My mother's birthday is today. She turned 88-years-old. Happy birthday, Mom!
Let me confess: I held something back from my last update. I've come to a deeper understanding of this new chapter of my life. I'm here in Arkansas taking care of my mother and I made the decision to do this back in September. (It wasn't much of a decision to make as it was simply the right thing to do and the only thing to do in these circumstances.) It's a new chapter in my mother's life and my life and I've recently started looking ahead as to how this chapter closes out. Well, this chapter closes when my mother dies.
For some reason (aversion, simple-mindedness) this hadn't occurred to me until I was journaling a couple of weeks ago and it struck me that the end of this chapter is the end of my mother, may that day be far into the future. It's a grim reality that I've been living with and not a day passes when I don't think about it. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I look at her and think to myself that I'm with her now until she dies. --This is a lot for me to deal with and I don't quite know what to do with it.
I managed my father's death but arrived by his hospital bed when he was barely conscious. Interestingly, his yahrzeit, the anniversary of this death that Jews commemorate, happened last week. Mom is slowly but surely losing her consciousness but in an entirely different way. We're at the point now that, at lunch, she can't remember what she had for breakfast or if she had breakfast at all. Mom is very good natured and affable. And I hope this characteristic continues. And we have experienced another decline: Mom says she's afraid of her shower and won't bathe anymore. What will probably happen is that I'll contact a service we've already used to have a home healthcare person come by every week or so to help Mom shower. If I don't do this, Mom will develop medical conditions that will be very unpleasant for everyone. And so it goes.
There's a coincidence I want to tell you about. In 1981, two graduates of the University of Missouri - Columbia, one a graduate of the prestigious journalism school, the other an Arts & Science graduate with a major in English Literature and Film Studies (me), were accepted into the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course. My colleague was George Hodgman. He went down to NYC after the program ended as did many of us. He became a highly successful magazine and book editor who was pushed out during a wave of publishing consolidation just about the time his mother in Paris, Missouri needed a hand when she developed dementia. (My parents were born and raised in Paris, Texas.) George moved from NYC to Paris and ended up writing a best selling book, Bettyville, about his experience. He had long struggled with drug addition and society's pressure of growing up gay in small town America. George committed suicide when he was sixty-years-old.
People have told me that I should write a book about my experience and my reaction is that George already wrote that book because he did.
Mom's had a couple of difficult days recently. I came home one day after a trip to the dentist and running some errands and she was in a real snit because she couldn't find anything to eat even though our larder has been replenished following the ice storm. Her mood finally improved by the end of the day around dinner but she woke me up that night because she couldn't find her cellphone case and was in a full on panic attack complete with uncontrollable diarrhea. It was all very unpleasant. And she's had some nightmares that require comforting back rubs.
The really big news is that Mom and I were both vaccinated. Once we got our appointment, it was a very smooth process that was hosted in the tornado shelter of a public park on South Zero Street in Fort Smith. Getting the appointment was not so easy. Mom was already enrolled for a vaccination at a pharmacy here in Alma. Mercy Medical, the health care operation Mom and I use, contacted us that Mom could also be enrolled in its program so I put Mom on that list too. Then, a week later, I started getting multiple texts and emails from Mercy that we could schedule an appointment for Mom. When I tried doing that on my computer, the result was the same for me as putting Mom on Mercy's waiting list. But the texts and emails continued, several times a day.
Remembering that browsers behave differently under different circumstances, I tried scheduling Mom's appointment from my cellphone. Success! I was cheered and let a couple of my friends know. One replied that this was good news but what about a vaccination for me? As I'm only 62-years-old, I didn't think I qualified because the cut-off age is 65. But then I remembered that Mom and I share the same telephone number and email address on our medical records. Maybe the duplicate messages I was receiving weren't duplicate messages, maybe these were messages to me too. So, just for laughs, I tried scheduling an appointment for me and, what do you know, I was successful! I didn't lie on my application. I didn't fudge any facts. I do have medical conditions that put me at risk. And I ended up getting vaccinated! God bless America. Mom and I have our second dose scheduled for March 22 and we'll be there, right on time.
I have no guilt about how I organized my vaccination. I do not want to bring Covid into my home and expose my mother to it whether she is vaccinated or not. And we will continue to live an isolated life. I do have some guilt that I ended up on the list above school teachers, other essential workers, any Black person and other person of color, and people older than myself.
More news about myself and medicine: Originally, when I "onboarded" with my primary care physician (actually a nurse practitioner), she told me that she would be able to manage my psych meds and I wouldn't need to also have a psychiatrist. That cheered me as having more than one doctor begins to make my healthcare more complicated. I know from personal experience. But as my psych prescriptions came up to be filled, my PCP began to better understand the actual load of my meds and decided that she couldn't manage them by herself. So I have a referral now for a psychiatrist. That triggered a referral to a counselor, probably an MSW, who will administer the talking cure and let the psychiatrist manage the prescriptions. That's how it usually goes based on my experience. I'll let you know.
Good news about chess: My skills are advancing. I've completed several tiers of lessons, am still working puzzles that are getting increasingly difficult, and playing games against the computer and consistently winning. Of course the computer is set at the level just above the easiest one, so I need to step my game up to the next level. I tried this a week ago and ended up wanting to resign from the game because I ended up in such a miserable position. I couldn't figure out how to resign and settled myself into playing for the loss and actually ended up in an unexpected stalemate against the computer. Go me!
And I've been sucked deeper into the modern chess world. One of the "celebrities" I follow on chess.com has a YouTube channel and I've subscribed to it. Then, I realized that a lot of chess action, including that guy that I follow, is happening on Twitch. Twitch! So, now I'm starting to watch chess on Twitch. And then I found out about the chess scene on Discord so I reopened the account I started when I was interested in Daf Yomi (a seven year program to read and learn Talmud) and have started my search for the chess servers there. I haven't cracked that yet, but I'm optimistic that I will.
Slowly, but surely, I'm going through my boxes in the basement that were moved here from my rooms in Madison. In particular, I'm looking for a three-inch, three-ring binder where I filed my important papers. In that binder, I hope I will find the title to my car that's still in Madison. I need the title so I can donate the car to Jewish Social Services in Madison.
I celebrated Purim with my congregation in Madison and it was funny. We did a MadLibs reading of the Megillah and it was fun. Many on the zoom call were in costume. That was fun. I've order matzah from Amazon, egg (which I enjoy) and special Shmurah matzah which, based on my experience, is truly the bread of affliction.
Of course, I've been reading the new Stoppard biography by Hermione Lee. It is really good and I'm not writing that just because I'm such a Stoppard fanboy. Lee was already a well-respected biographer and she's done a masterful job writing Stoppard's life. She has a knack for tracing his personal history to his work and she's consumed and seemingly memorized all of Stoppard's, even his more obscure radio plays. I don't believe art is autobiographical, but there are connections of course and Lee shows the connections without any strain.
I'm preparing to lead my synagogue's March Men's Havarah meeting. We're having a discussion of one of my favorite topics: Sex. I've learned just enough Kabbalah and Talmud to be dangerous on this topic. I've also picked up my rabbi's suggestion and have written a special prayer that can be recited either before or after making love. I like it and will be posting it on an online service called RitualWell, a site that collects blessings and prayers that are not already part of our liturgy. I'll share it with you soon, as soon as I get over my shyness. There will be handouts.
I was reading The Forward and learned about a movie called The Vigil. It's a horror movie about a Shomer, someone who observes the ritual of watching over a dead person until they are buried. Our hero is hired (yes, it's also a way to make some extra cash as I learned when I worked for the Jewish funeral home in San Francisco) to take the overnight shift. Terror ensues. I thought to myself, what a great idea for a horror movie! I should have come up with that! So now this is on my list of movies to watch.
When I go to the library to pick up books for Mom, my first stop is actually its website and I reserve books for her. I've noticed that each book listing has a couple of numbers attached to the head of the page. One of the numbers is a score from the state of Arkansas about the reading level of the book. I was surprised when I discovered that The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks, was written at a fifth grade level. Then, I discovered the LM number, the Lexile Measure of the book that helps make a relative measure of a book for the level it's written on. So my curiosity got the best of me and I did some investigation about the relative measure of some books. These are the Lexile numbers for a selection of books:
Middlemarch, George Eliot: 880
Harry Potter and the Socerer's Stone, JK Rowling: 880
The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks: 930
Interview with a Vampire, Anne Rice: 900
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle: 740
New Moon, Stephanie Myers: 670
Hamlet, Shakespeare: 1,390
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh: 760
The Stand, Stephen King: 840
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norman Juster: 1,000
The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss: 430
So, there you have it. The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorites growing up, is up there with Hamlet and above Middlemarch. I don't think I'll pay much attention to the LM score in the future.
Two of my dearest friends were grooming their library and came across some books I loaned them ages ago. They've returned the to me. Why, oh why did I lend them not one, not two, but three editions of my beloved Tristram Shandy I have no idea. One of the editions is my tattered college paperback. I count the experience of reading that book to be my first, deep reading experiences. It set the bar for all my reading thereafter. It was the winter in Columbia, Missouri and was so cold where I lived that the water froze in the toilet. I would snuggle under an electric blanket and read for hours and hours on end, completely rapt.
My sense of time is beginning to match that of my mother's. Days seem to be melding together and sleep comes in fits and starts. Observing Sabbath and studying the Parsha, the weekly Torah portion, help me stay into the cycle of days, but my days don't have much structure to them. Perhaps I'll change that.