SLIPPING MINDS AND SLIPPERY PILLS

This is "BIN," better known as Rich
Most of our senior friends and relatives are always concerned about losing things, misplacing things, forgetting things, etc. We all agree that the most perplexing thing is going into a room and standing in utter amazement, wondering why we are there and what we went into the room to retrieve. That’s not just a daily occurrence, it’s several times a day. We also talk about misplacing things that we just had in our hands several minutes ago.
On our recent trip to Texas we had a really good laugh at/with my brother-in-law Rich, who said he doesn’t mind me mentioning his name. I wanted to call him BIN for Brother-In-Law but he says he’s not modest and gave me permission to use his actual name. He doesn’t mind being laughed at.
When I went to the kitchen of their home, I heard Rich say, “I need to take my pills before we leave on our trip.” He went to the cabinet, took out his pills and vitamins, put them on the cabinet like we all do. There in plain view was the stack of his various pills to take.
I turned and went to the adjoining room. Suddenly I heard him say, “Where did my pills go? They were right here on the cabinet.“
Rich had mysteriously lost his pills on their journey from the cabinet to his mouth. I gave him a really hard time about that. How can you lose pills on their journey from the cabinet to your mouth? That’s nutty, not just a matter of senior-absent-mindedness.
“Maybe I threw them in the trash,” Rich remarked in disgust at himself. He went to the trash bin and searched all the way down to the bottom of the trash, which is never a pleasant task. No pills.
It was starting to get serious. He spoke about his mind slipping, like all of us can attest to who are over 60, but now his pills were also slipping into oblivion. He had not moved from the appointed place at the cabinet where he always takes his pills.
As I am laughing uncontrollably at Rich’s predicament, which he found to be not as funny as I did at this point, he is understandably totally confused because he had lost the pills somewhere between the cabinet and his mouth. How could this be? Was there a pill snatching fairy who exists to keep senior citizens on their toes wondering if they’re losing their minds?
The mystery was finally solved when Rich opened the drawer of the cabinet and saw the pills in a nice little stack next to the scissors, which he had used to open his over-the-counter antihistamine.
See, the pharmaceutical companies are in a conspiracy again. Not only do they make pill bottles that seniors cannot open, but they make over-the-counter pills in ridiculously encased cardboard sheets that we have to use scissors to separate a single pill from the cardboard instead of being able to easily push them out of the foiled top like we should be able to do. It’s impossible.
I know that the designers of those antihistamines are envisioning gently aging seniors citizens struggling with the packaging of over-the-counter pills, and they’re laughing at us. It’s, simply put, a conspiracy.
However, I don’t think there are many people who scoop up their pills and deposit them in the drawer with the scissors they just used on the difficult packaging.
Rich got our trip off to a good start as we talked a long time about his slipping mind and the slippery pills that ended up in the scissor drawer. That got us started on a good humor wave which lasted all day.
Rich was a good sport but I’ll always think of him as BIN (brother-in-law) who lost his pills on their journey from the cabinet to his mouth.

MEME'S PICKLED LEGS

It’s been eons since I’ve slept past 4:30 in the morning. I wake, write in my blogs, do early morning chores and other necessary things before everyone else in the Southeast gets up. I’m used to it but often wished I could sleep until at least 6:30.
I woke at 2:30 this morning with paralyzing cramps in the calf of my right leg. That hasn’t happened since I started taking Dr. Gott’s advice and putting an unwrapped bar of soap under the bottom sheet of my bed. Often I would have a slight tightening in my calf, but I would rub a bar of soap on it and it would go away. Don’t ask me how it works, it just does. Dr. Gott said in his newspaper column that it might work and it has for Gramps and for me.
This morning at 2:30 I woke to horrible cramps in the calf of my right leg. I walked around. No relief. I rubbed the calf with a bar of soap (I can hear you laughing). No relief. I sat on the closed stool lid in the bathroom so as to not wake Gramps while I massaged the affected area very hard trying to work out the cramps. No luck.
I thought maybe if I were to get back in bed it would go away. That was wishful thinking. The cramps became more intense and I barely was able to get out of bed. I was only able to roll out of the bed, endeavoring to stand up without screaming in pain.
Suddenly the thought crossed my mind to drink pickle juice. I vaguely remembered reading that some football coaches give pickle juice to their players who have cramps during a game.
Being desperate, I limped painfully down the hall toward the kitchen disgusted because nothing seemed to even help the leg, let alone totally relieve the pain.
I opened the fridge and spotted a jar of bread and butter pickles, the only jar of pickles in the fridge. Grabbing the jar, unscrewing the top, I wondered how much pickle juice to drink. Shoot, if one drink would work, then two or three would certainly cure my problem. I swigged the pickle juice just like a thirsty man swigs water. First drink, the tightening seemed to lessen. Must be my imagination.
Second drink, I could feel the calf relaxing.
Third drink, the pain was completely gone.
How could this be? The pickle juice hadn’t had time to get to my stomach yet.
I stood there in front of the open door of the fridge in utter amazement. Surely this was not a total cure. I walked unaffected back to bed, wondering if the relief would last after I got in bed.
It did. I had no pain, no tenderness, no cramping. Instant sleep came.
I woke at 6:30, not my habitual 4:30.
Okay. If it did that for me, maybe I’ve found a cure for insomnia. When I wake at 2:30 to go to the bathroom in the morning, I’m going to go into the kitchen, take a couple of swigs of bread and butter pickle juice, go back to bed, and if I wake at 6:30 again I will write to Dr. Gott about my cure for insomnia.
After I told Gramps about my miracle, he decided he would take a swig of the same pickle juice when his hands cramped up, like they do every day while reading the newspaper or a magazine. He opened the newspaper, began to read it. Both hands immediately cramped up. His hands were frozen in place by the cramps. He dropped the newspaper, grabbed the pickle jar with grossly distorted hands, took two drinks of the pickle juice and the cramping went away immediately. Glory be!
The only problem is, our breath could light a candle because the bread and butter pickle juice has Tabasco in it.
Oh, heck, I don’t care. It’s just good to have lucked onto this cure for leg cramps, hand cramps and possibly insomnia.
Can you believe this? While reading the paper this morning I read that Dr. Gott’s topic for the day was about pickle juice for leg cramps. How timely was that? I’ll bet he doesn’t know about using pickle juice for insomnia. I’ll have to try it out tonight.
Do not ever throw your pickle juice away. You might need it to cure various and sundry things in the future. Pickle juice might put the pharmaceutical companies out of business.