Baking bread and blogging a post. Sometimes you need a starter.
While I don’t use a bread starter because I have a bread machine, I needed a starter for this post, and I got it from Dave Rogers — a simple email with a simple question: How are you doing? And then a pop over to his weblog, where he refers to bread baking and includes a link to a bread blogger making his own starter.
Aha! So much synchronicity has to be a message from the “universe” that it’s time for me to post. Thanks, Dave, for the starter.
The frustrations and aggravations of taking care of my mom are what they are. She asks the same questions over and over again, and each time I answer, I lose a little more patience. She’s constantly fiddling with things, objects — folds and refolds towels (including paper ones), keeps putting on and taking off the rings she wears. (One is the grade school graduation ring of my father’s that he gave her because he couldn’t afford an engagement ring at the time. It has a ring guard on it so it doesn’t fall off, and she wears it on her middle finger. The other ring is a gold wedding band, which is too big for her middle finger, but she wears it anyway. I found the gold band on the floor the other day and tried to give it back to her. She said it wasn’t hers and she doesn’t know whose it is. I now wear it on the middle finger of my right hand.)
We celebrated her 90th birthday on Saturday with her favorite lunch (kapusta, kielbasa, and potato salad — all of which I cooked) and invited two of her cousins and their mates to join the party. One of them made and brought chrusciki, and the other biscotti. (There just never seems to be a way or a time to start my much-needed diet.) My mom wasn’t always sure who everyone was, and her participation in the conversation resulted in blank looks all around. But she knew it was her birthday and knew it was her party, and, for one afternoon, she forgot her aches and pains and roster of complaints.
OK. So, what have I done for me lately? Been to the chiropractor twice. (Whaddya know! Medicare covers it!) I have a massage scheduled for next week. I’m planning to go out to visit with my grandson next month for my own birthday and, on the way back, stop in Albany for a couple of hours.
But, most importantly, I discovered the Unison Community Arts Center, where they have a Senior Citizen QiGong class, and they are going to again schedule West Coast Swing classes in the Spring. The Center is only about five miles away, and the QiGong classes are during the day, which works for me. Hopefully there will be other workshops I might like to attend. African dancing maybe?
This weekend at the Unison, there’s a Readers’ Theatre presentation of “Steiglitz Loves O’Keeffe”, which, if I can haul my butt out of here at night, I might go and see. But that’s not as important as getting out a couple of times a week for QiGong and dancing.
Meanwhile, Dave, and oddly enough, while so much of the rest of the Northeast was socked in by that big storm last week (my daughter had almost two feet over there in MA), we had less than six inches that melted quickly. Mother Mountain protects her own.
Tomorrow we take my mom to a neurologist to see what might be able to be done for pain management.
Life with mom isn’t going to change until some drastic change on her part, but I am making a major effort to do some fun things with whatever life I can squeeze out these days without her.
It’s a start.

Several grandmas I know have hooked themselves up with the Red Hat Society, begun in England as a gloriously goofy notion but now bastardized into a typically commercialized fad.
Yesterday, back in my old stomping grounds, Albany, a bunch of grandmas (and assorted supporters) gathered at a recruiting office to protest the war that’s destroying many of their grandchildren. According to the Troy Record,
COLONIE – A group of grandmothers gathered outside the Colonie Center Air Force recruiting center Tuesday to enlist for the war in Iraq.
They said they wanted to replace the soldiers who are currently doing third and fourth tours of duty overseas…. “We feel it is our patriotic duty to enlist in the U.S. military in order to replace our grandchildren, who have been deployed there far too long and are anxious to come home now while they are still alive and whole,” Patricia Beetle of Castleton.
“By this action, we are not supporting the use of military force in Iraq – in fact, we are totally against it – but inasmuch as it exists, our goal in joining up is only to protect young people from further death and maiming,” she added.
The group also took pot-shots at Bush Administration officials like Vice President Dick Cheney, who was successful in receiving numerous deferments from serving in the military during the Vietnam War…….
I never seem to be in the right place at the right time. Years ago, when we lived in Castleton, it was a really redneck town, and we were not so affectionately called “those communists on the hill.” Where was Patricia Beetle when I was protesting the Vietnam War??? (See my story about that on my old weblog;scroll down to “A Little History.”)
And, in Albany, I lived within walking distance of Colonie Center. I would have been right there with those kindred grannies.
Red Hat Society vs. Raging Grannies. Hmm. Which one sounds like my kinda group?
Actually, there is a New York Grandmothers Against the War (it’s really a New York City Group), which is affiliated with Grandmothers for Peace International.
There’s also a link from the home page of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to sign a global petition with “Women Who Say No to War.” Over on my sidebar is a link to Code Pink., the sponsors of the petition.
Meanwhile, love those Raging Grannies!

“…..we know nothing about 95 percent of the known universe…….. Seventy-five percent of it is dark energy, 20 percent of it is so-called dark matter, and the remaining 5 percent is what we can see”.
The above is a quote from NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, reflecting on the Hubble Space Telescope and the knowledge it continues to send back to us.
Imagine that! We can only see 5 percent of the 15 billion year (give or take a few billion years) old galaxies and other space phenomena that exist all around us who are marooned together on this small planet in a small solar system in the fancifully spiraling Milky Way galaxy.
Yet, so many of us seem to prefer to live in an intellectual darkness that rivals that of the unknown universe.
And in that darkness grows our fear of each other; our fear of the fact that there is no One watching over us from above, no great Truth of which we are the chosen custodians.
And so we kill each other over prophets and profits, out of a naive need to have what exists either black or white. We let cultural icons circumscribe our vision, following their faintly lit lead through the darker matters of our minds — so much easier than facing the many messy shades of gray.
We hobble ourselves out of fear of the dark, when we could hubble ourselves together in shared wonder.

“Iraq, the Musical,” compliments of freeway blogger.

This afternoon, a friend called my from Myrtle Beach, where she goes several times a year for fun on the links (golf, that is). Yes, she’s one of my retired cronies of whom I am supremely envious. During our chat she asked me if I had seen a segment on CSPAN with Barbara O’Reilly of mahablog.com and had I heard of her. I didn’t and I hadn’t, so, of course, tonight as I finally left my mom sleeping and got online, I went to maha. From which I followed the link (no relation to golf) to Maureen Dowd’s article in True Blue Liberal, from which I linked to TBL’s home page ,from which I linked to this graphic and painfully funny illustration of the “New Christian Science Textbook.” Alll that was after I linked to the video of maha’s O’Reilly on CSPAN.
By now it’s after midnight, and so finally, while mom is finally sleeping (with her favorite shoes tucked under her pillow so no one will steal them) I’d better let the rest of the links go.
That is, after I stop over at BlogSisters and leave a comment on this post about Congresswoman Heather Wilson, who is someone I would never have on my pro list, given her terrible and terrifying voting record.

This video clip is hilarious. Pump up your volume!
Bush on Comedy Central.

They weren’t pretty — not by the standards of our American culture today. And what they held up for us to see in the mirror of truth wasn’t pretty either.
Betty Friedan, the feminist icon of my times, died yesterday at the age of 85. This is my favorite Friedan quote, given in an interview with LIfe magazine in 1963:
Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men.” It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.
Sojourner Truth, much of whose life was lived not too far from where I am now, is featured in my local newspaper today. The piece ends with the following:
‘Ain’t I A Woman?’
Sojourner Truth gave this speech in 1851 at a women’s convention in Akron, Ohio.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
“Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?
“I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?
“I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
I look around me for the Betty Friedans and Sojourner Truths of this generation, yet all I see are Hillary Clintons.
_______________________
It is not that I don’t try to look attractive myself. After all, I did just blow a bunch of money on getting a hair cut and highlighting.
Double Vision — © Elaine Frankonis
I choose the cosmic and the common,
refusing to sever half my soul.
I choose to grow in all directions:
to bear with thorns as well as fruit;
to glory in the ground
and desire the sky;
to stretch roots across acres
and reach for bedrock;
to stand firm in my space
yet assume the varying shapes of the seasons.
I eschew the single-minded vision.
I am all
Eye.
_________________
Every day my mother tells me that I look pretty (even if I’m in my sweats and my hair looks like a fright wig). To her, the important thing is to look pretty, and she believes that it’s my first priority as well. I have long since recognized that my mother never looks beyond the packaging. Which is why she’s never seen the truth of who I am. Denial is her faith of choice.
__________________
speaking of beauty:
from the frontispiece of ANOTHER BEAUTY (prose, 2000)
& in the collection TREMOR: Selected Poems –
by Adam Zagajewski, tr. Clare Cavanagh
ANOTHER BEAUTY
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
This is why I pause: which word
to use, you or he. Each he
betrays some you, but
calm conversation bides its time
in others’ poems.

I’m watching the tango dancers at milongas in Buenos Aires and I’m literally drooling. Just before my mother’s sudden shift into major dependency, I was really getting into the tango — for all of the reasons why all those others love that dance.
I think about all of my former dance cronies back in Albany who are probably taping the show because they’re out dancing. Thursday night was always a good dance night. I wonder if my ol’ dance partner is still out there, devotedly taking lessons, dancing every chance he gets.
I google around to see if there are any places near here to take some lessons and brush up — meet new people. There’s one — a little more than a half hour away in Newburgh. The only daytime private lessons are on Sunday. I could do that — make Sunday afternoon, twice a month, my time to dance.
I’ve sent the studio an email to see what the possibilities are.
If I don’t do something soon to get both my body and mind back in shape, I’m going to irretrievably lose them both.
My mother, who wants me just about glued to her side all of the time, keeps asking when she and i can go out dancing. I’m sure that she’ll think that she should go with me to the lessons, should I sign up for some. She thinks we’re best friends. Oh man, is she ever delusional about that!
I’ve got to get away. Get away. Get away.
Dance away. Dance away. Dance away.

On 20/20 tonight, a program about mothers and daughters. I couldn’t identify with most of it, except for the older Jewish mother and her daughter. I could learn from that daughter, who counters her mother’s criticisms with humor. Why can’t I just make a joke out of the controlling things that my mother still tries to lay on me??
OK. So that program wasn’t really all about me. But an ebook I downloaded from my library does resonate a lot more with me, especially since the adult main character finds herself stuck back at her parents’ house because her mother has alzheimer’s and her father is dying of colon cancer. What she says about her mother is about mine too, and this quote did make me smile because it’s so true.:
Wherever she went she left behind a trail of soggy tissues.
Oh, man, do I know that trail. They fall off her lap, out of her sleeves, from between her bony fingers. They overflow from the pockets of everything she wears. I’m always bending down to pick up those soggy tissues. And that’s all both very real a very apt metaphor for just about how it goes around here these days..
I bought myself a refurbished iRiver multi-media player that they don’t make anymore to which I downloaded two audio books to listen to as I try to fall asleep each night. I got if off ebay for a pretty reasonable price; it will probably take me the rest of my life to learn how to use all of its features. But all I care about now is using it for my ebooks and NPR podcasts. Next, I’ll teach myself how to download photos of my grandson. Maybe even a little video of him. Good exercise for the brain.
It’s supposed to be a nice day coming up. In the 50s. I’ll haul my mother out of bed by noon and we’ll get in the car and go somewhere. Maybe we’ll get lost — although I’m not sure I can get any more lost than I am.
It’s all about me.