Day four, five and six. in A small but passable life.

Day four:

I had to get out of the room. I decided to take a walk. I googled for stores, thinking snacks. It seems this motel is in a food desert. The closet big stores were nearly four miles away. I found a neighborhood market 1.1 miles away. Google maps said I could walk to it in 27 minutes. I put on socks and shoes for the third time in a year. And long pants for the first time in a year. I also wore my fleece jacket. It was still breezy and cloudy with intermittent rain. Nearly to the market the sun came out for the first time in three days. I probably didn’t need the fleece jacket or the long pants. The store didn’t have much. I bought Mom some nutrition bars and chips. I got a Naked Green Machine. I was back in the room with an elapsed time of one hour. That was the longest walk I’d taken since Daughter and I did part of the Peralta trail at the end of October. I was done for the day.

Day five:

Mom had no idea. It was her 81st birthday. We woke up to sunshine! Finally, after three days of cool and gloom. We were in the car by 11am. I found the marina. We were an hour early. We had sandwiches in the marina store. Mom was disappointed in her Rueben. But she did eat half of it. We waited another twenty minutes and met our Captain at 1pm. We boarded the boat and were pleased to find that we were the only passengers. It was a sunny and windy day, blowing about twenty knots. We were on a thirty-six foot boat and after killing the engine and raising the main sail and part of the jib we averaged a little over five knots SOG. Nice! It was called San Diego Sailboat Tours so our Captain kept up a steady patter about everything we were seeing onshore. Mom loves that shit. She was happy. I, on the other hand was watching the Captain single-hand the boat. It was our first time on a sailboat. And yes, I did interrupt his spiel a few times to ask questions about the boat and sailing. We made a big circle around the bay and was tied up at the dock after our two hour tour.

Mom was pleased with her surprise birthday present.

Day six: (today)

We left fairly early this morning for the zoo. We started with the half hour bus tour. We then spent several hours walking around doing the zoo thing. I’m not a fan of zoos but it was on Mom’s bucket list. So I persevered. The last thing to do was the sky tram thing. We were waiting in line and Mom basically almost passed out. A couple of gals saying they were nurses stepped up to help. Of course, the first thing they did was the stroke test protocol. Security was called. He wheeled her out to the car in a wheelchair for me. They offered to give us tickets for another visit, which I said “No thanks, we’re leaving tomorrow.” I brought Mom back to the room.

She’s fine now. She’s in her bed. I’ll bring her some soup from Denny’s later. (She doesn’t want to go out.)

Tomorrow we head north.

Los Angeles.