In lieu of a regular post I thought I would share one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. Maybe my most favorite. This was taken a couple of months after my 90 year old dad had broken his leg.
Let me back up.
My youngest son lives with my Dad. It’s a brilliant arrangement. My elderly father has someone to keep tabs on him and my son lives rent free in the overly expensive San Francisco bay area. Win win.
Both of them have birthdays in November. My son shares his with one of his best friends and every year they host a birthday camping trip. This particular year (2015) my son managed to break his leg on their annual camping trip in a very remote location where he couldn’t be transported to a hospital until the next day. I spent the entire day at the hospital while he underwent surgery to patch together his badly broken leg with screws and plates.
I didn’t leave the hospital until very late in the evening and rather than drive the two hours home I decided I would just stop at my Dad’s house and spend the night there. When I arrived, just a few minutes shy of midnight, all the lights were on which I thought was odd. My Dad is a firm deliverer in an early bedtime. I unlocked the front door and my dad’s voice came from the family room “Andrea – is that you?” I ran into the family room and my dad was sitting on the floor, leaning on a chair.
He had fallen when trying to navigate the step up from the family room into the kitchen. He managed to work himself into a sitting position and had been there for going on four hours before I arrived. And I wasn’t even planning on stopping there. He could have been there for days until someone had come along. His chief companion and caregiver was in a hospital an hour away, recuperating from surgery.
I tried to help him up but it just wasn’t going to happen. I called the fire department for a “lift assist” which is a service our local fire department provides when someone falls and can’t get up on their own. When they arrived they weren’t sure that something else wasn’t amiss and wanted to send him on to the hospital. So after spending the entire day at the hospital with my son I got in my car and followed an ambulance with my dad to the emergency room.
Diagnosis: Broken leg.
Two broken legs in one day.
It all ends well but it was weeks of hospital and nursing homes. Back and forth from the hospital my son was in and the nursing facility my dad was in.
The picture above was taken a couple of months after his accident where he just couldn’t bear his hair anymore. I drove him to his barber so he could have a haircut.
Here is the best part of this story. When we moved to California back in 1960 and my dad was the ripe old age of 35 he went to a barber in downtown Palo Alto and asked for a haircut. He went to the same barber until he retired probably in the 1980’s. The gentleman you see in the picture is the son of original barber. My father has lived in Palo Alto for 59 years and has only had two barbers in that entire time frame.
After months of hospitals, nursing homes and sleepless nights it was just so lovely to have this moment of complete Norman Rockwell normality. And that is the story of my son and my dad both breaking their legs a day apart.
