It’s hard not to slip into a funk these days. Mom doesn’t seem to be able to make any decisions for herself anymore. There’s no point in asking her what she wants to eat or where she wants to sit or what she wants to do. Her answer to all of those questions is always “I don’t know.”
And I’ve lost some teeth and the dental lab is having a hard time making a partial that fits. I’ve been back and forth to the dentist for more than two months. And it will be another two weeks until the next iteration comes back from the lab.
So, I went and bought a new car. A Ford Escape. A 2008 demo that I got a good deal on. It’s been a long time since I owned an American car. I’m feeling a little schizo, since, while I bought “American,” which is a good thing, I think, I also bought a small SUV, which is not as fuel efficient as, say, a Subaru Impreza, which is smaller. A lot smaller. The truth is I LIKE sitting up high in the driver’s seat. (Now, there’s a metaphor that has real meaning for me.)
Actually, the Escape is the same length as my old Subaru and only a couple of inches wider. I bought it in Albany so that getting it serviced will mean that I’ll have to spend a day in Albany and that will mean that I can have lunch with my women friends, whom I hardly ever get to see anymore.
I also have a new hair cut. A funky hair cut to help lessen the other kind of funk.

Not as expensive a funk neutralizer as a Ford Escape, but at this point, every little bit helps.

MYRLN is a non-blogger friend of mine who is the guest-poster here on Mondays. It’s another MYRLN Monday.

WHOSE COUNTRY?

by MYRLN

It’s maddening and often infuriating, and it should lead, every day, to a fierce question: Whose country is this?

It’s a question that should be put to every elected individual and bureaucratic appointee every day by citizens through snail-mail, e-mail, and phone calls…or any other means of communication. And for its transparency impact, every arm of mass media — print, radio, t.v. — should shove the question into the face of every political and corporate talking head in daily and weekend-circuit shows and interviews and at every press briefing or conference. Shove it at every current and future presidential candidate at every turn. Whose country is this?

But neither citizens nor media do it much — almost never, in fact. And that’s our real problem today. Nobody asks the pertinent question: whose country is this?

Why should we ask? Because without it, these elected worms and their political appointees and their corporate masters have come to believe — and seek to make us believe — that the country belongs to them. That they can do what they want with it with impunity. And when anyone might venture to say, “Wait a sec…what’re you doing? Why’d you do that?”, the worms reply, “It’s a secret, a matter of national security, and it’s unpatriotic of you to question it. It’s our business, so you butt out.”

Don’t ask. National security. Classified. Executive privilege. Homeland (that Nazi-esque term) security. They all mean the same thing: the worms claiming it’s their country. How imperial. How dictatorial. How Cheneyesque.

So they need to be bombarded, these worms, reminded that their secrecy, their power grabs, their declarations from on high are not tolerable. That their disregard of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is not acceptable. That the government is not theirs to do with as they will. They must be reminded, loud and clear and forcefully, that it is a government of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE. And if they don’t like it, get the hell out — of office and even the country.

Whose country is it? It’s ours…we the PEOPLE.

And this P.S from me, Elaine of Kaliliy:
If you watched 60 Minutes last night, you saw and heard just evidence of whose country this has become, as Congressmen documented the fact that too many of them work hard to pass legislation for corporate backers and then leave Congress to become lobbyists for — or employees — of those corporate interests. (Case in point: the Medicare Prescription Bill) The country obviously belongs to those with great money, which in turn buys great power.
There are a lot more of us “people” than there are of the monied interests. It’s sort of what it was like just before the French Revolution.
Liberte. Egalite, Fraternite: that should be the rallying cry these days for “we the People.”

A hospice in Rhode Island keeps a pet cat named Oscar, who, like the doctors and nurses, makes daily rounds of the patients.

But that’s not all Oscar does.

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

The article linked to, above, tells of his success as a harbinger of death.
Many cats seem to know when their owners are ailing or even out of sorts. The cat we had when my kinds were little, a male, was usually stand-offish — didn’t really like to cuddle or be petted. But whenever I wasn’t feeling well, he would curl up next to me and purr so strongly that I could feel his vibrations in my own body.
Calli, my cat now, a female, loves attention. But the only times I ever saw her try to comfort someone were the two times my mother was so out-of-it that we wound up taking her to the emergency room. Each time Calli kept trying to get into her bedroom (where she knows she’s not allowed) and jump onto my mother’s bed to lie next to her.
I wonder if she’ll be able to tell when my mother’s time comes.

It’s another MYRLN Monday.

A Noisy Democracy
by guest poster, MYRLN

The system’s pretty near broken altogether. We
have an i.q.-challenged president who believes god has his ear when actually it’s Dick Cheney whispering through the heating vent. Cheney, of course, is the vile, corrupt, dictatorial leader of the shadow government actually running the country from an undisclosed location. (George W. is only akin to the old Charlie McCarthy puppet enlivened by Edgar Bergen, no offense to them.) We have a Congress wholly incapable of doing anything but jumping as high as its various corporate masters tell it. And a mass media with attention deficit disorder, all striving to become another Fox News or New York Post. And controlling it all is a multi-faceted corporate empire whose motto is, “How many consumers have you screwed today?”

Anything of the people, by the people, for the people is not only forbidden territory, it’s under daily attack. (And we don’t have Molly Ivins any longer to put it all in its proper perspective.)

None of this bodes well for the democracy created 231 years ago. It is seriously endangered on all fronts, all under the guise of protecting us from terrorism. And Americans of all ilks have permitted the erosion of the democracy. A lazy, compliant, silent electorate actually bought into the crap this vile — no, let’s arrange the letters in their true order — this EVIL government has been spouting. Like the characterization of wanting to stop any more of our young men and women from being killed in Iraq as “unpatriotic.” And “supporting the troops” is letting more of them die — and that’s supposed to somehow be a good thing. What too many fail to grasp is that this alleged “war on terror” is little more than a callous excuse for seizing more power and violating our democracy. Think disregard for habeas corpus, think torture, think spying. No, terrorism is ultimately defeated by working with all parties to eliminate the social and economic conditions that foster it (thus minimizing, if not eliminating altogether, support for the crazies, including those in our government, who think violence is an answer). Alleged military “solutions” are useless, they can’t stop terrorism. Ask Israel.

Unfortunately, these are not the 1960s. We could use the energy and fury of those years today. If it were still the ’60s, there’d be none of this pukey, half-assed political and moral maundering going on. The streets would be filled with protesters at every turn, beating on tin pails outside the White House, making an unholy din that drives its inhabitants up a wall and reminds them in no uncertain terms that their chicanery is no longer tolerable, and that tells them loud and clear whose democracy this is. And candidates for the next presidency wouldn’t be whispering mealy-mouthed platitudes for nothing more than personal political gain. They’d be out in the streets, too, shouting in defense of democracy. In every city in the land, young and old alike would be in the streets making a huge and powerful noise, crying, “ENOUGH!” Demanding and ultimately getting change — a return to democracy. OUR democracy.

Loud and incessant noise can be very effective.

Democracy likes it..

He stands on the front lawn and waves good-bye. He’s dressed in green camouflage shorts and a brown camouflage vest and hat. Binoculars hang from his neck, and the strap of a “base station radio” crosses his chest. He’s ready.
He’s ready for his 5-year old birthday party, which has the military theme that he chose.
He comes from pacifist parents and grandparents, but he just loves all that camouflage and adventure.
He also loves fire engines and police cars with sirens. He loves rescue ambulances and helicopters, and big rigs and recycling trucks. And his room is filled with miniatures of all of those.
I am leaving before the kids arrive for his party. We had a small family celebration for him a day ago, and I have to get back to my mother, who has sobbed on the phone to me each of the two nights during which I have been here “respiting.”
Last evening, before he went to bed, we sat together on the couch and watched the movie Cars. Earlier in the day I sat in the dappled shade in front of the house and read Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story. No doubt about it — King knows how to twist a tale. It was hard to put down the book and go in for supper, which my daughter prepared and my son-in-law cleaned up after. All I had to do was sit down and eat. Ah! What a luxury!
Earlier that day my grandson gave me a tour of the gardens. “Tha’ts Cleome”, he says as he points to some plant that has not yet flowered. “That’s Seedum,” he informs me, “and that’s a Butterfly Bush.” He identifies the Day Lilies and counts them as we walk by….”Fifteen,” he says. “We have fifteen Day Lilies over here, and there are more over by the fence.” He wants to be a landscaper. Or a road worker.
I’m tired after the long drive back to where I live. But before she goes to bed, my mother wants to dance. And so she leads me around the small living room in a perfect Polka. She doesn’t always remember where her bedroom is, but she never forgets how to Polka.
Before I go to sleep I will read more of Lisey’s Story.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I stay up until I finish it. It’s not “respite,” but it is an escape.

No matter what, I’m going to Massachusetts tomorrow for my grandson’s fifth birthday. The “whats” are already starting, but I’m going if I have to sneak out before dawn.

There are two ways to live:
you can live as if nothing is a miracle;
you can live as if everything is a miracle.
— Albert Einstein

I used to live entranced by the everyday miracles of this natural world. How did I lose that capacity??

For links to the originally reported items, go to the Harper’s Weekly Review, from which the following were taken:

And, finally, my favorite:

Just a side note on the elder abuse issue. Sometimes it takes every ounce of self-control and empathy to keep from venting one’s frustration and exhaustion on the person who’s the cause of both. It’s very much like what you might feel toward the much-loved infant who has not slept in 24 hours and who keeps crying and you can’t figure out why and you just want it to shut up. While I have never done violence to either of my children or to my mother, there are times when I can understand how some otherwise competent adults just totally lose it. I don’t have any answers. I just grind my teeth a lot.

Crow’s Feet by guest-poster, MYRLN.

“I Gotta Crow,” Peter Pan says (not meaning he’d captured one).

Counting Crows was a rock group.

A crowbar doesn’t have wings.

Eating crow, figuratively, is no fun, and literally would likely be awful

Yet on the whole, crows are a pretty interesting species, despite their predilection for standing in the middle of the road and eating the innards of recent roadkill. And despite the name for a collection of them: a “murder” of crows.

Watching them steadily, however, can give you a genuine respect for their intelligence and behavior. For example, throw a slice of bread out in the yard for them on a regular basis and at the approximately same time, and in short order, the crows will learn the behavior and arrive within a half-hour to collect the bounty. And they don’t sit there and peck at it either. They pick up the whole slice, even an end crust, and fly off with it. All this only after one has seen the bread and called one or two other crows to come over and keep protective watch while he goes down to gather it. They like an occasional dog biscuit, too, as ascertained when one flew by carrying the bone-shaped treat and looking thusly much like a tuxedoed crow wearing a bow-tie.

They are, of course, marauders, too, as everyone knows. They search out nests of other birds and try to make a meal of eggs or fledglings. The nest birds will naturally counter-attack and drive off the invading crow. And the crow will fly off, chased and pecked at by the nesters, while making no effort to resist or fight back. (A fact also true of hawks being chased by smaller birds, including crows.) There’s just too much available to bother fighting for it.

The other fascinating aspect of crows is their group behavior. While families keep pretty much apart from each other, staying in their own defined territory, there are times when that separation is dumped. A couple times a year, there’s a migration, and in that instance, hundreds and hundreds of crows fly off together in a great black sea aloft, wave after wave of them. No “vee formation” as with geese, just a wide and long sheet with occasional breaks between the sheets (no pun intended).

The other group action comes when a crow’s nest (a real one, not a ship’s lookout post) is targeted by a hawk. A cry goes up from the endangered nest. A member of a nearby family comes to investigate, sees the situation and goes back his nest to report, and a call goes up down the line of families until soon there a dozens of crows showing up to drive off the invading hawk (who merely flies off in search of another meal elsewhere). Then all return to their own family nests to resume whatever they were doing before called to defend a neighbor.

As for crow’s feet, they look okay on a crow but not around your eyes.

Our language makes use of many crow analogies.

Here’s a poem, thanks to Jim Culleny of No Utopia, that tugs at the edges of my nostalgia for my ballroom dance days.

Fox Trot Fridays
Rita Dove

Thank the stars there’s a day
each week to tuck in
the grief, lift your pearls, and
stride brush stride
quick-quick with
heel-ball-toe. Smooth
as Nat King Cole’s
slow satin smile
easy as taking
one day at a time:
one man and
one woman,
rib to rib,
with no heartbreak in sight–
just the sweep of Paradise
and the space of a song
to count all the wonders in it.