Derailed

Old train buffs never die they just get derailed! And I suppose that is what Dad is going through at the moment. At 89 he can't see well enough to run his model railroad and at our last garage sale he sold what was remaining of his HO scale model railroad. It was the small town he built quite a few years ago as the trains had been sold years earlier for a paltry sum. No, growing old is definitely not for wimps. He'd still be on the computer surfing the net for all sorts of things if his eyes were better and that's not bad for a man heading toward his 90 th birthday. Mum is not a whizz at the computer but she puts other 84 year olds to shame. I get a real kick out of Mum telling ME to go Google it if I'm in a quandary about something and she just loves Wikipedia. What she finds mind blowing is how quickly the Internet comes up with the answers (providing one asks the right questions). Although she gets the wrong end of the stick sometimes like when she was writing a letter of complaint to Google about the cream corn she bought recently from an Australian company. She thought she was talking to the company and she hadn't got any further than Google's search page. I don't think Google was really interested in the taste of the cream corn but I caught it before she sent it and transferred the letter of complaint to the right web page. It resulted in a lovely phone call from the company and a full refund. I doubt Google would have been as generous.
I took Dad shopping this morning while Mum was having tests done at the local diagnostic centre. We went to a lighting shop as he has his heart set on buying a desk lamp in the shape of a lighthouse because his son in law John loves lighthouses and anything to do with the sea. I like observing how Dad's mind works, I can't figure him out but I like observing. We couldn't find one so he said, "Jan I guess you are going to have to make one". I like his confidence in my abilities, I wish I were as confident. While we were having coffee he commented that the area had changed so much that he was glad I knew where we were because he didn't and then he commented that when he was in Fort Pierre (his hometown) he always knew he was in Fort Pierre because it never changed. Is that why change seems so scary to people growing older? They suddenly feel lost? I felt that when I was 6 and now as I get older I dream of having a mobile home so the scenery constantly changes. I don't want change to faze me, I want to embrace change. Of course with the rising cost of fuel I just may have to be content with being an armchair traveller. Not if I can bloody well help it!
Well I've got to go because it's almost time for MASH. You just never know when we'll come across one we haven't seen.