Uncle Albert update

 Uncle Albert update 

Uncle Albert continues in the house he moved out of our house to. It’s nearby. He continues to share with the same two university students and construction worker that were there when he moved in in May.

     He continues to come here, but not every day anymore. I pick him up at nine, and he stays with me much of the day. Most days we eat lunch together. Monday and Thursdays late morning he rides with me to my appointments with Dr. Feight.

After I saw Dr. Feight this morning – or after I saw him and Uncle Albert read his magazines – we went to his "boarding house, as he calls it. (“I’m Major Hoople,” he sometimes adds.) He had invited me to lunch, which one of the young women he lives with had contracted with him to make for us.

     The young woman’s name is Maggie – she’s a sophomore from the Tidewater, majoring in biology. She loves Uncle Albert. She could “eat him up,” she says.

     “But that’s not what we’re having for lunch?” Uncle Albert says. Maggie looks at him, he smiles, she shakes her head. “No,” she says. Uncle Albert looks at me.

     “What then?” I ask her.

     “Tomato soup,” she says, “and grilled-cheese sandwiches.” And a glass of milk.

     “Do you like milk?” she asks.

     I say I do just as she says, “Albert likes milk.”

     I look at him: “You do?”

     “I guess I do,” he says.

     “You know you do,” Maggie says. “You’ve said so.”

Mae West

We sit down at the kitchen table, Uncle Albert and I. The soup smells good, and the sandwiches hiss in the frying pan. Then, Maggie is ladling the soup into bowls and levering the sandwiches from the pan onto plates and cutting them in half corner to corner. She puts the soup and then our sandwiches in front of us.

     “Serve from the left and take from the right,” she says under her breath, adding aloud, “though I won’t be here to take.” She has a class to rush off to. “But just leave everything on the table.” She’ll take care of “it all” when she gets back.

“Bye,” she says, looking back in on us an instant later, sheathed in a blue slicker with matching blue wellies.

     “Bye,” I say. Uncle Albert raises his glass of milk – he’s got a mouthful of grilled cheese.

“What’s up?” I ask as he swallows. “Why should something be up?” he asks. “Nothing’s up,” he says.

11.09.17