My parking lot problems

Sheldon had parking problems as well

It's legislative session time, which means I'm parking in Texas so the lobbyists can have front row spots on the hill. Not that I'm bitter or anything. I need the exercise, and it's not hot enough yet for me to glare at their luxury cars as I struggle up the hill past them. Notice I said yet. I park in what's known as the garden lot with all the male legislative workers. The female legislative workers get to park on the top of the hill with the lobbyists. It's thought that the women should be closer to the building because they often walk out at night. They'd put me on the hill as well, but we wouldn't want a lobbyist to be raped and murdered on the way to his Lexus SUV, now would we? This year, in addition to the indignity of hoofing it in with the boys, I got spot number 666. If you think I pull into 666 each morning, you might want to hold back on toilet papering my car. I swapped parking tags with another member of the media when he wasn't looking. I'm a true sweetheart. Today, I took a break from session to meet someone about a story at a local coffeehouse. It was a pleasant day so I enjoyed my stroll through the Capitol gardens and saluted Huey before arriving at my car. I arrived at my car to find a woman who appeared to be taking photographs of it. Now I don't drive anything snazzy Are you kidding? I'll probably be driving this car until I retire. Should've, could've, would've gone to law school and become a lobbyist. Then I'd be on the top of the hill in a massive, luxury SUV. But I digress. My point is it was somewhat surprising to see someone photographing my car. I walked up to the woman and politely asked if she was taking a photograph of my car. She ignored me. I walked in front of her and asked again. This time, she looked at me and started gesturing. At some point, two things became clear to me. One, the woman was deaf. Two, she actually was photographing the Toyota next to my car. Through a series of hand gestures, the situation came into sharper focus. Someone had parked in the woman's parking spot. Not just that, but someone had parked in a deaf woman's parking spot, and she was taking photographs because she couldn't just call Capitol security and say, "Hey, someone's in my spot." I decided to help her. I didn't recognize the car. But it was an older Corolla with piles of junk in the seats so I narrowed it down to belonging to someone in the media. Then I peered a little closer into the window and spied an insurance form. Aha! I could get a name and an address. I looked up triumphantly at the woman, who shoved her phone in front of my eyes. She'd tapped in "Car looks like my daughter's. I was taking a photo to show her." I nodded my head, walked to my car, climbed in and drove off.

A Christmas Story

Scottie thinking about the cafeteria instead of his Christmas sweater

My Uncle Scottie is special. He's lived away at school for as long as I can remember. As a child, I always knew the giant bag of candy in my grandparents' freezer was earmarked for Scottie. On nice days, we'd go visit him. We'd sit at a picnic table while he happily crammed candy into mouth. All of the candy. The entire giant bag of candy. Tons and tons of sugar making an always hyper Scottie really, really hyper. The school eventually asked ever so nicely that we stop bringing candy.

Scottie can't talk. The fact that he can walk is a testament to my grandmother's determination. When she realized he wasn't hitting the developmental benchmarks that her older children hit, she grasped each of his chubby little hands, pulled him gently to his feet and walked with him in a hunched over stance until he finally got the concept of walking. It must have taken her months.

My grandparents love all of their children, but they light up when they see Scottie. He's not just special in a developmental sense. He truly is special. For us, he is pure joy, even if his hands are always sticky and wet from shoving them in his mouth. Scottie loves to eat. He loves to be outside. He loves to run. He's very slight with an ever present smile. Looking at him, I see my grandmother's coloring and traces of my Dad and Uncle Brian. At times, I wonder who Scottie would have become had God seen fit to make him a regular Joe. At other times, I see how happy my family is to see Scottie. I don't think he knows who we are, but he always seems just as happy.

Many years ago, one of Scottie's schoolmates got a recliner. The recliner was built on a rocker frame. Soon, Scottie was racing into the shared living room and claiming the recliner. Every day. It became a problem. Finally, the school called, explained the issue and Scottie got a recliner of his own. My grandparents were so happy to have something to buy him that he actually would enjoy. Now that the giant bags of candy were taboo.

To say that Scottie adores food is an understatement. He lives for it. I don't know how he does it but he can make a grab for someone else's food without even looking their way. It's uncanny. At school, he strolls around the living room, slyly edging toward the cafeteria door. He doesn't know who the president is or that there's something called the White House, but he knows what is on the other side of that door.

Scottie lives in a cottage at his school with other men who share his developmental challenges to varying degrees. Some wear helmets to protect their heads. Others are confined to wheelchairs. Grown men wander around with toddlers' toys in their hands because that's where their development stopped.

It's always sad to see these souls because you wonder - at least I wonder - why God brought them into the world this way. Yes, they're loved, fiercely loved by their families. But is it fair that they have such limitations? It often depresses me to visit although I'm always happy to see Scottie.

A few years ago, I went to the annual Christmas party, where one older resident sat in his chair and held a finger over his mouth to shush the chatter around him. Every once in a while he would vacate his chair and wander off somewhere. We were warned not to take that as an invitation to sit down because he would take off his shoe and throw it at us. We left the chair alone. Then Santa walked into the room, and not just any Santa. The saddest Santa you've ever seen: Thin, without a pillow to fill out his stomach, a gray wig perched sloppily on top of his natural brown hair and sneakers to pair with his too short, threadbare red felt pants. The cranky resident in his chair lit up and cried "Santa!" To this old man, Santa existed, and he was right there in that cottage with a sack of toys. For me, joy came into the room with that old man's innocent excitement. For Scottie, well, the ornaments on the tree looked like maybe they might be edible, and he was plenty happy about that possibility.

Dealing with a picky eater

My husband and I are involved in the care of an 80something near and dear to us. One of our jobs is to get her to eat. You'd think this would be easy. Imagine if you had someone offering to cook you anything you'd like to eat. You'd eat, wouldn't you? You'd pretend you were the queen living at Buckingham Palace and eat, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong.

Now I have some experience with picky eaters. My husband is a picky eater. Before we married, my husband took me to meet his parents. My future mother-in-law immediately got down to business and told me about the food issues. Apparently, for the first - oh, I don't know - 10 to 40 years of his life, my husband ate fast food restaurant hamburgers and nothing else. My father-in-law would go to the restaurant and buy the frozen patties. They cooked them at home, making a separate meal just for him while the rest of the kids ate the regular meal. I was horrified by this story, and then I remembered that my husband is the youngest child.

Growing up, my mother's rule was that we had to eat what was in front of us. For the most part. We got to pick one thing that we didn't have to eat. I chose pork chops. I hate pork chops. Otherwise, we were expected to at least try everything else. This held for me, my sister and two of stepbrothers. Then there's my baby stepbrother. He was impossibly cute as a young child. One Thanksgiving, we were seated at the table with our plates of turkey and the side dishes, and I looked over at his plate. He had a celery boat filled with peanut butter and a minuscule piece of turkey. I looked at my mother, who immediately changed the subject. I'm still bitter. That woman made me eat liver and onions as a child. A celery boat of peanut butter certainly never came sailing my way.

Getting back to our charge, I went over the other day with a plate of food. She refused it, saying she wasn't hungry. I looked down at the counter. A dripping ice cream scoop was sitting in a pool of melted ice cream on the granite. Two empty bowls containing streaks of ice cream were on the coffee table. So I knew what the score was. Now, my initial thinking was if you get to your 80s, eat all the ice cream you want. Add some nuts and some hot fudge. I'll get the whipped cream for you.

Then our charge went to the doctor the other day. Her doctor is little more strict than I am. He decreed that she has to eat regular meals. Candy and ice cream aren't going to cut it. We relayed this information to her care giver, who takes her to the grocery store. A few days later, they went to the grocery store and the care giver watched in horror as ice cream, candy, cookies and crackers went into the cart. Finally, she had to say something: "Glenn doesn't want you eating all that junk." Our charge looked at her, flipped her hair and said, "Glenn's not here."

A day later, I went over to the house and started slyly looking for the candy under the guise of cleaning. I thought I could sneak at least some of it out of the house. Would you believe that I couldn't find it? Any of it? She apparently has a hiding spot.

Tonight, we offered to do dinner. I made stuffed shells. Have you made stuffed shells? This is not an easy recipe. It took me several hours. I roasted some broccoli, added bread and sent Glenn over with a plate. She refused it, saying she wasn't hungry. When Glenn came home, I told him we may have to take drastic measures. No Internet for a week. Wait, she doesn't have the Internet. How do you ground someone in their 80s?

My granny: A force of nature, sha

Florence Gertrude Gauthreaux Hebert

Exactly 101 years ago this month, Florence Gertrude Gauthreaux came into the world. I imagine she immediately let out a gusty yell, protested the choice of midwife and asked for something to read. But I'm just guessing.

Some of Granny's children

Florence - she also answered to Gertrude - was my grandmother. I called her Granny. The neighborhood kids called her Mrs. Hebert. My cousin used to call her Mrs. Hebert as well because that's what the neighborhood kids called her. You can't argue with second-grade logic.

My grandmother, who died in 2008 at age 95, was a pistol. She lost her mother at a young age. She and her sisters were divvied up, and Granny landed into a Dickensian/Cinderella childhood with her godparents. She wasn't bitter about her lot in life. She was thankful. She got regular meals and an education because her mother died of appendicitis after having four children in four years. The regular meals because her godfather was a better provider than her sickly father was (He died young). The education because her godparents lived next door to the parish truant officer. Life just tends to work out.

Granny as I remember her

Granny got a few years of education in a one room schoolhouse and used it to her advantage. By that, I don't mean that she applied herself, put herself through law school and became president of the United States. What I mean is that she read. Voraciously. She read the classics. She read romance novels. She read children's stories. She read newspapers. She read tabloids. She derived a tremendous amount of pleasure from reading. Her children and grandchildren also love to read.

Granny with Mom, Uncle Raymond, Aunt Marilyn, Uncle Albert and Nanny

I would imagine that reading was a necessary escape for my grandmother. She spent the first few years of her marriage living with her in-laws. When she and my grandfather got their own place, it was a 3-room shack without running water. They raised six kids there. I think they slept in shifts. Before she died, Granny told a lot of stories. One involved being a young mother with a young child (my Uncle Albert). My grandfather did odd jobs to put food on the table. He fished, picked moss and hunted. When work was scarce, they didn't eat. One of those starvation times came when Uncle Albert was a baby. My grandmother didn't remember her own empty stomach but her thankfulness that Uncle Albert still was breast feeding so he didn't go hungry.

Granny had four children: Albert, Herbert, Olive and Raymond, and then she took a break. A long break. She was in her 40s when my Aunt Marilyn and my mom were born. She always said she had my mom to keep Aunt Marilyn company. It's a good thing she did. One day, my grandmother snuck out of the house to gossip with a neighbor. My grandfather decided to sneak across the bayou to the store. How they managed to sneak past each other in a 3-room shack is a mystery for the ages.

My mother during the bayou years

My Aunt Marilyn was 4 and my mom was 2 at the time. They wanted to swim in the bayou. Being good girls, they knew the rules. They weren't supposed to go swimming without supervision because my Granny knew someone whose kids drowned (supposedly the kids were in a boat with their father. The kids ended up in the water. The father couldn't decide which one to save so both boys drowned. Sophie's Choice on the Bayou). My aunt and my mom decided one would swim while the other watched from shore; then they'd switch places.

My grandfather was rowing home when he spotted two small children playing by themselves in the bayou. "What idiot let his two small children play unsupervised?" he muttered. Then he got closer to the tiny figures. "Oh, I guess I'm the idiot," he said. My husband loves that story.

Granny in her late 50s/early 60s

Granny became a widow when my mom was 17. She mourned my grandfather and never remarried. She left the 3-room shack for a home with a screened-in porch in Gibson, where she had the misfortune to live across the street from a man who liked to wander out to his driveway every morning in his boxers to get the newspaper. Actually, it was his misfortune. One morning, the man stumbled out his front door in an early-morning, bleary-eyed haze. Granny popped open the front door of her porch and hollered: "I know what you're doing. You're trying to turn me on by coming outside in your drawers. Well it's not working." The man died of mortification right on the spot. No, I'm just kidding. He settled for canceling his newspaper subscription and moving to another country.

Granny never drove. The fact that she didn't have a car puzzled me as a young child. One day, I asked where her husband was. She said he was at work (he was dead). This satisfied me because, naturally, the car was with him at work. If Granny couldn't find a ride, she took the bus. She climbed onto the bus to go to New Orleans when the pope visited. She climbed onto the bus to visit us when we moved to Bossier City. The bus didn't stop in Gibson except when Granny was onboard. Somehow, she convinced Greyhound to not only swing by and pick her up but to also drop her off on the return trip.

Aunt Peggy and Granny

Getting in touch with Granny was tough despite the clunky, dial phone that rested on her kitchen counter for decades. She insisted on an unlisted phone number. I didn't know this until I went to her funeral. A sweet lady came up to me and explained that Granny called her from time to time, but she couldn't call her. Granny wouldn't give out the phone number. The sweet lady was Granny's cousin. Even family didn't always rate.

Please don't misunderstand me. Granny was a pistol, but she could be very kind. She was an excellent seamstress (a skill my Aunt Marilyn and my cousin Helen inherited), and she shared her talent. Every newborn in Gibson got a baby quilt from Granny. She adored her grandchildren. The back of her couch was lined with high school graduation photos. We grew up longing for our own photos to join the collection. Subtly, Granny instilled in us the desire to graduate from high school - and most of us did. Granny always made me feel special. She used to pull me aside and confide that I was her favorite among the 16 grandchildren. Then she'd give me a small gift and make me promise not to tell the other grandchildren because Granny was on a fixed income and couldn't afford to buy something for everyone. Years later, at Granny's funeral, my cousin tearfully related that the death was very hard on her because - and she shouldn't be telling me this - Granny always told her that she was the favorite and gave her a stuffed toy at Easter.

Granny gave me this teddy bear one year

Eventually, after she turned 90, it became clear that Granny couldn't continue to live at home alone. There was the problem with the bills. She decided she had paid enough to the electric/telephone/water companies during her lifetime, and she wasn't paying anymore. She had a point. There was the problem with her memory. She started accusing people of stealing absolutely absurd things like butter, and there was no reasoning with her. "Granny, why would so-and-so steal your butter?" "Well, to eat with bread, I guess." Then there was the problem with the house itself. It was in bad shape, and she didn't want to let in anyone to fix it.

5 generations. Granny loved babies. This is my Nanny's family.

Finally, my mother and Aunt Marilyn showed up one day and invited her to lunch. Granny loved lunch, especially when it involved a buffet at a Chinese restaurant. They took her to lunch ... at the nursing home. She cried. I saw those tears running down her cheeks and started sniffling. My mother shot me a look and told me not to start. The nursing home was a good thing. Granny made friends, got her nails painted, played Bingo, attended Mass and did crafts.

Granny at my wedding. She was in her 90s.

Granny lived a long life. Every year, she phoned the doctor's office and went in for a physical. She was plump, as grandmothers should be (although she always insisted she was a size 8). But she kept active. She'd pair sneakers with knee-highs and a house dress and walk every day. Around and around the block. She was fiercely independent.

I was at work when my cousin Kim called about Granny's stroke. We thought this was it. But it wasn't. I drove to Thibodaux every weekend for weeks. My mother drove from Shreveport every weekend. We wanted her to die with all of us at her side. So, naturally, she slipped away in the middle of the night while we were asleep. Even in the end, Granny did it her way.