This tree has no doubt appeared before. This is perhaps a very common view on this here daily tree feature – because it’s what I see when I step out of the house and walk up the driveway to the expressway. This is the Port Saint Nicholas Expressway, as I like to call it.
I had a somewhat disconcerting experience with Arthur when we stopped at the bank yesterday, while running our Thursday “shopping day” errands.
I pulled into the parking lot at the Wells Fargo bank in town, and said “Both you and I need to go to the bank.” Arthur asked what he needed to do at the bank, and I said we’d discussed that he needed to withdraw some cash – his cash reserve in his wallet was running low. Then Arthur said, as confident as could be, “Why are were here. This isn’t my bank.”
Bear in mind, this Wells Fargo branch is the same as it ever was. I have a vivid memory of walking into this bank, in 1998, with Arthur, when he opened this account. So his bald assertion that this wasn’t his bank struck me as quite… disturbing. So far most of his memory failures and lapses are related to things that just aren’t salient (new or old), and I can’t quite figure how the local bank he’s been using for 25+ years isn’t salient. So this was a new type of problem.
The fact that he didn’t think it was his bank threw him off, and when we went inside, he couldn’t for his life figure out how to ask for what he wanted – and the teller was one of the frequently replaced sorts the bank in town struggles with – barely competent and probably only employed because no one more qualified can be found.
Once he was on the spot and couldn’t put together what he needed, and I had to step in, Arthur became embarrassed. His standard reaction to that is to get angry. When we got to the car he was combative and incoherent. He asked what we had to do next and I said grocery shopping and he said “whatever” in his exasperated way when he feels I’m being overly controlling.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km; retailing, 1hr]