Last week, I was getting ready to
go to my Alzheimer’s board meeting and decided to take the dog outside before I
left. As I walked past the tubs of tomato, sweet potato, and pepper plants, I
noticed another of those pesky Japanese beetles crawling along the grapevine
that twines across the lattice work.
We’d been trying to get rid of the
beetles for weeks. They had skeletonized the grape leaves and I could swear
they were eyeballing our tomato plants.
After reviewing information
from the Master Gardener’s, we had tried a couple of recommended ideas to get rid
of them. One of the recommendations was
to pick them off. My first reaction had been “Ewwweee” but after a couple of
weeks, that didn’t seem to be a bad idea.
I never thought about the beetle
squirming in my hand in a bid for survival. When I went to throw it down, I
whacked the back of my hand on the handle of the dog leash. Hard! It puffed up
like a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis. Well, I iced it, had it x-rayed, put
in a splint, and looked at by an orthopedic doc. Verdict was that it wasn’t
broken and the tendons were where they were supposed to be.
My hand was a small reminder of how
difficult life can become. We never realize how great something is until things
go wrong and it doesn’t work right.
When things go wrong, we can easily
be persuaded to pay more attention to what is wrong than what is right. I know
how true that was as a caregiver. It was a constant struggle to schedule
substitute care while I was at work. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I
was so lucky to have a big family and people who were willing to go the extra
mile to help me keep Jim safe. But things went wrong—he wandered away, he was
stubborn, he paced, he scared some of the hired help.
I can still remember Jim’s
frustration when he couldn’t find the right words, or when he made a grocery
list and later noticed he had transposed letters. When his mechanical brain
quit functioning correctly, he remembered how to take the vacuum apart, but not
how to put it together again. His musical knowledge slipped away and he
couldn’t remember song lyrics or what chords to use.
In the category of things going
awry, no one has ever been exempt. Even people, who seem to lead golden lives,
have catastrophes. To make it worse, those who live in view of the public often
have their personal disasters plastered all over the tabloids, Internet, or
even mainstream news where armchair quarterbacks nationwide critique their
failures.
Just recently, parents have been
skewered over the flames of self-righteousness for not being watchful of their
children. People expressed their outrage toward the mother of a three-year-old
child who wound up in a guerilla pit at the Cincinnati zoo. Fortunately, that
child lived and no charges were filed against the mother. Another child was
allowed to wade in a lagoon near a Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and was
attacked and killed by an alligator. The child was too young to read the “no
swimming” signs, and the parents did not realize the danger in ignoring the
warning.
Before we are too quick to judge, I
think maybe we should consider the times when things could have went wrong, but
didn’t. Our lives can be upended in a heartbeat.
People can have life changing
injuries in an accident. My accident was small, but not having the use of my
right hand for a couple of days created more problems than I would have thought
possible. Signing a check left handed may have been the highlight. Heaven knows
what the bank is going to think of those scribbles!
More than a week after the
hand-whack-gone-wrong, my hand still hurts and remains swollen. I still have two
fingers that don’t always do what they should, which makes typing incredibly
challenging.
Less than a month ago, I didn’t
even know what a Japanese beetle looked like, much less that one would be responsible
for an injury. Until things went wrong, I didn't realize just how good things were!
Copyright © July 2016 by L.S.
Fisher
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