The lesson we can take from

her life is to be open to wonder,

to look at the world as she did

at the end of her life, as a

garden of possibility.

The quote above is from the end of The Queen of the Big Time, a novel by Adriana Trigiani.
I have finished all but one of Trigiani’s novels, and this last one, Roccoco, is next on my reading list.
You don’t have to be Italian to find yourself immersed in Trigiani’s families, but if you have strong ties to any European immigrant culture, her stories are bound to resonate with you.
Trigiani creates characters that are neither heroes nor harlots. In their struggling humanness they are a compelling reminder that life is what it is, despite what we might have dreamed or hoped. And yet that can be OK too.

[The garden image above is used with permission from the photographer, Melissa Volker]

According to a piece in my local newspaper yesterday, sea lions and dolphins are being trained to by the Navy “to detect and apprehend waterborne attackers” who may be tempted to float by naval bases without benefit of a boat.
The piece, reflecting what was reported here, goes on to say that

…sea lions have been trained to carry special “cuffs” in their mouths, attached to long ropes. If the animal discovers what the Navy calls a “rogue swimmer,” the arresting sea lion officer can clamp the cuff around the swimmer’s leg. “The individual can then be reeled in for questioning…”

I’m just thinking — suppose those sea creatures are even more intelligent than we supposed. What if they decide we’re not the good guys.
My local paper also had a short article (also reported here) about a partially mummified man’s body being found in a chair in front of his still-on television set. Apparently he had been dead for more than a year. A report from someone about a burst pipe brought police to the residence. What a world!
And, tucked onto the travel page is a bit about the city of Paris starting it’s own blog, www.voiceofacity.com, where 10 Parisians give visitors their insiders view of the City of Light.
And now, back to the “what a world!” perspective, here in New York State, the number of moral conduct cases against teachers has doubled over the past five years. Full story here.
They say that all kinds of “immoral” conduct has always gone on, only there weren’t the kinds of mass media capacities for instantaneous comunication before. And mistreated individuals feel freer to speak up these days. Maybe that’s all true, but I still think we are a civilization on the downslide, taking with us the natural processes that keep this planet alive. We are doing our part to rev up the Big Entropy on the way to the Big Whimper.

The cousins. Fourteen of them representing three generations. They came, yesterday, for a birthday lunch with my mother, who turns 91 today.
They came with flowers and cookies and photographs. They came with delicious Polish babka, three kinds of home made pierogi, and good spirits, wishes, and love.
We notice that we are mostly female — not suprising, since we have always known that our clan is a matriarchy. The only males at the party were my brother, a first cousin, and a cousin by marriage (who took a videotape of the rest of us gathered around my mother singing both Happy Birthday and Sto Lat. ) Only the older ones of us remember the words to Sto Lat, the Polish version of “may you live a hundred years.” When my generation is gone, so will go the memory of those words. Our kids have married into other nationalities — great for genes, not necessarily so for native traditions and languages.
We were a noisy group, but then we always are when we get together. My mother, being somewhat deaf, couldn’t sort out background from foreground conversations; she sat in her favorite rocking chair and watched and smiled.
She is the oldest of her clan. Here is a photo of her with the youngest in attendance, her great grandniece, Olivia.

Today, she’s very tired, a little disoriented. She keeps reading through her birthday cards, crying because she misses my dad.
I have blogged before about how, as I get older, my ties to my family become stronger. Before my cousins left for home yesterday, we shared emails, vowed to get together at least several times a year. My mother is the last of her sibling generation, which, when they were all alive, held family gatherings at the drop of a hat.
Now it’s up to us. The cousins.

From This Week:

Apparently spam is becoming one of those things people are learning to live with — like death and taxes.

Actually, SpamFighter (there’s both a free and a cost version) works pretty well on Outlook Express to filter out most of my spam. A few do get through, but not in the numbers that used to before I downloaded the software.

My mother and I sit at her window next to the bird feeders and watch the tiny creatures battle the storm. It is so windy that they are often blown backward even as they try to fly forward.
“How beautiful!” she says over and over again as the three male cardinals flit from feeder to snow to tree to fence, struggling for a solid perch to wait their turn for the goodies I have left out for them. There also are three female cardinals, and I watch as the genders take turns waiting in the tree from which one of the feeders is hung. I notice that they don’t use the feeder that is right outside the window. Too close for comfort, perhaps.

There were dozens and dozens of birds here all morning, braving the pellets of sleet to feed their all consuming energies. I wonder where they go to get warm. I have never found any of their nests, but the woodland here is thick, so that’s no surprise.
The sleet turns to rain, the rain to snow, the snow to sleet, and the winds turn the bird feeders and the trees into rollercoasters. But the birds hunker down on the branches, still hungry. Hungry and determined.
I will go now and throw some food on the frozen snow for them.
And then, hungry and determined, I will sit at the window and eat my lunch.

“During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States,” said Maryann Frazier, apiculture extension associate in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences in a written statement distributed by the university. “Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses.”
[snip]
In total, honey bee pollination contributes about $55 million to the value of crops in the state. Besides apples, crops that depend at least in part on honey bee pollination include peaches, soybeans, pears, pumpkins, cucumbers, cherries, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries.
The above from here.
They say it could be pesticides or some organism that is running rampant because of an upsetting of the natural balance.
We humans are the scourge of the earth. We are also a very weird unbalanced species. The following from Harper’s Weekly, to which you can link to check out sources.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire eldergloggers like Ronni Bennett and Marian Van Eyk McCain who set great examples of how dynamic and influential individuals over 65 can be.
While Ronni is right in championing elder pride and publicizing elder capability, the truth also is that there is a reason for the stereotypes of the little old lady and man who hold up the checkout line because they pay for their purchases in small change, try to get rambling conversations going with the checkout person, take forever to wheel their carts out of the supermarket door, and drive as though there are no other cars on the road. I always seem to be just behind them at checkout. My point is that there are many numbers of older elders in every community who try everyone else’s patience.
For four years I lived with my mother in an upscale Senior Citizen building (250 apartments) that also housed the town’s Senior Center, which offered all kinds of great programs, from dance to discussion, as well as the kinds of banal activities Ronni cites. I got to know lots of the women (the population was mostly female) who lived there. A large number of those I knew eschewed any of the activities in favor of sitting around the lobby and complaining. I found that the women I knew who were over 75 — probably because of the dependent and housewifely lives they led before they lost their spouses — had no interests outside of their aches and pains and piddling gossip. Those elders who had active intellectual and/or physical lives before reaching 70 (barring any severe illnesses) always seemed to be able to find places and ways to stay lively. But where I lived, those were in the minority.
I will be 67 next month, and I think I can still kick butt pretty well on any number of fronts. But in ten years or fifteen years (or maybe even before; who really knows) I might well be one of those annoying old ladies at the checkout counter. It won’t be that I plan to be or want to be. Rather it will be because I am the victim of whatever the aging process will be doing to my mind and body.
So, while we’re telling the world that we are still a contributing force in society, we should also remind the world that most of us who will manage to live long lives might well find our force severely diminished. We will need compassion and comfort and understanding and patience.
As my Polish grandmother (who died in her early seventies) used to say, “Staroszcz nie radoszcz.” Which, loosely translated means getting old is a bitch.
Nevertheless, somewhere before life’s last wanings, there is, for many of us, a rich eldertime that is both Ronni’s and Marian’s focus, and this piece captures it all beautifully.

she loves to dance so every night we put on the easy listening channel on cable tv and I lead or she leads. she follows almost perfectly. I’m perfecting my lead very nicely with her as my partner. she will be 91 next week, and she still asks where and when we can go out dancing. she doesn’t always know where she is or how to get to her bathroom, but she knows how to dance. we laugh really hard when we trip over each other’s feet (which doesn’t happen to often, but when it does, we start giggling and can’t stop). today I laughed a lot with three of my former work colleagues (women) who came down to spend the day with me. we howled over the silly things we did and silly things we do. made so much noise we thought we’d get thrown out of the cafe where we had lunch. shared endless anecdotes about the kids we know and love and mates and how we spend our days. complained about getting older. unlike many of the elderbloggers I read, I still color my hair, wear make-up, and am addicted to fashion. I have to make sure that my hair covers my ears so that my pretty-much invisible hearing aids don’t show. they looked at the things I am knitting and reminded me that I could sell them for a good price. someday I might, when I have the energy to deal with record keeping. I am overwhelmed with ideas for what to blog about. she will be 91 next weekend and my brother began inviting some of our cousins to come up for lunch and now there will be more than a dozen and guess who gets to do all the preparation. my cat is too fat. I weigh too much. I am going to ignore valentine’s day. my four and one-half year old grandson uses words like “apprehensive” and uses them correctly in context. next month I will be 67, WTF!
after a survey of 1,000 American women found that most valued their favorite clothes more than sex, and would gladly abstain for 15 months in exchange for an entire new wardrobe.
A world that’s 7 to 12 degrees hotter will require a lot of adaptation, said Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post, but right now, we have no real alternative. “The dirty secret about global warming is this: We have no solution.” About 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. With India, China, and other parts of the Third World rapidly developing, worldwide output of carbon dioxide will likely grow from 26 billion metric tons to 40 billion metric tons by 2030. ….. Politicians who blather about Kyoto, or “cap and trade” schemes for carbon dioxide emissions, are simply “grandstanding”—pretending to be addressing climate change, when they aren’t. “That’s one truth too inconvenient for almost anyone to admit.”
The U.S. simply can’t admit how badly it has behaved, because the consequences would be disastrous: criminal charges, trials, “and a complete breakdown in morale among intelligence officers.” No, the return of justice will come only “after Bush has left office.” The next president will make redress. He—or she—will have to apologize to el-Masri, “or else the guilt will truly belong to America, and not just to the Bush administration.”
Asked why he is in such a hurry to run, Obama tells Kroft, “You know the truth is I’m not. We have a narrow window to solve some of the problems that we face. Ten years from now, we may not be in a position to recover the sense of respect around the world that we’ve lost over the last six years. Certainly, when you look at our energy policy and environment and the prospects of climate change, we’ve gotta make some decisions right now. And so I feel a sense of urgency for the country.”
saw this huge woodpecker as I was heading down the driveway today — big plumed red head, looked like the Woody Woodpecker cartoon. I’ve counted five different kinds of woodpeckers around our property. also the usual junkos, chickadees, jays, cardinals, mourning doves, titmice (or is it titmouses?), wrens…… we have our own aviary. endlessly hungy winged things. I feed them. I feed everyone.