Value caregivers over ballplayers

I’ve been down this road before, both figuratively and literally, sometimes unsuccessfully. It was a waning afternoon a couple of weeks ago when I rounded a curve on the two-lane near my place and there she was, a huge, muddy snapping turtle slowly making her way across the road. A similar situation some years back informed me that I am not cut out for wild animal rescue; I grabbed the turtle’s shell and who knew her neck was long enough to reach around and clamp down on my leather glove? This time a savior on an ATV came to my rescue. I held up traffic and he knew to pick the big turtle up by the tale and take her to safety. Now I know. As do you. You’re welcome.

Not far from the turtle rescue I watched a red-tailed hawk floating about ten feet above a ditch, slowly circling downward, not flapping her wings, just riding a low thermal. When she got to about three feet above the ditch she suddenly dropped extraordinarily quickly to the ground, disappearing from sight, like a mistaken mirage, before rising in that slow, elegant way they have, a mouse in her talons. The wonderment I feel at scenes like these is beyond anything I can possibly describe.

The Major League Baseball World Series has begun and because my television reception comes from an old antenna in my attic, I’ve not seen much baseball in many years. This year the games will be on a mainstream antenna-friendly-channel so I’ll likely check out a game or two, but let me say this about major league baseball players: they are paid entirely too much. I say this from the point of view as a caregiver the past number of years. The average baseball player makes more that $4 million per season, before getting a few months off.

The average caregiver in a health care facility makes between $9-13 per hour. These are the people we trust with feeding our parents, grandparents, and partners, cleaning them up when they need it, providing conversation and company when they sorely lack it, and pine for it. What are we thinking? Our values seem to be entirely backward. We don’t care who’s changing dad’s diaper tonight, but what inning are we in and what’s the score?

In the mornings for the past few years, I took my wife in to the shower to clean her up and to wash her gorgeous hair. I loved doing her hair. As I dried it with a hairdryer I would sing to her, usually Christmas songs. “Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?” She always smiled as I sang. I’m an OK singer but what she smiled about was love, not my voice or choice of tunes. Afterward I’d wrap her in a blanket in a chair, so that I could have 3-5 minutes to shower before she wandered off, which she never did. Anyway, every other day I’d tap the head of my electric shaver on the side of the sink to get rid of detritus from previous shavings and as I did this I would hear a voice in the next room exclaim happily, “Come in!”

She thought my tapping was someone knocking at a downstairs door and even very deep into her confusion she was always the gracious host and all-around sweet human being, a woman who understood her muddled husband like no other, inviting in anyone who wished to call. And when no one came into the room we laughed. And sometimes that’s enough.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.