It's been a long time since I've been here. In all honesty, life has been busy at best, crushingly so at worst. And I've found myself in this wordless place--probably because I've found myself in a place that has had life and circumstances swirling so madly around me that there has been no space to think a thought, let alone craft a sentence worthy of anything but a Facebook status update.

It's been awful, frankly--and something that I've come to realize I can't continue, because without contemplation, without awareness, without making space, there is no real life.

Not one that I'm particularly interested in living, anyway.

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So Frank says that my assignment for the week is to do as much good for myself as I can, and to love and defend myself the way I would love and defend a friend who is in the same position. To give myself the kind of advice as I would give them.

It's harder than you think.

Because, you see, I have been very carefully taught.

This past week, I took my 81 year old father to the urologist.

This started about a week ago, when he called me at 8:30 in the morning, telling me that he had spent the night in the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully to urinate. And now it was getting scary.

My husband went with him to the emergency room, where they installed a catheter. In not such a gentle way, my father told me. But the catheter, he reported, is cool, because he can sleep through the night now.

This was just the beginning of the TMI.

So I ended up taking him to the urologist, to have the catheter pulled.

Me–in a waiting room full of old duffers discussing their pee-pees and the various vagaries of them. It was like sitting in the barber shop in Hell.

The nurse took my Dad back, and he looked at me as if I had betrayed him when I remained seated, so I ended up heading back to the examining room. I couldn’t bring myself to go in as he disrobed, but was invited back in when he was “decent” again.

I walked in to find him sitting on the examining table with a giant paper napkin over his lap, his trousers around his ankles and his cap on.

I burst out laughing.

I won’t go into detail about the other events of that day, because they are not fit for human consumption. But I will say that it’s quite a shock to find your Dad in a doctor’s examining room, looking like that creepy old man from the bus station.

On Facebook recently, I had the interesting experience of seeing a photo album posted to an acquaintence’s page. This acquaintence was someone I knew from having attended the same church she currently attends, long, long ago.

The pictures she posted were of a dance, conducted in the main meeting room of the church.

These pictures brought on a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I’ll explain.

When I was a young teenager, I recall a certain meeting of the “Brothers”, on the weighty subject of roller skating. You heard me correctly–roller skating. This special meeting was called because, apparently, there was much consternation that the church was sponsoring trips to the local roller rink, and there was some question as to the appropriateness of this activity for young people. You see, the crux of the issue was that they played MUSIC at the roller rink as people skated, and it was thought, by some of the elders, that this movement to music could somehow be interpreted by some onlookers as “dancing”. And if it was, indeed, dancing, or could be interpreted as such by those unsaved individuals who could actually see us skating, then what sort of a testimony for Jesus would we be, and how many of those unsaved would we cause to “stumble” in their quest for Jesus’ truth?

I remember quite a bit about this meeting–I was allowed to be there but, of course, being a female, I was unable to speak or participate. I remember the red faces, the shouting–even the tears as one brother pled with another on points of scripture, regarding our position in the world, and our duty to remain unsullied by the sensual pleasures of the same. I remember their discussing the finer points of roller skating, and which movements which were executed in roller skating crossed over from the wicked world of dance. Of course, there were some folks there who felt that being in the roller skating rink at all was sinful, because they played rock music in any case, and if you exposed yourself to that, even without moving at all, one was in a place that shamed the Lord, and no good Christian should even want to be there. And rumor had it that some folks drank beer in the lounge before and after skating–so there ya go!

Roller skating=rock music=dancing=beer=Hell. An astonishing slide from the Friday night mirrored ball to the Lake of Fire.

I remember the faces of my contemporaries as the old folks levied their judgment on what was turning out to sound like the most evil of activities–some were shocked, some were outraged, some were confused and some, clearly the most backslidden among us, were simply bored, and no doubt planning their next excursion to this den of wickedness on the next Friday night, in the company of the rest of the youth group or not. Those were the folks who, no matter how UNdevoted to the activity of roller skating they might be, were prepared to go and defend its honor, on principle. Or out of sheer rebellion–but then, it was the time in history when the line between principle and rebellion was very, very thin anyway.

And it was painful. Really, really painful. So painful, in fact, that many left that meeting, never to return.

I remember it in my mind as The Great Roller Skating Schism of 1971.

So you can imagine my astonishment when initially presented with photographs of young people from my old church, not only dancing, but dancing in the auditorium of the church. The very room in which the Lord’s Supper is served every Lord’s Day!

But not astonishment alone, but extreme amusement. Because while, at this stage of my life, trying to roller skate would no doubt mean certain death, and while dancing never was and never shall be my strong suit (having gone through my most formative “dance learning” years spending all my energy trying not to move to music), I am taken back in my mind to those days when it was such a big hairy deal as to be the final nail in the coffin of some folks’ connection to their “brothers and sisters in Christ”, and wonder at the ironic and hilarious way the world turns, and wonder at how things that, at one point in history, were so incredibly important to the fabric and dogma of The Church, are, after a few years, meaningless.

And it leads me, when I hear the screaming and hollering coming from the Fundamentalist faction of society about the dire consequences of some action or another, to picture them all on roller skates.

"There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face."

-Bernard Williams

I love all animals. And while this house is replete with cats, and we already have a dog, you might recall that, while I was in the hospital, I began to obsess on a new breed, and the idea of what other dog might best round out our household. What new personality might lift the spirits of a home that has been, of late, far too busied with the business of sickness and death.

We needed a clown. We needed a burst of vigorous and exceptional and humorous energy. We needed a small, fey and sprightly spirit that was also full of love and affection. We needed a velcro dog, a lap dog, a puppy that likes to fall asleep at your feet without getting in your face. Not much bark, a whole lot of face-lick. We needed a dog willing to please and given to comical play.

We found him.

Meet my new psychiatrist.

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He's wonderful. He snores, he farts, he snorfles wonderfully, he doesn't run so much as he dances, like a tiny, tuxedoed pixie. He leans against you when you sit together. He sleeps under my chair as I type.

He is just exactly what I needed.

It's an indulgence, I know. I didn't really need another dog. But at the same time, indulgence is not always such a bad thing.

He's going to the Montgomery County Scottish-Irish Festival next weekend, if you want to come meet him.

Well, yes. To all events, there comes an ending, and everyone had been invited back to the restaurant for a luncheon buffet I had arranged. For me, there is nothing more depressing than getting all these people together and then expecting them all to walk away from the gravesite, all alone. So there had to be some way for people to visit and to take care of each other. So there was lunch.

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So in the end, I know that what I did was nothing. In the end, I know that all I am is all I have always been to them--not good enough. And in the end, what went on between my mother and me was built on a lie--a lie that I had convinced myself had finally become the truth. That she had finally reached an ability to approve of me, to trust me, and to be satisfied with me.

I believe that people find, after death, exactly what they hope for. I believe that, after death, the final rewards come, and that each human being finds the peace and the happiness that they have wished for. I believe that if people want to go home to Jesus, then they do.

But I have to say that I hate the Jesus that compels such easy and unthinking and mindless cruelty, and it will not be his face I seek at the end of my life.

Not now, not ever.

So Mommy, sleep in peace, and in the comfort you so much deserved and so much wanted. And know that I am satisfied with YOU--not in your Christianity, but in your wonderful, flawed and perfect humanity. I will miss you as my Mother, for all the earthly happiness you gave me, and for all you taught me. I give you the release that you could not give me.

I love you. I forgive you. And I will see you again.

Paul came home from work on Monday, and in his hands were the photos that I had picked out from her albums...

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It was all quite Jesus-y, which was fine because that's what my mother would have wanted. I know she often bemoaned the fact that, at some of the funerals she had attended, the gospel hadn't been preached to her satisfaction, and the opportunity to "witness to lost souls" had been missed. But that was not the case at HER funeral, to be sure--there was plenty of talk about that.

Little did I know that I was that lost soul. But that was pointed out to me, in detail, later in the day.

The next morning, I had an appointment with the cemetary at 9:30, to take care of that whole real estate biz before going to the funeral home in the afternoon.

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Through it all, Paul kept me fed and rested as best he could, and dealt with the life-things that I couldn't pay attention to. He drove me everywhere, so that I could make and take phone calls in the car without worrying about cracking my own self up. It was he who was here when I cried that first night, and who just held me as I did.

He was, as he has always been, my hero.

I could have done it without him--you do what you have to do. But I am so awfully glad I didn't have to. It would have been unbearable without his calm and his help and his unutterable goodness.

For those of you who don't know through the internet grapevine, my mother passed away last Friday morning.

Life has been somewhat scattered since then.
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This is going to come in fits and starts, as the whole thing is coming back and coming out of me like photographs in an album--little scenarios rather than a timeline. More to come.

Dad and I went up to visit with Mother today. She's completely out of it--where once she was responding to outside voices, at this point, she is no longer aware of them.

Except....

When we first got there, I stood by her bed and said, "Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?"

And she said, "What?"

It was the only really coherent thing she said all day.

Once you are "Mommy", it would appear that you stay Mommy, and you answer your child's voice, no matter what.

I posted this on my Facebook this morning--

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." - Mahatma Gandhi

And it explains a lot, because that is not what I have been doing, and it may be the key to why I am NOT so happy right at the moment...

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A Wall Street Journal article, from someone outside the industry, that pretty much verifies what I said in my last friendslocked post.

Please--be educated about this. Learn as much as you can. And express yourself accordingly.

There are those of us out there who, whether willingly or not, are Grammar Nazis. We literally cringe at abuses and misuses of our mother language, and sing the praises of the Oxford comma and correct spelling. We are driven to madness when we realize that we often occupy the planet with folks who turn verbs into nouns and vice versa because they think it makes them look intelligent, or who think that to, too, and two are interchangable spellings of the same word, or who can't quite grasp the innate and subtle beauties which make up our delightful language.

We learned how to diagram sentences, and often do, just for fun.

Grammar Nazis can make mistakes, too--especially if we are Star Trek fans, and have learned to split our infinitives with abandon because we prefer "to boldly go" rather than "to go boldly" just because it sounds neat to us (thanks, Gene!). But we are aware of the mistakes, often as we make them, and hope that no one is out there with a red pencil, because we are Roddenberrying, or misspelling, or making typos in our haste to get our thoughts down.

However...

Once in awhile, we come across a situation where our minds are so assaulted by a mangling of the language that we can barely contain our rage. This happens most especially when we come across an individual who uses the language to actually un-say what he or she may be attempting to say. Invariably, these nincompoops look at you when they catch your puzzled expression and say, "What do you mean, you didn't understand what I said? I said it flat out! How could you possibly misunderstand what I said? I talked for a full FITB period of time and you don't get it?"

And our only response can be, "Well, you used a lot of words, but you didn't really say anything. Or you said a bunch of words that were confusing, twisting in a most agonizing convolution so that they lost all meaning. It isn't the number of words you use that make you understood--it's the way you put them together."

Hence, if we grow up to be real Grammar Nazis, we find ourselves in a position to relate entirely with every high school and college writing teacher we've ever known in our lives--those brave men and women who slogged their way through the purple prose of our adolescence, armed only with their editing skills and a red pencil, to make some sense of what we've written in sweat and blood. We come to admire their courage, their valor, and their devotion to clarity and meaning in the face of our rampant and completely incomprehensible creativity.

We squee at the idea of red-pencilling. And fall instantly in love with anyone else who can red-pencil with a similar delight.

Like Wayne Lawson.

Dear godz--I think I need a cigarette...

Walter Cronkite died last night at 7:42 PM. Interestingly enough, it was a time that would have seen him safely and responsibly through his own evening broadcast, which would have aired between 6:30 and 7:00 PM. Plenty of time to put the day's stories to bed before he himself put down his own head and rested.

He was the first person to be labeled a news "anchor". He was the only person that the Big Wigs thought would be capable of holding the nation's attention for a full 30 minutes, rather than the 15 minutes that had been previously allotted for an evening news broadcast. He was the bridge that held hands with both Edward R. Murrow and Dan Rather.

My family was a Huntley/Brinkley family, but when it came to NASA broadcasts, there was no one else but Walter Cronkite. And reporting space flight in the era of the Mercury astronauts was no easy feat. I remember sitting in class with a television in front of the room, listening to Walter Cronkite, who was able to hold the fascination of millions of school children through endless and interminable countdown suspensions (a ten minute earth orbit would often require a full day's broadcasting, they put a hold on the countdowns so often, while NASA tinkered with their new and incredibly dangerous toys) with animations and simulations and models that showed us just exactly how the science WORKED.

I remember secretly squeeing as my parents bemoaned and disparaged him when he told the nation that the war in Viet Nam was unwinnable. How dare he? It's treason! How dare he broadcast such subversive hippie shit when all he was supposed to do was read the news!

I freakin' LOVED him for it. It was only one more aspect of his incredible bravery--risking his own reputation and the ire of the American people with the same courage that he called upon to glider onto Normandy Beach on D-Day and report from war zones all over the world. And while you're watching all the memorial coverage today, with reflections on his marvelous and incredible life, remember that he was, after that broadcast, one of the most hated and reviled figures in America, among the very people upon whom he depended to do his battle in the ratings. The first of the "liberal media figures", when that wasn't a particularly popular thing to be.

The truth was that important to him, and telling the truth was what he did, even when the truth was hard to tell, and hard to hear.

I also loved his "You Are There" series, where he would take us back in history, reporting on the significant events of the world just as if they were happening right now, and we were watching them through our TV windows. At the end, he would always tell us, "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... and you were there." Considering the fact that Walter Cronkite reported the news during some of the most significant events in human history, from WW II to Watergate, I would imagine that reporting on the great events of the past was very much the same as reporting on contemporary events, and that he was completely aware of the marvels of change that he had witnessed and told us about that were, indeed, happening RIGHT NOW, and what their significance would be in the context of history.

He told us our beloved president had been shot. He told us that man had left his footprint on the moon. He told us we could not win a war that so many of our sons and brothers had spilled their blood to win. He told us who our new president would be. He told us when one of those presidents betrayed us. And he did it in his grave and reassuring baritone, and often with a twinkle of excitement in his eye when the nobility of humankind made itself evident. He also told us, from time to time, with a tear in his eye. He told us in color, as he had told us in black and white--and even before there was a picture at all, over the waves of our radios. And you knew, when he finished, that it really was "the way it was", with his personal integrity intact and his dedication to the truth unmarred.

It was a remarkable life--a life that was lived in a time when it was glorious to be a reporter. And I don't think he ever lost the gratitude that a real reporter would have for the privilege to have witnessed such a remarkable space of time, or the excitement a reporter would feel as he watched history in the making. That gratitude and excitement was obvious to those who watched him--just as obvious as his precision and his character and his endlessly high standards.

And the rest of us who were around got to share that with him. There are many, many people, some reading here, who weren't so lucky, and I feel a certain sorrow for them, that they didn't get to experience what was arguably the last of the true NEWSMEN, because it is very different from what we know now. Reality without cynicism, truth without varnish, information without opinion, news without spin.

It was glorious.

And if you want to know what it looked like to us, here's an example...



Facts--with a heart.

Thank you, Uncle Walter, for all you did.

Godspeed, and rest well.

If you need a little break from the "All Michael, All The Time" nonsense that is currently sucking up airtime on every bleedin' television station from coast to coast, and you need a bit of a giggle, go meander your mind over to Sarah Palin's Facebook page, and read what messages your fellow 'Merkins have written to Saint Sarah.

It would appear that the majority of her fans are flexing their uneducated writing skills, chomping at the bit to support her petty and vindictive public flounce out of the governor's mansion and into the wild blue yonder of her narcissistic personality disorder. And a more swirling, illogical, misspelled and ungrammatical flood of blind and misguided adoration you would have a hard time finding in the blogosphere, let me tell ya.

Meanwhile, our intrepid Alaskan bloggers and Huffington Post contributors Shannyn Moore and Ak Muckraker are going strong in the face of ridiculous threats of slander suits from the Palin camp. Shannyn is making halibut ceviche and Ak is attending backyard barbecues in the face of this legal folderol, clearly maintaining what is known in the politically correct corporate world as a "work/life balance".

And good for them, I say. Would that Sarah Palin could have done the same thing.

It would appear that Ms. Palin is all for free speech if you are a misguided, half-assed, deposed California beauty queen, but if you are actually exercising that right in criticism of her...no, not so much. Call the lawyers and start them composing blue-backs to help protect the Fairy Princess of the Wilderness from those meaniepoos.

And the truth is, she ASKED for this. She made herself, and her family, with all purpose, public figures. She did it to herself. And what made her think that she would somehow be immune to the kind of public scrutiny and its attending ridicule that every public figure, since time immemorial, has suffered? Did she think that an allowance would be made for her?

WHY?

And what is it with Republican women? Do they not get the concept of "contractual obligation"? Miss California gets canned because she won't get her ass to contracted public appearances, and St. Sarah bows out, mid-term, from her obligations as the duly-elected governor of Alaska and decides to take her show on the road because it's not fun for her anymore and David Letterman makes jokes about her daughters? You were mean to me, so I'm going home to my pretty pink bedroom to lick my wounds?

I mean, PLEASE. Are they incapable of seeing anything, save a pregnancy, to completion?

What intelligent life form could actually buy into this shit?

She is a living, breathing joke, and if she thought that she would be able to deflect the public ridicule by stepping down, she was sorely mistaken, because now the likes of George Freakin' Will is disparaging her.

I don't know about you, but I'm poppin' the popcorn--this is only going to get better.

Until we are all free, we are none of us free.

--Emma Lazarus

As you celebrate today--and you SHOULD--remember that the battle still goes on, and that we must win.

And special shout outs to the Great State of Alaska, who earned a little more independence yesterday!

Things were so busy yesterday that I thought my brains were going to explode.

Back to the surgeons--there's something surreal about hearing someone singing "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" from Grease into your crotch as they deal with your dressings..;-) It all got very silly, which is better than everything being awful at the doctor's office--it's better to be laughing than crying, definitely. The surgeon says three more weeks and I'm back to work, so I'm taking every minute of laughter I can get before the stress ramps up.

Then we went to check out the nursing facility that they'll be releasing Mother when she gets out of the hospital. The last four days in that whole area of my life have been a little emotional, as well as busy, so going to this lovely place back in the woods full of what appeared to be truly happy people and to be treated so well and so attentively gives me hope that this will be a good place for her, at least temporarily and maybe permanently. I hope that she likes it as well as I did.

Then over to the hospital to visit her, and then on to Dr. G's office for MY PCP checkup.

He was in rare form.

He took a look at my incisions, then grinned at me and said, "Your ass looks great!"

"Thanks," I said. "So does yours."

I like him. I don't know why I resist going to him as much as I do....;-)

On Friday, Barb The Home Care Nurse (she takes care of both Mother AND me at this point) called me from Mom and Dad's house to let me know that Mom was running a fever of 101.6. Their doctor's office was closed for the day (which is a whole 'NOTHER issue, that may or may not be expanded upon later), and Mother was so weak that she probably could not have walked herself to the car to go to the doctor's office anyway, so they called the ambulance and off she went to the ER.

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This is just heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. To have to face this whole idea, for him, is to have to face the idea that he isn't who he thinks he is, and that his life isn't what he thought it was. It's having to face 81 when he doesn't FEEL 81. I get it. I totally get it.

But the idea of having some stranger decide FOR him what needs doing, rather than being denied the dignity of making those decisions for himself, is far more heartbreaking. And he doesn't understand that that could happen, without too much trouble at all--that he could transition from being a human being to a "case" without too much sweat at all.

So I'll be going over in just a little while to make sure that the bedclothes are changed and washed...and do what I can to reverse the idea that I hate them, and am only interested in "putting them away".

If I ever had designs on becoming a politician's wife, they have completely evaporated at this point.

Can someone please tell me how freaking HEARTLESS one has to be in order to refer to one's four young sons as "jewels and blessings" three days after one leaves them alone--on a day that celebrates your relationship with them--in order to dip your flaccid and sorry dick in some exotic hoo hah while continuing to stand firmly on your lies and your "Christian values"?

Jesus, I'm sure, cannot stop puking. And during what pauses he manages in the middle of his puke fest, he is heard to scream, "Get off my side!!"

And these people are "defending marriage"? And gay couples who want to be in monogamous, government sanctioned, committed relationships are the THREAT?

It is like the entire Republican party and their designs on 2012 are marching relentlessly and without thought off the cliff in a suicidal death march. It's almost like they're trying to implode.

Maybe it sounds like I need my tinfoil beanie, but it seems way too programmed to be coincidental....

We've been extremely lazy around here of late.

But I think that Finn has proven himself particularly good at the fine art of finding some of the best napping places around...









Now you know why I don't have a windowsill garden.

He's the reason we can't have nice things...;-)!