To hell with Hezbollah and its daily headlining. Sometimes it’s important in keeping one’s spirits up to be reminded about life’s more fun-damental absurdities.. The following are excerpted from Harper’s Weekly Review:

It’s those small miracles that keep me going.
The one enchantingly irridescent baby skink who lives somewhere near our cement steps and who somehow survived the snake who prowled the area not too long ago.
The new green growth at the tip of the one piece I broke off and stuck in dirt from the 35-year old cactus (inherited from a former lover who was moving) that I had carted along on my last four moves and finally chucked into the woods because I was sure it was dead.
The avocado plant I grew from a pit whose tips I had pinched back and thought I killed that is now sprouting two new branches.
My garden’s yellow pepper plants nipped early in the bud by deer? squirrels? now two feet tall and budding again.
My spunky chubby cat who comes when I call her, no matter where she is outside, and who continues to try to teach me her meowy language.
Life responds to patience and tenacity. So I order lily bulbs to plant in the fall, seeds to start indoors in winter.
My mother has two days of partial awareness, responding to both a visit to a priest staying briefly in the area who was a close friend of both parents and also to a visit from our cousins from Florida. And then she has two days of rummaging through her closets taking out all of her clothes, forgetting who we are, wandering around her three small rooms looking for ……. something. First she’s cold and puts on layers of blouses. Then she’s hot and tries to take off all of her clothes.
We have eaten the last of the tomatoes that I was able to salvage from the beleaguered plants. They were deliciously satisfying small miracles. I am awaiting the blooming of the resurrected peppers.
I have always been tenacious. Now, I am learning patience. A small miracle.

s I was uploading photos from my cousins’ visit, I took a good look at my own image and realized just how many more lines and wrinkles I’ve developed in the past year, how much older I look, how much more tired — how fat my upper arms have gotten.
So I took a look at how I’ve changed over the past half-dozen years. I am quickly developing the face of an old lady, and I don’t like it one bit. Feh on caregiving!!

ell, me and the millions of others who got his email asking me to share his message with my colleagues. Since it’s a message the point of which I share, I will share it. Here:

emember, that is. Remember the cousins who are coming to visit on Wednesday. Last month, she remembered them. Tonight, she doesn’t seem to.
She hasn’t seen the couple in more than 20 years. They are in their 80s now and live in Florida — are stopping by on their annual drive to visit the wife’s family.
On Friday, we will take her to visit the Polish priest who was a good friend of my dad’s — gave him those Last Rites. The priest is filling for a colleague who is on vacation this week and whose parish is in the next town. My mother says that she doesn’t remember him either.
I’m hoping that she’ll remember them all when she sees them — when they talk to her in Polish and anchor her in the past that they shared.
We never know, morning by morning, whether she will wake up remembering or not. “Where’s my mother,” she sometimes asks, sometimes asks in tears.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask her on those vacant mornings. “You’re my mother,” she says. “Where’s my brother, Teddy?” she wants to know. She always remembers her brother Teddy. And her husband. The people who took care of her before her memory began its dulling decline.
I remember well that young man cousin (he was eighteen when I was three), holding me by the hand, showing me the cows and chickens, giving me rides on the tractor, and letting me pick strawberries that I would eat still warm from the ripe fields. We have been emailing as of late, getting to know each other again for the first time.
I’ll bet our cousins can make her remember. They will make her laugh and tell her the stories she has forgotten about the good times on the old farm, where all the uncles and aunts and cousins would gather at least once a summer for a week out of the stifling city. And the adults would sit around at night and sing all of the old Polish songs about a homeland far away but not forgotten.
What I remember most are the smells — fresh hay piled in the barn, hot strawberry jam being ladled by Ciocia Steffa into the dozens of Mason jars she sealed with melted wax, warm milk straight from the cow, tilled fields wet from a day of rain.
What, I wonder, will she remember.

hile I am anti-this-war, I am not unilaterally anti-military. Granted, we currently have a screwed up military system, and, on top of that, the individuals who have been rousted out of their regular lives and sent out to shore up the rapidly exhausting fighting forces across the world are really getting short shrift (if they even manage to come back to get it). Employers of reservists who are called into active duty are required by law to make their jobs available to them if/when they get back. But often these reservists (and therefore their families) lose their health and other benefits and wind up taking pay cuts if/when they get back.
Sears, however, is voluntarily paying the difference in salaries and maintaining all benefits, including medical insurance and bonus programs, for all called up reservist employees for up to two years.
According to snopes.com,

hat would Lawrence Welk think of the world today?
What makes me be thinking about Lawrence Welk, you might wonder. I’m not much the Lawrence Welk type — all that flag waving an hymning. Don’t mind the ballroom dancing, though, but the accordian music and the Lennon sisters I could live without.
I sat with my mother this evening and watched a DVD From Lawrence Welk to America with Love. She, of course, was entranced by the “big band” music and the harmonious singers. I couldn’t help notice how old everyone was — especially the audience. I mean, they looked even older than I am.
If you didn’t live through the 40s and 50s, then you have no idea how patriotic we all were during those years. We all believed that America was the greatest country in the world, and like Superman, we would always defend “truth, justice, and the American way.”
We were a white bread country, at least on the surface. For those of us on that surface, it felt good to be proud to be an American. We believed we were the good guys. Lawrence Welk was a good guy. He honored his parents and his family; he believed that God had blessed him; he loved America.
I wonder if he would still love what it has become.

ast week she slept 18 out of 24 hours every day. This week, it’s just about the reverse. Her moods swing to the extremes. At first, she’s weak and panting, eyes almost closed, unsteady on her feet. She won’t sit, won’t lie down. She walks — small baby-steps. Hands, nose, and feet like ice. Then suddenly she’s smiling, wants to dance, strolls around her room, pokes through closets and drawers. And then she sits, head in hands, mumbling softly, but I can’t understand a word she’s saying.
After six hours of this, I have a meltdown. An extreme meltdown. Six hours is all I can take; then I need a break to do something. DO SOMETHING other than baby-sit someone I can’t even have a conversation with but can’t ignore to keep my mind and hands busy. My sib has to take over. I sit myself down in front of my sewing machine and do some mending/adjusting/hemming. Sewing calms me down because I have to focus on what I’m doing, block everything else out.
This has been an extremely frustrating day for me. It’s 11:30 p.m. and she’s still not asleep. But I sure want to be.

‘ve been wanting to write something about this issue, but, being neither one or the other or both, I felt I shouldn’t.
However, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, written by a practicing Jew, put it out there in a way I respect and understand and support.
I wasn’t looking for this kind of piece. I went over to check out my blogfriend Tamarika and linked to this post of hers, which led me to this blogpost.
Andrew Benjamin, a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, ended his article in the Sydney Morning Herald with this: