Chuck stared blankly after he placed his breakfast order. “No, I’ll take the cold cereal instead.”
Sometimes, Chuck’s esophagus blocks his food. It gets stuck—“right here.” It remains there until he eats again, when it may journey up into his mouth again. “And there’s not much that’s coming out the other end, either,” he explained.
“Do you still drive?” I asked the 98-year old, trying to change the subject. I could still imagine the taste of the food, the second time around.
“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to meet another driver of my caliber on the road!”
Chuck had fallen prior to his move into the retirement home, landing on his head. 30 stitches patched him up. The fall had reduced his short-term memory, and he now required the use of a cane. So, in his mid-nineties, he reluctantly gave up golf and tennis. “Tennis doubles is a wonderful thing. Don’t need to cover nearly as much court!” I guessed so; I had given up on tennis three decades ago.
Chuck was a patent lawyer. The precise details of every patent were still packed in the back of that cranium. Long-term memory was definitely not a problem.
“You know how a ship being attacked from an aircraft has to take three readings on the location of the plane and its angle of attack before you can aim, load and fire a 2.9-inch shell from the ship’s deck?”
Of course. Everyone knows that.
“You have time to take two readings. By the time you try to take the third reading, you’re toast! Up in smoke! No one could figure out how to take that third reading in time.”
Chuck’s client had figured out a way to accomplish this, using a sort of scrabble board contraption.
Another client developed an invention that produced weird electrical waves. Whenever Chuck inadvertently left his lunch near the gizmo, his lunch got hot. “You’ve got the descendent of this in your kitchen. It’s called a microwave.”
Just then, two men dressed in black suits made their way down the corridor, a black gurney between them. All they lacked was a body.
Chuck smiled. “What do you expect?” he asked rhetorically. “Just take a look at where we live.”
With that, cane in hand, he headed down the hall, as if he were hunting down a new tennis partner.