Stolen Cigars
I’m miffed today. My cigar order has been hijacked.
Let’s start at the beginning. I have an uncle that is in a nursing home in Pilot Point, Texas. He is my dad’s only living uncle and he isn’t much older than Dad was. Uncle Dick was sort of a Mama’s boy his whole life. Well, no, he WAS a Mama’s boy. Bless his heart, he lived with his Mother his whole life and she took care of him and he took care of her. He did marry once, but that is one of those family stories I’ve never quite known all the details. I think it was annulled. Uncle Dick farmed the family farm and then, in later years, he was a janitor at K-Mart ( . . . which should lead me into that cool story of him talking to the aliens once, but that will have to wait. Remind me to come back to it sometime, okay?).
Mamma Williams, Uncle Dick’s mother, died in 1978. After that he just kind of wandered around. He moved to New Mexico and then to Austin. Various relatives helped him here and there. My cousin Wyndell down here in Austin befriended him for a time. My Dad and Mom would come down sometime and try to help him through his difficulties. Eventually, Uncle Dick’s arthritis got to him so much, he needed constant care. My Dad moved him up to a nursing home near their house and did all he could to help him be comfortable. A lot more comfortable than Dick would have managed on his own, that’s for sure. Daddy always felt a lot of responsibility for family and once his dad and his grandmother were gone, he felt like he needed to take care of Uncle Dick.
Dad was really good about visiting Uncle Dick regularly and they had a very good friendship. But then Daddy died. Mark and I went up to the nursing home and told Uncle Dick. He knew the minute we walked in the room why we were there. And he knew me the minute he saw me, even though I hadn’t seen him in probably 20 years. I know, it is weird that I went that long without seeing him, but Daddy visited and the rest of us didn’t feel much need to.
Since Daddy died, I’ve tried to visit Uncle Dick when I can, which is not as easy now that Mother has moved away from that area. He is very sharp and has some interesting things to say, but he is hard of hearing and it is sometimes hard to understand him, too. One pleasure Uncle Dick has in this world is smoking his cigars. For a while, he had the pleasure of ordering things he saw advertised on television, but Daddy put a stop to that and that left him only with cigars.
A few weeks ago I got a call out of the blue from the nursing home he is in. They told me that he was out of cigars. They stressed that he was a difficult person to deal with if he didn’t have his cigars. Dick only gets a very limited amount of money each month from his Social Security for personal spending and with the cost of everything going up, he was about to run out of cigars. What to do? I wasn’t going to be going up any time soon and I had never bought cigars in my life. Then I realized the internet could take care of things. I ordered a box of 50 cigars (no, these aren’t fancy Cubans, these are cheapy 50-cent cigars). They were on their way. I was quite proud of myself.
Last week I wrote Uncle Dick a newsy letter and asked if he was enjoying the cigars. He doesn’t write (well, much) and can’t call, so I hadn’t expected confirmation from him that he had had the cigars, but I assumed they had made it. Today I got an early morning call from the nursing home saying that Dick was asking about a package that he was expecting from me. I called back and told them there should have been a package. Fortunately, the website I used to order had nice online records and I could tell them exactly what time UPS had delivered it. “Oh, it was delivered here?” she said. Well, where else would it be delivered? The name on the UPS slip was the name of the director of the facility, but, obviously, anyone could have signed her name. So far, no sign of the cigars. The social worker that I talked to was going to call me back with a report, but no word yet. I expect someone thought there was something good if a package was coming and decided to just stick it in their backpack. How low do you have to go to steal cigars from an 85-year-old man? I know people in nursing homes are victims all of the time (we don’t even like to think about my grandmother’s things that were taken), but it makes me so sad to think about it.
So now what to do? I plan on going up to Dallas this weekend, so I guess I will be going a little further and taking some cigars to Uncle Dick. I will also be sniffing around some “care”-givers and see who reeks of Imperial cigars.
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That WASN’T what I intended to write about tonight, so you can still look forward to a report on the new Bruce Robison CD “The New World” which comes out in September, but, bless Bruce, I got a copy early. And I bought the new Sarah Bird novel today and am about to go dive into it. And we’ll get back to the little green men and Uncle Dick one day soon, too.
