This thanksgiving, I am thankful for
a daughter and son-in-law and grandson who welcome me to live with them
that same daughter, who is cooking Thanksgiving dinner for about a dozen people on her birthday.
a son who can fix my mini-notebook that I crashed because SUSE sucks
the drugs that keep me functioning
my women friends who keep me functioning
the Internet that keeps my brain functioning
the fact that I can still function
Oh Sarah, oh no!!
My mom fell down. I wasn’t here. I was at my daughter’s, when my mother tripped and fell. My brother was with her; he said she lost her balance (which she does occasionally) and fell in his kitchen. She has a big bruise on her bad shoulder. And, she says, everything hurts.
When I got back here the day after she fell, against my brother’s wishes, I called an ambulance take her to the hospital. She couldn’t walk unless we held her up, and she was in a great deal of pain. My brother wanted to take her to a walk-in medical office that has an X-ray machine; we’ve taken her there before. But I didn’t want to take the chance. Suppose she had broken something.
The hospital X-rays showed no broken bones. A CAT scan of her head showed no pathology. It did show “volume loss,” however. (Like that’s a surprise??!!) The attending doctor wanted to keep her at least overnight because she was in danger of falling again. He wanted to hydrate her and give her a sedative (since she was agitated) and some tests, including blood. If she had stayed overnight, she would be been eligible for Medicare in-home help. My brother insisted on taking her home. So, we did.
She slept soundly that night and way into the day. Then she ate and went back to sleep.
And it has all gone downhill since then. She woke up at 3 a.m. this morning, incoherent except for crying that she wanted to go home and that everything hurt. I gave her an arthritis strength Tylenol, which seems to work well on her pain, and eventually, she went back to sleep. She repeated that scenario at 8:30 a.m. She gets up to eat something, and then goes back to sleep. While she’s up, she’s barely communicative.
The attending physician in the hospital gave me a script that says my mom needs one-on-one care 24/7 because there is a great probability that she will fall again unless someone has an eye on her constantly. .A nurse is coming tomorrow from the county’s Adult Protective Services to evaluate her condition and her living situation. That is part of my strategy to put as much pressure on him as I can to hire someone to come in and help with her care while I’m going through my move — and, of course, after.
But it is only a matter of time.
I’m standing by the kitchen window, looking out at the trees and the pure blue sky, drinking hot chocolate and eating challah smeared with Smart Balance. My daughter’s voice drifts in from the living room, where she is reading a book to my grandson, who is sprawled on the couch nursing a fever and a cold. The book is one I bought her when she was a child — “Grandma and Machek,” about a Polish grandmother who tells her granchildren the story of her living in Poland as a little girl and how her friend Machek (who became their grandfather) outwitted a wolf. They are doing a home school unit on making a family tree, and we have just finished looking at two fading photograpsh of my 1940s extended family — one that includes more than 50 people. I showed him the ones who came over through Ellis Island. He is interested in every detail.
Such is my life without care(giving).
But in a few minutes, I will be leaving to go back to the turmoil of the other part of my family, where my mom, who is in her nightgown day and night, needs better care than she is getting when I’m not there.
I visited a nursing home yesterday that’s located 1.3 miles from my daughter’s house and has a secure dementia unit with an enclosed outdoor courtyard. The bedrooms are big and sunny, with room for personal furniture etc. Unless my brother hires someone to come in and help with my mom during both this transition of my leaving and my actual departure, I will fight him for her guardianship and power of attorney. She deserves better than she gets from him; and I just can’t give any more. I could see myself volunteering at the nursing home a couple of mornings a week and visiting her several days a week, at least until she gets acclimated.
My brother wants her, but doesn’t know how to give her the kind, patient, consistent care that she needs. I just want to see her get good care. And I need to take care of myself for a change.
And that’s how it is, as I go from this place of peace to that place of war. It never had to be this way, but that’s how it is.
I’m off to see the wacky little wizard who makes me laugh.
That’s what we are now, I guess, to today’s kids. We were educated to be teachers more than 40 years ago, before MTV, before rap, before Marshall McLuhan, before school shootings, and definitely before the Internet. We saw ourselves as professionals and dressed and behaved accordingly. We spent a lot of time preparing for our classes and saw ourselves as the guiders of young minds — inspirers and role models. And we worked hard to make learning exciting and fun for our students.
Some of us eventually moved into other fields; most of us are retired, now. Schools and kids have changed so much that I know I could never handle one of today’s classrooms.
That’s not the case for my old friend, John Sullivan, who, although retired from the CIA and a published author, still manages to do substitute teaching. The other day, I got this email from him:
Earlier this month, when I began subbing, I hadn’t taught a high school class since I was in graduate school in 1969. During the time our two sons were in high school, I became aware that things had changed, but this awareness didn’t prepare me for this new age high school.
One of the two schools in which I subbed is the same high school from which our older son graduated, and there are still some administrators and faculty there whom I know. The student body includes the entire socio-economic spectrum as well as students who, according to the principal, speak 75 languages. There are hints of Blackboard Jungle there, but only hints.
One of the teachers for whom I subbed left a note about one of the classes, to wit: “John, this is the class from hell, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” I went into the class a bit nervous, to say the least, and was very surprised at how well it went. At least half of the kids are Latinos, and for whatever reason, we hit it off. I talked to the teacher the next day, and he kept pointing out that he just couldn’t communicate with them, and he was obviously afraid of them.
One of the seniors in one of the AP classes I had is a borderline genius, has a serious stuttering problem and has been accepted to Harvard. A girl in a Freshman AP class came back from lunch, and in reply to my quetion, “how was lunch”, said, “It was ok, but some Jewish guy tried to stick my head in the toilet.” When she said she hadn’t reported it, she also said, “I took care of it. I beat him up.”
The only semi serious problem I had was with a disruptive Afghani kid, but it worked out.
One of the bigger adjustments I have to make is the almost slovenliness of the male teachers. Some of them are unshaven, dress like rag pickers and look more like students than teachers. The desk, and working area around the desk of the teacher for whom I subbed yesterday looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. Papers, books, CDs etc. were strewn everywhere.
All of this being said, and as tiring as it was, I have gotten some great feedback from the kids and other faculty with whom I worked. At the end of my last class yesterday (a Freshman AP history class), the kids gave me a spontaneous ovation. I liked it.
I’m sure that there are some young “old time” teachers out there, and I have the utmost respect for them. I watch my daughter, who is home schooling my grandson, carry on the tradition of this family as she stimulates a love of learning and a curious intellect in our energetic six-year-old.
Encouraging changes in the teaching and learning of today’s schools is an essential part of President-elect Obama’s plan for improving education. But government can only do so much. The dedication of parents and teachers to creating and providing exciting learning environments is key. And school bureaucrats need to retool themselves into committed educators as well.
Meanwhile, teachers like John will continue to make a difference, one classroom at a time.
Ex-Lion Tamer tagged me for posting five interesting things about me.
I had to do some serious thinking about this, since these days, my life is about as interesting as a bowl of cold oatmeal.
1. I once accidentally left a pink satin teddy in a bed at a New York City hotel where my daughter was waitressing/singing.
2. For more than twenty-five years people assumed that I had curly hair because I always had a perm.
3. Last night my mother and I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching “Lilies of the Field,” and I realized that I had never seen the movie before! Sidney Poitier was totally HOT!
4. I hardly ever read non-fiction. I am usually reading two fiction books at the same time and listening to a third on my MP3 player as I fall asleep. Understandably, I often don’t remember the stories a month later.
5. I started two craft businesses thus far in my lifetime, doing craft fairs and selling to folks who found out about my wares by word of mouth. The first I called “Self-stones,” and I turned tumbled stones into various simple accessory items and packaged them with a description of the magical lore and healing properties associated with those stones. The second was called “Sass & Chic,” and I sold shawls that I crocheted in a spiral from a pattern that I designed. Here’s a photo of four, two of which I embellished with washable pony beads.
Of course, I never really made any money from either craft business. But I had fun.
I need to figure out how to have some fun in the future.
It’s hard not to feel mired in the moment today, as I wander around my current living space, stepping around half-filled boxes and over piles of belongings about which I have to decide whether I still want them belonging to me. Or me to them.
Getting a phone call from my college roommate (through undergrad and grad school) helped to remind me what I’ve blogged about before — all my life’s a circle. The friends I have made, both online and off, are still out there, and inevitably they circle back into connection.
{Ah, the phone is ringing again. It’s one of my long-time close friends in Albany, checking in to see how I’m holding up. We make arrangements to meet for lunch on Tuesday, after I pick up the laptop I crashed from my geek wizard on my way through Albany to my daughter’s.}
Two days ago, I got a comment left on my blog from a former colleague with whom I lost touch more than a decade ago. She found me on Google. Once, on the spur of the moment while we were both still working, we flew out to Key West for a week. I usually don’t do things like that, but she does, and we had a great time. I took a bunch of photos with my feet in them and put them into an photo album I titled “Footloose in the Last Resort.” I had the energy to be creative, then, despite a very demanding job.
This has been an unusual spurt of re-connections, of giving the becalmed circular motion of my life a jump start.
Camille Paglia, in the November Salon.com issue, has this to say about Sarah Palin in a lengthy piece that also deals with Barack Obama and a lot more:
I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.
As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.
The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan — nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.
Years ago, I read Paglia’s books — blogged about her version of feminism here. Paglia almost always takes the devil’s advocate position on issues — which always stimulates heated (but worthwhile) discussions.
While I don’t really agree with Paglia’s assessment of Palin’s political potential, I understand that there’s always a possibility. Who really knows what fuels Palin at her core; she was played and used by her party and the press.
And, it turns out, it wasn’t just Palin who was played. According to the New York Times, both the press and the public were played into believing the lies about Palin put forth by a fake expert and phony think tank.
It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.
Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.
Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.
And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
There you have both the power and the terror of the Internet.
Given Paglia’s comments and the hoaxers’ success, I’m much less inclined, now, to look at Palin as a bubble headed hockey-mom. Granted, she was not ready to be vice-president. But, if she really has any smarts, she has learned from the fiasco of her campaign, and she has learned something about whom to trust and not to trust. Certainly, she had all kinds of cards stacked against her this time.
Meanwhile, here are some links to articles about the phony baloney web site and the tricksters who pulled it off.
Huffington Post
The New York Observer
And don’t forget the Times article link above.
The hoaxers’ website is here. When you go there, you will see that “Einstadt” claims that he really exists and is not a hoax.
And so we’re confronted with the dilemma of whom to trust out there on the Internet.
Whom do you trust/believe of those you read on the Internet, and how do you know their trustworthy?
Maybe it’s all just phony baloney. Like the stock market.
Today was supposed to be my official move day, but I’m bogged down by stuff and responsibility.
So, instead, the move has become a slow one as I sort and pack and dispose of. At the moment, my car out in the driveway is packed with household stuff that I will take to the Salvation Army tomorrow. And then, next week, I will pack the car with another load that I will drive out to my new space at my daughter’s.
Actually the slow move is working out OK because I just can’t shake my responsibilities to my mother, especially since she has suddenly become very weak and wants to sleep a lot. And so I spend a week here taking care of her and then drive out with my packed car to spend several days setting up my space and playing with my grandson. The drive out is like a mini-vacation in and of itself — I have several hours all to myself to think and surf between NPR and country western music stations. Sometimes, I even sing out loud, moving my shoulders to the steady beat while cruise control takes over.
Stuff and responsibility. I’m carrying a lot of baggage.