The chronic malcontent goes up the country

Today I drove my mother out into the country for Cousin Dave's memorial gathering. I took I-84 to US 30 and cut up Newberry Road just past the little town of Linnton. We expected rain, but it was intermittently sunny. I wore sunglasses. The roads were dry. The car ran fine. I found the Grange Hall without getting lost. As we came around the bend, I could see we were late. Cars and huge trucks lined the gravel road in front of the building.

“I'll drop you off,” I said to Mom and pulled up in front. She maneuvered out of the car and almost fell over as she tried to slam the car door. “Slippery,” she said. She wobbled toward the building.

I crossed my fingers, drove back onto Skyline, and found a spot a couple hundred yards along in a pullout. I parked, spent a moment hoping nobody would come round the curve and wipe out into my car, and walked back along the gravel road to the hall. The air was refreshingly brisk. I smelled spring. I pulled out my camera as I walked. Water gurgled in a gully but I couldn't see anything beneath the lush greenery. An open meadow past the row of parked cars glistened brilliant green, soggy wet against a backdrop of fir trees.

A group of unfamiliar men stood near the door, chatting. One guy said something about Dave elk hunting in eastern Oregon. I didn't linger to introduce myself. I am not a hunter. I gave them a weak finger wave and one of those smiles that I hope said, I don't know you, we share a loss, but not a huge loss, because I was only a cousin, and I'm guessing you guys are work buddies, and the sun is shining so how bad could it be?

Inside the grange hall, people milled about, talking loudly and carrying paper plates of food. Cookies, crock pot meatballs bristling with toothpicks. Across a big open space of beige linoleum, I spotted both my brothers and my sister-in-law. My mother was lost in the crush. About five long folding tables covered with blue paper tablecloths had been set up in a row, blocking access to a display of photos. Children of all sizes and genders, mostly blonde, ran screaming among the adults.

Someone had created a huge photo poster of Dave's life, pasting photos on multiple sheets of poster board, captioning each one by hand. I recognized none of the photos. Dave was a stranger to me, I realized. There were no photos of family Christmases that included my family (although I have some from our elementary school days). I felt sad to realize that I grew up distant from my cousins, even though we lived in the same city. For a tiny second, I blamed my mother. Then I realized that we all lived full, busy lives. Across the city might as well be on another planet when you are a kid. Even after we grew up, the only time I saw my cousins was on rare occasions when I was visiting from California and they happened to be visiting my parents. Once, maybe twice. The next generation of cousins once-removed appeared and grew up without me. Now there are twice-removed cousins running around.

Some people are close to their cousins. Not me. Much as I adore my girl cousin, our lives rarely intersect. She's busy with a full-time job, traveling, a relationship, and I'm busy in my cave doing this. I don't even know my boy cousins.

I wandered and took pictures. Two framed paintings perched on table easels, one of a country cabin and one of an elk standing on a ridge. A set of antlers took up most of a side table, elk presumably. I wouldn't know. I do know the owner of those antlers is almost certainly deceased. A large flat-screen computer monitor showed a slideshow of photos of Dave and his kids and grand-kids. His eldest daughter sat on a bench by the wall, watching the slides and weeping.

I was ready to go when my mother gave me the high sign.

“I would use the restroom, but I don't like the look of those stairs,” she said. The restrooms were in the basement. The stairs were steep and many. Carpeted, though, which might save old bones from ruin. Still, I didn't argue.

“Just as long as you don't mess up my car.”

I walked out into the sunshine to fetch my car. The sons and daughters of my cousins were standing around in groups. My cousins once-removed. I waved and pointed to my car, which I'm sure was perfectly translatable as I'm going to fetch my car because my mother can't walk that far. I walked on, breathing in the spring air. It could be fake spring; we get that a lot here in February. Crocuses bloom, and then bam!—snowstorm. But it's an el nino year and the hottest on record besides. I think winter is over.

As we pulled out of the parking area, I noticed my mother digging through her many pockets. She does this frequently. It usually means something got lost: a glove, sunglasses, cell phone.

“What are you looking for?”

“I thought I saved my cigarette butts,” she said. “But now I can't find them. Guess I threw them away.” My mother, the perfect guest: she packs 'em in, she smokes 'em, she packs 'em out.

I smelled burned ash and started coughing.

“You aren't on fire, are you? I don't have a fire extinguisher.”

She laughed. I wasn't joking; no fire extinguisher. I let it go, figuring if she were on fire, we'd find out soon enough.

On the way back, the smell of burned cigarettes was overpowering. I rolled my window down a bit and tried to breathe through my mouth.

The chronic malcontent takes a philosophical view

I've been dreaming lately of escape. Hitting the road, leaving it all behind, taking a geographical. Even though I know that wherever I go, there I'll be, I still want to take myself someplace else. I'm not sure where exactly. I haven't done more than choose a direction: south.

My friend Bravadita has used her recent brush with death as a metaphysical platform from which to launch a tiny house. She's collecting sinks and things, immersed in the process of crafting a new life from the inside out, from the ground up. I'm guessing the actions she takes toward building her pint-sized dream house help her tolerate her crappy day job. I want to get some of that.

The maternal parental unit has now declared her intention to stay in her condo as long as possible. I interpret that to mean until she falls, breaks a hip, has to go into rehab, and from there, into an adult care home. I don't say that to her. I say, I support you in your desire to stay independent as long as possible. I work daily at being a good daughter.

She changes her mind weekly. I try to keep up.

Today Mom took a cab to a doctor's appointment about two miles from her home. She arranged it by phone ahead of time. I kept my fingers crossed this morning, as I waited by the phone, in case she needed a ride home. I was fretting a little bit. I was acting like a parent whose child had gone to school on the school bus for the first time.

I called her around noon, wondering what I would do if she'd gone AWOL. Wanted! Scrawny old lady wandering in NE Portland. If seen, do not approach. Call authorities. I imagined my tiny twig mother getting into the cab of a semi-truck, bound for Ojai with a load of lettuce. Breaker, breaker in a deep smoker's voice.

She answered the phone. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“How did it go?” I asked (on your first day on the school bus).

“The driver who took me home was quite nice,” she said. “A lot nicer than the one who picked me up.” The customer has spoken. Are you listening, cab company? I doubt it. Nobody cares what old ladies think.

“I'm glad you made it home safe,” I said.

“I'm going to eat lunch and take a nap,” she said and hung up the phone. I felt some of my tension ease. Maybe this is a good sign. Mom can take a cab.

My brother is adamant that Mom should move into a care home, the sooner the better.

“You want her to be safe,” I said with compassion.

“Yes!”

“Even if that means she's not happy.”

“Yes!” Well, he didn't actually say that, but he meant it.

I felt the same way up until a few weeks ago, when I started to shift more toward the happy camp. I'm sensing my family is trapped in a four-quadrant decision window. What's that, you wonder? Thanks for asking. It's a quadrant with four choices: safe but not happy, happy but not safe, not happy and not safe, or happy AND safe. Of course, we say we want happy AND safe, but truthfully, Mom prefers happy not safe, and the children lean toward safe not happy. As long as Mom is competent, she can do what she wants. Up to and including getting into semi-trucks with strange truckers.

I don't trust my feelings on any of this. It's like when I hear someone who clearly has an eating disorder declare, “I can have bread everyday. I just have to manage it.” Like when an alcoholic says, “I can have a beer once in a while. I can handle it.”

It used to be I would see family at weddings. I stopped getting wedding invitations years ago, after the cousins of my generation had kids and then grand-kids. Now I can see what's coming: I'll be seeing my cousins at funerals. What's left of us, that is. On Saturday I'm taking Mom to a grange hall in the country for Cousin Dave's memorial service. I imagine it will feel as bleak as the graveside service did, except for indoors.

A pollster called me this evening from a 555 number. Is that even possible? I thought it was Windows Technical Support again. I started preparing my strategy as soon as I heard a young woman speaking with a clipped British-Indian accent.

“I'm not trying to sell you anything and I won't ask for a contribution or a donation,” she reassured me. It was almost time for iZombie, but I sighed and agreed to be polled.

Most of the survey was about two bond measures, one to raise money for schools and the other to raise money to build affordable housing for seniors. As I struggled to translate her accent, I thought to myself, it's pretty silly to expect people to quickly come up with thoughtful responses on such important issues. I did my best to answer, though. Definitely yes, somewhat yes, undecided lean yes, not at all convincing. It was entertaining to hear her pronounce Oregon Orreezhjan. I almost stopped her to ask where she was calling from. Deepest darkest Atlanta, probably. Or Austin. The heart of call center country.

Mostly I was grateful that that wasn't my job, to call weary people at 8:30 at night. 10:30 central time zone. In the background was the buzz of many voices. It sounded a lot like the buzzy background of the Windows Technical Support cretins who've been calling me three times a day for the past month.

Today the scammers left me alone. I can hardly believe it. Maybe it's because I asked the young man how he could live with himself, knowing he was breaking the law, taking advantage of people with a heartless scam. Probably not. One can hope.

Fool on a hill

I've only been to Skyline Memorial Cemetery once, with Mom to direct me, some years ago, so I wasn't sure I would find the place. The clouds were low over the West hills of Portland. The road was socked in with fog. I almost missed the sign. Luckily, I had viewed the place from satellite the night before (Google Earth!), so I knew that the funeral home office was just off the second driveway. I was 20 minutes early on purpose. I figured I'd use the restroom, get a map, and sneak into the periphery of the group somewhere near the grave site, if I could find it.

As it turned out, the family was gathering in the lobby of the funeral home office. The former wife of my youngest cousin was already there. We recognized each other, which for me is a big deal, for her, probably not so much. Still, she seemed glad to see me, and I was glad to see her. I like her. When I came out of the candlelit restroom, I greeted her with a hug. I was conscious of the degree of my social enthusiasm and wondered if I should dial it back a bit. Not that I'm so flamboyantly social, I've met her what, five times in 30 years? But it was a funeral. Well, at least I wore black.

People I didn't recognize came in out of the damp fog. In my cloud of social anxiety, I was just barely conscious of my awareness that most of them in my generation were overweight and obviously colored their hair. And they all looked so old. What happened to us? Dave was only 61; that seems so young to me. It occurred to me as I was standing awkwardly trying to keep an appropriately sad but welcoming look on my face, that I probably looked just as old and decrepit to them as they did to me. WTF.

I realized that some of the strangers were actually grownup children of my cousins, towing their own young daughters and sons. Some of the faces I may have seen once at a barbecue a few years back, at my aunt's 75th birthday. Seems like ancient history now. My memory fails me daily. Names and faces... like my mother, I am learning to fake it.

The funeral home assistant, a tall heavy young woman dressed in a parka and black leggings, perked up as soon as Cousin Dave's wife arrived. I could see her move into a brisk-but-sympathetic let's-get-this-show-on-the-road mode. I tried to model my face after her expression. Nobody noticed.

“If you want to drive your car to the site, just follow the truck.” She didn't have to say which truck. We all knew: The truck with the casket hanging out the back. I can only imagine what it was like to drive that truck from the house to the cemetery. Did they hang a festive red flag on the end of the casket? Would any nearby drivers realize that there was an embalmed body, sans a few organs, resting in the box? Now there's a plot for a story...

Someone murmured something about walking. That sounded good to me, and apparently to many others. We swarmed out the door into the drippy fog and walked in small groups out to the parking lot. My aunt came over, a tiny shred of an old woman wearing an eye-watering hot fuchsia windbreaker. I think my mother might actually have a pound or two over my aunt. (My aunt has always competed to be thinnest.)

She gave me a long, uncomfortable hug. Her eyebrows barely reached my chest. I'm not sure where she was looking—at my jacket, I guess. I stared off across the parking lot, patting her back, realizing belatedly that I was actually holding her up. I waited for her weight to transfer back onto her tiny feet and extricated myself from her embrace.

An exotic long-haired young woman came over and gave me a hug. Who...?

“I'm Julie,” she said in a choked voice. Oh, right. Julie. My brain scrambled, trying to unravel the family tree on the spot. Dave's second daughter. Oh, right. She just lost her father. Bummer.

My brother and his girlfriend were there, two familiar faces. The small crowd walked in groups up a small rise. As we crested the hill, a cold wind attacked. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the typical 40° damp wind we all know as Portland winter. We all huddled into our scarves and trudged onward.

Not far along the road was the mausoleum wall. About 20 yards below the road, a backhoe and a little pickup filled with gravel were parked on the muddy grass. An empty bier stood waiting for the casket. I presumed the bier hid the open grave beneath. Hey, I've seen funerals on TV, I know what's what. Pretty soon, six men of varying ages struggled into view, carrying the wooden casket across the slippery grass. I recognized Dave's two brothers and Dave's son. I thought of all the things that could go wrong, but they settled the box on the bier without mishap. 

I hovered on the periphery as about 30 people clustered around, facing a bearded guy wearing black and holding a book. Minister, pastor? Four members of the grounds crew waited respectfully nearby. One was a blond woman wearing enormous black gloves. I imagined they were itching to get back to backhoeing and spreading gravel.

As if on cue, as the minister led the crowd in the first of several prayers, the fog began to lift. The view was impressive. Far across the valley, sunlit glimmered on a section of the Willamette River. Dave's other daughter stood up to make some brief remarks. Fifteen minutes later, the wind was cutting through my jacket. Small children were crying out loud, the adults were sniffling into tissues, partly from grief, partly from the biting wind, and I was ready to bail.

After another prayer, a young girl stood by the box and faced the assembled group to sing an a capella hymn. The first stanza had everyone moaning and sobbing. So cute! So sweet. By the third stanza, people were starting to shift around in the mud and pull their scarves around their necks. By the fifth stanza, she was still going strong. Where's Monty Python when you need him? I gazed off over the open fields of the cemetery below, inching away from the mourners (prayer and hymns have that effect on me), and watched a crow fight off a hawk over our heads. The hawk kept circling, aloft on the wind, and lazily drifted away toward some distant trees. The crow returned to a tree near the mausoleum, the winner, for now.

The story should end here for effect, but life is so strange. The grounds crew lifted a white plastic cover and placed it over the casket. Unfortunately, the cover did not fit over the box. My youngest cousin, Dave's younger brother, had built the box himself with the assistance of Dave's son. He was standing next to me as we watched the dilemma unfold.

“Twenty-four inches tall and twenty-eight inches wide,” my cousin said. “That's what they told me. It better fit.”

People milled around for a few minutes, churning up the grass, then most retired to the shelter of the mausoleum wall, where the cemetery people had set up two rows of folding chairs covered in dark green fake fur (I kid you not). The cousins and sibling gathered in groups according to their age brackets, waiting for the cemetery crew to find a cover that would fit. I wandered a dozen yards away to see the grave marker for my grandparents, who both died in 1985. My girl cousin came over with her daughter.

“When Grandpa came to stay with my mother, after Grandma died, he was so sad,” my cousin said, glaring bleakly at her twig of a mother who was holding court by the mausoleum wall. “My mother had no compassion at all for him and what he was going through.”

She looked at me. “You know my mother.”

“I do know your mother,” I agreed. I thought about mothers. I decided that even as much as I'm struggling with my own mother, I would not want to trade. I know her mother.

The wind felt like it was coming straight off the ocean. At that point, I hit my limit. I didn't know I had a limit on graveside services, but apparently I do. I decided I didn't need to see my cousin's coffin lowered into the dirt. I said goodbye to my girl cousin and her daughter, and to my brother and headed away from the group to get up to the road. The grass in places was pure mud, which made walking treacherous. My brother's wife walked back to the parking lot with me. The hem of her long dress was wet from trailing in sodden grass. We talked about aging parents, but didn't figure anything out.

Cousin Dave is on the roof

I dreamed a mildly romantic dream last night. Sadly, though, no tongues to report; I rarely progress that far in dreams anymore. Don't know what that means, and it doesn't matter. I didn't regret the loss. I was more interested in the fact that, in my dream, I was ageless. I mean, I wasn't any specific age, as far as I could tell. I wasn't old or young. I just was. My perception of me existed outside time.

Sure, my dreams have changed over the years, whose haven't? When I was 6, I dreamed creatures from outer space were taking over the earth in flying saucers. That was the year the city adopted oscillating sirens on their police cars. I was sure invasion was imminent. When I was young, I used to fly a lot in my dreams. I don't fly anymore. I don't even run. Now all I do is stomp repeatedly on nonfunctional brakes. Or I lose my car altogether in some part of the city I've never seen before.

I feel like I live life interrupted, daily. I aim in one direction and find myself going in another. I wait in wait-and-see mode, not bothering anymore to wonder what the future holds. I know what it holds. I don't need a magic 8 ball to know where we are all headed. Yep, you got it. Hell in a hand-basket.

Cousin Dave died last week. His mother called me because she was afraid if she called my mother, the news would send her off her rocker. (Oh, sorry, that's a euphemism for lose her mind. No, that's a euphemism too. I mean, she would lose what cognitive ability she still has.) I was the designated bad-news bearer for my immediate family. I took the coward's way out and wrote an email to my siblings. But I called my mother first to give her the sad news.

“Cousin Dave died yesterday,” I said when I got her on the phone. Oh, darn. Should I have used a euphemism to soften the blow? Should I have said Cousin Dave is on the roof? I am a lousy liar. I can't even tell a good joke, because I dread making people wait through the setup. I should probably at least have made sure she was sitting down. Well, in my defense, I did wait until evening so I didn't ruin her afternoon nap.

My mother is a former nurse. And she's a former librarian. That means, to me, that if she hasn't seen death and dying up close in person, she's certainly shelved some books about it. I figured she would say, oh, that's terribly sad, grieve a bit, and move on. Unfortunately, my mother has been replaced by a pod person whom I no longer recognize. This new pod-mom creature was devastated by the news of the loss of Cousin Dave.

“Oh, no. Not Dave. No. Why couldn't it have been me?” she wailed. I cringed. I know it's not my mother anymore, but it's still hard to hear her suffer.

Cousin Dave was my mother's brother's eldest son. A heart attack laid him out. By the time they got him to the hospital, he was dead. Oh, wait, I should say he had passed. Or passed away? Is that the right euphemism? I can't keep track. I always thought passing was what one did on the two-lane road to the coast when you're stuck behind a log truck. Whatever. So, Dave is gone. We lost him.

Eventually Mom emerged from her blue funk to call my aunt and get the details. She called me the next day and sounded pretty calm as she told me about the casket-building her brother's remaining children and grandchildren were doing. I was impressed. Casket building would never have occurred to me. I'd be more likely to sew a shroud.

“They plan to wrap him in an elk hide,” my mother said bemusedly. “The other kids plan to put in a Native American blanket.” Right. For his trip to the happy hunting ground. I don't know what Dave's idea of heaven was, but I'm pretty sure it involved guns, judging by how many racks he had hanging in his living room. And when I say racks, I mean elk and deer antlers, just so we're clear.

I didn't know Dave well. I am closer to his sister, my only girl cousin. Dave was an enigma, like all older males. He grew a beard, married a Mormon, had a pack of kids and got divorced. He was happily remarried to a woman I met once or twice, who seemed to enjoy hunting as much as Dave did. I'm sad she's a widow. Dave was only 61, the same age as my older brother.

Mom told me today she doesn't feel up to attending the graveside service day after tomorrow. I guess I'll drive up the hill to... I don't even know what that part of the city is called...to Skyline Cemetery, a place I've only visited once, some years ago, to see the graves of my mother's parents. They died the same year, 1985, within months of each other. Dave's grave will be nearby, with a nice view.

When I was maybe 14 or 15, before I got my first boyfriend, I remember a family visit to Cousin Dave's house. I don't know if it was winter or summer, but I remember Dave, my handsome older boy cousin, offering to play some records for me on his record player. (If you don't know what a record player is, it's a device that played vinyl records.) He might have played more than one song, but the only one I remember is Chicago's Colour My World. To this day, I can't hear that song without thinking of Cousin Dave. RIP Cousin Dave. You will be missed.

The chronic malcontent joins the tiny hat movement

Sometimes when I stand at my computer desk, staring morosely at my screen, my cat sneaks silently into the room and sits on the floor behind my feet. Inevitably, eventually, I step backward onto his tail. I think it's a ploy to get sympathy. I thought he wasn't all that bright, but maybe I'm wrong: He's figured out how to get love. That is more than some of us can say.

I'm seeking a hat that will clamp down on the vertigo. Is there such a thing? I have many kinds of hats: berets, cloches, stocking caps, straw hats, watch caps, baseball caps, and hats whose names I do not know. Most are black. None of the hats I have seems to mitigate the vertigo, so I'm hunting for a new hat. Maybe something in tin foil.

I wear a hat pretty much all the time. I wear a hat to the store. I wear a hat to job interviews. I even wear a hat to bed. I'm wearing a hat right now. The only time I don't wear a hat is when the temperature exceeds 90°. Then I'll let my scalp roam free. People are always shocked to find I actually do have hair. I suspect they believe I've been a cancer patient for years. Nope, sorry. I buzz my hair short on purpose.

Somebody should invent a hat that helps old people think. Teachers used to tell students, “Put on your thinking caps!” to imply that they were not thinking to their full potential. Did it inspire students to think harder? Deeper? Clearer? Who knows. All I know is, I want a thinking cap. I want one for my mother, and I want one for me. I don't care what color.

Lately I've been thinking that everyone should start wearing a hijab, the Muslim women's headscarf. If everyone walked around in hijabs, maybe people would get used to seeing them around town. Then they wouldn't be scared of hijabs. It's normal to be scared of things we don't understand. If you were wearing a headscarf on your head, you would understand it's a piece of cloth that wraps around your head. Then you wouldn't be scared of it.

I'm not much of a joiner. Groups make me feel uncomfortable, and the idea of joining a movement in a presidential election year really makes me queasy. (I might accidentally become a Trumpeter or something, and then I'd have to kill myself.) However, I don't think the tiny hat movement is all that well organized. I haven't seen any newsletters. I don't know if there is a website. In fact, I might be the first one in the tiny hat movement. It's hard to tell if I'm part of a movement when life is moving around me. Do you ever have that feeling?

Anyway, if you would like to join the tiny hat movement, leave a comment, and start wearing a hat.

The chronic malcontent experiences ego deflation

Happy effing new year, readers. All 10 or 12 of you. I hope this year all your pleasant dreams come true (and none of the nightmares). Me, I just hope to stay present as the moments sweep me along, if not savoring each treacherous moment, at least, not wishing I were somewhere else doing something else. I'm just hoping to be here now. What else is there? I've spent years trying to fix my past and manage my future, and look where that got me. Broke, flabby, and discontented. Joke's on me.

Once again, it seems whatever mojo I enjoyed over the past few months has evaporated as I've been sinking into my mother's shrinking world. Aspirations of art, writing, doing something with myself, all seem to be misting into nothing. Late middle-aged woman, interrupted. Again. Interruptions in the past I blamed on partners. This time it's my maternal parental unit who has become the baby planet nucleus of my parched existence. I've whined about this before, sorry if it is getting boring. It's boring to me too, and it's my life. I suppose it's hard to sink lower than the realization that I'm bored with myself.

I had an idea for a story today. This is nothing new. I'm a dreamer, ideas are like breathing. The frothy cloud of creativity burbled in my chest. My heart rate accelerated. I suppose my eyes twinkled, although I'm not really sure (they sometimes dance from vertigo). I chortled once. If I remember, I will commit it to a Word doc and save it in a folder that I will rarely look into again. I have enough ideas in there to last a while. Unformed hazy potential.

As I've grown older and less optimistic, I've finally stopped seeing creativity as the antidote to my malcontentedness. My creative life has pretty much shrunk to this blog, the electronic platform from which I whine. I used to paint, but what do you do with a bunch of paintings nobody wants? Build furniture out of the particle board panels. Cut the canvases into strips and weave them into placements. See? An idea a minute. I sit in meetings and draw the images you see on this blog. I have a notebook-a-month going back to 1995. Who wants them, raise your hand.

The excessive-thinking malady brought on by fear of downsizing is cutting the crutches out from under my wobbly creative spirit. Too much stuff is at war with need more stuff. (What's up with stuff, anyway? How did it turn into my higher power? There's a topic for another rant.) The Love Shack is not a big place, but more to the point, I will not last forever. Before I die, if I have the choice, I would like to jettison some of this baggage and abandon myself to the creative spirit. I'm sure it's still in me somewhere, waiting patiently for an invitation to peek around the door.

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.