Rumbles

I guess the first thing that ever happened was on a visit by my parents to our capital city, Wellington, where I was living and working. This would have been in the mid-late 1970s, which is going back a bit. We were all out in town, looking around on a busy working day. My dad and I were engrossed in discussing something and it suddenly dawned on me that Kath was not with us. "Where's Kath?" I said. We looked behind us and there was no sign of her in the crowds. "Don't worry," he replied, "She'll turn up - she gets like this sometimes."

Sure enough, she did turn up - I can't remember any explanation of where she had been, and at the time I passed the episode off. But my father's comment has come back to me now, as has her own stories of an "Aunty Kate" who used to go wandering out of the house and down the street and who had the habit of breaking up biscuits on the plate. About which, more later.......

I can also remember my dad mentioning to me on several occasions that she was noisy round the house, especially with handling crockery. I can recall suggesting they get her eyesight tested, as maybe she was having vision problems with judging distance. Once I started living with her, I found she could crash a cup down on a saucer quite forcibly - enough to make you jump out of your skin if you were not ready for it. She didn't seem to be aware of what she was doing and it was fruitless to try and alter the behaviour as my dad no doubt found out. I cannot remember anything like that from my younger years. We have now graduated to one of my tin tramping mugs (the bright orange enamel one) which doesn't break if dropped and has no saucer to crash on, thank goodness.

Probably the only other thing was that once she started to lose mobility in the mid 1990s, I found her inordinately heavy on me if I gave her my arm in walking. She would just let me take her whole weight, and at the time I kind of found it surprising that she seemed to have no awareness whatsoever of how she was dragging down on my arm. I am sure this ties in with the general lack of awareness of others that became more obvious later, and somehow in an uncanny way my mind at the time associated this with that slight manual clumsiness she had always had.
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