On 20/20 tonight, a program about mothers and daughters. I couldn’t identify with most of it, except for the older Jewish mother and her daughter. I could learn from that daughter, who counters her mother’s criticisms with humor. Why can’t I just make a joke out of the controlling things that my mother still tries to lay on me??
OK. So that program wasn’t really all about me. But an ebook I downloaded from my library does resonate a lot more with me, especially since the adult main character finds herself stuck back at her parents’ house because her mother has alzheimer’s and her father is dying of colon cancer. What she says about her mother is about mine too, and this quote did make me smile because it’s so true.:
Wherever she went she left behind a trail of soggy tissues.
Oh, man, do I know that trail. They fall off her lap, out of her sleeves, from between her bony fingers. They overflow from the pockets of everything she wears. I’m always bending down to pick up those soggy tissues. And that’s all both very real a very apt metaphor for just about how it goes around here these days..
I bought myself a refurbished iRiver multi-media player that they don’t make anymore to which I downloaded two audio books to listen to as I try to fall asleep each night. I got if off ebay for a pretty reasonable price; it will probably take me the rest of my life to learn how to use all of its features. But all I care about now is using it for my ebooks and NPR podcasts. Next, I’ll teach myself how to download photos of my grandson. Maybe even a little video of him. Good exercise for the brain.
It’s supposed to be a nice day coming up. In the 50s. I’ll haul my mother out of bed by noon and we’ll get in the car and go somewhere. Maybe we’ll get lost — although I’m not sure I can get any more lost than I am.
It’s all about me.

First, some fact-facing from the contemporary woman I most admire, Molly Ivins:
President Bush says it’s a great idea and he’s proud of the secret spy program? Attorney General Gonzales explains breaking the law is no problem? Dick Cheney says accept spying, or Osama bin Laden will get you?
Or might we actually have gotten far enough to point out that the series of high-profile security events is in fact part of a propaganda campaign by our own government?
A Molly Ivins column a day keeps defeatism at bay.
Meanwhile in the little picture, “Snow, snow,” she says as she wanders around her bedroom.
“Yup, ma,” you say. “There’s lots of snow outside.”
She shakes her head and waves her hands, frustrated that you can’t understand her. “Snow, snow,” she repeats. Then she puts her hands to her face.
“Ah,” you say. “NOSE! You want a tissue to wipe your nose, right?”
Right.
More and more often she sounds like a schizophrenic. She knows what she wants to say, but her brain reverses letters, skips to another track, leaves her frustrated and frightened. It’s worse when her pain is worse. The pain makes her cry.
Such are the facts, here, as you put your arms around her and hug her and she kisses your neck. “You’re my mom,” she says. “I love you.”

I continue to get relevant comments on posts I made a while ago. Sometimes those comments behoove me to go back and re-read that post. This is one of them well worth re-reading.
As education specialists of every ilk scramble to respond intelligently to the recently publicity about how girls are now doing a lot better than boys in school and what to do about it, I can’t help repeating what I said in my previous post: “Everything we are is in our brain.”
BUT that doesn’t mean — even if gender IS in the brain — that all of our personality traits, including learning styles, are gender based.
Like many boys, some girls are tomboys and learn better when they can move around and not have to sit still. Some boys, like many girls, get totally involved in process and are not, by nature, assertive.
It seems to me that education first has to address the kinds of intelligences that children can have, and no two children will have the same balance among those intelligences. In dealing with each child as an individual, issues of gender=based tendencies become irrelevant — or they would become irrelevant if that’s the way education was conducted. Each child would be enouraged, motivated, and rewarded for honing skills in all the various intelligences. What would eventually happen in terms of learning “styles” and gender, I’d bet, is that we’d wind up with a bell curve, with some girls all he way on one end, a whole bunch of girls and boys rising from each end toward the middle, and some boys on the other end.
And, maybe someday the advice given by a character that I quoted in that old post will resonate respectfully with both genders:
“What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn’t exactly move over and make room for me –I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That’s something some women don’t seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away. Everyone has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you– you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there’s nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That’s what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”
I wonder what the male equivalent of that kind of statement would be.

Nah, not mine.
I’m thinking about my 3 1/2 year old grandson who’s having chronic digestive problems. Poor kid. They’re testing him to see what’s going on.
On the other hand, his brain is full of that good fire. My daughter tells me this story:
He doesn’t just absorb and retain things, he makes connections and builds bridges in his head — there’s a line in the Polar Express at the end, “The thing about trains is, it doesn’t matter where they are going. What matters is deciding to climb on board.”
Last night we were playing trucks in his room and he suddenly said, “The thing about trucks is, it doesn’t matter where they are going.” After I got over my shock, I said, “what does matter?” He smiled and said, “Climbing over me to the other seat and getting in.”
Everything we are is in our brains, it seems. As I watch my mother’s brain slowly, slowly shut down, I am even more aware of that.
On 20/20 last night, Norah Vincent shared her experience pretending to be a man while she researched her book “Self-made Man: One woman’s journey into manhood and back.” During her interview, she makes the point that “gender is in the brain.”
Our brains, ourselves.

Since I live about a 20 minute drive through the mountains to get to my “local” library, I’m just beside myself with delight (interesting image, isn’t that?) now that my regional library system has instituted a way to download ebooks, including audio ebooks — which is what I tend to borrow because I fall asleep easier when I’m distracted from my daily realities by listening to fictional escapades.
Being a technological idiot, it took me a while to figure out how to use the software that you have to download, but I did manage to blunder my way through it. As of now, I have two novels burned into CDs, and as soon as I buy more RW discs, I will burn some more.
The one I’m listening to these nights is Elizabeth Berg’s The Year of Pleasures. I’ve read other stuff of hers, which are definitely “chick picks,” but she writes well and has a gift for making you see and feel another woman’s inner life.
Mom’s still sleeping, and it’s just after noon. I can get some work done around here if I put my mind to it. Heh.

I’m listening to Eva Cassidy while the sweet bread rises in the bread machine, the apple crisp bakes in the oven, and I sautee onions and mushroom for a turkey meat loaf that will be for dinner. My mother is still sleeping at 1:30 in the afternoon. She sleeps about 15 hours a night these days, including many trips to the bathroom.
I usually sleep late too, but on this pouringly dismal day, I’m up earlier than usual because of a series of return phone calls from various doctors. My tests came up with nothing to indicate why I am getting “head rushes” accompanied by a fog that drifts over the lower part of my right eye. So I guess I’ll get my eyes checked, again. I made an appointment with a neurologist for my mother to see what we might be able to do about pain management for her. Ah drugs!
Meanwhile, I cook. I hate to clean. I leave that until when I can’t stand it any more. I figure I’ve accomplished something when I clean up from my cooking.
Across the evening sky all the birds are leaving
Oh but then you know it was time for them to go
By the winter fire I will still be dreaming
I do not count the time

While my mother is sleeping, I should be cleaning up my littered living space. Instead, I’m eating Post’s Maple Pecan Whole Grain cereal laced with half and half and reading the February issue (not yet online) of Harper’s magazine and listening to Josh Groban. Well, that was a few minutes ago. Now I’m at the keyboard instead of cleaning up my littered living space.
I’m blown away by an article in Harper’s called “Crapshoot — Everyone loses when politics is a game” by Garret Keizer, which explores the great divide between “players” and “workers.”
Some quotes:
— A player is characterized by the consciousness that he is different from ordinary people. That difference is key to his self-understanding.
–The Democratic Party offers to validate your identity. The Republican Party instead offers to give you an identity — that of a player.
— For the true worker, the pleasure is in the work. The pleasure of the player, on the other hand, is in “having it made.”
— Exculsion is contained in the very definition of the player. If everyone goes onto “the field,” it’s no longer the field. It’s a park.
— The player cannot imagine himself in different terms, but the worker has a second incarnation. When work is denied he becomes a fighter.
— People who say, “America is now a deeply divided country” are either facetious or naive. It has always been a deeply divided country.”
As Home Health Aids rally today in Central Park for fair worker wages, I am particularly attracted to some of Keizer’s reflections on religion:
“The most interesting kinds of religion, for my money, challenge the Gnostic pretensions of the player. The Buddhhist bodhisattva, for example, is a player who thinks like a worker. Elite in his attainment, he refuses to enter Nirvana “until the grass itself is enlightened.” Blessedness for the bodhisattva means joining the union When Eugene Debs said that as long as there was a criminal class, he was in it, that “While there is a soul in prison I am not free,” he was talking like a bodhisattva. He was talking like one of the worker saints. Not for nothing is Jesus remembered as a caprenter, like the stonecutter Socrates. Both were markedly blue collar in their approach to wisdom. Introduce them to a player, and their natural inclination was to take him down a peg……
“Consider you own call, brothers and sisters, “St. Paul (a tentmaker) writes to the church at Corninth. “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, but many were of noble birth.” Not many of you were players, in other words. The rise of evangelicals in American politics is the latest attempt to rectify that deficiency. It is an attempt with theological parallels in the frequently intoned evanglical credo — derived interestingly enough from St. Paul himself and distorted by any number of stadium preachers since — that it is “faith in Jesus Christ” and not good works that saves the believer. In the extreme version, the “Saved become players, with Jesus consigned to the role of their Unclue Guido. He made a deal for us on the Cross. We don’t have to work. Wer’re made man. The ethical agnostics, the observant Jews, the wetback Mexicans mumbling over ther beads in the backs of cattle trucks (the same people we hire at slave wages to watch our kids and diaper our parents) let them believe in the necessity of good works. It’s rather convenent that they do.
As for us, our Godfather is in heaven. Or maybe in the White House.
Keizer’s lengthy piece is worth totally quoting. Certainly worth buying the February copy of Harper’s to read.
So, before I get back to work, I’ll end with the following quote, which reminds me of what I used to tell my Dad: ” When the revolution comes, you know what side I’ll be on.”
The worker, on the other hand, has a second incarnation, and this is what makes him more interesting. When the opportunity of work is denied to hm, or too many of the fruits of his labor are withheld from him, the worker becomes a fighter. He and she have done this many times…….. You may say that players fight too, but that is a comparatively shallow statement. What players do is use weapons for toys — and workers. Jousting, counting coup, reciting one’s deeds and lineage in an epic poem — that is all player stuff, and the worker hasn’t got time for it. The worker’s approach to fighting is, like his approach to everything else, decidely workmanlike. The worker’s way of war is to bust heads and get back to work.
And I guess that’s what I’d better do.

She still sleeps a lot and has pains all over her body. But she’s more lucid in the moment (can’t remember what happened yesterday) and keeps wanting to dance.
She can’t dance in her backless slippers, wants something with a leather sole.
So I get on the Net anf finally find a pair of suede soled slippers — black brocade ballerina slippers. She can wear them around the house and they’re not too expensive. No tax and free shipping. I order a size bigger than she normally takes, hoping they will be wide enough for her troubled feet.
Do the Chinese use a different shoe template than we do? Made in China, they arrive too small. Free shipping back. I reorder an even larger size and hope for the best.
She wants to dance, and she wants dancing shoes.

As a nation, we don’t only outsource and “leave to the other guy” basic life-saving services, like the ones that would have saved those dozen dead miners — as the NY Times reports:
This devastating timeline is at the core of a detailed report by Ken Ward Jr., a reporter for The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, that questions whether some of the 12 fatalities might have been prevented by a faster, better-organized rescue effort…..
As individuals, we outsource the care of our children, our elderly, our homes, even our meals. And, with this outsourcing comes a detachment from all of those connections to people and actions that, until these days, have been at the core of what being a human being living on this planet is.
We idolize the machines and mechanisms that disconnect us from the limitations of our human bodies. We outsource the capcities of our own minds to the machinations of those various entertainment and physical labor saving machines.
No, I don’t want to back to the dark ages, and obviously, as I sit here at one of those machines, I’m not anti-technology — especially technology that saves lives and makes physical work easier.
But as I watch how much my ailing mom needs to be with family, needs to have a sense of being truly cared for — as I do the physical things for her that I could outsource — as, last night, I watched a tv commercial that ends with “Good Night, John Boy” — and as I read the Times article about how those men would have been saved had there been less corporate penny pinching and more human consideration — I got to thinking that this outsourcing phenomena is leeching us of our connections of what is important about living in these bodies.
Which is all why I didn’t outsource my mother.
But I’m thinking that, when I’m her age, having lived so long in a society based on outsourcing, I will not think it odd or dehumanizing to use that outsourcing service myself.
Times change. Not always for the better.