Ardis

I was just lured like Hansel and Gretel across the street by my 85-year-old neighbor Ardis. She’s the sweetest thing in the world but the conversations with her tend to recycle themselves every five minutes. She’s got almost no short-term memory so this leads to a lot of awkward silent moments because I’m afraid to ask a question or respond to any point that she’s making for fear of haviing a rerun of the very same talk we just had. Either way, I’ve got the script memorized but it’s hard to know which portion of the script will surface at any given moment.
“Do you know what happened to me not long ago?” she said today.
“No. What?”
Of course, I’m immediately regretting saying this because I know I will have heard what she’s going to bring up. But because I don’t know which specific story I’ve already heard, she somehow traps me into answering no. These are very delicate tightropes we sometimes walk down in life.
“Somebody,” she says, “and I don’t know who, but somebody wired $90,000 into my bank account not long ago.”
“Wow!” I say as though this was the first time she told me.
“Isn’t that amazing?”
She’s always very animated in telling me.
“Yeah, wow.” Very little emotion left in me to apply to the recycled versions of these conversations. I mostly just throw in head nods and try to occupy myself with looking for something to eat in the kitchen while I’m listening to her.
“And I have no idea who it could be!” she says.
And, of course, I start to finish the story for her because I remember more of it.
“I think it might be the friend of yours who died not long ago.”
“Yes, maybe,” she says shaking her head, perplexed, “I really don’t know. There’s no way to know.”
We both shake our heads at this as another long silence ensues.

So I walked her across the street and she fixed me a drink which I'm still having trouble saying no to every time she offers. Then she started talking about her driving test which she's so worried about passing.
"I've been studying and studying but this stuff won't stay in my head."
She started reading me the sample test question.
"You're driving next to a double-yellow line. When is it okay to cross over the double yellow? A. When the line closest to you is a solid yellow line. B. When the line closest to you is a broken yellow line. C. When the line closest to the lane next to you turns to a broken yellow line. D. Never"
I didn't know the answer the first time through mostly because I was having the hardest time paying attention. So she read me the answer- "B. When the line closest to you is a broken yellow line." Within five minutes she'd forgotten that she'd asked me that same question and she started reading it to me again.
"You're driving next to a double-yellow line. When is it okay to cross over..."
I immediately cut her off because I knew how long it took to get through the question.
"When the line next to you is broken," I said.
She looked at me and then the paper and seemed thoroughly impressed.
"Wow!" she said, "You really know this stuff!"
I felt so good about myself that I didn't want to point out that she'd already read me that question. I actually did finally tell her this but it didn't take her long to forget that she'd already told me. And so I didn't bother telling her again. For the next 10 questions, I just miraculously finished answering everything even without her reading me the options. Every time, she was so impressed with my extensive knowledge of the material.
It did feel good. I gotta' get over there more often.