I mean, I've been through noticing Alzheimer's appearing, but that was a long time ago and my other parent did most of the work. And I've been through an abrupt decline as part of dying. But I think this sounds different than either of those.
I'm quite a long time into a process of having become aware that my mother has substantial delusional beliefs about the world. This isn't exactly an aging thing -- it was apparent to lesser degree when she was a healthy middle-aged woman -- but has become more acute in the twenty years since she retired, probably in relation to being more socially withdrawn. I have done absolutely nothing useful about it, assuming that ineffectually trying to persuade her out of false beliefs doesn't count as useful. She still seems to be perfectly competent in carrying on her day-to-day life; I figure that'll fail catastrophically at some point and I'll do something then.
So, kids! Don't be like me!
My sister and I are getting worried about my mom's forgetfulness. She openly acknowledges it and laughs it off, but we've been thinking that it is actually worse than we've all acknowledged. Her partner is kind but I don't see him taking affirmative action about the situation. So far, she seems OK so long as she is in her routine, so we haven't done anything.
My mom has become much more shrunken and withdrawn and quiet, which bums me out a lot, but I haven't seen a mental decline. EXCEPT ONE THING: she impulsively ordered Jammies and me a $700 pizza oven after hearing the owners interviewed on some podcast. I am 100% sure that it makes amazing pizza. We do not have the bandwidth to deal with it. It will cost us $250 to return it to Vermont.
(Can't it just stay on the back deck? I think the guilt of watching a $700 pizza oven rust out, un-used, would make me feel bad every time I noticed it. Can we sell it locally? That's what we're debating. We mostly want the path with the least cognitive load, but $250 is a lot to throw away.)
In theory, she said she was happy for us to have the remaining $450, but in practice it will go back on to her credit card and I'm not going to ask her for a check, because they're generous people who tend to round up and I like having a relationship where I reciprocate when it makes sense.
If you use it twice, it's probably under $380 a pizza. So it seems more economical.
I have a friend whose mom lives near-ish to me, advanced Alzheimer's. Still lives on her own in the house where she raised her family with a helper coming every day. A previous helper opened a credit card in Mrs Friend's name. There are cameras in the house for her kids to keep tabs. I had dinner with them last month, a mostly normal conversation except she said she saw kangaroos in the yard, and of course repeating things. Financially, logistically, emotionally, seems completely unmanageable but they've been doing this for years. Some unpleasant sibling conflict with the imminent decision to move to assisted living.
Seeing that (from a distance) makes my own parents' age-induced shortcomings and any difficulties for me in helping seem insignificant. My mom won't see a doctor except to respond to perceived crisis, is my biggest concern. Nagging changes nothing.
If the storage space isn't too bad, I'd hold onto the pizza oven. That seems like the sort of thing that might be lots of fun when the kids are a couple of years older so they're all useful, competent labor, and that's really very close for you.
You can make your own pizza oven out of cob.
Dr. Oops built her own out of masonry several years back. Allowing me to tell her "Dammit, Oops, you're a doctor, not a bricklayer!" Which made me very happy.
It's pretty much the same kind of work.
Yes, I have been going through this. In retrospect my father has been completely incapable of managing his affairs for at least four years but since he was not out-and-out delusional we perceived the symptoms as simple forgetfulness. I was lucky that he's not conspiratorial and has been very compliant in general. We had to move him across the country to be in assisted living near me, thousands of miles away from a lifetime of friends, and he's been generally very cool about it.
Tip number one is get power of attorney and access to all the finances. A lot of people are cagey about the latter as long as things seem to be functional but believe me a lot of dumb choices can be getting made along the way. (My father has tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. He's done things like buy fake plane tickets from a scammer. He sends people impulsive, ill-considered gifts that he can't afford. (Sorry, Heebie, but I think you might need to be worried.))
You should definitely talk to them about moving closer, if that's at all possible. It's a big process both emotionally and logistically so get the ball rolling. Once a crisis hits it's an order of magnitude worse if you have to try to manage it long distance. Both my grandmother and my father stalled literal decades making the choice to pack up and move after it had become the obvious right choice.
I can't comment on how to handle it with a living partner. I do think my mother's support covered over a lot of my father's problems and... I didn't get a full debrief on her deathbed.
In-home care is a huge pain to manage and gets expensive quickly. The details matter but you'll hit the region of assisted living rates around 3-4 hours/day (and that's a minimal shift, so basically daily help is roughly equivalent to AL when you include rent/property taxes).
If they have the resources (on the order of $250K+), investigate "continuing care retirement communities". These are communities where you start off with an apartment and minimal help and have access to more assistance (up through hospice) as you need it. Generally you need to do this before you have significant needs (for at least one partner).
If resources are an issue, email me and I'll send you the address of a very good advice center.
My siblings and I very successfully browbeat our mother into moving to a retirement place after my dad passed away. She's having a great time, and there's no need to worry about her forgetting to eat or burning down the house from forgetting to turn off the stove. My sister lives about 20 minutes away, which is quite ideal.
My father was a college professor who taught until he was 84 years old. He was slipping pretty badly by the time he gave up teaching. RateMyProfessor had comments like "For God's sake, retire!" (Or, more charitably: "He's a nice guy, but he needs to retire.")
When he had all of his faculties, he was kind of an arrogant prick, but an interesting thing happened to him as his brain started to go: He became humble. He understood, more or less, what was happening to him, and he accepted it gracefully. I found him very charming in his final years.
(But Jesus, my crazy fucking siblings were horrible about his decline. The ones who didn't interact with him were insistent that we were forcing him into assisted living.)
He bought a lot of random bullshit off of eBay -- completely consistent with his tastes, but wildly excessive. (For decades, he had owned an antique cash register, for instance. He bought three more on eBay.)
But he could afford it. And he never got scammed by anybody. People picked up a lot of good deals at his estate sale.
He sends people impulsive, ill-considered gifts that he can't afford. (Sorry, Heebie, but I think you might need to be worried.))
It did honestly make me worry a bit. My dad still is sharp as a tack and so I think we have some systems if something like this happens any time soon again. And she was able to say, "Well, I knew neither of your brothers would want it..." and be sheepish about it.
My uncle did a lot of impulsive spending when he was dying from a decade-long battle with multiple myeloma, including a gigantic black new truck when he'd previously been a folk music styled hippie scientist. The funniest one of these was the therapeutic robot seal that he ordered for my grandmother's old folks home. Apparently it went over fairly well.
To the OP: one thing that occurs to me (and granted, you said there's more to the story) is to wonder about concurrent medical conditions. Like urinary tract infections can look like precipitous mental decline in the elderly. I'm guessing it's not that specific condition, since I think that's the kind of thing that happens when the decline is further along, but I'm wondering if there's other underlying conditions that can cause decline.
my crazy fucking siblings were horrible
My father had to choose (theoretically; ultimately the choice got made for him) between moving closer to me or to my sibling. This introduced an extremely stupid amount of emotional drama to the situation. Try to get everybody above-board on their musts, can'ts and won'ts.
How would you characterize the partner in this situation? Clear-eyed but overwhelmed? In denial? Dealing with their own separate issues?
But it costs more than 7 pizza ovens.
Further to 16: delusions are responsive to medication.
I don't have any useful advice, but I did notice on this recent visit that my mom seems noticeably old for the first time. She's still cognitively fine but physically she's starting to decline in significant ways. She's very aware of her mortality and one of the things she made sure to do on this visit was show my sister and me where she keeps her will and associated documents.
He bought a lot of random bullshit off of eBay
My father-in-law did this as Alzheimer's set in, but mostly random car parts for who knows what reason.
I indirectly saw this happen via my parents dealing with both my grandmothers. They both were in a step-up support community mentioned in 12. The biggest early conflict which I think is pretty common was the refusal to give up their drivers license.
My parents are fairly old (78) but still fully functional. They buy ridiculous weird shit but they've been doing that for decades so unfortunately I can't blame it on aging.
I indirectly saw this happen via my parents dealing with both my grandmothers. They both were in a step-up support community mentioned in 12. The biggest early conflict which I think is pretty common was the refusal to give up their drivers license.
My parents are fairly old (78) but still fully functional. They buy ridiculous weird shit but they've been doing that for decades so unfortunately I can't blame it on aging.
Double positing is a sign of cognitive decline.
Having gone through slow mental decline of relatives in multiple depressing scenarios, here's my few cents. I'm assuming you aren't particularly close and that your parent won't be very open to an honest chat about how they are doing. Was the decline actually rapid? Folks who are smart and highly competent usually manage to compensate for slow declines until they hit a tipping point where they can no longer compensate, but you start to see sign of those coping mechanisms (like Post-Its in lots of places or more rigid coming home/leaving the house rituals like putting everything near the door so nothing is forgotten when they didn't do it before). If it honestly was sudden and significant, there are reversible reasons for mental decline - urinary tract infections like someone mentioned but also B12 deficiency. Take a look for physical symptoms as well - shuffling or irregular gait, incontinence (look in the bathroom cabinets for Poise pads or similar because that's a bit kinder), balance and coordination, hearing and vision. Watch them drive, best if it's not a familiar route. Check out their prescriptions. Make all the observations you can, and do some medical Googling to make guesses (these are for you, to try to get more information, particularly if they refuse to see a doctor). When you do that, look up anognosia. It's a very, very common symptom of Alzheimer's, where the decline is imperceptible. They aren't being assholes on this topic; they literally have faulty feedback about their experiences.
Next, you need to figure out who their doctor is (if you don't know). A good sneaky way is to look at prescription bottles. Call the office and say what you are seeing. The office won't be able to tell you anything at this point, but they can look more carefully at the next appointment. Better if you call doctors for both parents. Maybe someone's due for a vaccine booster or something?
Next step is to figure out what you are and aren't willing to do and what is and isn't possible. Money solves a lot of problems. Proximity solves a lot, too, as Yawnoc notes, depending on how much time you (or a sibling) is willing to spend on problems. If you and your siblings are close to each other (emotionally, not geographically), start figuring out a plan to put into place if you hit a point of crisis. It's sad, but when you have little power over independent adults, it's very difficult to insist someone move to assisted living (and yeah, "continuous care" is best if you don't anticipate needing to switch to a Medicaid facility). Divide the work if you can. Figure out how long waits might be for facilities in your preferred location (since in a crisis, you will need to understand where one or both can go right away). You can ask nicely to make sure power of attorney is in place for legal, medical, and financial aspects. You or a sibling can ask nicely for a Living Will. (Better if you can say you just updated or got yours done and want to make sure they are taken care of.) If you and your siblings aren't close, be very clear about what you won't do. (Chipping in $XK/month for care? Attending doctor's appointments and making treatment decisions? Emotional support for the sibling who does those things, potentially including "covering" care so they can go on vacation or just get a break for a week or two?)
It's a very hard path, and I think the best way to navigate is to set priorities for yourself. What is most important to you? If you have kids, what do you want them to see (and potentially emulate)?
How would you characterize the partner in this situation?
My mom died suddenly, faculties mostly intact, about six years previous. So it was just my parents' seven surviving children -- and only three of us were helpful to my father in any meaningful way. (And we -- and my father -- all agreed that assisted living was the right move.)
My dad has abruptly become much older, frailer, and more checked-out in the past two years. It's very upsetting to me, but he sees his doctor regularly and I don't know what there is to do about it.
Heebie, I'm sure you've thought through the pizza oven situation thoroughly, and probably don't need the input of uninvested outsiders, but fwiw (nothing) I agree with LB in 7.
If family trends continue (men die suddenly in their sixties, women live past ninety), my mom will be ready for assisted living around the time my heart spontaneously disintegrates.
You should probably look into your blood pressure.
I did a lot of reading on this stuff and talking to people when I was trying to help my parents. They were never in the continuing care market, but I did learn some stuff about them from boooks, open older friend and the website of the elder care lawyer. Highly recommend finding a good elder care lawyer who might have referrals to care managers (nurses or social workers you pay to help coordinate stuff.
(1.) the continuing care places often want you to have a few years of good health before you need their services. If they're really in decline they might not take you.
(2.) they may charge higher rates for different levels of care, but to some extent they are operating as insurers - that's why you have to pay the big fee to get in. But they aren't regulated that way, so you need to have a lawyer review the contract and check the financials. A friend (who had no kids and had been in the foreign service) retired to one in Maryland that she thought was good, but over time she and many residents thought that the community was expanding in ways that were not financially prudent, and taking on debt that could compromise their care. She left and had to give up her deposit. She moved to a rental place in Maine where she had lived when she first retired before moving to MA. I don't know what her ALF options there were, because she got liver cancer and went downhill fast. I'm guessing she just had hospice in her apartment.
Care managers are a wonderful thing I had no idea existed before! They can cost a lot but they're your eyes and ears if you can't be physically present and they can do a lot of the things it's not practical for you to do. They can also be a non-emotionally-invested authoritative voice on the situation, if that's needed.
On the flip side, we found placement agents almost completely unhelpful when looking for assisted living. We ended up basically just Googling it.
Getting my dad on Kaiser Permanente was a game changer for simplifying access to doctors and health records. He had a dozen different doctors on his old plan with a dozen patient portals (or none at all). KP has everything in one place, all electronic, I can manage all his appointments and prescriptions myself online.
You should really visit places, but go with your sarcastic sister instead of your busy sister. Because your busy sister won't appreciate jokes you make when she's trying to ask about ratios.
Keep in mind that your busy sister has the actual power of attorney to make decision though. Because your dad figured it best to give authority to the one most likely to remember the answer when you ask about ratios.
Having watched my grandparents' decline:
~On no account let the parent move in with a child.
~ Get them into some kind of retirement community long before they're ready for it.
~Make them get their hearing tested and wear hearing aids if needed.
26: Anognosia s/b anosognosia?
35.last: yes, thanks.
The issue with trying to "make" parents do stuff is that you basically can't. Have you ever had to convince someone their hearing is going? My father tells me he gets his tested every year, that they find normal outcomes, and while that is likely true, it is also obvious that he doesn't hear particularly well. AJ's uncle asked his grandmother out to lunch, and then brought her to an audiologist because "he had an appointment for himself." She had her hearing tested, purchased hearing aids, and it was a big improvement, but multiple nice, normal conversations about her obvious hearing loss didn't do the trick! And what if she had just refused to get out of the car? Lots of people find hearing aids tiring and unpleasant to wear, too. You can refuse to speak with your parent unless they wear them, I suppose, but that may just mean you don't talk much. How do you move an adult out of their home if they don't want to go? You can follow the legal process to declare them incompetent, which isn't fast or cheap, as I understand it. You can't use their assets to pay for it. You can't sell their house. It sounds so easy to say "move them to a community that will fit their needs," but if they don't agree, you're left with subterfuge, threats, or biding time until a crisis occurs where the situation becomes untenable.
I mean, maybe other folks have loved ones who will be reasonable and age gracefully and handle their own affairs. My paternal grandfather did so. But that hasn't generally been my experience.
I'm not sure what level of abruptness we're talking about but my mom had a stroke (well, a brain bleed) that caused her to age about 20-25 years in the month she was in the hospital and rehab. My dad had passed about five years before, so we didn't have that factor to manage, and my sister and I are both hundreds of miles away.
The psychological profile is complicated -- she is mostly still herself, except that she has some lingering attentional impairments that make it very clear that she'll never drive again and clear to her most of the time that she can't manage her own affairs. So I have POA and her checkbook, with no resistance. In fact the challenge we've had is the opposite of fighting for control: she is inclined to a sort of deliberate helplessness that we have to try to talk her out of, to remind her of things that she can still do by/for herself.
She has a new partner since my dad's death and he's been taking care of her for the most part since the stroke. Only issue there is that he's in his late 80's and not in the prime of health himself, and also is overprotective and a little bossy, which exacerbates her tendency to helplessness.
We had her living in a senior-living community with assisted-living and skilled-nursing care available on site for a while, but she was just settling in and starting to feel at home there when COVID hit and she found the isolation to be intolerable, so she's been back at her partner's place since then. If not for the pandemic I think that could've been a good solution, though tbh I'm not sure how easy a time she would've had making friends and finding community -- that was always more my dad's strength than hers.
We've talked about moving her to be close to either my sister or me, but she prefers to live with her partner for as long as that's possible, which seems reasonable enough. Anyway, the job of parenting an aging parent is definitely no fun, especially from far away.
No sudden decline here, so I don't have any advice, but since we're on the topic I'll vent. My mom is losing her ability to form new memories, as well as her existing memory getting fuzzier. She was diagnosed with lung cancer at the start of Covid times, but responded well to chemo and seems to be in remission now, but she got much weaker over the course of treatment; while she's bounced back some since then, she's 88, and it's been a real slog. She was on keytruda, and that seems to have triggered an immune system freakout that gave her a horrible full-body rash; she's now on methotrexate for that (yay, chemo to take care of the side effects of the chemo).
She can handle her most basic needs, but really needs someone in the house every other day or so. One of my sisters lived in the same town as her, I'm an hour and a half away, and the other two sisters are more distant. So for the last couple of years, local-sister A has been doing most of the support, with me and the other sisters rotating in for anywhere from a week to two months at a time.
That was working okay, if not indefinitely sustainable, but sister A & BIL have now bought a second house in southern California, with the intent of moving permanently down, in the same town as sister J, also near niece & grandniece. The hope was to get mom into an assisted living facility down there, but mom doesn't love the idea, and none of us are quite ready to put our foot down and say she has to do it.
So we're all just kind of going along scheduling things a couple of months at a time. Four of us kids, two retired and the others able to do our thing remotely, so it's been possible to make it work... but something's gonna have to give.
My grandmother recently died and my father, who lived with her steadily for the past 15 years and intermittently before then, is getting ready to disburse most of the contents, sell the house, and then set off on a through-hike of the AT. Afterwards, he's probably going to buy a condo in my neck of the woods because he really wants to live in a blue state.
I'm flying down there in a few days to help facilitate all of this, and I wonder if anyone has any helpful tips or lessons learned from doing something similar. I've helped a friend clear her childhood home following the death of a parent, and I had to go through my mother's apartment and deal with her stuff when she was institutionalized years ago, but I'm feeling overwhelmed. My grandparents kept everything (e.g., printed napkins from my parents' wedding, retained even after the divorce), and I'm not sure how to balance keeping and purging. (Kept stuff will go in a storage unit while my dad is hiking.) Should I get plastic tubs to protect stuff like photo albums for storage, or are cardboard boxes ok? Should I bring my grandmother's three vintage furs to a consignment shop or sell them online?
Gah. Maybe I don't need advice so much as just a chance to vent...
Plastic tubs, J, cardboard will wick up moisture
Also sympathies to you and everyone else going through this. My parents are in their early 80s and in very good health but being so far away almost all of the inevitable is going to fall on my two brothers
I've been reading a lot about through hiking if that helps. I have repressed everything about closing out the family home except that sitting alone in your old house watching Hinterland isn't great for mental health.
Your dad should probably move quickly since March is the common time to start the AT if going northbound.
You can finish if you start in April or even May, but that's usually done by younger people.
39: I haven't gone through it myself (so am offering advice I might be unable to do) but there's a good discussion in the first chapters of _Secondhand_ (good book, worth reading, I was pitching it as book group suggestion), which leans towards, "get rid of most stuff, and only keep selected items."
Thanks, all. I'm planning to scan or take pictures of a lot of stuff that can otherwise be tossed.
My dad is planning to start the hike on St. Patrick's Day, a week after his 70th birthday. He had been section-hiking prior to the start of the pandemic, but this is his first effort to do the whole thing. I'm looking forward to following along with a foam-board map and pins, as he's got one of those satellite gps wristwatch thingies that will ping us with his location each day (and allow for SOS calls in places with no cell service).
I've got a bigger GPS thing, hooked on the shoulder straps usually.
J, Robot, I'm sorry. That's such a big, tough job. My suggestions: Come up with a few things you really, really want, that will make you happy to look at. Find those to save. Some things will be easy to sort and toss or donate. Identify those. For me, it's usually kitchen/dining things and sheets/towels/tablecloths. Just donate it all unless it's rags or somehow unacceptable. Do a bit of those in the mornings to build up momentum. Find charities that will pick up furniture (assuming it's in usable state). Papers require moderate concentration and will probably take up most of your time, so do those next, but just a quick sort of keep/toss. Keep all the photos and sort them later, along with important papers. Do the hard stuff at the end of the day so you get a break after. For me, the worst was my grandmother's dresser, which smelled like her perfume.
If you need to rent a dumpster, always rent the bigger dumpster. Always.
There's too much guilt to go into many details, but my mom is back in her apartment with a live-in aide. She often sounds depressed, but she does seem to be making progress in increasing her mobility.
Since this is the camping thread, I'll just note that my new, used Double Rainbow has arrived.
Mine is old enough that it was still made in America.
I'm thinking this is the appropriate place for this but it's my birthday today, two years out from a certain milestone and my dad just wished me a happy penultimate birthday. Um....
Is he threatening to kill you within two years?
Happy birthday! Sorry about your impending doom!
Happy birthday, Barry!
Also, it's okay not to remind him to murder you later.
We told you not to go to Delphi, but did you listen?
Thanks all. My birthday is on the 7th and it was still the 6th when he wished me a happy birthday so I think that's what he meant which may be worse since he doesn't know what penultimate means
Of course, even fewer people use the word in birthday greetings.
My friend's husband's 2nd language is English, and his malaprops/mistakes are amazing. (He doesn't speak much English on the job or at home.) So for example, recently he used "tomorrow" to mean "later". This came up because he was selling a car to my other friend. On Wednesday, she confirmed that the transaction was on Friday. He said "Ok. See you tomorrow," and after a little more back-and-forth, my friend and I were just getting more and more confused, and finally just consulted the English speaking spouse. She looked at the screen shots of the text messages and decoded it for us.
Tomorrow famously means later in Spanish, right? Probably many languages though.
For example, this t-shirt.
I think that's a charitable interpretation of a historically racist joke that Hispanic people are not industrious.
"Manana" means "later" about as much as "I'll do it tomorrow" means "get off my case, you nudge."
I almost forgot, Happy Hunky Christmas for those who celebrate.
I really thought that's it was just literally one of the meanings in Spanish. Isn't it definition 7 at the Royal Academy of Spain's dictionary? https://dle.rae.es/mañana?m=form
At any rate "Hasta mañana" certainly can mean "see you later" and not literally "see you tomorrow" right?
Maybe so. Still, I think in the context of planning a meeting, you wouldn't say "see you mañana" when you were actually getting together in two days. Or maybe so! idk.
My Spanish is very rusty, so I'm genuinely unsure. Googling hasn't really helped me much, but here's someone who seems to be a fluent but non-native speaker (Jamaican guy living in Spain?) explicitly saying "You can say "hasta mañana" even if you're not going to see them literally the next day."
In a wide variety of wholly unrelated languages, "tomorrow" is an adaptation of a word or phrase meaning roughly "in the morning".
Speaking of interesting translation issues, it took a moment yesterday when talking to my Argentinian colleague to work out that when she said "wizard" in a particular sentence (which she didn't think was the right translation) the word she was looking for was Magi. (Which is a strange one because it's a word that you basically only use in English in exactly one context.)
penultimate birthday: vaguely threatening
ultimate birthday: an awesome birthday celebration
Many happy returns of yesterday, Barry!
Hasta mañana is specifically see you tomorrow. If it's an indeterminate point in the future it would be hasta luego.
77: Are you a native Spanish speaker or are you guessing here? I think both just mean "goodbye."
At any rate, "hasta luego" just means "goodbye" and does not require any likelihood of seeing the person soon. "Hasta mañana" seems to be used with people you see habitually like coworkers but not necessarily someone you're sure to see literally tomorrow. It can just be someone you usually see often.
Maybe "see you soon" is a good English equivalent?
"Hasta luego" most closely translates to "see you later". "Adios" is the closest translate of "goodbye".
I realize that's the most literal translation. But I still claim "hasta luego" can always be said at parting.
"Adios" is a higher register (for more formal or serious situations) than "goodbye" is in English, I thought.
I like to keep people on their toes by saying "hasta manzana."
Hasta la vista, baby.
OT: Did one of you (Doug, I think) go to Allegheny College? If yes, please email me. I have a question.
83: sure. Can't "see you later" always be used? I don't think you'd use either for a situation where you are getting off the phone with a call center help person.
It's a nice, optimistic way to talk before you go into risky surgery on your eyes.
88: I absolutely think you can say "hasta luego" in that setting, for example: "I hear hasta luego from strangers in elevators (customary to say something before taking leave here in Chile)." Of course my Spanish is rusty and was never that good and I could easily be missing something.
Back to the original story, the whole point of your story was that there's languages where "see you tomorrow" means "see you soon." I think Spanish is such a language, but even if Spanish is not such a language, whatever language your friend speaks almost certainly has that property. It's the sort of thing that seems like it would be reasonably common. Even in English "tomorrow" can mean the indefinite near future, such as "the children of tomorrow" or "tomorrow's leaders" (mañana also has that usage, though it's different from the "in the next day or so" meaning that we're discussing here, my point is just that it's pretty typical that the word for the literal next day also has other meanings referring to the future).
I think the literal translation of ahora is "now" but when I was in Puerto Rico I was told to treat it as "soon" and "soon" had many subtleties. So if the bus driver said the bus to Mayaguez was going to leave "ahora" you might ask "ahora? o ahorita? o ahorititita?" to decide if you had time to go get a sandwich and still catch the bus. I think "hasta pendeho" was one way we said "see ya later" because, you know, we were young and all that. I don't speak much Spanish.
At the Mexico City airport, they post your flight time, and then they post a gate when it's roughly ready to go. The board only says the flight is "late" once it's around 15 minutes after the scheduled departure. Then once they have a new estimated time they put the new time up and it switches back to saying "on time." Some of these things are just cultural and linguistic differences in dealing with and communicating about time, and not racism. The racist thing is jumping from "on time means roughly on time" to "you're lazy and can't be trusted." You just need to know what it means when the board says the flights on-time and then it's fine.
92: Is the ordering there that "ahorita" is sooner than "ahora"?
I like to keep people on their toes by saying "hasta manzana."
I remember, in HS Spanish we learned the phrase, "vaya con Dios" (go with god) and my friend quickly shifted that to "vaya con Elvis"
72: magus, singular. Some of us use it quite a bit. John Fowles novels. Historians of 20th century occultism. Genestealer cultists.
87: I went to Sewanee for undergrad. Related mountains and final vowel sound, but not actually the same institution.
96, 72: Since my grad program led to an MA in German and European Studies, we were sometimes referred to as magi.
There was a Spanish professor in the Gaeltacht who asked a local person if they had a word with the same meaning as mañana. "Sure," came the reply, "though without the same sense of urgency."
94: yes. right right right now / very very very soon is sooner than now/soon (even though I guess the "ita" means "little," literally.
English has "presently" to capture soon/now confusion.
97.1: Thanks. Sorry for my confusion.
100: No worries!
(If we still say Kobe at 100 comments, then Kobe+1)
Back to the original story, the whole point of your story was that there's languages where "see you tomorrow" means "see you soon." I think Spanish is such a language, but even if Spanish is not such a language, whatever language your friend speaks almost certainly has that property. It's the sort of thing that seems like it would be reasonably common. Even in English "tomorrow" can mean the indefinite near future, such as "the children of tomorrow" or "tomorrow's leaders" .
But I'm pretty sure that if it's miercoles and you're making plans with someone for viernes, and they say te veo mañana, you're going to be confused and say, "Jueves? o Viernes?"
Annie: It's only a day away!
Beckett: Yes, but it's also always a day away.
102: To the contrary, that's exactly the situation where it should be the least confusing. You already know your plans are for viernes, so it's abundantly clear in that circumstances that "hasta mañana" doesn't mean literally tomorrow!
Anyway, I'm confused about what your theory of the origin of this grammar error is. Do you think it has a different explanation than their being an idiom in his language that literally translates to "see you tomorrow" but which can mean "see you some time soon that's not today"?
Wait. If you're having the following conversation in English with another native English speaker, you would find this entirely straight forward:
[Wednesday]
Utpetgi: So we're meeting up on Friday?
Friend: Ok. What's the address?
Utpetgi: 100 3rd Street.
Friend: See you tomorrow!
You would interpret that as clearly "later" and not say, "Wait a minute. Were you thinking Thursday instead?"?
As for this friend, I suspect he makes comical malaprops in both languages, because he's full of weird sayings that crack me up. There was one when he may have been exposed to Covid, and someone asked how he was feeling, and he texted "Soy #1!" Or pronouncing "gangster" as "hamster" (which kinda makes sense, because of the h to g thing). So I cannot attempt to explain this particular "tomorrow" one, except to say maybe it's not very funny if you're not primed to find his word choices funny.
Why has hamster rap never been a thing?
105: What I'm saying is that if there's a language where "tomorrow" is genuinely ambiguous, sometimes it means literally the day after today and sometimes it means a time in the near future that is not today, then sometimes this could be confusing and require clarification. The least confusing situation where it is least likely to require clarification is when you already know the time it's referring to!
English (or at least the American English I'm familiar with) does not have this ambiguity, so yes it would be confusing to hear someone using it in the other way.
I guess there is no way anyone here could know a native spanish speaker, so we'll just have to wonder forever. Curses!
My sister used to be dating an Argentinian, but they broke up.
105: In this situation, I would be concerned that the person didn't know what day it was, and go over it again to make sure there was no confusion.
[On a Friday]
Wimpy: I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
House: Pay me tomorrow!
Wimpy: That's what I said!
110: Did he use "Buenos Aires" as a greeting?
I only met him once. I think he spoke only English the whole time.