Previously: My half-sister, Anne, died from Lewy Body Dementia, a disease not easy to diagnose until the final stages. Now, I am the only Townsend left. Nichole formed a close link to her four male cousins and my uncle when she first moved to California in 1990. I felt better about her being three thousand miles away, knowing she had blood relatives in the area.

Background: (For those who missed earlier chapters.) When my daughter moved to California, hoping to be discovered, her first visit back home had a purpose as always. Four years had gone by. No hopes of stardom in sight. She came hand in hand with a lanky man who looked ten years her senior. (Turned out Jeff was a year and a half younger.) We knew she was in love, but this guy didn’t fit in with our family values. No desire for higher education, no job skills, no sensitivity to the feelings of others. He loved to draw caricatures and to imitate people, exaggerating their flaws.

Nichole loved musicals, The Wizard of Oz being her favorite. He made fun of her tastes, preferring horror and gangster films and Jackass movies. She liked funky vintage clothes. He dressed Gothic style. They did share one thing. Both prefer animals to people.

Knowing our feelings toward Jeff, she married him regardless, thus creating a rift that’s never quite mended. We almost ruined her wedding day.
She came home two years later to attend her brother’s wedding ceremony.  Then when we moved she flew out to see our new home. We  traveled to Los Angeles to visit our ‘lost’ daughter several times in twenty-six years.  Her phobia of airplanes kept her grounded.

When Frank showed signs of dementia, I hinted to Nichole she should come while he still remembered her name. Hating to fly was her excuse. In truth, my daughter has a fear of being bored. She’s always on the move with her six-figure desk job, one that supports Jeff’s free-lance ‘play’: radio spots, voice-overs, cartoon drawings, and screenplay writing.

Chapter 103 ends with Nichole calling to say she has tickets for Orlando at the end of April and will stop for a short visit after staying in Key West for three days and visiting her brother, Chris, for a half day. "Think of interesting places we can go," she added before hanging up.
 

How can you show long-time residents of L.A. anything new? Their last visit ten years ago, we drove from end to end of our senior community and bragged about the fitness center, three pools, four tennis courts, and the theater club that had performed my first play. We treated them to the weekly fare at the Kitchen Club. The food is good and cheap. But an outsider would see all those gray heads at the long cafeteria tables and think Nursing Home—Yikes! Who could blame her for not wanting to come back?

What to do? What to do? Let’s see. Old Mc Donald’s Farm was ten miles away. A Drag Strip Museum, tucked somewhere on the outskirts of town, would bore me. Nichole nixed Ocala’s Canyon Zip Line because of her fear of flying. Shopping malls are all alike. Out of options, I queried my neighbor. She had just visited EARS, forty miles north of Ocala in a small town called Citrus. The price? Eighteen dollars and dead chicken pieces or bleach. (That’s optional, however.)

When I first read about EARS two years ago, I wanted to go, but as usual with Frank’s growing dementia, he had no interest. I figured Nichole and Jeff would enjoy a guided tour of the Endangered Animal Rescue Sanctuary, the final resting place of wild animals now injured, abandoned or abused to such an extent they couldn’t be reintroduced to the wild. Something different, I was sure. Then I checked the L.A. Zoo. Wouldn’t you know? The big tourist attraction had a special area for endangered animals too. Nichole had even done volunteer work too.

"It’s still new," my daughter enthused. "I researched EARS, and they have a liger. I’m excited. "

"A liger?"

"Yes." She read from the internet. "‘A liger is the result of breeding a male lion to a tigress. A tigon is the result of breeding a male tiger…Ligers are the world's biggest cats, larger than their parents, with the strength of a lion and speed of a tiger combined. An average male liger stands almost twelve feet tall on its hind legs and weighs up to half a ton, twice the weight of a wild lion or tiger… Today there are believed to be a handful of ligers around the world and a similar number of tigons, the product of a tiger father and lion mother. Tigons are smaller than ligers and take on more physical characteristics of the tiger."

Yea! Entertainment for one day. I made reservations. Tours were limited to fifteen people. "A lot of walking," the lady in charge told me, "but we have a golf cart for anyone handicapped."

The second full day of their visit, they planned to leave around five for Orlando to catch an early flight home the next day. Again, what to do? Thank goodness for The Villages, a senior community, twelve miles away with a new section modeled to resemble an old western town. That could be interesting. At least, we could find a good restaurant.

Prior experience had taught us that Nichole stuck to Jeff whenever we went anywhere. She let him dominate the conversation. "Wouldn’t it be nice," I voiced to hubby, "if just the four of us get together for dinner when she arrives? Just you and me and Chris and Nichole. No one else. Do you think she  would buy that? Leaving Jeff alone for a few hours? And would Joanne be offended it we didn’t include her and the grandchildren?"

"One way to find out."  Frank reached for the phone. "Call Chris first. See what he thinks because he’d have to drive her to a restaurant where we would meet and then later then drive back to Apopka."

To be continued.