Main category.
Yesterday, I think I had my 19th nervous breakdown. We had sent family back home, and I had visited my mother late in the afternoon and found her looking frail and not so good. In the meantime, I had learned my sister was on her way here and arriving late Wednesday and so we had decided, selfishly, to go to Portugal on this prepaid trip that we had scheduled back in May. There is a…
Today we brought T’s mom and 14 year old cousin to the airport and it was a day fraught with many complicated emotions. On one hand, so happy to have our house back after seven weeks of having company, on the other so sad to see particularly T’s mom go since she is getting older and we are acutely aware of time these days and how little of it we have. When I was walking…
Yesterday after visiting mom, I came home and sat on the front porch with our Croatian family and our neighbor. We just sat there enjoying the night and trading stories, a New Orleans tradition. My neighbor regaled us with nursing home stories – her parents escaping with one of the elderly who still has keys to her car and an errant karaoke machine they were trying to get jump started at the lawn mower repair…
Today is July 31st, but I turned the calendar in the laundry room over to August just in case I forget tomorrow. It’s a calendar that Flower made me last year for 2009 and for August it has three photographs of my mother and the caption reads “the most special people in our lives” – how appropriate.
I went to the hospital for the afternoon visiting hour and a half and I asked for a comb so that I could get the knots out of mom’s hair. I combed through almost rastafarian type mats. After that I put moisturizer all over her face, especially where they had moved the tape around her lower cheeks from the tube for the vent. Then I made a small braid on the side of her hair.…
I was talking to my neighbor over the fence and catching her up on what is going on around here, we’re getting ready to start the fifth iteration of the adoption book, mom was not progressing today, my sister wants to sue me; my neighbor laughed and said she needs to talk to me more because she instantly feels as if her problems are nothing in comparison. It’s great to be needed. I was telling…
Since this has surely been the summer of our discontent and hey, hurricane season isn’t over yet, I’m just going to focus on something my father used to say, he said it in Ladino and I wish I could remember the words, but the saying is that just when you think it is the blackest that is when the light comes. So I’m willing to believe that uncertainty, lunatics, the moribund and dead aside, things…
So much truth to the art of selfishness, thanks Ayn Rand. There does come a time when you can put your best foot forward and find that people just want to stomp on it out of pure spite and so whatyagonnado? Well I say you do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around. Meanwhile, here at the OK Corral it’s countdown time – our visiting family leaves this Sunday, mom is slowing being weaned off…
It’s Satchmo Fest in New Orleans and this weekend is filled with free entertainment everywhere. It’s also White Linen night on Saturday, when the galleries all open up their doors and everyone wears white and hits the streets. WWOZ has been playing nonstop Louis Armstrong and that has been a delight! Armstrong got his nickname Satchmo after the editor of a magazine called him Satchel Mouth because of his large lips. Louis Armstrong is one…