Where does the 'im' set in?

It is true that impatience is at the other end of its nemesis, patience. It is when you know you can't go any further, but you also know that you had started somewhere, far more pleasing, to where it desperately headed. In most cases, it's like a runaway, untrained horse that kept on galloping wildly across the field, not knowing where to go and not knowing he just tore apart the neighbor's white picket fence along the way and left a few strands of horse mane as evidence. I know it should be much simpler than this, but is impatience ever any simpler? I mean, where does the 'im' set in?

I live it in some kind of daily format now:

Oma, my 99-year old German grandma-in-law lives with us and she seems to breathe the 'im' in my patience every two minutes or so, as long as I'm at home. Over the phone it has become quite impossible, because she hardly hears anything unless it's being screamed at her. She had disposed of two pairs of hearing aid and then, just the other day, reminded my husband to buy her another one. She forgot why she hated her hearing aid in the first place: "The sound gets all mumbled up together...I couldn't understand anything."

What we found out after having her tested was that no hearing aid would have done its job on her, after all. The doctor said that, though her hearing has deteriorated quite significantly from her last test, her comprehension has gone down the drain even worse. Besides she never liked the transition period with the equipment; the adjustment period between the scrambled hearing, to a controlled volume, to where she could easily isolate one sound from the other and combine sounds that make sense together.

Oftentimes, we had to grin and bear the 'im' a lot and learned how to go with the flow and enjoy the other sweeter moments when Oma couldn't hear, much less understand, when we fool around with words or gestures or when we even berate each other over some kind of you-are-wrong and I-am-right, husband-wife back and forth. Sometimes my husband and I could talk three yards away from each other and have some sort of privacy, even with Oma as the third person and a curious black dog with the busy, wagging tail.

It's not even just the hearing: Oma's eyesight, with traces of healing glaucoma on both eyes, is displaying signs of her ninety-nine years. There were times when I had to re-wash the spoons, forks, dishes, pot and pans because they're not quite properly cleaned. [I know, we should already ban her from dishwashing, but she usually insisted and we always complied.] It's easier not to argue much with Oma, because it could be a lot pointless and stupid to even go there. Fortunately, we won the laundry battle twice, two years ago, when she thought bleach was actually the regular detergent and my husband’s ivory-blotched clothes proved that they weren't.

So with her hearing and eyesight on red alert, we learned how to have sharp-like attention despite walls and floors in between. Just yesterday, I watched her move around our eight by twelve kitchen space. [You have to remember that Oma's kitchen is her own little world and it is where she feels the most special. And if you've tasted her banana bread and her chocolate chip cookies, you know she masters the oven and baking these yummy dishes is her forte.] Well, while she moved around with the fridge door open and her slim, pale face halfway in, she had also left the hot water faucet running and the oven turned full on. I waited five minutes to see if she would notice. She went back and forth the fridge, leaving it open, to the sink left of the fridge, wondering what she had to do next.

Can you imagine what just dawned on me while I closely watched? Oma couldn't see the steaming, running water, let alone hear it; nor hear the oven heating up; nor remember what she needed to do next; nor even notice that I was a few feet away from her peripheral view. She moved around the small, square kitchen with her gray eyebrows furrowed and her skinny lips quenched, probably from her own 'im' trying mercilessly to get out.

And perhaps, on one of those rare moments, my own 'im' settled back and hesitated, then stayed way away from the forefront. This time, patience ruled and kept itself exposed, vulnerable and relaxed. I don't know where the 'im' set in a lot of times, but I am beginning to know when and where patience shows up: It is always when the heart is open and where time begins to shut up.

I could almost hear the docile horse quietly tapping its heels, cautiously slow-trotting back, barn ward.