Compassion Sold Separately

My favorite cousin greets me just before midnight when my flight lands. No matter how lovely she is or how many of my favorite relatives insist on living in this city, I hate it. We embark on the long drive to her house. The conversation launches into family relations, it's unavoidable. Speaking of the unavoidable, we inevitably get around to talking about my father. He is in town and the family is fairly pissed at him. 

I don't know how other families are, but in this family if you hear about an incident from more than one person....it's HUGE. If two people mention it, someone is livid and it might not even be one of the two you heard it from. We're an odd bunch, I'm just at the beginning of figuring out how this family functions and I can tell we're odd. 

The story goes like this. My Grandfather is 88, fairly forgetful about daily things, having angina attacks, uses a walker and his wife of 66 years is....I'll get to that....but you can see that he needs a hand with things, right? On top of it all he's in the process of moving from one care facility to another. My father volunteers to transport Grampa from one facility to the other with a few possessions. This will tell you how literal my father is. He picks Grampa up and drops him off. Read: Grampa waits in his room for his son to fetch him....while his son waits in the car out front. Grampa has a cell phone and is worried, but my father refuses to have a cell phone. Grampa finally wanders outside and finds his son, then goes back to his room to get some things (alone) gathers what he can balance on his walker and goes back outside to load it in the car. My father drives Grampa to the other care facility, helps him unload the things onto the walker, gets back in the car and drives off. Grampa walks his carefully balanced load to his room.

Now, I helped Grampa (carried his old war uniform while my Uncle carried the 150-200 lb safe) to his room and let me tell you, it's a LONG WALK. It's a huge facility, built like a labyrinth. Dropping a gent such as my Grampa at the door is rude. I heard about this incident from 5 people. 

Hey good news! By the time I arrived my father was already on the shit list. 

It went downhill for both of us from there.