The eldercare term Sandwich generation implies a single sandwich, a single squeeze or sandwiching if you will. For those among us with more complex conundrums I'd like to re-appropriate from Wawa branding the term Hoagiefest.
Hoagiefest generation -- n., a generation or subgroup of the same finding itself navigating a pile of caregiving sandwiches. Some are classics, some are shortis, some are two-foot party subs. There are many, hence the fest.
Image: the family caregiver stands perched on one end of a seesaw while clowns throw a bunch of sandwiches at her.
Image(alternate): as the family caregiver sleeps, restlessly and half out of his mind, a posse of clowns piles hoagies one by one until he wakes up to find himself covered in Wawa hoagies.
What is to be done, brothers and sisters? We must eat a lot of hoagies. That is the nature of the Hoagiefest.
I want to admit here that caring is alien to me. I love, I really do, but I also connect with my relatives and family members like an alien from another care-free planet, like a sci-fi android discovering a new type of experience, Emotion. Being called upon to do what's right is to grow comfortable in "social situations," replete with "conversation" and "eye contact."
As reported in these pages, a few years ago I gave up drinking. And as these pages also inadvertently chronicle, drinking had played an essential role in company morale. Without it I felt lonelier, more depressed, crazy. The choice seemed to be to start drinking again, health consequences and genealogical tendencies toward alcoholism be damned, or to do some work.
That concept of work has me starting to dip into AA. A couple of months in I can report two things with certitude. First, I think it could help. Maybe it already is. And, there's the part I find controversial: these meetings mostly take place in churches. I have been on church premises more in the past three months than at any point in the past 15 years. No one has to drag me there kicking and screaming. I just head straight for the basement and it all works fine. I feel hope (bullshit aside) and somewhere outlined in the far future is "peace," something I did not envision prior.
One of the things people argue in the rooms is fake-it-til-you-make-it on the spirituality question. For those on similar fences, when asked to close a meeting by repeating the Our Father in a group, I suggest that you replace in your mind the word Father with Hoagie. This simple transposition strips the prayer of most of its patriarchal vestiges (most but not all, dear reader, for if a hoagie has gender it must be masculine). The remainder is downright innocuous, possibly even containing the seeds of a code to live by.
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