The Poop Deck

It has become a cliche’ to say, “if I only had a rich Uncle.” I had an Aunt. She died last summer and I inherited her estate. Although she had a lot of stuff, she was not rich. Years ago I heard the term, “Affluent Poor.” You have seen the commercial of the smiling man talking about all the stuff he has and membership to the country club,then he says, “somebody help me, I’m in debt up to my eyeballs!” The affluent poor has a lot of things but no money. That describes my aunt. She had a lot of stuff. The house was a collection center for items gathered resulting in the deaths of those who went before her. From her mother, my Grandmother, to her husband and her son.
As I searched through the house, packing as I went, a story unfolded, and a message came through. At least to me, a message from a sad story. It didn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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What a strange year this has been for me so far and it ain’t over. It started like the previous year ended. I had an aunt over 1000 miles away who was not able to take care of herself and wasn’t going to easily move into an assisted living home and I was responsible for her welfare. My Dad was diagnosed with dementia and getting treatment for that and cataracts and had one eye worked on. Mom was having good days and bad but seemed to be hanging in there well enough to step up to the plate and do the driving for Dad since his eyesight was questionable. Dad was getting better as his sister was getting worse. And that was the good news in a way.
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Perhaps you have seen or heard of a show called “Most Haunted”?
In most or every show there are scenes in which they capture on video, “Orbs.” My son Phil calls them “Spooky Dust.”
Sept. 9, 2005, after watching the show with Phil, Jessica (his G/F) and Melody my daughter, we decided to experiment with my digital video cam that has Night Vision capability because we have had unusual experiences in this house in the past.
After video taping some moments in the rooms we each have had experiences in, and then playing the tape, we got some interesting results.
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A week ago yesterday, or Friday August 5, 2005, Mom and Dad were walking out of the Village Inn after having dinner, and Dad experienced a pop in his left ear. The only ear he has had any hearing ability in for as long as I can remember. After that “Pop” he couldn’t hear anything at all.
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As I posted in my category “Flagships” my aunt died July 16th. My original intent for going down there pryor to her death was to go there and find her an assisted living home. Instead, I had to finalize her burial and begin the process of dealing with her estate as I am her executor and Successor Trustee of her estate.
In crude simple terms, I get everything she left exept for a couple items my brother and sister asked for. I now have to decide what I want to keep and what to sell or dispose of. But the title of this post refers to “time warp.” And that is what I want to address.
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It is almost 3:00am Friday morning, July 15, 2005 as I type this now, and I had a plan to go down to Arizona Monday morning to make arrangements to move my aunt to an assisted living home. But, I may be going down to attend or affirm her burial.
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Yeah here it comes JT… I was once chided when I got this gadget. Ahem…
I paraphrase the uterances of a critic when I disclosed this purchase to “him.” He said something like, “it doesn’t make sense to buy something that only has one purpose”…
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It is difficult to choose just how detailed I should get about the events that have occured since July 3rd, the day my Mom was taken to the hospital just in time. I can only imagine what I might be posting here now had not my sister, Diane, called the “folks” house before she went to visit.
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The Ol’ Gal has cancer! Well, maybe not in the true sense of the word. But some sort of wood rot has made itself unavoidably evident.
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My dad had a Larson Playboy, 14 footer. Whitish with red trim and a 75 hp Johnson.
For some reason we/he decided we would go upstream from our cabin at the 61 mile marker on the Lake of the Ozarks. This was way back before the Truman Damn was imagined.

Dad thought he was able to navigate the lake and up above where we were, the river channel was a serious issue…like shallows and mud just a foot under the surface of the lake was a matter of a few feet left or right of the original Osage river. Just past upstream/river of the Buffalo, one of us kids noticed and told Dad that there was something funny coming up in our wake. Dad stopped the boat!
Using a paddle, he stuck it over the side and it stuck just inches under the surface of the water. So he figured…since we didn’t hit anything underwater to that point, he would just turn around 360 degrees and go back the way we came in to that point. Make sense to me…you?

Well, we must have gotten off a degree or so and clobbered a log or some solid object and we were dead in the water. We had totalled our motors lower unit.

Fortunately, someone saw us trying to paddle upstream and towed us to a fledgling marina and offered to drive Dad back to our cabin so he could drive back with the trailer and take us and the wounded boat back home…at least to the cabin.

Meanwhile, mom, my sister and brother and I were still at the place we had our boat pulled up to and no food or water. No nothin!

This nice man there, walked up to us with a tray of Pepsi in 8oz. bottles, cold and swetting. Ice cold out of the “coke box” as it were…
Nothing has ever tasted so good in my life! I was a Vess Cream Soda kid until then. I have love Pepsi over Coke ever since then.
However, a Rum and Coke is much better than a Rum and Pepsi.
But I will always prefer a Pepsi when I can.