I drove on a Sunday, a day I picked because it wasn’t a weekday. It took between eight and nine hours to drive the distance between my home in Florida to my parents home in Lilburn, Ga. That’s a distance of at least 450 miles. As usual, Apple maps grossly miscalculated the time on the road to get to my parent’s home, predicting a mere 6 hours 29 minutes to cover the distance. Never mind time lost due to the pee stops. Never mind having to sit in traffic at the innumerable traffic slowdowns due to accidents on I-75, or the really big traffic snarl between Macon and south Atlanta on I-75 that forced me to spend an additional $2.50 on the express lane running parallel to that section of I-75. I followed the express lane up to I-675 and then I-285 to finally reach my parents home. I have no idea why traffic was that bad on that section of I-75 on a Sunday afternoon, but it was horrid.

One of the delays in my travel was trying to find lunch down in Valdosta, Ga, after I crossed the Florida/Georgia border. It was 1pm, so I thought, why not, the lines and waits at any of the fast food places shouldn’t be long. Boy was I wrong. I stopped at four different fast food places only to find the lines snaking out the doors and filled with what I’ll assume were college students and young families. All this on a Sunday afternoon.

I finally ate lunch at a Sonny’s, spending $15 (tax + tip) on a Big Deal. I’ve long been a Sonny’s patron for forty years, when they first opened near Atlanta, but my patronage may come to an end. I remember Big Deals as being a big deal; meat piled high on your bun, with three sides which included fries. Now, the meat (pulled chicken in my case) barely covered the bun, and the french fries are an extra. I got enough to eat, and the food was good, but the days of inexpensive dining that I remember at Sonny’s are long gone.

On the way out of Valdosta I stopped at a Circle K (strange things are afoot at the Circle K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DsFMJQHbMs ) and tanked up for the second half of my trek northward. The gas prices are all above $4/gallon everywhere, a price this high I haven’t seen since the early 2010s. While standing at the pump waiting for my car to fill, the pump started playing ads complete with crappy audio. I can ignore the visual part, the the audio I can’t, and it’s a truly annoying experience. Except this time, someone had written, in Sharpie, next to one of the buttons, the word “mute.” I immediately pressed that button, and blessed silence ensued. To that unknown person who wrote that, bless you. I finished filling my car in blessed silence.

I made it to my parents’ home, had a bit of supper with everyone, and then crashed out for the night. The trip took more out of me than I expected. I guess that’s to be expected when you’re 68 and haven’t commuted anywhere in over two years due to retirement. I managed to stay fully alert due to the terrors of driving up I-75. There are a lot of crazy folks driving these days. I now spend three days with my parents, and then get to drive back to Orlando, experiencing the joy of driving on the open road in America. Lucky me.

I traveled to Atlanta this past weekend to visit my 87-year-old parents and to spend quality time with them. As a newly-minted retiree I now have far more time to make such trips and for longer periods of time. Which isn’t to say I’ve not been up to visit before now, but with the restrictions of work and other issues in Florida, it made scheduling to visit more complicated and the trips much less frequent than they probably should have been.

And now I’m in the midst of watching my father fall to dementia. My uncle, his younger brother, died from Alzheimers in the early 2010s. My uncle’s fall was swift and brutal, less than two years from diagnosis until his death. Now my father appears to be in its grips, although his progression is slower. There are periods in which it seems to be abated, such as this visit. Or so it seems to an outsider looking in. My mom is his caregiver and has the unenviable task of watching over him constantly as well as watching him…

My mom isn’t alone in this. My brothers and sister are living in Atlanta, and all of them lend a hand, especially my older brother and my sister. And my sister is very close to my mom (just like my daughters are with my wife), so there’s that. My mom misses me very much, as does my dad. And when I travel up to visit I do odd jobs around the house for her, and she sits and talks with me while I work. Before I left I set up out iPhones so that my mom can “see” me with the Find My app, and I can keep an eye on her and my sister back up in Atlanta. My mother found solace in watching me travel down Marta from Doraville back to the airport, and then saw I’d made it back home to Orlando. I text and email and talk to her constantly, but Find My seems to give her that little bit of extra comfort that she can see and reach out to a specific location. Where I’m at isn’t abstract anymore.

Over the years while he’s been in retirement I’ve made the trip up to visit my parents. I have a photo from January 2012 that is a reminder of what he once was.

This photo shows him smiling and happy, especially to see me. He loved me very much (he loved us all equally) and he was always glad to see me when I came home. We were upstairs in his home office at the time and I was talking to him about the Olympus E-P2 with the 45mm f/1.8 lens, and as I was demonstrating it I just lifted the camera up and grabbed this quick photo. Nothing planned. Later we went into Conyers and walked around taking photos like a couple of tourists.

That’s my father with his Olympus E-300 and kit zoom. My father was always the avid photographer, going back to when I was a little kid. He got me hooked on photography, helping me get my very first 35mm camera, a Yashica Electro 35 rangefinder. Later in the 1970s he used nothing but Olympus, starting with one of the first OM-1 film cameras to be sold in Atlanta. Over time he purchased every version of the OM series, from 1 to 4, along with a number of lenses and the Olympus flash kit. He was pretty good photographing orchids, which he raised in his greenhouse out back. Back around 2015 he gave me one of his last OM purchases, an OM-4T. I have it in on of my bookcases, kept carefully clean. I pretty sure it still works, even as old as it is. But I’m afraid to take it out for fear I might damage it, or worse, loose it.

That greenhouse is still out back, but it’s a shadow of its former self. My older brother still tries to keep it up, but where it once was crammed full of beautiful orchids, it now is pretty empty, and most of the pots that once held many an orchid are empty and piled up in back of the greenhouse. My dad doesn’t go into it any more, and hasn’t for some number of years. The path from the house to the greenhouse entrance, while quite short, is steep and difficult for him to navigate without fear of falling.

This year is going to be far different than any other up to this point in time. I have no idea where the journey will end, and refuse to think on it too much. But the keywords for 2020 living are going to be focus, calm, and supportive. Most importantly, providing as much strength as possible for the family, especially my mom and dad. Especially my mom.

When I married and settled down I noticed how I was getting fatter, and so I tried to switch to diet replacements as an aid to keeping the midriff from bulging too much. The first, and worst for me, was Tab. I tried other diet sodas including Diet Coke, eventually developing an “acquired taste” for it. I didn’t start drinking Coke Zero until I started traveling to Japan, where that’s the only diet soda they serve. I learned to like that, and eventually preferred it over Diet Coke.

Now we’ve got a re-release of Coke Zero called Coke Zero Sugar. And I’m here to tell you that as far as I’m concerned it’s absolutely horrible. I know many have written they can’t tell a difference, but I certainly can. The taste may be different, but it’s not improved, not by a long shot. Since, for health reasons, I need to completely switch off diet sodas, now’s as good a time as any. Thanks for the motivation, Coke.

Family Extant

I was born in Atlanta and moved to Orlando 30 some years ago. Most of my family still lives up there, such as my mom and dad. Mom was in the hospital late last week having about one-and-a-half liters of fluid drained from around her heart. Several weeks before she’d been stung by a hornet and had reacted badly to the sting. A doctor proscribed steroids to bring down the swelling. My mother, being 83, had her immune system suppressed and caught a bad case of pneumonia, which led to the trip to the hospital and the massive draining. She went home today to be looked after by the rest of my family.

Mom, as they say, managed to dodge the bullet this time. I think a trip up to Atlanta is called for in the not too distant future.

Closing

I’m in a much more retrospective frame of mind these days, far more so than I’ve ever been. Perhaps that’s the product of getting old, like the fear of death. It’s not just my death I think about but death all around touching all I love and care about, leaving its shadow over everything.

On the way back home I traveled the same route in reverse; my parent’s home to the Doraville station, then cross Atlanta on MARTA to Hartsfield. It was while I was waiting at Hartsfield that I came across this scene that seemed to sum up some of my thoughts and observations on Atlanta.

For example, that Kia sitting in the main part of the airport points out what has changed with regards to auto manufacturing in Georgia. From 1947 to 2008 GM’s Doraville Assembly plant pumped out Olds and Pontiacs, primarily for the southeast region. It made a lot more sense to make them local to the booming Atlanta market than to build them in Detroit and then ship them cross country. The plant, shutdown and empty, sits next to the Doraville MARTA station. The Kia plant is south of Altanta in 85, near the Georgia/Alabama border.

And Doraville itself is no longer “a touch of country in the city,” the way the Atlanta Rhythm Section sang about the community forty years ago in their 1974 album “Third Annual Pipe Dream.” It has instead become part of the vast urban sprawl that covers the entire metro Atlanta area; gray concrete, worn asphalt roads and parking lots, innumerable strip malls, pine power poles strung up with power lines everywhere, punctuated with entrances to old neighborhoods. I miss the Doraville of forty and more years ago, but there’s no going back to it these days. Like they say, you really can’t go home again.

Today was another quiet day at my parent’s place. I helped my dad fix one of his sprinkler heads. His sprinkler system has heads that sit just above his rhododendrons. Those rhododendrons are taller than I am, which means this particular sprinkler was that tall. While all the azaleas and rhododendrons are green and growing they’re well past the blooming season. If I want to see them in bloom I need to come back and visit next spring.

I also spent a little time with my dad walking through the greenhouse. It’s good to see it still in operation, but it’s nothing like the “glory days” of ten, and even five, years ago. There was a very bad freeze one winter and the thermostat in the greenhouse failed to activate the heater in time. When my dad woke up early the next morning, a lot of the orchids had already been frozen out. All that invaluable time invested in those orchids was wiped out. Since he’d was already retired he couldn’t afford to just buy and replace.

Even though he still has far more orchids than I have (and will ever have), at the height of his orchid collection both walls would be covered with sitting and hanging orchids, many in bloom. They’d cover both walls as well as hanging down the center. By comparision I have six, down from a dozen I had five years ago. One of them is an orchid he gave me that I haven’t managed to kill yet.

The best I can say is I have the memories of those times, and he has a lot of Kodachrome slides of his orchids. There is a record, living and fixed.

While everyone went down to Centennial Olympic Park or Lenox Square to watch fireworks, I spent a quiet evening with my parents. My dad has spent the last 35 years turning the property around the house into a huge forested garden, covered with azaleas and a long orchid greenhouse back behind the house.

The whole property is on a fairly steep slope from the top of a hill down to a private lake. Even when the sun is up, the house and property are in deep shade due primarily to all the native pines and oaks. It’s perfect for growing azaleas and zenning out.