Unfortunately True
Posted on March 20, 2009
At around 8:45 on Sunday morning he walked into my house unannounced, carrying a short stack of mail.
He’d been in the area, he said as Samantha gave him a hello hug around the legs, and had decided to stop by and say hello.
Furthermore, he stated mildly, he now knew about the colors.
I wondered at his real purpose for visiting. His scrubby stubble, combined with the fact that my home is hardly “in the area” for him, meant that something was wrong. I asked him what colors he was talking about, speculating as I did so whether he’d had a fight with his wife or something.
”The colors“, he answered, tilting his head with an expectant expression, “of the teams“.
”The… teams?” But he didn’t answer this time, and my thoughts turned to more sinister possibilities than a little marital tiff. I asked him if his wife knew he was at my house, a question which he answered with a firm “maybe“.
I began to suspect something was very wrong. I invited him to sit down in my kitchen and have some coffee, and presently he plopped down and laid his little pile of mail on the table. Was he OK? “Yes, ” he answered, he “was fine.”
Watching me nervously pour him a mug of coffee, he straightened out the the Popular Mechanics magazine and the two letters he’d inexplicably brought into my house, leaned forward and spoke earnestly:
“I have been encouraged to invest in a civil war chess set and I was told you might have one,” he stated and, after a pause, “What do you think of that?”
I disavowed any knowledge of any such Civil War Chess sets and, as I did so, I picked up my cell phone and began tapping out a text message to my wife, who was out of town. I didn’t have his wife’s cell phone in my contact list, but she did.
Comments
So…ummm…did you end up parting with your civil war chess set or not? Don’t just leave us all hanging. We realize you ‘disavowed’ but something tells me “he” could tell you were holding out. (Was it the one with Mary-Todd as the white queen or was it the one with General Grant as the white queen…?)
Oh, yea, . . . and what meds did he take too much or not enough of?
Although readers of my Closure series may already know the contempt and humor with which I regard the Franklin Mint, suffice it to say that I would only be interested in owning a Civil War Chess Set long enough to desecrate it in the most disgusting and visceral way possible.
As for meds, well, until that morning we didn’t know he needed any.
Was that Arthbard you were referring to or am I on some completely weird and different tangent?
No, this is pretty much a transcript of something that happened the Sunday before last.
The situation is ongoing.
I’ve been there. It’s a strange situation to be in and harder when the wee ones are around and you just don’t know what they’re going to do. My Father inlaw had a chemical imbalance brought on by a severe deficiency in folic acid which had him having paranoid delusions that Husband was wanted by MI5 and he tried to hurry me and the girls to pack up all our clothes and he was going to drive me to the airport so I could escape to the safety of my uncle in New Jersey. Apologizing for raising such a worthless son. I assured him I would get to the airport, I had a friend who could take me, thanked him for the warning. Then he got up and went back to his car and drove home. Was surreal. He spent a year in hospital before they figured out what set off the episode.
I hope they can get him stable and back to normal. Hopefully it’s something simple like a deficiency too, because FIL is perfectly fine now, although he has to take horse pills of folic acid. Two years on and he still has trouble trying to pick apart what was real and what was delusion because, sadly, he remembers everything.
Drop me a line if you want or need to.
Folic acid, really?
And a year in the hospital!
Yes, my visitor has since gotten better, though he spent a week and a day or two in hospital himself.
In Michigan, hospital stays are rarely over four days and patients are usually either discharged or transitioned to a managed group home after that in order to make room for the next group of people in need as well as to de-institutionalize their condition.
In our case he was lucky in that his symptoms subsided to the point where he is able to maintain some self control and he was discharged to go home with his wife.
I understand that there is continuing treatment, and he hasn’t fixed a day to return to work yet.
Scary stuff!
Folic acid, really. It seems after the age of 60 it becomes harder for the body to absorb. I’m glad to know your friend is better and the treatments were successful.