Happy new year from the Hellish Hand-basket

It boils down to this: Do you want to be safe, or do you want to be free? I always thought this choice referred to civil rights and terrorism, but nope, it actually applies to aging maternal parental units. Who knew?

If Mom had asked me, I would have chosen safe for her. But she didn't ask me. When I asked her what she wanted, she chose freedom.

It's not a huge surprise. After the two moves over the summer (to the retirement home and six weeks later, back to the condo), she's pretty clear now that safe is nice, but free is better.

Free when you are 86 is not the same as free when you are in your 50s, 60s, or even 70s. Now that her doctor, DMV (and I) have taken away her car keys, her circle of life has narrowed to the condo complex.

She phones in her grocery orders to me. I fetch and carry. I forget things, but I don't complain to her. How can I complain when her brain has gone AWOL? What's my excuse? Just stress. I complain to my younger brother, Chuck.

Mom and Chuck are not talking. When Mom moved out of her condo, she left behind boxes of old photos, cards, letters, and memorabilia. Chuck took the stuff to his house to sort, thinking Mom had abandoned it all, and it was bound for the trash. Chuck sorted out the stuff and found many things he thought were too great to toss: Mom and Dad's wedding announcement, negatives from our childhood, postcards from around the world. Along comes Christmas and suddenly Mom wants some blank holiday cards she is certain were in one of those boxes. She demanded the boxes be returned. She complained to me when the boxes did not arrive immediately. I emailed Chuck: for the love of god, give her the damn boxes. Chuck brought her the boxes. Last time I saw her, she had sorted a bunch of old negatives and photos into the trash can.

“Mom, Chuck wanted all that stuff!” I said, trying not to sound too aghast and failing.

She frowned at me. “What?”

“Chuck spent hours sorting through all those photos,” I said. “He wanted to keep that stuff. He was going to give them to me to scan!”

“Oh.” Her expression was a mix of chagrin and belligerence. Kind of like a two-year-old caught writing on the wall with permanent marker.

I took the paper sack of stuff to the kitchen and wrote in big letters on the side: “Keep for Chuck!”

“Don't throw this away!” I admonished her.

“All right, all right.” She meant get off my back. We silently declared a truce. I hugged her and told her I loved her.

It's New Year's Eve. She had a lunch date today with a bunch of condo ladies. That's good. It's late now. I was busy doing end-of-year stuff and forgot to call her. I'll call her tomorrow. I hope when she's sitting out on her patio tonight, smoking a cigarette in 30° frosty air, that she catches a glimpse of the northern lights and feels free.

Season's greetings from the Hellish Handbasket

'Tis the season for giving. A few minutes ago, the phone rang: Planned Parenthood, calling for donations. Dream on, dude. While I was listening to the telemarketer drone on about the litany of crimes committed by the opposition, there was a persistent knock at my door: another solicitor, seeking donations for some unknown cause.

I waved the phone at her. “I'll come back later,” she promised. I might turn on the porch light: It's pitch dark out there. Then again, I might not.

Bah humbug. I'm not in a giving mood. This week, the wind has been uprooting trees. Rivers are flooding roads and yards and basements in outlying areas. Entire apartment complexes are sliding down muddy hillsides. This morning I wasn't sure it was morning; I thought my clock was wrong, it was so dark outside. I don't have any extra to give—not money, not time, not love. Grrrrrr.

Last week, the family from out of town came and went in the blink of an eye. The long-awaited family discussion to talk about what's next for Mom barely happened. It wouldn't have happened at all, I suspect, if I hadn't started the ball rolling by looking at my mother as we all sat around her condo living room and saying, “So, Mom.... what do you want for the next phase of your life?”

She seemed a bit unsettled to be on the spot, which is unlike her, but possibly the new normal now that her brain seems to be disintegrating. The extroverted woman I used to know is gone, leaving this strange pod person in her place.

“Well, uh, I, uh... I want to just stay here for now,” she said apologetically. She probably knew that wasn't what her children wanted to hear. A few days before, she had mentioned her interest in touring adult care homes in the area. I was like, Yes!

I tried to remain calm.

“I've got my friend Summer to come and clean once in a while,” Mom said. My sister and I looked at each other. The guest bathroom was a mess.

“What about food?” my sister asked.

“The condo ladies go out to lunch every Thursday,” my mother said.

Great. At least she eats on Thursdays.

After driving everyone out to Gresham in pouring rain in my mother's old Camry, eating a rich dinner (including dessert), and driving back to Mom's condo, none of us was in a mood to dig into a compassionate, caring conversation about how Mom wants to live out her remaining days (weeks, months, years... her aunt lived to be 100, for chrissake). My brother wasn't feeling well. He went home.

Woozy from sugar, I drove my jet-lagged sister and her sometime husband to their downtown hotel. The rain had stopped. The lights of the city sparkled. Mom came along, riding shotgun like a sprightly wizened elf.

Joke's on you, cave painters

Does it seem these days like we are all going to hell in a hand-basket? Maybe we've been in the hand-basket for a long time (like a few thousand years, maybe?). But like the proverbial frog sitting in the slowly heating pot of water, we are now too logy to do anything about escaping our imminent demise. Oh, we drop a few bombs here and there, attend a summit or two... but it's all feeling a little like, wheeeee, what's the use! Hell, here we come.

In honor of the end of 2015 (and possibly the end of Western civilization as we know it), I hereby present a compilation of some drawings I don't think I've used before. For your viewing pleasure. Enjoy. This is also in celebration of the fact that I can now drag and drop my jpegs directly into my post. (Thanks, Google. You've shown yourself a true friend, here at the end of the world. You have my gratitude. For as long as my brain holds out, which probably won't be all that much longer.)

When a year stumbles to a close, I sometimes review where I've been and think about where I'm going in the new year. I don't make resolutions anymore because it seems stupid to set intentions I have no intention of keeping. Lose weight, get more exercise, drink more water, read more literary fiction and less science fiction, sleep less, be nicer... yada, yada, yada. If the myriad dried-up pink post-it notes posted on my computer monitor and mirrors haven't convinced me that these are good ideas, then why would I imagine writing up a list of resolutions for 2016 would work any better? Deluded magical thinking. Again.

So, no, no resolutions for me. I can't even resolve to survive, considering that at any moment I could be smashed flat in an earthquake or gunned down by some stupid terrorist. Life has always been precarious, but I guess I had some hope that good could prevail, if not for me than for others. But now I'm thinking good is not a safe haven. Positive thinking is a waste of energy. Fighting for anything is futile. We're all going to hell in a hand-basket.

I used to worry my tiny head about whether I should settle for simply existing, or whether I should strive to thrive. As if I knew what thriving would actually look like. A newer car? Would that be thriving? More money in the bank? How much is more? How much is enough? I am beginning to think there is never enough of anything: love, money, safety, life. It's all impermanent. Uncertainty is the new god. Or maybe it's the old god who has been laughing at us the whole time as we tried to keep civilization together. Har har, joke's on you, cave painters!

I'm just cranky because my mother is declining into dementia and I can't earn enough money to survive. La la la, what else is new? Some people don't have mothers. Some people don't have jobs, or homes, or countries, even. Who am I to complain? But I can't help myself. I'm an American. I have a god-given right to bitch, bestowed upon my by a quirk of geographical fate. Of all the places you could be born, the gods are sending you to.... Oregon! Lucky baby! Yeah, your family is nuts, and you are going to grow up female in the 60s and 70s, but hey, it could be worse. You could have been born in Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Idaho. Stop yer belly-achin!

The holiday season is always fraught with ironies, and never more so than this year, I think. It cracks me up that Americans are rushing around trying to get the perfect gifts for their loved ones when the world is crashing. Is this a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? (I've always loved that image.) I don't think the human race is any more special than, say, polar bears or dolphins or honeybees. I just don't think we humans are constitutionally capable of playing well with others. Greed and self-centered fear creep into every culture, eventually. Is that true? Are there some indigenous cultures in little pockets of rain forest and desert that will survive the religious fanatics swarming the rest of the planet?

You know what else pisses me off? Chronic malcontents large and small are emerging from the woodwork, proclaiming the end of the world and running around like banshees trying to find their little slice of safety. More guns! Arm everyone! Build walls, keep out the invaders! Kill the insects, no, eat the insects, wait, what? So on top of my own little suitcase of troubles, now I have all this competition from other malcontents! What gives?

If I were Little Mary Sunshine, which I'm not, I would say, oh, pish posh, tempest in a teapot, drink some water, and recycle your plastics. Instead I will say, merry ho ho and happy Christmas from the Hellish Hand-basket. Now put down your weapons, back away slowly, and maybe you can have some pie.

The chronic malcontent is stuck in one long slow pratfall

My life is punctuated by drafts of proposals and dissertations that magically appear in my email inbox, demanding my editing skills. Compensation is predetermined (too low). Deadlines are often severe. I immerse myself in each paper like a scuba diver slipping gingerly into mucky water. Eeww. I add Oxford commas and snarky comments exhorting the authors to embrace Word styles instead of manually typing their tables of contents.

In between editing jobs, I fret about my mother and try to keep my nose above the surface of my anticipatory grief. (Yes, there's apparently a name for it.) It's almost two and a half years since I lost my teaching job and two years since I finished my dissertation and earned my degree. In between editing jobs and fretting over my mother, I have time to reflect on the current state of my life. Sadly, I seem to have lost my funnybone, and the loss has manifested in fewer blog posts.

Back when all I had to fret about was resenting my job at the career college and finishing my massive wretched tome of a dissertation, I didn't know how lucky I was. Pre-vertigo, pre-dementia, pre-summer of carlessness... ah, the good old days. My attention was riveted on the PhD and the job. As I steamed and stewed in my self-righteous messy little bog, I could always find something funny in the experience. Students! Ha, ha! Dissertation chair! Har har! The jokes were low-hanging, shiny baubles just above my head. So I picked them. Who wouldn't? I didn't name names; nobody was hurt in the making of this blog.

I mean, admit it, it's hilarious when someone does a pratfall into a hole in the sidewalk (especially when they are texting). Come on, don't tell me you haven't laughed at someone else's misfortune, as long as they were only humiliated and not hurt. That's how I felt most of the time, back in 2013, like I was watching myself taking one long slowmo pratfall. So funny, look at her clutch and cling to her expectations and resentments—what could be more comical? ROFLMAO.

So what's the problem? Thanks for asking. Lately, the jokes seem to be harder to find. I'm sure they are still there, somewhere, peeking out from under my scowl. I feel so weary. Who knew a 90-pound, 86-year-old scrawny twig of an old lady could be so heavy?

Maybe I'm caring too much. Everything seems overly complicated. I fear I'm descending into dementia along with my mother; we'll probably end up roommates in the same adult foster care home, yelling at each other and drooling on our bibs.

Hey! That joke snuck up on me! It's not a great one, I know, but it has potential. It's a chuckle, not a guffaw. But I bet there's more where that came from. There's not much funnier than demented old people who don't know how funny they are. I imagine a sitcom about a mother stuck in adult daycare and her recalcitrant, unwilling, resentful caregiver of a daughter. Well, maybe that's a little close to home. Still, there's a joke in here somewhere. I could go in after it, but maybe it's better to just let it gently percolate to the surface, like a stinky gas bubble.

The chronic malcontent comes up for air

Humble apologies to all four of my blog readers, who all reached out to me to find out if I was getting ready to jump off a bridge. We have a lot of bridges here in Portland, so their concern was not entirely unfounded. If I had to choose the bridge of my demise, I think I would choose the St. Johns Bridge. It's tall enough that odds are I'd die upon impact, so no chance of slow drowning. Plus it's in an area some distance from the main city waterfront, so I wouldn't upset tourists, and bicyclists and joggers wouldn't feel compelled to stop and watch me flail. (I'm not much of a swimmer.) And what's more, I hate to be cold and wet (I know, why am I in Portland?) So a quick exit would be the best for me. But I'm not planning on doing that, jumping, exiting, or swimming. You all can simmer down: I'm hunkered in the Love Shack, getting on with life.

The bane of my trouble, the source of all that is, of course, is the maternal parental unit, who has gone somewhat mentally offline in recent months. I fear her double move over the summer gummed up her mental gears. This once vibrant and energetic dynamo (her nickname used to be “Mighty Mouse”) is now a shadow, physically and mentally. She's a fragile twig, tottering on tiny Merrell-encased feet. Indoors or out, she bundles in previously worn fleece jackets, usually bright red, which are pockmarked down the front with cigarette ash burns. (It's a wonder she hasn't spontaneously combusted.) Things fall out of her pockets. She carries her cellphone in a little case attached to a wrist bracelet, like an oversized life alert. It's painful to see her like this. Sometime over the summer, she lost her mojo.

She is well aware that her mind is failing. She is anxious about it, but growing resigned to the muddle. Her world is shrinking. Yesterday some estate sale people came to wrap up and remove decades of collected china, glassware, dishes, and knickknacks. Some of the stuff was probably 100 years old. What do you do with all that stuff, if your adult children don't want it? Dump it on the solitary grandchild, who has her own life and family in Sacramento? Mom is detaching from life, and that means, for her, emptying the china cabinet is a victory. One more thing to check off the checklist.

My victory came when (after a long overdue flurry of tears), I realized that this transition, rather than being a tragedy, could be an opportunity to welcome in a hurricane of love.

Mom had four kids. In essence, she created a small troop of willing and stalwart (but somewhat unskilled) laborers, and we lift and tote and schlep and reassure as best we can—four hearts and minds to support her as she eases out of this world. What else are children for? She and my father apparently did a good job parenting us, if we are all willing to hang around and help her. That is, if caring for the aging parent is the job of the children.

That question is the bug up my dark place, as you may have guessed. As Bravadita pointed out, the logical next step would be for me to offer to give up my apartment and move in with my mother. (Not going to happen.) If I had a big home with a sunny spare room, I'd invite her to live with me, no hesitation, well, not much hesitation. But I live in the Love Shack, which is barely big enough for me, the cat, and a thousand or so books. Steps. Uneven rugs. Cat toys. Dust. Detritus. Squalor. Nobody should be living here in these conditions, not even me. There's definitely no way Mom could move in here.

Mom's condo is a dark cave, darker even than the Love Shack. Only one window faces east, and she keeps that barricaded against the light. The living room window faces west, receiving golden sunsets in the summer, but not much light in the winter, thanks to the angle of the sun and the corner of her garage. Being the hothouse flower that I am, I would not survive long in that cave. However, long before I withered from lack of light, she (being an energy vampire, aka an extravert) would have sucked the life from my bones and tossed my desiccated carcass into the spare bedroom. No, moving in with my mother would not be a good idea for either one of us.

The alternatives are two: move someone else into the condo to live with her, or move her out to someplace else.

I can feel the will to live draining away as I write this. Hokay. Maybe this is enough for today. Now I need to find some ironic yet poignant silly drawing to go with this half-baked post. The world is crumbling. I should stop whining. Eventually I will, but not today.

Untethered

For the past three years or so, I turned to this blog for comfort and solace, the way desperate people siphon the will to go on from therapists, counselors, and friends. I could almost always find the rain cloud of black humor floating above my head, even in my darkest moments. Rarely was I at a loss for words. However, over the past year, as my focus has dissipated, my reading audience has dwindled to a handful of stalwart fans and some spammers who slap me with encouraging comments (keep up the good work!) as they squat and deposit stinky links leading back to their nefarious products. For the first time ever, I removed some comments! I don't know what that signifies. I don't really care. I'm depressed.

I'm in free fall. Slo mo free fall. I'm detached from everything except my distaste for life. I know things are bad when I take myself so seriously I can't find the joke. I've lost my mojo and now it's slow mo free fall to an as yet unknown destination that probably resembles something flat like a sidewalk. Ugh. Too messy. No, I'm not suicidal, but I definitely want out of this messy bog.

I feel like I'm on yet another annoying precarious edge overlooking yet another stupid abyss. I'm cranky as hell. Why? Thanks for asking. My friend Bravadita is fighting breast cancer, battling insurance companies and doctors with her bare hands. My brilliant sister is on the verge of financial ruin, even as she treads the rues of Paris. My mother is disintegrating, shedding her sense of self, a few memory cells at a time. I can't fix any of it.

I'm trapped in self-centered fear. My inability to earn enough to cover my expenses makes the last 20 years of recovery seem like a stupid pointless mirage. I suspect I should have turned left (into finance and accounting or maybe computer programming) instead of right (into art and teaching). That crossroads came and went years ago, no use in whining now, I know. Alas, alackaday.

To top it all off, it's fall, which always brings me closer to the edge of despair. The slant of the watery sun prods me toward hibernation, as if that were actually a solution. Is it possible to go to ground until spring? Perhaps, through the magic of the Internet and UPS. Everything is harder in winter: the frosty ground, the wind-whipped air, my blue-tinged cuticles, my sluggish blood. Okay, now I'm starting to really wallow. Look at me, I'm rolling in it from side to side. Ahhhhhh.

I admit, I miss this, this self-centered whining. Where else can one say the ridiculously egotistical, embarrassingly selfish things that need to said? I guess it's good my audience has dwindled to mostly auto-bot spammers. I would feel just slightly less inclined to whine if I thought people were reading this drivel. I feel fortunate my mother cannot find her way to this blog.

I was challenged this week to honor my creativity. Somewhere in me an artist still lurks, but she's been hibernating, mostly, for about 15 years. She surfaces now and then, in this blog, for example. She sleepwalked through graduate school. She dreams of days when creating was a compulsion, as essential as food. These days, creativity is a dry-bones memory of a once-verdant shelter. Parched. Hemmed in by clutter and white-knuckled fear.

I'm waiting. Waiting to find out if Bravadita will survive. Waiting to see what solution my sister will conjure out of the rich European ether. Waiting for my mother to decide how she wants to live until she dies. Waiting for spring. Waiting for the miracle to inspire me to stop the self-seeking long enough to feel something besides despair and resignation. Hope is a real thing, I know this in my brain. But my heart is disconnected. Untethered. Falling.

The chronic malcontent to the rescue

I root for underdogs. I cheer for the downtrodden. I'm a bleeding heart sentimentalist. I cringe at jokes that make fun of others: I hated Candid Camera. Suffering makes me tear my hair, especially the suffering of animals. Human suffering is a bummer too, but I figure humans can get therapy and eventually resolve their issues. Not so animals, so they get most of my compassion.

I've never been called to be a hero (until last week), so I haven't been too sure that I would man up for a challenge if one came my way. I can be a bit squeamish at the sight of blood. So when I saw a baby squirrel lying motionless on the patio at the base of my back steps last Thursday, my first thought was, Oohh, ick. Is it dead? I stared gingerly at the little body, noting its eyes were black slits. Bugs were crawling around its nose. I saw it draw a breath and heave a sigh. Alive!

I ran inside. I found an decrepit small round wicker basket and lined it with an old kitchen towel. Then I put on gloves and ran back outside. Must save squirrel! I carefully levered the squirrel into the basket. Now what? I saw my neighbor outside in his front yard.

“Hey Roger, do you know what to do with a baby squirrel?”

“No, sorry.” He didn't even want to look at it, although I held out the basket like an offering: Take this squirrel, please!

I took it inside the house, set the basket  on the stove, and texted my sister-in-law Dierdre, the one-woman animal rescue super hero. No response. I dialed the Audubon Society.

“I found a baby squirrel,” I said to the woman on the phone. “What should I do?”

“Is it red or gray?”

“Gray.”

“Nonnative, invasive species. Put it back outside and let nature take its course.”

I hung up, resigned. Trash squirrels apparently don't deserve to be rescued. Cute little gray squirrels grow up to be nasty invaders, crowding out the cute little red squirrels. Oh well. Kill one species to save another...

Suddenly the phone rang.

“Is this Carol? I'm Laurie. I'm calling about the baby squirrel?” I sent a prayer of thanks up: Dierdre had apparently called her squirrel rescue compadres.

“Audubon told me to leave it outside and let nature kill it.”

“No, no, they're wrong! I'll come and get it. Give me your address.” I told her how to find me and she told me what to do for the squirrel while I waited. Most important: keep it warm. “Put it inside your shirt,” she suggested.

“Not a chance,” I replied.

“Well, do you have a heating pad?”

“I'll figure out something,” I said. We hung up.

I turned the oven on warm and put the basket o' squirrel on the back burner. I went back to my editing project, checking on the squirrel every few minutes. Things soon got toasty on the stove. The squirrel started moving around and squeaking. Was that a good sign, or was it starting to cook?

“Chill out, Frank,” I told it. My cat sat nearby, looking perplexed.

Laurie had said wrap the squirrel up tight (“like it is the nest,” as if I've ever seen the inside of a squirrel nest), so I wrapped it not too tightly in a swatch of old fleece bathrobe and put it back in the basket. The next time I checked, it had crawled out of the fleece and the basket and was scrabbling blindly around on the edge of the hot stove. Another inch and it would have landed nose-first on the kitchen floor. I grabbed it and put it back in the basket. “WTF, Frank!?” Was it too hot, or was it looking for more heat? Who knows what is in the mind of an abandoned baby squirrel?

Two hours later, Laurie finally arrived. She'd come from the west side of Portland in rush hour traffic. Now, that is the mark of a super hero. I led her to the kitchen and showed her the basket on the stove. She rubbed the thing's stomach as if she'd done this many times before.

“Oh, it's a little girl,” she said happily. Okay, I thought, not Frank, Francis.

She wrapped the squirrel up in a fuzzy scarf. Then she looked at it more closely.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Is it...?”

She started breathing into its face while I watched in appalled fascination.

“Come on, little girl, come on,” she murmured, doing squirrel CPR. I escorted her to the door and off she went into the night, carrying what might have been a recently deceased baby squirrel.

Or not. As long as I don't know for sure if the squirrel died, the squirrel exists in that quantum physics limbo, neither dead nor alive, but a strange combination of both. I still don't know the outcome. The squirrel probably died. But maybe not. It might have lived. For me, it's both alive and dead. A feeling I experience myself at times.

It's been a week, and I still think about that squirrel.

The cable company has eaten my brain

I do a lot of thinking while I'm trotting the trails and roads in Mt. Tabor Park. I don't figure anything out, but I try. I start out slowly, treading cautiously on unreliable ankles, while my brain churns through the current list of resentments: Mom, cable company, fall, Mom, steep hill (ugh), cable company, end of summer (grrrr), no car, Mom... round and round as I shuffle along the trail. Pretty soon my knees limber up, my lungs stop laboring, and my brain sinks into a welcome sludge of endorphins. Ahhhh.

Occasionally I notice that I'm being passed up by just about everyone in the park. Long-legged tanned age-indeterminate men, young short-legged women in spandex pants, yappy dogs, long-haired skateboarders, bicyclists, they all go speeding by me as I plod along at the edge of the road. The only people I overtake are old ladies, so I guess I'm still doing okay.

You may recall that the maternal parental unit dragged up on apartment living, opting to move back to her cave-like condo, where she can step five paces to her private smoking area, where her garden is just over the fence, and her friends are a yell away. I've got to credit the old bat: She went all in on the move to the retirement community. There wasn't a single gray pantie left in the condo when she moved out. Everything but the kitchen sink got moved; I know, because I helped move it. Then, when she made up her mind that she wanted to move back, she didn't waste any time. She called the movers on Monday and by Friday the fancy retirement apartment was empty. Just a couple nails in the wall showed that anyone had come and gone.

I haven't been over to the condo yet to see the disarray. I've been wrestling with the cable company to get my mother's landline activated (by phone, of course—I haven't actually gone over to their retail outlet to challenge them to an arm wrestling match, although that could be my next ploy). The cable TV and internet modem were activated successfully, but I don't know what it is about my mother's phone number. For some reason, the phone gods don't want to release it from limbo.

You know how you run into a brick wall sometimes, metaphorically speaking... you bash into it and get rocked back on your metaphorical heels. You say, whoa, what was that? Then you run at the wall again, because you don't really know how thick or how high the wall is. You don't know what it is made of, either: are they real bricks or those phony papier mache bricks that they use on movie sets? Bam, you try again. Hmmm. Could be they are real bricks, you think to yourself. Well, but if I just keep bashing into the wall, sooner or later, it will crumble, right? It will give way before my dedicated onslaught. My passionate energetic relentless assault will reduce it to rubble, sooner or later... right?

Well, maybe not. This is what is known as escalation of commitment. In the real world, this kind of brainless doubling-down gets countries embroiled in wars. In business, this kind of stubborn resistance to reason results in products like New Coke (which just happened to turn out well, lucky break). In my own tiny world, if I count up how many hours I've spent on the phone with the cable company yelling “technical support!” into my handset and listening to their insipid hold music, it would add up to a week's worth of time spent not earning. I'm doubling-down on that damn phone number. After all the time I spent getting it ported over from the phone company, there is no way I'm going to give it up and settle for a new number. It's a matter of principle now. And brick walls. And sore heads (mine, of course; the cable company couldn't care less, I'm sure.)

I called Mom on her cell phone to give her the update on her landline situation. She sounded as weary as I felt. Tomorrow she will come over to drop off the last of the empty boxes she borrowed from me, and I think she will hand me a little stack of cash. It's guilt money. (She can't call it gas money anymore, because I no longer have a gas tank to fill. But she'd better not call it wages.)

She knows she put her kids through a wringer these past few weeks. Moving her was no small feat, emotionally or physically. Even though she hired movers to move her back, she knows we are all exhausted.

“We just want you to be happy,” I said for the umpteenth time. Hey, fake it till you make it.

“Where would I be without you kids?” she said, and I could tell from her voice, she wasn't joking.

“You don't have to pay for love,” I said, thinking, why, oh why, doesn't she give me enough money to make a difference! Argh.

She's safe. She's home. I don't think we dodged a bullet; I think we all pretty much took a shot to the gut. But we survived. Tonight I feel pleasantly beat up after my slog in the park. Just for today, I'm present, or as present as I'm going to get. Tomorrow I'll do a little dance for the phone gods and hope for a miracle.

Rewind

I've been away from the blog for a while, immersed in life and not feeling energetic enough to share. The vertigo is destroying my frontal lobe, grinding off layers of brain matter with every wave. Well, I know that isn't really what is happening; I know vertigo is an inner ear problem, not a brain problem, but that is how it feels: like heavy ocean waves are beating the inside of my brain. I've found the symptoms get worse with stress. Ha. Does anything get better with stress. I ask you. Really. I'm asking. If you know, please tell me.

What am I so stressed out about? Thanks for asking. The usual crap: weather, earning, creativity, cancer (Bravadita's), transportation (lack thereof), and my mother.

Actually, news flash, the weather has been pretty excellent: mild late summer days punctuated by a little bit of much-needed rain. Really not much to complain about. It's that rich moment just before the leaves go golden. I guess it's really the turning of the earth and the angle of the sun that puts the melancholy in me. Sometimes I wish I could sleep until April. I've heard naps can be good for you. Maybe not that long, although I'd be willing to try it.

As far as earning goes, I am still editing other people's massive dissertation train wrecks for money. I don't like it, but I can say with a bit of pride that I'm getting better at it. I'm sure that is good for the clients. For me, maybe not so much: I don't think just because I'm good at something, that means I ought to do it. I got caught on that hook for years... sewing, typing, driving the short bus. Ack! My good friend said to me in 1989, “It's never too soon to stop doing what you hate and start doing what you love.” Those oddly convoluted words granted me permission to stop sewing for a living, an activity I detested. Maybe I can find another set of equally interesting words to set me free from editing. Hey, it could happen. All I have to do is finish my book, market it, and watch the cash roll in. Said the crazy insane woman.

I'm doing a fair amount of walking these days, compared to before my car went to Ford Focus heaven. I was sort of hoping to have achieved buns of steel by now. I'm sad to report that is not yet the case. I'm still working on it. Now I've almost convinced myself that I don't need a car, that in fact, I'm a better planetary citizen without a car. That doesn't stop me from eyeballing the shiny not-so-gently loved cars parked in the used car lots I walk by on my way to my weekly meeting. I'm just looking. Mostly at the little yellow striped mini. It's gone now. Oh well. Another missed opportunity.

My younger brother gave me a bicycle he wasn't using, in exchange for one I gave him that was too big for me. The exchange was leisurely, taking place over the span of ten years or so. In the interim, he seems to have lost the helmet I gave him, so I need to get a new bike helmet. Plus the bike he gave me has no front brakes and the seat is stuck too high. But it's got great big fat tires and it's small enough so that falling off it doesn't seem like it would be fatal. I wonder two things: Will riding a bike will retrain my brain to find its balance? And is this bike stolen?

I've saved the best (or worst) for last. Last month you may recall, my siblings and I moved our maternal parental unit into a lovely apartment in a large retirement community. I remember feeling a great sense of relief when we finally got pictures hung. Apart from the ongoing telecommunications nightmare requiring me to check in with the cable company every day, I thought things were going pretty good. Unfortunately (for me), my mother has hit the reset button on her move.

I accompanied her to her doctor's appointment last week. As I helped her fill in the forms in the waiting room, I started to get a bad, bad feeling that all was not right in retirement village heaven. Depressed, lonely, bored. Depressed, lonely, bored. In a warehouse for old people.

In the exam room, she sat on the exam table in a gown, with her old lady blue jeans half on her legs. When the doctor came in, she kicked her feet like a kid and said belligerently that she wanted to move back to the condo.

The doctor asked her to stick it out another month, but I knew that was a waste of breath. My mother is a bulldog. You wouldn't know it to look at her tiny 93-pound frame, but when she wants something, she goes after it with a single-minded focus. Maybe that's because she can only hold one thing in her mind at a time these days. The move pretty much destroyed her short-term memory. She may be hoping it will come back if she moves back to familiar territory. Logical. She reminds me of what a cat does during an earthquake: run until the earth stops shaking. Wherever the cat hunkers down equals safety. Right now Mom's world is shaking. The condo represents safety.

Most of my blog viewership has departed, leaving only a few friends and family members, all of whom are over 50, I believe. So you get the word rewind. I don't need to explain. If you are under 40, you may not be familiar with the word rewind. Just think of your parents' VCR. Or that old 8-track tape player in your basement (antique!). My mom wants a mulligan. A do-over. A reboot. She's calling a moving company tomorrow to help her rewind time.

My first thought was, how could she do this to me? Fortunately, my second thought was, how can I support her in her quest to be as happy as she can be in her final days? My third thought was, what the hell am I going to do when my turn comes?

A phone company and a cable company walk into a bar...

And I bet you can guess who pays the tab! Yep. My mother. The phone company and the cable company are fighting over who gets to be my mother's telephone service provider. There can only be one winner here: The apartment building is wired for cable voice, not for phone company voice. We are trying to get her old number ported over to the new apartment. But the phone company is hanging onto her for dear life.

When two bullgods clash, humans are no better than ants scurrying for cover. The Titans toss lightning bolts while I sit with my mother's cigarette smoke-infused Trimline phone to my ear, tentatively dialing 0 to talk to a representative. Their messages fly through the ether, barely missing each other: While I'm on the phone with the phone company, the cable company is leaving me messages at on my home phone, telling me that this entire frustrating telecommunications hell is happening because the phone company won't let go. I picture some muscle-bound demi-god holding my scrawny twig of a mother over a fiery abyss (laughing loudly, of course, because you can do that when you are a demi-god). Luckily, Mom is oblivious. Her main concern these days is selling the condo. The fact that her phone never rings doesn't seem to bug her as much as it bugs me. Probably because she's not the one trying to get through to her on the phone.

Through a strange technological twist of fate, my mother can dial out on her cable-company phone line, but no one can dial in. The disembodied recorded voice says, “This number is not in service.” Not what you want to hear when you are trying to reach your 86-year-old mother. We are stuck halfway between the two companies. Meanwhile, Mom is paying her bills like a good soldier and wondering why I looked so stressed out.

Meanwhile, Bravadita has had a bad week. On Wednesday, she had a breast removed. Wait, that sounds so bloodless. Let me rephrase: Her left boob was trying to kill her so the doctors cut it off. With scalpels. She lost a lot of blood. Then they put some wadded up padding in its place and sewed her back up, with some drains left hanging to squirt out the leftover juices. What the hell!

Vertigo was bad yesterday. For the first time since this whole stupid vertigo thing began last May, I had objective vertigo in addition to subjective vertigo. That means not only did I feel like I was on a boat on the ocean, but the ocean and the boat were spinning around me like an invisible hurricane with me in the middle. For a few minutes I sat very still. As I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling my stomach begin to roil, I saw my life disintegrating into complete disarray. Wreckage of the future, here I come! Next stop, bus bench, shopping cart under bridge. Then I did the Epley Maneuver on my head, first one direction and then the other. The waves subsided. The hurricane stilled. I sat up, a little wobbly, and carried on with my editing job like nothing happened. Because, really, my life is good.

Meanwhile, as our planet groans with the insults we heap upon it daily, people are uprooted across the Middle East, fleeing for their lives from a disaster the United States helped to create: You broke it, you bought it seems to apply here. I pondered the state of the union and the state of the planet on this 14th anniversary of another bad day as I walked in 90°F heat 30 minutes to get to my meeting. I think I would be willing to open up my home to some refugees. Maybe a couple of teenage girls. We could talk about makeup and boys. I don't mind sleeping on the couch. Maybe I could eat some yummy Syrian food. Maybe they would be inspired to vacuum occasionally. I hope they like cats.

After the phone call to the phone company, I was wrung out. Because it was almost dark, Mom let me take her car. As I left, she slipped me an envelope full of cash (not enough to do more than buy some groceries and put gas in her car, but enough to prove she loves me). When I got home my smoke alarm was chirping loudly, and my cat was waiting by the door, glaring.

The chronic malcontent is stuck in telecommunication hell

The past couple weeks I've donated my life energy to communicating with the telecommunications monopolies that rule our town. They are surprisingly difficult to communicate with, considering that communication is their business. Go figure. I can now sing the cable company's hold music, albeit somewhat off key. I must say, I like their jingle better than the classical music that fills the interminable gap between their weary phone reps' I'm going to put you on hold now and the third-party verification software system, which wisely bypasses a live operator altogether (leaving no one to scream at).

You never know what can go wrong in telecommunications. Then things start to go wrong, and you are amazed at how much stuff can go wrong. The list of wrong things doesn't seem to end. Telecommunications is currently the root of all my woes. I'm seriously pondering what it would be like to simply cut the cord completely and go live in an ashram. Well, not seriously. Where would I find an ashram in my mother's new neighborhood? I'm not even sure I know what an ashram looks like. Now that I think about it, I may have walked by twenty ashrams on my way to Target and never even known it. See what I'm saying? You never know about things. Wrong things and ashrams. What's next?

This all started with Mom's move to the retirement community, which uses the evil cable company monopoly for phone service instead of using the evil phone company monopoly. Mom, bless her bumpy little head, wanted to keep her old phone number. (“I've had this number for 50 years!”). That was our phone number when I was a kid, when we had a party line and the first two numbers were actually letters, standing for ALpine, our telephone exchange. So, of course, Mom wanted to keep her old phone number. But therein lies the problem. That phone number belongs to the evil phone company monopoly. In order to move (port) the number over to the evil cable company monopoly, you (meaning me... that is, I) had to go through a lengthy third-party verification process to prove that yes, we really did want to move this phone number over to the new company, even though it meant some dire things could happen in a power outage (which of course we had the next day, requiring my 86-year-old mother to search around on hands and knees in her new office to find and reset the cable company modem).

As I waited for the beeps and shouted “Yes!” periodically into the phone, I reflected on the way technology screws with us. You see, I did all this last week: called the cable company, listened to the hold music, got the third-party verification, recorded all the appropriate responses after the beep... and for a few days, it almost seemed like it worked. When Mom called me, her good old Alpine number showed up in caller ID. I thought, maybe there is a god!

But then, it slowly became clear that no, apparently whatever god there is cares nothing for telecommunications. In a twist of pure communication bedevilment, Mom could call out on her new cable company phone line, but no one could call in. In other words, the old number was stuck half in, half out of some port somewhere in a bank of computers, where I am pretty sure the cable company and the old phone company were fighting over who would get to have it. It's mine! No, confound you, it's mine!

I think it's Mozart, some classical crap by Mozart, that plays between during the hold time between the cable company and the third-party verification software. On my speaker phone, the volume swells and fades in a most annoying fashion, making me hate classical music more than I already do. (And no, I don't like country music, either, just so you know.)

Maybe you can tell by my snarky tone that I'm harboring some resentment. Yes, it's true. I wish it weren't, and I'm implementing all possible rituals to divest myself of said resentment up to and including small critter sacrifice, if that seems called for (millipedes have invaded the basement). In the meantime, I'm declaring a telecommunications moratorium. If you want to talk to me, send me a damn letter.

I'm not even going to tell you what happened with Mom's cable television. Imagine everything that can go wrong. Multiply that by ten.

Dog days

Now that the maternal parental unit is ensconced in her new digs, I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would be too easy if all the stress was over. Finally, on Wednesday the family grapevine lit up: Mom thinks she's had a stroke. Naturally, my first thought is, after all we've done for you, you go and strokes out? True to form, I can make anything, even someone else's disastrous health problem, all about me.

Being carless, I waited on the phone rather than rushing (which would consist of walking or riding a bus) over to the retirement community, as if my presence would solve anything. It sounded like a crowded bus station through the phone: my brother's wife Deanna, a family friend Shirlene who is a nurse, and in the background, my mother's voice, loud and clear. That is not the voice of a stroke victim, I thought to myself, as Shirlene offered to come get me and drive me over to Mom's. Because somehow it was assumed I would want to be there to add my two cents to the pandemonium.

I declined the ride and walked over after I finished eating my breakfast. You can't tackle old senile mothers on an empty stomach. When I got there, everyone else was gone and Mom was snoozing on the couch. She woke up when I opened the door (I have a key).

“Shirlene said I was dehydrated,” she said with a little smirk.

I did my typical eye roll.

“I'm waiting for the cable guy,” she said. “I've been waiting all afternoon!”

“It's not even 1:00,” I said.

“Wake me up when he comes.” She laid back down on the couch, on her side with one elbow bent and her hand in the air. That can't be comfortable, I thought, but hell, for all I know she usually sleeps standing on her head. This might be a down day for her.

She woke from time to time, whenever there was a noise. The dryer buzzing. A car alarm echoing somewhere across the quad. Each time she was irate to find the cable guy had not yet arrived.

To be fair, she wasn't interested in watching television. She wanted her landline phone. The apartment building uses the cable company for telephone service. She'd been without a proper phone for four days, and she was ready to toss her little pay-as-you-go burner cell phone out the window. No matter how many times I reminded her, she couldn't seem to remember that to hear me talking on the other end, she had to hold the cell phone to her ear. I don't know, you figure it out. Maybe if they made cell phones look like brick-size cordless phones, she would get it.

Eventually the cable guy showed up and installed her phones. When I left, at her bequest, I took her car. Wheels! Zoom, zoom.... but I didn't need anything. Nowhere to go, really, nothing to buy. I drove home and parked it. The car sat on the street outside my apartment all day Thursday.

Friday morning, she called. “Can I have my car back?” she said, just a tiny bit belligerently, as if daring me to keep her key.

“Of course you can have your car back,” I said. I drove the car over and parked it outside the driveway at her building. She was outside on a park bench having a cigarette. I watched her walking toward me, a diminutive stick of a woman bearing no resemblance to the mother I used to know.

She took the car key happily, and didn't offer me a ride home. I didn't ask for one. I walked home under partly sunny skies.

The maternal parental unit goes AWOL

On Saturday, my brothers and I got our 86-year-old mother moved into her new retirement apartment. With an eye on the clock, we scrambled to assemble one disorganized load, drive it four miles, and offload it before 4:00 pm when the truck turned into a pumpkin ($39 for another day).

We filled the big yellow truck with Mom's full-size bed, headboard, and frame; dresser and mirror; rolltop desk; computer desk, chair, computer, and monitor; frenetically flowered multicolored living room rug; flowered (and stained) sofa; wingback chair (also flowered); coffee table; round kitchen table and four chairs; TV stand and TV; plant stand and plants; about a dozen framed photos of my brother's cats and dogs; about a hundred framed photos of my niece and her 2-year-old son; a half-dozen or so acrylic paintings painted by yours truly when I was 18 to 20 years old (neither improved with time); 30 boxes of miscellaneous crap, mostly paper, collected over a lifetime; several armloads of tiny red, fuchsia, turquoise, white, and black polyester knit tops and slacks; a box of dingy white Easy Spirit sneakers; two boxes of half-used lotions and shampoos; a brimming box of vitamins, herbal remedies, and pill bottles; four boxes of paperback books; and a box or two of half-used cleaning sprays, bottles, and cans.

The new building uses the cable company rather than the local phone company for telephone service, so Mom's landline will not work in the new apartment. This means until she gets connected via cable, Mom has only her cell phone to communicate with us. Her cell is a cheap burner phone, fueled by phone cards. And she isn't all that clear on how to use it. (“Mom, hold the phone to your ear!”)

As it turned out, her cell phone skills didn't matter. The morning after the move, my younger brother called me to say that Mom was not answering a knock on her door. Apparently, she had set her cell phone down on a little display ledge outside her new apartment (next to a tiny green frog figurine) and walked away.

“Uh-oh,” I said. With no cell phone, Mom was incommunicado. I pictured my scrawny mother doing a fist-pump in the air, saying to herself, Free at last, finally, free at last! 

My brother searched the dining room: No mother. He went back and pounded on the door: no answer. I texted him: She's probably at the condo. He drove over to her condo and found her packing some kitchen stuff (half-used bottles of condiments and spices). Apparently, she hadn't missed her cell phone at all. Later, when we told her she'd left it outside her apartment door, she said, “That's what everyone keeps saying,” in a skeptical voice that suggested to me that she thought we were all trying to gaslight her.

For the past two days, I've been going over to her place, taking her car to the condo, loading up boxes, and driving stuff to her new place, unloading boxes up the recalcitrant elevator, and parking them in her living room and kitchen. One trip a day is all we can handle. Three trips waiting to go up and down the elevator with my hand-truck precariously loaded with boxes—and dodging scooters, walkers, and shopping carts—has not turned me into a paragon of patience.

I guess I moved some things she didn't want moved (hey, how was I supposed to know!?) Yesterday, we hit our limit. Luckily her neighbor across the hall came over at that moment to introduce herself. Coincidentally, they both have the same first name. I stood by and watched the two pint-sized old ladies move close together so they could see and hear each other. As I gazed down at the top of their heads, I thought, she's bonding. She's making friends with the other kids at boarding school. That's my cue to exit, stage right. I murmured my good-byes. They barely responded. I faded down the hallway, smelling my own freedom just steps away.

Moving the maternal parental unit

Last week I was volunteering at a business conference for a nonprofit group of which I am a member. When you volunteer, you meet the members behind the curtain, the ones that help and the ones that hinder. I hope I did more helping than hindering. I was accused of rolling my eyes. You can interpret that any way you want. Of course, I would bet you would have a similar response if most of the comments you heard from the attendees went something like this: This is a great conference, where's the Diet Coke?

After four days of hospitality hell, I was ready for some downtime. But it's time to move the maternal parental unit into her new apartment at the retirement community. This morning she was supposed to call me when she got up, but she forgot. I called her at 11:00 am. “What are you doing?” I asked as soon as I was sure she knew who was calling her. (Who else but me says “Hello, Mudder” when she answers the phone? I dread the day she doesn't know me.)

“I'm putting things in boxes,” she replied.

“You were supposed to call me when you woke up.”

“I forgot to write it down,” she replied.

“I'm coming over.”

“Let me come get you!”

“No, I need the exercise!”

Now that I am carless, we have this conversation at least once a week. I've stopped trying to explain my actions. My explanations don't stick. Although her memory seems to be selective. Today we met a nice man named Bill who held the elevator for us. Mom told my younger brother about Bill. She apparently remembered everything Bill had told us about himself (moved in last week with his wife, lived in a condo downtown for eleven years, still living out of boxes).

Back to the story. I dressed in lightweight gear, shouldered my backpack, and walked over to her house (roughly a mile and a half) in muggy heat. My plan was to help her pack and take a load over in her old Toyota Camry.

When I arrived, she was gamely stuffing things into boxes with not much care for what was in each box. I watched her for a minute and then pulled her car out of the garage, backed it up to the back patio, and loaded a few boxes into the trunk. When I went back inside, she was in the dim bedroom, peering into a shoe box, muttering something about having shoes she's never seen before. I looked at her shoes. They all looked the same: black leather slip-on loafers from Naturalizer. I opened up a dusty box: well-worn 50s-style black suede pumps.

“I'll never wear those again,” she said firmly, shoving the shoes into the box with the slip-ons.

“Then why are we moving them to your new apartment?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

We drove over to her new place, a few miles away, and she told me where to park. I unloaded the trunk and the back seat. She held the door open. Then she held the inside door. Then Bill showed up and held the elevator door. All the doors started pinging at us for holding them open.

“They ought to have a freight elevator!” my mother said for the millionth time.

“It's unlikely they will put one in now, just for you, Ma,” I said.

She opened the door to her new apartment and found something to hold the door open. I loaded bags and boxes, walking back and forth from the elevator lobby to her apartment. I said hello to two different old ladies who were strolling the hall, one with a wheeled walker and one with a wheeled shopping cart of the smaller variety, the kind I had intended but failed to purchase.

Back in the apartment, I set a couple small shelves in the walk-in closet and started unpacking the sheets that had been stored on them back at the condo, until my mother stopped me.

“Those sheets are for the twin bed,” she said.

“Then why did we move them?” I said. “Your bed is a full-size bed.”

“Well, I still have a twin bed at the condo!”

“Yes, but you are giving that bed to Reggie,” I reminded her. Reggie (not his real name) is my 60-year-old brother, who apparently got dibs on the twin bed in the guest room. I looked at the stack of flowered sheets, pale green and pastel pink, thinking, yes, Reggie will enjoy sleeping on those.

“I'm going to unpack the bathroom stuff,” Mom said, disappearing around the corner.

I repacked the sheets and took the box to the door, along with the boxes we'd emptied.

“I'll sort this all out later,” Mom said as I watched her shovel lotions and bandages and deodorant and toothpaste into cabinet drawers. I turned and admired the perfect white tub.

When she was done with the bathroom, we unloaded the one box of kitchen gear and food she had packed. I set it all on the counter, thinking it was impossible to organize the kitchen with one box of miscellaneous utensils, five half-opened bags of cereal, a can of water chestnuts, and some bread crumbs. As I shoved it against the wall, I realized I had moved all these cans and bags after the mouse meltdown last June. (See a previous blog post.) When the box was empty, we went down the elevator and out to the car.

“Shall we make another trip?” I asked as we were heading away.

“No, I don't think so,” she replied. I drove us to my apartment, and she took my place in the driver's seat. She fiddled with the mirrors, although I'd left everything the way it was.

She blew me a kiss and took off down the gravel road, sideswiping a yellow recycling bin and an empty green yard debris garbage can on wheels. Bam. They rattled but didn't fall over or get dragged, so it's all good, right? She didn't slow down. I'm not sure she realized she'd hit them. I stood watching her go.

“Drive safe,” I muttered to her tail lights. Tomorrow I expect we'll do it again. Hopefully sans recycling bin abuse. Saturday my younger brother plans to rent a truck so we can load up some furniture. Then the fun will really begin. Stay tuned.

The chronic malcontent flirts with terminal uniqueness

I'm sitting in the Love Shack, hunkered down under the ceiling fan with my feet in a bucket of cold water. The temperature outside is 96 °F. cooling down from something higher than that. It's about 90 in here, still not time to open the doors and windows. Hence, the bucket of water. Aaaah.

It's Friday. Now that I am living a carless summer, this is the day I typically take a 40-minute walk to meet a small but dedicated group of people to talk over some stuff. It's really too hot to hike the city sidewalks, but I am willing to go to any lengths. And the bus doesn't go there. So I walk.

Walking is good, because I am in a contemplative mood. What am I contemplating? Thanks for asking. My friend Bravadita is facing the challenge of her life—cancer. I don't understand it. I can't figure out how to think about it. I want to figure out how to deal with it. Stupid reaction, especially because it isn't me on the firing line. It's so typical of my brain to try to make everything about me.

What does one say to a friend who got blindsided with a diagnosis of cancer? To answer that question, I turned to the higher power: Google, of course. Type in what to say to friend with cancer... bam! About a billion webpages on the topic. See, never fear, the Internet is here. Here is what to say to a friend who has cancer:

I'm here for you. 
What can I do to help you today? 

Boring.

There's a much longer list of what not to say. Here are a few:

You just need some omega-3s and a few hours in a sweat lodge. 
How long do you have? 
Can I have your Gucci pumps when you are gone? 

Yeah, I can see how those responses might be a bit gauche.

Time out. My feet are numb. This plastic bucket (formerly a kitty litter container) isn't quite big enough for my size sevens. Ouch. Toe cramp. Sorry, I shouldn't be complaining about a tiny thing like a toe cramp.

That's one of the problems with my life. I want to pretend I'm the sickest, saddest, most decrepit human on the planet, but there's always some sad sack whose life is sadder than mine. What's up with that? I can't complain about losing my memory because my 86-year-old scrawny twig of a mother really is losing her memory: so not fun. I can't complain about a toe cramp, because Bravadita has frigging cancer. I can't complain about anything really, because I'm not dead. I'm alive, much as I try to pretend otherwise. And, as far as I know, I will probably be alive tomorrow. Argh!

Don't misunderstand me: I don't want to be dead. I just want to be special. Special would lend some meaning to my humdrum boring life. But only a certain kind of special, mind you. I don't want the reverse lottery kind of special: you know: cancer, amputation, brain amoebas, bus bandits. I don't want to be special enough to get hit by a car while I'm crossing Burnside, or to die in a plane crash that is never found, or to be pancaked into my basement by a 9.0 earthquake (all things I worry about, no matter how unlikely). No, if that is what comes from being special, I'm okay with ordinary. Let me hide out in the masses, a drop in the ocean of life, a worker among workers. Uniqueness can be terminal.

The chronic malcontent tries to avoid the consequences of living

Today I cried. Just a little, not for long, but it was an unexpected shock, to find myself sobbing into my hands. I haven't cried, really sobbed, since 2004 when my father was dying. Since then, I've felt sad, angry, and frustrated, but I haven't cried. Until today. The sudden storm of tears left me wondering if there's a limit to the number of calamities that people can handle. After I reassured my cat that I hadn't gone insane, I thought about what can make people cry.

Here's how I think it works: when we are preadolescent, we can handle one problem and that's it. Some problems are bigger than others, of course, but one that confounded me as a child was being denied access to something I wanted. Like a cookie, for example, or a Monkee magazine. Must have cookie! Must read about Monkees! Or losing something I possessed, like when my bratty brother would encroach upon my territory, bashing through the door to steal my stuff because he knew it made me crazy.

If our poor little child selves were confronted with more than one simple problem, we experienced total meltdown, and if problems piled up and lasted a long time, the repeated meltdowns eventually turned us into neurotic candidates for multiple Twelve Step programs. Well, I'll speak for myself.

However, by the time we are adults, we are pretty good at pretending we can handle whatever life throws at us, which is baloney, of course, though few of us will admit it. That's that whole admitting powerlessness thing... yeesh, too creepy, who wants to admit powerlessness? Not me.

Hey, ponder this! Somewhere around age 80, I think we revert to our younger self's strategy of tackling one problem at a time. It's not even like tackling. It's more like...all other problems cease to exist. No, that's not right. It's not that they don't exist, it's that they don't register on the radar. They simply don't appear on the to-do list. When our brains get to a certain stage of deterioration (or is it simply a case of old-age-related stubbornness?), we choose to address only one problem at a time, and it better not be a super big one, like downsizing to move into a one-bedroom apartment at a retirement place.

My mother reached that moment a few years ago when she found her brain wasn't retaining the instructions for sending and receiving email. Her world started closing in on her, and she recognized it as it was happening. In fact, she embraced it. “I'm not learning one more darn thing!” she declared and thus achieved independence from the little bit of modern technology her children had managed to thrust upon her (computer, cell phone, email, Facebook). Tomorrow my mother turns 86, and coincidentally (or not), she will be picking up the keys to her new apartment at the retirement community. Let the moving commence! Said the weary elder daughter.

I'm only 58 (only!), but today I had had enough. Too much! Too much sadness, too much anger, too much frustration, not enough serenity, not enough surrender. Life comes at all of us, but my stupid stubborn well-educated brain keeps trying to convince me that I'm exempt somehow from the consequences of living. My response to realizing I'm not exempt was to burst into tears. Real classy.

My eyes are gritty. My nose is clogged. The cat is demanding I stop typing. It's late. The paper I'm editing will be waiting for me tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.

Two shank's mares walk into a bar

A friend dropped by briefly today. He laughed when he saw me. I thought that was odd, but didn't say anything. We concluded our business. Later I happened by a mirror and saw that my hair was sticking straight up. I looked like Don King. Or a shocked Bride of Frankenstein. Since I stopped coloring my hair (brown), it's now reverted to it's natural color (mottled grayscale). Not only is the color different than it used to be, but the texture has also changed, which accounts for its vertical tendency. There was a time when I would have killed for hair with the ability to stand up and salute. I guess it just proves the maxim that if you wait long enough, all your desires will eventually come to you.

Take climate change, for instance. Hot, is all I can say. Hot, hot, hot. I'm loving it, although I admit that I start to wilt a bit when the thermometer nears 100°, especially if I'm outside hiking from store to bus stop with a heavy sack of groceries. Oh, woe is me, I have to walk. Alas, alackaday, and all that folderol.

Speaking of odd idioms, I called my mother on the phone tonight to tell her I would like to borrow her car on Wednesday. “Shall I come pick you up?” she asked. Part of me would like nothing better than to have my mother drive over to loan me her car. Part of me thinks walking might be beneficial for my butt.

“I'll walk over,” I said.

“You'll use your shank's mare?” she said playfully.

I was like, what? My what? I'd never heard that expression before. I Googled it while we were on the phone and read some background on the term. Ha! Shank's mare! I love language. I should probably have studied English. But then I'd be unemployed. Hey, wait! ...well, whatever. I still love words.

Speaking of words, I've spent the past four days editing a train wreck of a dissertation proposal. At first pass, I despaired. I didn't think there was much hope. The structure was there, thanks to the institution's template, but the content was fractured and bent, with huge gaps (the theoretical framework is completely missing!). A plague of perplexing grammar gaffes sent my brain grasping for meaning... every paragraph had some sort of bizarre arrangement of words, kind of like those magnetic word games you seen on your friends refrigerators, where people before you have spelled out cryptic sentences like closet cats pee dark secrets. I've seen this kind of language abuse before from native English speakers who somehow absorbed just enough in high school to produce phrases like “On the same token,” and “as it relates to them being able to hit the ground running; hence being prepared.”

I am starting to develop a systematic process. First I wrestle the format into submission. If you've ever used Word styles and section breaks, you know what I'm talking about. Once I've got the styles, headings, and pagination nailed down, I generate a Table of Contents to reveal the bones and help me navigate the paper. Then I scan the paragraphs for main ideas and shuffle them around so they fall in line with the subheadings. Next, I take paragraphs apart to nudge ideas next to their buddies. And then I go word by word, semi-colon by misplaced comma by missing bracket, to wrench meaning out of each sentence. I go round and round in circles, finding statements that are repeated, or should be repeated but don't agree, shoving things hither and thither, sometimes working with the paper zoomed out to 30% so I can see two pages on the screen.

I highlight all the 4 billion instances where she should have cited a source (can we say plagiarism?). When I've combed the paper for dead commas and excessive spaces, I save the wreck as a pdf file and get down to the task of digging for meaning. I check my edits as I go—I always find errors, some of them egregious. Argh. As I work, I add comments in the margin, berating the hapless would-be scholar for thinking her feeble research question is going to pass muster with her reviewers.

Then again, she's attending an online for-profit university not unlike the one I attended, so all bets are off. Maybe her reviewers will be inexperienced and lackadaisical and wave her on through to the IRB review. Or maybe she'll get the Nazi mentor who blocks progress because of misplaced commas. I will probably eventually find out what happened: This is her proposal. If she's satisfied with my edits, she'll likely submit the dissertation. I can hardly wait.

Gains and losses, but sometimes it's hard to tell which is which

Yesterday Mom and I went to the retirement village (more like a small city) to look at a one-bedroom apartment. After a long walk through the maze, the marketing coordinator Helen unlocked the door of apartment 305. We went inside. Full-sized kitchen to the left, bathroom to the right. Living room with a bay window straight ahead. I walked across to the windows and peered down. The apartment was on the third floor, overlooking a parking lot. I saw two pigeons resting on the roof of a sky bridge below.

The air conditioning was on full blast. I turned it off. I noticed the brownish plaid rug sported the dents left by the previous tenant's furniture.

“They are in the process of cleaning the apartment, should be ready in about a week,” Helen said.

We went into the bedroom. Plenty big enough for Mom's bed and computer gear. I've lived in less space. The room was light, but not in direct sun. I went into the bathroom and stopped short in disbelief. There was a tub! And next to the bathroom, a washer and dryer! Mom and I looked at each other in shock. She had pretty much resigned herself to living without her beloved bathtub. And no way did we ever expect to have a washer/dryer unit inside the apartment! Score!

“Tub!” I shouted, grinning like a maniac.

“Washer and dryer!” she responded.

“Space for your dining room table!”

“And chairs!”

Helen probably thought we were insane. After some milling around, we went down the elevator and out the back door of the building.

“That is the path to the garden area.” Helen pointed across a narrow private street to a sidewalk going up a gently sloping hill.

“And there is your smoking area,” I said, pointing to a lone bench in a patch of dried-up grass by a chain link fence.

After we saw the underground parking, Helen led us along the path to the main dining area. As we walked, I could feel my spirits lifting. Inside me, a cranky old monkey wearing a fez and a hair shirt was jumping up and down yelling take it, take it, take it, take it!

The three of us stood outside the building in the sunshine. I kept my mouth zipped and watched Mom for signs of freak-out. Drawn brows, shifty eyes, hands reaching for cigarettes. I didn't see anything.

“You have 24 hours to decide,” Helen told Mom. Mom looked at me. I looked at her. In her eyes was the abyss. She took a deep breath... and jumped.

“I'll take it,” she said.

Right on, Mom, I thought. Good to know, just because we get old doesn't mean we automatically lose our nerve. My mother is nothing if not courageous. Eighty-six years on the planet can kill you but it can also make you stronger. Ditto having four kids, I suppose. And a precarious life with intermittent employment and a crappy car. But let's not make this about me.

Mom gave Helen a big hug, or as big a hug as a shrinking underweight old lady with bones like twigs can give. While we were bubbling with bonhomie, a young woman wearing a housekeeping badge that identified her as Tiffany came over and introduced herself to us, welcoming Mom to the place. Soon, I thought to myself, soon there will be others looking out for her. Already she's making friends.

When we got back to the Love Shack, I saw that the tow truck had come and towed my dead Focus away to its new life as someone else's problem, leaving an empty space in the area where the neighbors fight to park their cars. I don't think I'll be filling that space with another vehicle anytime soon.

You know it's hot when the cat sleeps in the tub

During the spring, winter, and fall, I often try to remember how it feels to swelter in 90°+ heat. I never can. I know for my friends in Arizona, 90° is practically sweater weather. We aren't used to it so much, here in Stumptown. This year is unusual. June was a record breaker: nine days over 90, 21 days over 80, and 25 consecutive days with no rain. We joke around here that summer starts July 5: not this year. Summer arrived early and brought the fire season with it. The fireworks show at Fort Vancouver just about burned down the fort! WTF, you guys in The Couv!

I'm hunkered in front of the computer, waiting for the sun to stop scorching my front windows: To pass the time, I poured cold water on my head. The cat is dozing stoically in the bathtub. I wonder what he would do if I turned on the cold water. Yowwww!

This heat has slowed me down a bit. So has my new pedestrian lifestyle. I'm still managing to maneuver around, though, more or less. On Thursday I hopped on the #15 bus to join Bravadita in the Pearl District in NW Portland for the monthly First Thursday gallery walk. We met first at Powell's Books in 90°+ heat and sat in the AC for a while, talking, postponing the moment when we would enter the furnace outside to find our first gallery. Finally, we could postpone no longer. Water bottles in hand, we plunged into the heat.

Did you know sweaty feet and sandal leather combine to make blisters? Argh. I hobbled gamely from gallery to gallery, looking for something, I'm not sure what. Inspiration? A place to sit down? Affirmation that I'm still an artist? Huh. I don't see my art hanging on any walls except the Love Shack's. We were swinging with the young and hip crowd, wandering from painting to photograph. I took surreptitious photos of Bravadita when I thought she was ignoring me.

Sometimes I wonder where my acrylic paints are (what box, buried in what closet). I wonder if the ultramarine blue is moldy, or if the cadmium red is crusty and desiccated. I wonder where my good paintbrushes are (what drawer, what box). I wonder what it would be like to paint something. Anything. And then I think, where would I put it when it's finished? Every inch of wall space is covered with shelves or art.

I remember in art class years ago, we had an assignment to paint on a 11 x 14 panel, photograph the image, and paint a new image over the old image, over and over. I painted about 50 images in the space of several hours. I still have the slides somewhere (what box, what drawer). I could repeat that assignment again. Paint, photograph, and repaint, over and over. In a year, I would have one painting and 365 photographs of paintings that existed for one day. Oh, art, how transient thou art.

I'm running out of food. The heat wave has conspired to keep me housebound. Walking in this heat is not healthy, and I'm not a morning person. I won't starve, no worries. I don't feel like eating much in this heat, anyway. If I get really hungry, I can always order online and get stuff delivered. In a few more days, the heat will break, we'll be back to our usual cloudy damp gray skies, and I'll try once again to remember what it felt like to be sweltering in my cave.

Hunting and gathering in the heat of the day

This morning I had a choice: take a bus to buy groceries at Gateway, or walk a mile to the big store on Glisan. Choices, choices. Waiting for a bus would be boring, especially in the blazing hot mid-day sun. The bus would be air-conditioned, though. Tempting. Plus, I like the store at Gateway. I've shopped there for years; I know where everything is, which is reassuring. Waiting for a bus to take me home, somewhat boring. But at least I wouldn't have to lug groceries home on foot.

Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, besides saving the $2.50 bus fare, the main factor that swayed me toward walking was the depressing spread of my ass. I need exercise. The only way I would be inclined to get moving is if I had a purpose: the hunting and gathering of food, or what passes for that activity in the modern age of Western civilization in East Portland. Plus, oddly enough, the vertigo seems to be better when I'm walking. So, at a little after high noon, I embarked upon the approximately one-mile journey to the store on Glisan Street.

Are you wondering if I was pushing my shiny new red shopping cart? Thanks for remembering. No, I did not, and I'll tell you why: The thing is huge. And heavy. I might as well steal a shopping cart from the store. It's quite a device, though, I must say. It folds up flat for storage (although the only place left to store things in the Love Shack is on the walls). It's quite sturdy. It's impressively shiny and red. Did I mention it is huge?

Unless I can figure out how to put a motor and a steering mechanism on the thing, I can't see myself wheeling the red shopping cart up hill and down dale to the store. I parked the red cart next to the other rarely used appliance in my bedroom, the vacuum cleaner. I've ordered a folding handtruck from Sears (I know, I'm insane). Until the new device arrives, I'm relying on my new backpack and two cloth grocery bags. I don't know how Bravadita does it: Despite being a pedestrian (by choice), she always seems so stylish, carrying the most lovely, functional bags while hiking the city in designer shoes. Sigh.

After making sure I had a bottle of water and my straw hat, I set out into brilliant 80° sunshine. Most of the trek to the store is downhill. It's not bad, walking downhill. Moving at the speed of walking, you can see things. I noticed used cars parked along the curb (none for sale). Now I know what a Pontiac Vibe looks like: just like a Toyota Matrix. Huh. I noticed lots of people grow vegetables in their front yards. The gardens are glorious, a direct contrast to the lawns, which are already crumbly gold fields of straw, even though it's barely summer. A long hedge of honeysuckle filled the air with a sweet delicate scent, blending interestingly with someone's crappy perfume and the smell of a decaying squirrel carcass.

I paced along, measuring my progress from shade patch to shade patch, winding through the hilly neighborhood down to Stark, then quick like a bug across Stark, then over to Burnside, and finally a few more long blocks to Glisan (our blocks are rectangular here on the Eastside). A few short blocks up the hill is the big store, on the other side of the street. A fancy pedestrian crossing, complete with flashing lights, gives the pedestrian the illusion that she is safe if she steps out into the street. There is no stoplight. I gave a special WTF, jackass! wave to the driver of an SUV, who waved back as she barreled through the crosswalk mere feet from my toes. I can see how pedestrians, especially those older than about 30, get killed while crossing wide boulevards: Once you step off the curb, you've got nowhere to go if someone doesn't stop. One little hitch in your gitalong and bam! you are flying into the gutter, a broken mess.

Luckily, that did not happen to me. I made it across the wide boulevard with no mishaps and entered the store from the parking lot, looking like all the other shoppers who came in cars to shop for groceries. I sank into air conditioned comfort. I don't know where things are in this store, so it seems bigger than it really is. Wandering the aisles, I saw lots of things I thought I needed and wanted. I limited myself, however, to what would fit in a tote basket, knowing I would have to carry it all back home.

Shopping as a pedestrian is different now. I'm making new choices. I have a list. I can't afford to forget anything; it's not like I can just hop in the car and zip back to the store if I forget eggs. Today I bought smaller versions of things, and fewer of them. Where I used to buy three cans of organic garbanzo beans, now just one. Instead of the large size olive oil, the half size. The smallest cabbage. Two onions instead of four. One dozen eggs, instead of two (I eat a lot of eggs).

I always go through self-checkout so I can avoid interacting with others. I also like to pack my own bags. As a pedestrian, I need to devise a new packing system. I put some heavy stuff into the backpack and distributed the produce between the two cloth bags, one for each shoulder. Apples, onions, broccoli, zucchini, carrots. Heavy but evenly balanced. I took a long swig of water, put on my sunglasses, and headed for the door.

The heat of the day hit me like a fist in the face. For a long moment, as I crossed the shimmering parking lot, the thought occurred to me that I may have taken on more than I could handle. I trudged slowly back up the hill, well aware that my next conscious thought might be from a hospital bed. But the heat was just tolerable. The space between pools of shade was just doable. The weight of the two bags was just about balanced. The sweat rolling down my back was soaked up by the backpack. My feet were hot, but the soles weren't melting, quite. I stopped once to drain my water bottle and let the sweat roll down my butt crack. Then I hoisted the load and plodded the last three blocks to the Love Shack. I guess I'll have to do it all again in about four days, or when the zucchini runs out. Bright side: I can always take the bus.

Feeling the heat? Let's all scream like babies!

When I got home from a walk in 98° sunshine, I saw a strange shadow on the drape that hangs across my front door to shield my living room from the brutal rays of southwest summer sun. I pulled aside the drape and saw a large, flat box on my front porch. I knew what was inside. Although it is exactly what I ordered, I am not jumping for joy. What is in the box? It's my ticket to the old folks' home. It's my invitation to finally surrender and join AARP. It's the realization that life as I know it is over. It's related to the sinking feeling that comes over me when I realize I should have started saving when I was 22. Yep. It's my brand new, shiny, red wheely cart, ordered online and delivered by some sneaky delivery person while I was out. It's official: I'm old.

I took the contraption out of the box (heavy!), but I'm blogging to delay the moment of assembly. I dislike those instruction sheets that show exploded views of nameless gizmos that seem to fly under the desk as soon as I open the plastic baggy. I'm not that great at assembling things. I once took an aptitude test at a temp agency. The nice lady set me up with a small piece of wood drilled with holes. In each hole was a bolt with a wingnut on the other side, holding it in place.

“Just undo the wingnut from this side, take out the bolt and put it through the other way. Then screw the wingnut back on.” She left me to it. Within moments, I had two wingnuts and a bolt flying across the floor. On my hands and knees in a pleated skirt and blazer, I rescued the pieces and eventually got them inserted and partnered up. I held up the wooden torture device triumphantly. Other people in the waiting room avoided making eye contact. As you probably can guess, I didn't get sent on any assembly line jobs. Too bad. I could have had a great career over at the sheet metal plant. Seriously.

Now that my eyesight has gone south, I don't expect putting together this cart to be any easier. I predict at least one washer will make it under the baseboard heater before I'm through. Truthfully, I'm postponing the task because it's 90° in the Love Shack. Because it's only 89° outside the Love Shack, I have opened the windows and the back door. Two old tired fans labor to shift air around the room. One is wheezing rhythmically in time to my music.

I got the wheely cart so I can pack my groceries home from the store. I'm carless now, remember? It's the carless summer. How is it going? Thanks for asking. So far, not too bad. Twice, no three times, I have made navigation errors that added many extra steps to my hikes. For example, a couple streets between the Love Shack and the store don't go all the way through. Hey, how was I supposed to know that? I can't pull out my dumb phone with an armful of groceries! I ended up walking around a block back to where I started. People watering their lawns or weeding their roses probably thought I was nuts when they saw me stomping by, carrying a bag of groceries in my arms like it was a baby, alternately cursing and laughing.

Today I walked a long way out of my way because I didn't know there was a pedestrian footpath across the freeway. In my quest to seek the shady route, I avoided the desert-like bicycle path, which would have taken me over the freeway almost straight to my destination. Instead, I walked several long, hot blocks to another street that crossed over the freeway. From there, I looked out over the parked cars heading in both directions (rush hour), saw the pedestrian bridge off in the distance, and started once again cursing and laughing. Luckily, no one could hear me, although some drivers probably worried I might be planning to take a header onto their overheating Ford Focus. No wait, that's a different story...

So. A whole lotta walking, that is my new reality. I got a new backpack and an insulated tote bag to keep my frozen food frozen (although I found out it doesn't work that great in 98° weather). As soon as I admit I'm too old for anything, I'll assembly my wheely cart and join the throngs of gray-hairs riding the bus in the middle of the day. I'm all set.

All together now, let's scream like babies!