It stretched from the hummingbird feeder, across our window, to the doorframe — one thin wisp of web silk. You could only spot it when the sun hit it at a certain angle. One thread, almost invisible.
As the wind picked up, throttling small branches from the leafy trees, I thought that it would have to break. Instead, it stretched with the wind, catching the sunlight, holding on, refusing to let go.
I sit with her by the window. She is panting, breathing through her mouth. “Am I dying? she whispers.” She doesn’t know where she is, why she is here. Her hands and feet and nose are like ice. I’ve tried to get her to lie down, level out her cirulation. I try to put a heating pad on her feet. She keeps getting up, unsteady, unsure, unresponsive. Outside the wind turns the thread of web into a trampoline. But it doesn’t let go.
My sib comes in and gets her to lie down, and she slowly recovers, eats some homemade chicken soup and rice, can’t remember the last several hours.
I sit with her tonight and watch “Moments to Remember” on our public television station. We get up out of our chairs, and I lead her in a small box step to “Heart of My Heart.” Nat King Cole sings “Pretend.”
The De Castro Sisters come on with Teach Me Tonight. Big wigs, big fringed dresses, behind which they hide what they have accumulated and lost over the years. Frankie Lane comes on with a cane. Rosemary Clooney and Perry Como are on tape, of course, and I yearn for those sweet, innocent 1950s, when life was so much more than a tenuous thread whipped by the wind. And I swooned over Perry Como and didn’t have a thick middle.

Be like broccoli. That’s what I tell myself as I walk around my vegetable garden, wondering what’s bothering my tomato plants. I know that our resident squirrel has eaten all my lily bulbs and is working on the leaves of my sweet yellow peppers. One of them is only a short stalk at this point.
But the brocolli! It’s all growing strong and tall, with huge leaves — no actual veggies yet, but they’ll come. Nothing bothers to bother the brocolli. It’s left alone to grow strong. Brocolli is not sweet, but it’s nourishing, full of the stuff of health.
Be like broccoli, I tell myself, feeling a lot more like the chewed up stalks of the sweet yellow peppers — some of which, by the way, are growing new leaves. Today, I sprayed them all with hot pepper spray.
Be like broccoli. Or hot pepper.

Back in 1895, you were lucky if you managed to complete an eighth grade education. But, if you passed the eighth grade finals, as they are documented on this page, you knew more than graduating seniors today. I dare say that most of us with today’s graduate degrees would not do well at all if we sat down for 6 hours, which is what it takes, and gave it a try.
Heh. And imagine just how bad Dumbya would do!!

No, this is about neither baseball nor gay issues.
In -ings: staying inside too much; getting involved in projects that keep me inside. Of course, it’s raining AGAIN, and wildly windy to boot. I spent late last night and so far all day today right where I am now. My college graduating class (1961) is trying to get organized for the first time in 45 years, and I’m trying to help get a handle of where we all are and how to get in touch with everyone. Of course, if I had thought to have everyone at the reunion last weekend fill out a form with contact information, that would have been a good start. And another, “of course” seems to be that too many of us don’t use email much. If we did not have to use computers as a part of our jobs, we never really got into them. (Not me, of course; I’m addicted to blogging.)
out-ings: cleaning out; getting out; reaching out. Obviously, I’m having trouble with those. But in the larger world, it’s one outing after the other. There’s Haditha. And then there’s the secret detention center in Romania. Toronto terrorists link to Americans.
We are out of morals and in trouble. Maureen Dowd said it well in her June 3 Times column:

It’s a bitter irony. And not even a terribly illuminating irony, since Saddam truly had a regime of butchery and the American military is not in the business of atrocity, even if an undeniable atrocity was committed and even if the war has become something of an atrocity.
“It’s one of those things where we have become the enemy,” John Murtha said ruefully on CNN.

There’s an email message that’s still going around that started just about a couple of years ago, and I posted about it then . “Wear Red on Fridays.” Wear red on Fridays to let everyone know we want no more bloodshed. No more bloody lies.

That’s what this weekend was all about for me — looking backward, but not in a bad way. There were so many people at my 45th college reunion whom I really never got to know very well while we were in college. Most of them were the class leaders. I wasn’t one of them. I always preferred the fringes, where I didn’t have to live up to the expectations of others — part of my rebellion from my family of origin, where expectations for behavior ran high.
So, as a result, I’m getting to know many of these former classmates for the first time. I guess it’s the right time, because we all certainly had a great time.
I’m thinking about the passage of time today. Here’s a diptych of the group of six of us who have been very close friends for about 15 years. The first photo is from about 5 years ago; the second from yesterday. ( I guess a lot of our socializing centers around eating.)

As I watched “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants:” last week, I found myself really missing those friends, so I was delighted that they all got together to have breakfast with me the morning after my class reunion.
While I often feel isolated here, as my mother’s caregiver, I am realizing that, however invisible my ties to other people sometimes seem to me, they are there, and I have to make more of an effort to strengthen them.
I have often blogged about “all my life’s a circle” — or maybe it’s more of a spiral. I have to make more of an effort to make sure than I keep heading upward as I go around.

45 years. That’s how long it’s been since I graduated college, and tomorrow I will drive up to Albany for our first ever reunion. Overall, we were not a terribly gung-ho class, feeling more loyalty to our fraternities and sororities than we did to the institution as a whole.
I’m in the middle of getting food ready that I know my mother will eat and will be easy for my sib to reheat.
The weather promises to be the crap it’s been for the last week. I’m trying to figure out what to wear. I was hoping for a light, summery day — not these long muggy stormy hours we’ve been having.
I’ve got my 50’s CDs to get myself in the mood on the way up the Thruway. I’m looking forward to this, even though the people I hung around with in college will not be there. It will be an adventure, I’m sure. If nothing else, it’s a day away from her/e [sic].

I’ve been thinkng that what doesn’t die, grows. All of the dry sticks with straw roots that I planted last month have new growth. Even some flower bulbs (I forget already what kind) that I stuck in soil two months ago, are putting out tendrils. The cinnamon fern — that I threw in the woods after the dried out husk I planted looked like it was getting moldy but tthen I rescued because a google search discovered that it’s supposed to look like that so I replanted it — is sprouting leaves all over.
I kill carpenter bees and the hoardes of spiders invading the place because if they don’t die they will grow I hate killing anything, and I stay out of their spaces as long as they stay out of mine.
I think the converse is also true: what doesn’t grow, dies. Oh, maybe not as quickly as the black spider I almost stepped on as I was getting out of the shower today, and there are lots of kinds of dying.
when she woke yesterday morning, she kept repeating “who died…. what are you not telling me….who died….what are you hiding from me…” she cried and cried, wouldn’t lie down. “who died….who died…..am I dying?…” you do your best to calm her fears, but irrationality wins out and she finally wears herself out, sits in her chair by the table at the window and stares at the unoccupied bird feeders, waiting, it seems, for someone to answer.
I look around at some of the old, old trees around here. Each spring they start again to grow a little more. If I don’t grow, I will die a llittle with each turn of season.
It is spring. I need some fertilizer.

My 45th college reunion is this weekend, and I finally unearthed the box of college memorabilia I stashed in my brother’s basement. My graduation yearbook is there, of course. Both degree certificates. And these three documents.

1957 – 1958: my golden year. I spent my freshman year socializing. Obviously I made grades good enough to get me into and through my sophomore and subsequent years — although I don’t think I cut back too much on the socializing. I just didn’t save anything to remember it by.

It is two days ago. I’m lying on a straw mat on the grass under a mosquito-netted child-sized cabana. My feet are sticking out from under the net, but the rest of me is in the shade. I’m watching the grass grow between my fingers. My grandson sits in the corner, his big-flapped sunhat askew, explaining the workings of the model construction trucks lined up between us. In the background the voices of my daughter and son-in-law merge with all of the muted sounds around me. They are putting in a fire pit, hauling huge rocks from the woods behind their house and working up the sweat that I’m avoiding.
This morning, even before I was out of my pajamas, Lex (that’s my grandson) had me decked out in a fireman’s hat and water goggles, marching around the house playing a toy clarinet. I wanted the flute, which I sort of can play, but he said the sounds I make hurt his ears. Later on, he wants to check out my car engine. I open the hood. “Where’s the dip stick?” he asks. “I don’t know,” I reply, because I dont; I always have my oil changed every three thousand miles, so I never bother to check my oil. “There is it,” he says, pointing to the dip stick. He’ll be four years old in July.
We play catch and chase each other, and I take lots and lots of video clips and photos. I sleep soundly and wake up early.
On the way back to the mountain, I listen to the three disks of 1950-60s music that one of my college class members sent me from which to choose a batch to play at our reunion next weekend. I didn’t really know many of the people who will be there; we ran in different circles at the time. But I’m getting to know them now, via email and the private weblog I set up for us to plan and share and get to know each other for the first time.
I loved my college years. I’m looking forward to reliving them, for one night, anyway. Endings are just new beginnings.

That’s my favorite little guy. My favorite little guy who will be four years old in July. The one person who can make me belly laugh.