The title of this post is the title of a book (that I have just ordered from Amazon), one of the authors of which I heard interviewed on NPR on my way back home today.
The house of grammar has many rooms, and some of them are haunted. Despite the best efforts of grammatical exorcists, the ghosts of dead rules and the spirits of imaginary taboos are still rattling and thumping about the old place.
It’s no longer considered a crime to split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, for example, but the specters of worn-out rules have a way of coming back to haunt us. In the interest of laying a few to rest, let’s dedicate to each a tombstone, complete with burial service. May they rest in peace
According to the authors, many of those complicated rules of “proper” grammar that I expended so much energy on learning and then teaching my 8th grade classes back in the 70s are no longer worth worrying about.
Well, “makes me no nevermind,” as someone somewhere used to say. I’ve always known that language evolves. But is appears to be evolving faster than I.
I can’t wait to read the book.
Patricia O’Conner, one of the authors, appears on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time. Click here on the third Wednesday of each month to hear Pat live. She appears on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 P.M. Eastern time. If you miss a program, click here to listen to a recorded broadcast..
We are all remembering that it was a year ago today. I see people smoking and I want to tell them. I want to tell them that they should have been there to see where it leads, what it leaves behind in those who feel his absence as much as they felt his presence.
I took a Valium this morning before my spinal MRI. I am still relaxed in reverie.
April is such a neither month — not yet really spring, still capable of the few flurries I spotted yesterday on my way from the mountains to the valley.
A wedding in April is a weather-chancy thing. My cousin’s daughter’s this past weekend took place in a venue that featured a panoramic view of the Hudson River and the foothills of the Catskills. If it had been a sunny day, the view would have been breathtaking.
The cousins of my generation sat together, recognizing that we were now the “elders” of the family, as our younger relatives stopped by every once in a while to chat with us. On that dreary April evening, the music and dancing and revelry reminded us that warmer vistas are just beyond sight. Youth and hope and love ruled for those several hours as a muted sun slipped behind the hilltops.
One of my cousins, who married into a family that, for generations, maintained a 24 room house in what is a nicer part of the city, hosted some of us from out of town. The house is theirs now, her and her husband, who spend part of the year in Florida. It’s a house filled with generations of ghosts, all of those who lived and died here, family and extended family. For generations. They might sell it if they could; but who wants a 24 room house in a one-family residential neighborhood. For now, it works as a home-base for a number of the clan, including their daughter and future son-in-law.
My cousins and I, for the most part, are very different — at least our lives meandered down different paths, mine having taken me a long way to the left. But they are tolerant of my politics, my lack of religion. They are probably more tolerant of my viewpoints than I am of theirs. They are able to interact and relate with me and with each other in ways that ignore all of those values that might divide us.
As we sit around the breakfast table over the kinds of food we all seem to like (little things, like corn toasties — which we don’t like to toast — and Polaner All-fruit instead of sugar-ridden jelly or jam) they make me laugh. They do not pressure, they do not manipulate. Together, we are the kids we were who grew up playing “Flies Up” on their front stoop, even through dismal April afternoons.
We relax into the neither-nor of April, a time of its own, of our own.
There is another family wedding coming in June. I will be there again, in the bosom of family.
Closer by, my mom slips inevitably into dementia’s final horror. I stopped her from eating a paper plate the other day. I strain to remember the Polish I used to speak so fluently so that I can understand her.
I am not there now, I am home in Massachusetts, but I will be going to visit her in a few days to help set up space for, and help to acclimate, a live-in helper who speaks Polish.
Perhaps I should take my Valium with me. After all, it will still be April.
While I was moving, I sorted through some of the stacks of poetry that I had written over the years and pulled out a batch of short ones. Perhaps Thursday will be the day of each week that I will post one of them.
I live in Pioneer Valley these days, but I wrote this one back in the 70s when I lived in another valley. I think one of the reasons I call this blog Kalilily Time is because of my memories of that past valley time.
Valley Time
Easterly,
the winds tease the the sun
toward morning,
brushing aside the easy showers
of early summer clouds.
Time follows the way of the wind
through this dawn-misted valley,
filters through the blue unfoldings
of fragile morning chicory,
flows through the slow, green seekings
of those low growing vines,
breathes honeysuckle and wildrose rain
into the season’s drifting light.
Westward,
the sun leaves the high horizon,
draping a dry autumn night
over the tired faces
of September sunflowers.
I am thinking today of my late once-husband, who loved the power of words more than anything in his life, except his children. We shared both of those loves, but not in the same ways or same volume.
I am, once again, searching for the voice that I misplaced somewhere during this last decade.
In a way, it’s a relief. I don’t have to go through all the complex strategizing to get him to compromise — only, each time, to come up against a stone wall. Actually, it’s more like being dumped into a vat full of jello. Either way, I get nowhere.
I’m out of energy and stamina. I give up. He can take care of our mother any way he wants.
He has arranged with a female musician friend of his to come and stay with our mother. Every once in a while. No set schedule. I’ve met her. She’s nice enough, and, as far as I can tell, my mother likes her.
I wanted him to hire someone from an agency who is trained to deal with dementia patients. That is, who knows what kind of patience is necessary to deal with someone who pretty much lives in her own personal reality, which sometimes overlaps with a more objective reality — but even then, with her own emotional twist. But he wouldn’t agree to that.
So, I give up, and I’m intellectually and emotionally distancing myself from the situation. I will come in once a month to visit my mom. I hope that we both can take the emotional stress. It’s almost better if she completely forgets who I am.
I’m hoping to be completely out of here and out of primary caregiving by the end of the year. It seems like forever.
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.
Back #1: It was just a matter of time, I guess. Several nights ago, as I tried to lift my mother’s legs back onto her bed, I felt as though someone shoved a knife into the right side of the lower spine. It was a long night for me, as I painfully made my way to a chair, only to find it hurt too much to try and sit. Lots of Excedrin Back and Body later, I’m relatively OK as long as I don’t twist sideways or make a sudden move. I have a long history of problems with the right side of my body, including developing “drop foot” on my way to Harvard’s first BloggerCon five years ago. And it’s been all downhill from there. Back #2: Despite the above, I wrapped an Ace lumbar support belt around myself, put on the cruise control, and drove out to see my daughter and family, who, I knew, would give me some TLC — which I needed for more reasons than my out of whack back. Luckily, I had left my new quarterstaff there, and that surely came in handy for limping around the yard.
[Side note: Ronni Bennett has a section of her blog dedicated to the “Quarterstaff Revolution,” and I will be sending my photo to add to the growing collection.] Back #3: Last week, I took a little trip back in time and finally got together with my college roommate and her husband, who live about a half-hour’s ride from here. Both she and her husband were good friends of mine all through college. She and I were the same size and coloring We shared a room and later an apartment right through grad school, and we also shared our wardrobes. She is still slim.. Our lives are about as opposite as possible these days, but the memories of all of the crazy college experiences we shared (including driving down to Daytona Beach for Spring break with three of our male classmates) are still ties that bind. Back #4: Thanks to the Bush regime, this country is so democratically backward that we can only hope that the new president will have the strength and stamina to haul us back to where we belong. The latest indignity is PBS stalling about widely airing Torturing Democracy. It is, however, being aired by individual public stations, and you can watch it online.
She has old bones. And they hurt. Wrist, elbow, shoulder neck. Hip, knee, ankle, toe. They all hurt.
I give her two Tylenol, and she sleeps. I hear her whimper. “Please,” she whispers. She’s never been able to tell me “Please what?”
Her old bones hurt. Teeth. Fingers. Time makes old bones. Her bones have had too much time.
My bones are starting to hurt too.
How about doing something really nice for b!X, whose recent employment ended when a wall in the old building where he was working fell down, revealing a substantial lining of black mold. That was sort of the final obscenity in a work environment that had gotten steadily worse over time.
B!X birthday is October 25, and when I asked him what he wanted, he responded by saying that he wished all of my friends would by one of his photographs, which he has for sale here. They come 8X12, matte finish, unframed, and printed by a professional photography shop.
This is “Broken Circle,” one of my favorites. I even bought a copy for my new living quarters: Flickr photostream list of subjects and pick one of those — for example, from his cemetery series , or his green door series, or his central east side (Portland) series. If you want one from there, just let him know and he’ll move it to his storefront so that you can buy it.
It’s never a great time to be out of a job, but this time it has to be the very worst.
Actually, if you know anyone who owns a bookstore and needs someone who can do just about anything that needs to be done — from ordering to inventory to cataloging to shipping to stocking shelves — give them b!X’s web site, where he posts his resume (of sorts) under “about,” which I quote here, just in case…. (He says he’s even willing to relocate.)
About The One True b!X
An eleven-year resident of the Portland of Oregon, born nearly forty years ago in upstate New York, he is a devout agnostic and misanthrope who aspires to be an at least passable rationalist. He believes that cynicism only results from first believing people are capable of better and then repeatedly being proven wrong.
If events were pictures and emotions were sounds, his memories would play as silent movies.
•
When he was very little, he learned the all-important lesson that adults don’t always know what the Hell they are doing, when he revealed to a number of grown men that the reason the ramp on the U-Haul truck his father was using to move out of the house was not steady was because they had failed completely to attach it properly.
During his senior year in high school, in response to an uncooperative student newspaper, he published several issues The Myra Stein Underground Press (named for an infamous teacher who one day disappeared without explanation), which despite being an anonymous publication he later saw sitting in his file on the guidance counselor’s desk.
His brief college career in the main was marked by the eruption of controversy over the playing of a bronze Henry Moore sculpture with percussion mallets, a debate which landed him in The New York Times and ultimately led to him writing (the night before it was due) a well-received term paper on social drama.
Prior to moving to Portland, in 1995 he helped organize the S. 314 Petition, one of the first large-scale Intenet petition efforts, which sought unsuccessfully to prevent passage of the Communications Decency Act, although it did yield him an appearance in Rolling Stone.
Shortly after moving to Portland in 1997, he become co-owner (and then sole proprietor) of the Millennium Cafe, which he then ignominiously proceeded to run into the ground, but not before holding two successful July 4th events at which people read aloud the Declaration of Independence.
From late 2002 through late 2005, he published the critically-acclaimed Portland Communique, an experiment in reader-supported independent journalism whose departure is still lamented by some today, although likely not by the people who falsely accused him of taking bribes in exchange for coverage.
Sometime in 2003, he discovered The Finger, a zine apparently published by Swan Island shipyard workers during World War II, which he made available online and for which he has perpetually-delayed plans to make available as an on-demand reprint.
In early 2006, he founded Can’t Stop the Serenity, an unprecedented annual global event consisting of locally-organized charity screenings of the Joss Whedon film Serenity to benefit Equality Now, which to date has raised more than $200,000, making it far more important than any of the many other Whedon-related fan efforts or websites for which he’s been responsible.
Late in the Fall of 2007, he helped launch Fans4Writers, a grassroots effort to support the Writers Guild of America in its strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, although he was involved only long enough to get the website up and running.
He no longer is employed at The Great Northwest Bookstore, and would not necessarily object to working at another independent bookstore if a full-time opportunity presented itself, and in fact might even be willing to relocate for it.
•
He neither bikes nor dances nor dates nor drives nor drugs nor swims. He does, however, drink. Oddly, he no longer smokes. He is a life-long resident of Red Sox Nation who, when not wearing his baseball cap, enjoys wearing a porkpie.
Well, I’m not really going fishing, but I am going to the ocean, along with my son, and daughter and her family. We will be carrying out my once-husband’s last wishes and having what will probably be our last chance to all be together for a while.
This will be the longest time I’ve ever been away from my mother since I started caregiving in 2000. She will be in my brother’s care for the next six days.
And when I get back, I will begin counting down to my own “move on” day.
He’s waiting for me on the steps to my new door to a new life.
The space for me at my daughter’s is ready except for the painting. I am conflicted about leaving here, but, after eight years of the increasing burden of caregiving, I just can’t do this any longer.
When my mother was my age, she was going on cruises with my dad, surrounded by couples with whom they had been friends since their dating days. My dad passed away in his early seventies. I want to be able to have some sort of life before my number comes up.
I imagine being able to come and go as I please, being able to sleep through the night, sitting outside on my steps in the morning and having a cup of tea in the sunshine. Here, I am not only sleep deprived; I am deprived of all of those small things that become big things when you don’t have them.
I imagine being able to get off my anti-depressants, walk my way off my cholesterol med, throw away my muscle relaxant.
It’s come down to my life or hers. My brother, who has control of everything here, will have to figure out how to get her the care she needs so close to the end of her long life.
I don’t know how long my life will be. I can’t give away what’s left. Not any more.
And waiting for me with anticipation is my grandson, whose loving energy will help me overcome the guilt I will bring with me.
Flickr photostream list of subjects and pick one of those — for example, from his 
