On time

The clock in Grandma's apartment is dying; its second hand fidgets in place. It is endlessly 8:23 here, which Grandma has accepted as fact several times through the day, including at very un-8:23-looking times, AM or PM. This afternoon I broke news of the real time. Her instinct was not to doubt me, nor to doubt the clock, but to wonder how the clock and I could be true at the same time. I tell her that to avoid confusion I'll remove the clock from the wall until we fix it. To this she says Yes, good idea, and soon after returns to bed.

Dec 21: Christine Spindel, Heinz

We're sitting in the lobby waiting to be grouped, the usual routine. Grandma is surprisingly social, she's perked up within the last three minutes, no warning. She is introducing me to anything moving, and tonight she's calling me her niece which I don't see any dire need to correct.

We sat with Christine Spindel, a lady in her 90s who had recently published a book about her early years working at WDIA, a radio station that in her time there became the first all-black radio station in Memphis. She gave me a copy of her book, an extra from the storage pouch on her walker.

https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/166-let-s-put-him-on-the-air

OK!

Update: She says OK! quite often, as she did when I was a kid, although she's definitely bumped up the quantity. It's a little hunky-dory closure for every act: changing her pants ("OK!" i.e "Task complete"), changing the subject ("....OK!" i.e. "That was nice...What now?"), opening the door ("OK!" i.e. "Onward and upward!"), looking at miscellaneous papers on the table (this OK being a kind of interjection in the silence to reassure that she's still present) I've made it a kind of running joke with myself to say OK back, every time. This often amounts to an excruciatingly long ping pong match of OK!s, making me quickly advance to serious concern for my self-destructive commitment to humor, no matter how bad.

Her OKs carry on as she walks down the hall and returns to bed. She tucks herself in and I hear another. She'd probably OK! through the apocalypse.