Hot Dogs, Cold Cats

There are those quirky little behaviors that come with progressing Alzheimer’s, some physical activities, some verbal. Both are reflections of the brain trying to hold its ground against the encroaching darkness. Mom’s verbal quirks were, at first, quite humorous and, later, quite annoying. Now… now they are greatly missed.

For a couple of years Mom would express agreement, concurrence, or happiness by saying, “Hot Dogs, Cold Cats, Fried Monkeys and Stewed Rats!” It was an old saying she had taught us as kids. I have no idea where she learned it, but I suspect it was leftover from her youth, as well. Friends would come over and she would say it and they would giggle and encourage her to say it again. After about three months of that, okay maybe about 3 weeks of it, I got tired of the saying and was more than ready to take the hot dogs and the cold cats and stuff them where the stewed rats don’t shine…  but still people would come to visit and mom would express her delight to see them by recounting her full ritual of yummy animals.

Some people would try to confuse her by misleading her in phraseology, hot dogs, cold cats, yellow monkeys and fluffy rats, or some variant thereof. They didn’t really understand that being able to hold accurately onto that phrase was part of the anchor her mind had formed to keep itself from drifting farther afield. It was their way of playing the game with her and she always laughed with them, not understanding that she had gone adrift, but knowing, in her loving, hostess heart, that they were sharing a laugh together.

That annoying phrase, the one that used to make me pull my hair out, that phrase has now drifted off into the abyss of Alzheimer’s. Now, when delighted or in concurrence with a plan, she’ll still say, “Hot Dog”, but the rest of the menagerie is out sight, out of mind. And I miss them, because I know that they took a bit more of my mother’s memory with them. So now, I’m the one who recites Hot Dogs, Cold Cats, Fried Monkeys annnnnnd…..  And I wait patiently to see if the Stewed Rats surface in her smile. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, but either way we laugh at the silliness of the old saying and step forward into the next change.