A ten pound Apple Streudal

 

So I drove to Santa Barbara today and thought about blogging about Roger Ebert dying,  referencing some essays he wrote that I liked. I also thought about blogging about listening to people talk about race too at some point. Lately I've heard somethings that are distressing (especially those opining how students like those I teach have parents that are at fault somehow). Thought about blogging on the art in the museum in SB I went to for a few minutes, or the bad dinner at Aldo's, or how my feelings got hurt at the Danish pastry shop. But in the end we came home after a couple hours, not gone long, and then found my mom on the floor of the laundry room holding her head. She was being watched by my son today, who didn't know she was trying to do wash. I found her in a heap on the floor.
So I forgot the pictures, even the one of Martin Luther King Jr. I saw today of ALL days-and prison ones that were very powerful evoking for me Soledad prison,  made by a Danny Lyon. I forgot a lot of thoughts in a few seconds of discovery,  as my lens once more narrowed. Right down to now.

See...my mom is in her 80's and she has lost a lot of weight in a month.
Given she weighed 105 pounds at MOST- I can only imagine what her size is now.  It was always important to her to be thin. I think she likes this loss on some level, which is insane. She has a mind that is now not so clear. Very unclear actually, she is mostly lost really. She caught something over a month ago, and developed a bad infection in her jaw, maybe in her head, spreading dangerously, and then we discovered she had very poor oxygen. It's a lot to tell. She hasn't allowed me previously to take her to the doctor, but we've gone several times in the month, except for a brief time after her stroke a few years ago in spring too she never went to doctors all her life. She respects them-but she also proves out that any medicine gives her very real and difficult side affects. No that's effects damn it. She has insisted on climbing chairs, cooking, carrying coffee all over the house ruining all the rugs in her last few years. Ruining them. She's also maintained her innocence in this- but I doubt she sees the stains as I must  anyway. I postponed getting the rugs changed til June. Now she is doing a new thing. Staring. Sitting and staring. It's really strange to see it. She just goes away mid action or sentence.
We found her a few days ago, she's mostly deaf, watching her tiny TV in her room turned up loud to the Spanish channel watching novellas. She took a year or two of Spanish 60 years ago, but I'd hardly call her a Spanish speaker, she pronounces tortilla with the L's and burritos are burr-eat-as or something that entertains guests but embarrasses me. However she's equal opportunity, matzoh is "matt(like a guy named matt)-zahs".
So the general consensus was she was hearing the program in English, despite it being sent out in Spanish. It's a tough thing to say for sure. She's just undergone an extreme change in a month which is shocking for me somehow. To be honest.
Finding her on the floor in the small space of this laundry room wasn't good, she was holding her head. I thought she'd had another stroke. I said that, sorry.

I made her a ham omelet after we righted her. Now I'm the one pushing the food. A true role reversal.

It's been a very hard month or so for me, I'm saying deeply worrisome, most especially difficult because on another coast my father is probably going through something too similar-I think his mind is clearer-and it's hard to see my parents this fragile, in pain, facing death. My mom could fall and at her size it'll be awful.
So-the narrowing of my frame I recognize.
I'm doing wash, cleaning,  thinking of how to wash up the junkyard that is her room, looking at all the boxes of newspaper clippings, thinking of what a life is. Hers is strangely about trying to stay in control.
And I guess mine is too much about advance grieving.

When I was young I took care of my mother to some extent, when she was in a terrible breakdown after her divorce -when she took on my grandmother for years who was dying with Alzheimers. Prior to anyone naming it, having support for it, it was a five year period that was very hard. So, in a way I'm returned by my children hitting their 20's to my twenties, and by my mother to this time in my twenties at a minimum wage of $3.50, when each day was a real loss of muscle, of ability, a kind of new challenge to bring to it some cheer or I don't know...12 mile walks to get to a supermarket and be harassed.
I feel the darkness of depression mostly.

But with something like a perspective.

I bought a ham for 8 dollars for Easter.
Mom had an omelet tonight with a bit of that inside. She says it is the best ham she ever ate. Her mouth, following an antibiotic was so sore she couldn't take it-and she never complains-I suspected thrush but didn't get the doctor to treat it, despite begging,  so I gave her acidophilus and yogurt. This ruined eating for yet another week for her at a crucial time. But months ago she gave up 65 years of smoking. She can't breathe. I think this in turn set off some kind of her body balance goes to h in a handcart thing. I think she tastes more now. Salt bothers her. She used to favor brining.
Everything I do -which kind of pores guilt on my wounds-is the best she ever had including my bothering to carry her tiny bit of raggedy wash over to her room. The best she's ever seen someone do that. I used a hanger too!

I know that pretty soon she may not know me.
It's kind of hard to explain but Mom and her mom had this thing about insisting they'd never go in care. Like a facility. Grandma Lucas had good reasons-she'd been in the places in St. Pete her home in Florida, and as a retired nurse she knew the level of care. So Mom made the promise and Mom relied on my keeping it. And again I find myself feeling frozen, incabable, struggling with both fear, fatigue and just struggling to do this. I can't look away and I can't look.

So...anyway I played a moment of hookie today just getting in the car to ride along as my daughter went to turn in something to UCSB. She's done a year early but getting the loan to give her a grace period is hell. Anyway when she was in the financial place I sat in the car listening to an NPR piece. On This American Life. A young filmmaker wanted to understand men, white men, fixated on Asian women. I forget the term she used. Rice King. She openly spoke about it. I've known men that were like this. And I was interested in hearing about her conclusions on their fixation-but that isn't really where the piece went. She talked about deciding to make a documentary and a few men were heard saying that they loved "the black hair" or whatever. (You see my father has this issue but I don't speak about it.) His is a whole subservient, greater IQ, meek/dominance thing. I don't know- he has some weird unearned admiration, but also a myth structure. It's a creepy thing to me, another form of forcing women to carry some extra burden. The filmmaker settled on talking about a 60 year old man who futility and sadly wrote many Asian women until, to the filmmakers shock, he called to say he was getting married. She got invited into that-and mediated this complicated arrival and adjustment of a woman in her 30's from China who eventually married him. It left me to think. Both about my father and someone that takes care of him, but about the strange racial construct in that mix. About what drove these women here from poverty in China.

I was thinking about that as we sort of got to the museum of art in Santa Barbara. For reasons that are complicated I have great anxiety about the museum. No one knows. We went a few times with my severe back trouble - a five year torture of excruciating daily pain- prior to surgery, when my ability to walk was almost gone, so when I go back it's some kind of stored memory. A PTSD I guess. If I had to name it I'd say somewhere I retain that day when I had to tell the entire family I could not walk to get out of there. Had to have help. Lost control.  I look at the statues with the blown off penises that greet you as you enter and think about my fearing losing eyesight or walking, mobility. Things related to nerve issues I have.
We looked at California landscapes. In that room I smelled my father-in-law's Aramis cologne on a guy. Since Vern is gone that sobers me. We looked at impressionist paintings I've written into poems and do  wonder if my poems are THAT bad, because I  like them.
I found myself looking at a set of photographs. By Daniel Lyon. Some were these amazing prison scenes. Some showed the days when racism was being confronted at lunchcounters. A picture of two fountains, do you know I remember two fountain days? I stayed a long time looking at a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. right before he preached after four little girls lost their lives to hatred and a bomb in their church. One picture showed the shattered stained glass in that humble church. I looked at the wind blowing through that picture a very long time ago. I looked into the past- into the faces of those who were very brave. He took pictures that were in the times a changin'. So that set of art took me a long time to fully integrate into my own working being. Because that is what I think led to some of my choices-so I went back awhile.
I thought about how my mother would like this show. But it would be hard for her to see it now.

After we left we ate at Aldo's. It wasn't good frankly.
I think the girl spit in my Arnold Palmer. I have food poisoning. She dropped my plate bringing it out and wiped it off with a dirty towel- but my dinner companions do not like if I have ANY feelings about these things-we must NEVER speak to the people we pay 30 bucks a plate to poison us.

So I said the dinner was great and I'm retching now.

That landed us at the weird Danish pastry place, where Jack once bought a ten pound apple streudal in some strange error in ordering. I got hurt feelings, and we got a box of stuff and drove home.

I was trying on the drive to sort out my thoughts...seeing many birds on the tops of trees including an owl...when the silence was broken by some discussion of Jack's hiring someone coming up which I didn't follow- as I then tried to talk to him about how I liked reading Roger Ebert. I thought of him as an essayist extraordinaire. I remembered one essay I thought a lot about on death. It mirrors the way my daughter talks to me about death.  You'll go read that link, yes? I can't argue against his view. He manages to try to argue it himself. For me the fear is in non existence. Which would render the all of this I suppose into a joke.
I just respect him, and to be honest I hadn't really thought of it quite that way, so it taught me something. Of course the beautiful writing-oh-it was somewhere to be today, sorting in my thoughts.

But then, as I said, I found Mom sprawled on the floor and I couldn't put anything together again from my Humpty Dumpty last few weeks. I can't debate educational policy, or talk about race, or think about where we go after death, or if anything matters. Mostly I made an omelet and listened to her talk about her book of Virginia mansions she's been looking for, and switched on my Edith Ann Lily Tomlin CD. Because Mom loved it, and she can't hear it- so I can laugh about the two thousand dollar ashtray from Pars Bar.

When no one was looking today I gave 100 bucks to an overweight homeless woman who needed a bath and a home. She'll probably know neither. When I went outside with hurt feelings I also was trying to catch her -so I wasn't caught by the eyes that are on me and not so approving of my white guilt. She reminded me of the dichotomy we allow in this world.
I think that maybe she could be any of us. Well she is us. But for luck and turns of circumstance.
She wasn't begging, she was just going down the street- but she was appreciative giving me a hug.

I don't even know why that got into this wandering piece.

I'm waiting on a load of wash to finish. The day has been one with many references, thoughts, ends, bits, pieces. As you see.
But I liked reading Ebert-saying that being kind was something to live by.