I’ve mentioned before that Jim Culleny of No Utopia emails out a poem a day, sometimes his own, sometimes another’s. Sometimes I post them here, and here’s one I just had to.

It’s 5 a.m., and the sky is getting light in the east as we drive back from the emergency room with my mother finally asleep in my arms in the back seat. We got to the hospital around eleven. Delerious and (as far as we could tell) dehydrated, she moaned and cried and cursed at us during the entire drive out. She fought us as we positioned her in the wheel chair and then she managed to kick one of the nurses who was trying to take some blood and put in the hydrating IV.
We felt so helpless. Obvioulsy she was in a lot of pain. When her pain gets bad, that triggers episodes of dementia, and she becomes unable to articulate anythng about where and how badly she hurts. Her hands come at me, clawlike. “I want to kill you,” she cries. “Give me a gun.” Anger and frustration fueled by pain. Nothing will calm her but a sedative added to her IV.
Some of what she is going through is the result of trying some new meds, one of which made her so nauseous that she wouldn’t eat or drink and that’s why we took her to the emergency room. The other makes her sleep for hours, after which she (sort of) wakes up, eats a little something, and then goes back to sleep. Meds are trial and error. Not every med works the same on everyone. And she’s so tiny that even the lower doses are too strong for her. We have to work with her geriatric doctor to adjust the meds. My sibling is impatient with the lack of medical certainty. So much of medical science is hit or miss. And if you miss, you try again. But meanwhile, she suffers. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” she mutters. “Please help me,” she mumbles.
The emergency room has one bed empty. “You should have called an ambulance,” the admitting nurse says to me. I didn’t tell her that I wanted to, but my sibling wanted to drive us. That was one battle I didn’t have the energy to fight. It would have only upset my mother more.
I’ve said ths before, but I don’t know how ill elderly people advocate for themselves. For example, there’s a protocol they’re supposed to follow in the emergency room before they can give any treatment: take blood pressure and temperature, draw blood and analyze, get urine sample, do EKG, do an X-ray or CAT scan if indicated….. But there was my mother, completely distraught and delusional, feeling pain with every move she made. She fought against letting them take her blood pressure because she knows how much it hurts her thin arms every time. She ripped off the EKG wires as soon as the nurse put them on. So, we had to be her advocates and insist that they hydrate and and sedate her and worry about the other stuff later. We all had to hold her down to get the IV in her arm and let them draw blood and then put in the hydration. That was when she kicked the nurse and said shewas going to kill us all.
It was a long night for us because my mother slept during the IV drip. Other patients came and went. A young man, maybe about 16 years old, sullen and belligerent, handcuffed, blood-spattered, walks in with two cops. I look into his eyes. Anger. Fear. Defiance. Sadness. Sadness.
Later:
I’ve had exactly four hours sleep. She’s up. She’s only talking in Polish. My sibling doesn’t understand any of it. I was bilingual as a child and can still remember enough to communicate in basics. I’m surprised to realize that I’m slipping into actually thinking in Polish rather than mentally translating from English before I speak. But I’ve forgotten too much. Mostly I say, in Polish, “I don’t understand. Talk in English.”
She has pain on the right side of her face, including her eye. It could be residual shingles pain or maybe her glaucoma has escalated. We put ice on her forehead. We give her meds (not the one that made her nauseaous, though). I call her opthamologist, and he will meet us tomorrow (Saturday) morning at his office even though his office won’t really be open. Now there’s a dedicated doctor.
She has tea and homemade bread. She thinks we are people she knew when she livedi in Poland, asking us where we were born and where we went to school. She carries on a monologue in Polish. She laughs.
At least today she can laugh.
I am so tired I want to cry.
Finally, she sleeps again and so do I.

Now we have a pudgy woodchuck eating my lettuce. I’m tired of fighting the inevitable. He or she can have it all.
Tansy is supposed to keep away bugs. I have planted some near my tomatoes. I wonder if it will keep bugs from noshing on my tomato leaves.
And deer don’t like foxglove. I thew a bunch of foxglove seeds in the ground a year ago. Now I’ve got foxglove all over the place. I wonder if they would keep the deer away if I transplanted them to surround my garden.
Meanwhile, the little (but heavy cement) statue of baby Pan that I’ve been hauling around through every move for the past decade seems to have found a perfect spot. He’s a little worse for wear, having had part of his foot chipped off, but I’ve grown accustomed to his wild appeal.

I have a few manufactured creatures hanging out among my flowers. I’m rather fond of my garden whimsies as well.

There eventually will be a climbing spinach growing up the stakes behind the gargoyle. The other photo is how I try to put to use the trash (like that pallet under the plants and the tire that I painted green) that my brother has lying around his property. That little arrangement is in the woods near entrance to the garage.
And, for the first time ever out here, I spotted a robin. I don’t know why they are rare here on these acres. Actually, fewer and fewer birds are showing up at our feeders, since we take them down at night because of the racoons, and then we don’t get them back outside early enough in the morning.
I have never been a morning person. When my last boss was asked what she might say negative about me, she said that my desk was always messy and I didn’t like to get up in the morning. Some things never change.

On NPR, Harry Shearer has a weekly, hour-long romp through the worlds of media, politics, sports and show business, leavened with an eclectic mix of mysterious music, according to the website where you can listen to podcasts of his program. Listening to Harry romp was what got me through my sloshy drive from Massachusetts — when I wasn’t being entertained by the country music station, of course.
Near the end of Shearer’s June 3 program, he got a phone call from someone he apparently had spoken to before. She identified herself “Yvonne de la Femina,” a cabaret performer, and she recapped her gender journeys from male, to female and back and forth as such three times. (I was surprised that Shearer didn’t make some kind of comment about her being “three times a lady!”)
De la Femina claimed to be working these days doing a one-woman show on a cruise ship sponsored by Lunesta, the sleep-aid. (Was she for real or was this a put on??)
Shearer’s straightforward responses to the chatty transexual made the whole notion of her life and times sound almost plausible. After all, isn’t truth often stranger than fiction?
Then she told of her one date with Phil Spector. That’s worth listening to the podcast for.
Being a Google junkie, when I got home — and after my mother was asleep for the night (such as her night sleeping is, these days) — I did a search for “Yvonne de la Femina.” There was one hit, which rated Shearer’s 1994 album, It Must Have Been Something I Said. This is what it said about Yvonne de la Femina:
Another bit set in Iraq circa 1991 is “The Last Kuwaiti Woman Held Hostage”, which features Shearer interviewing cabaret performer Yvonne de la Femina (played by TV producer Tom Leopold). She is being held because her captors consider her to be a man, despite the fact that she had a sex change operation to make her a woman. The level of humor is quite impressive when you consider that the whole thing, which lasts 14-and-a-half minutes, was improvised.
I suspect that the bit I heard on Sunday was improvised as well. And done so well that they almost had me believing it all.
You can get a list of where and when Shearer’s program airs here.
There’s something uniquely wild and wacky about Harry, and he should be more well known than his is.

It’s Sunday, and I’m driving back from my daughter’s through the deepening fog of the Berkshire Mountains, through bouts of torrential rain that I’m trying to outrace. All along the way, groups of soggy motorcyclists huddle under overpasses, braced for the splatter of our speeding cars. I surf the radio waves for something to keep me awake. For a while, its NPR (more about that another time). I finally settle for country/western.
I grew up with country/western music — Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams…., an aunt who sang and yodelled, neighborhood guys who had a band. They taught me to play three chords, which was all I needed to play every Everly Brothers’ song. And Webb Pierce’s There Stands the Glass, which was sort of my college drinking anthem.
It’s Sunday, and I’m driving through driving rain listening to a countdown of the current top ten country songs. The lyrics are filled homey stories and homely stories and horny stories — all too human stories.
It’s just a high maintenance woman
Don’t want no maintenance man.
Lives and loves lost and found — you can’t have country music without those kinds of stories.
I’ve had my moments, days in the sun
Moments I was second to none
Moments when I knew I did what I thought I couldn’t do
Like that plane ride coming home from the war
That summer my son was born
And memories like a coat so warm
A cold wind can’t get through
Lookin’ at me now you might not know it
But I’ve had my moments
and
I told her way up yonder past the caution light
There’s a little country store with an old Coke sign
You gotta stop in and ask Miss Bell for some of her sweet tea
Then a left will take you to the interstate
But a right will bring you right back here to me
And, of course, you can’t have country without beer and smoke and a hot horny guy:
everytime you take a sip
in this smoky atmosphere
you press that bottle to your lips
and i wish i was your beer
and in the small there of your back
your jeans are playing peek a boo
id like to see the other half
of your butterfly tattoo
I have to say that I was disappointed that I didn’t hear any female singers in the top ten.
And so I switched back to NPR. Stay tuned.

[On Mondays, if he’s so inclined, my non-blogger friend MYRLN will be a guest poster on this weblog.]

TB? So what??

As one who years ago lost both parents to tuberculosis, a mother at age 5 (after being taken protectively from home to live elsewhere with relatives at age 3) and a father at age 14, the current matter of one Andrew Speaker, carrier of a drug-resistant hence particularly deadly form of t.b., strikes a deep chord. And it evokes a powerful reaction: the man is an insensitive, unthinking, uncaring bastard. He is a symbol of that growing class of people in this country — those with economic ease — who think the only ones who matter in the world are themselves. Everyone else can go get screwed.

Knowing he is infected and hence infectious, having been advised against such travel, he says “Screw it,” and goes on a globetrotting honeymoon. Then afterwards claims he didn’t think it was a problem. Of course not, thinking so would have necessitated considering others: like his new wife, and fellow passengers on the planes he used, and the help and other travelers at hotels where he stayed, restaurants where he ate, and so on. Oh no, he was going to enjoy HIMSELF and screw everyone else.

About being flagged in Italy and told to give himself up to authorities, he says he thought to himself, “You’re nuts. I wasn’t going to do that.” Of course not. It would have spoiled his fun.

Speaker is a personal injury lawyer — one of those kind you see t.v. ads about — and is now thinking like a lawyer, saying: 1) he wasn’t advised not to travel, 2) was told he should wear a mask, 3) thought it was all okay, 4) didn’t know it was a problem. Take your choice. (And bet your life on it: his personal doctors have been in conference with their lawyers.) Speaker’s only aim is to cover his butt one way or another, truth be damned. His actions displayed and continue to display his lack of concern for anyone else along with his ignorance of the epidemic that ripped the Eastern seaboard of this country in the 1930s and ’40s and killed thousands of people, like a 5-year old’s mother and a 14-year old’s father; of how people coughed and choked and spat blood and had no recourse but to stay home and die, or go to work (to sustain some income, however little) and thus infect others, or go to sanitoria like at Saranac Lake and die in last-ditch surgeries to cut away infected lung tissue. Not that such knowledge would have made any difference to him. He is of the privileged class. The world exists solely to serve him. (And his Daddy, also a lawyer, says it’s all the media’s fault for blowing the danger all out of proportion. Another ignoramus.)

The failure of government entities to short-circuit his gallivanting is no surprise: think 9/11,think Katrina, think Iraq.

And irony of ironies which would be funny if the situation weren’t so serious, his new wife’s father works at the CDC as a tuberculosis scientist.

What should be done with Speaker? Once upon a time, we could’ve taken him out to the nearest tree and strung him up. But even if it were still possible, that would make things easy for him. The best punishment would be to keep him in government quarantine but give him NO treatment whatsoever. Let him experience the suffering and pain and ultimate ugly death he so recklessly risked on others.

Undoubtedly, he would gasp at the end, “It wasn’t my fault.”

And this, in a recent MYRLN email, which I post here because I agree:

Watching her interviewed today by Wolf Blitzer only increased my admiration of Elizabeth Edwards. She’s smart, articulate, forthright, warm, and real. I’d take her as Prez candidate. And she makes Sen. Hypocrita Clinton look like what she truly is: fake, stiff, unreal, and unbelievable. I’d pay to see the two of them debate.