I (am lucky enough to) live with some Old People. Well, one of them is older – eighty-three – and has Alzheimer’s. I was his daytime caregiver for the 2008-09 season (yes, life runs in hockey seasons). One of them is a young ninety-five and, despite some definite rough spots, is in pretty damn fine shape. The other one is only in her sixties and, you know what they say: sixty-six is the new nineteen … or something like that.
I try to be courteous, of course, and yesterday I needed to make a run to Publix for my own nessesities (beer and Sudafed, as it was) and I asked the Old People if they needed anything. I got the usual “oh, no honey”‘s from two of them but, as if I should have actually expected some other answer, the ninety-five year old walked up to me.
She’s a small woman. Five-one – which still trumps me by at least an inch – and her weight is near the same as her age. She’s sharp as a whip, this one, but her hearing has gone quickly over the last year or so and she get’s really close to whomever she’s speaking now as if we are having the issue hearing her.
“You know those trays that old people put their teeth in,” she asks of me matter-of-factly as if I’m supposed to simply nod my affirmative.
“Uh, no, not really.”
“Well, they’re near the toothpaste and the dental floss. I need one of those.”
So, yesterday, at Publix (at 27 years of age), I bought my first SeaBond Denture Bath.
Just another Pinellas County, Florida right of passage, I suppose.