes! Sylvie hid them on me, and I want them back.”