Afternoon showers

I got a call from Mom yesterday in the middle of the work day, asking about the bank.   She said she'd called the bank and they said she had no account there.  Since everything she has is at the bank, this caused her considerable anxiety.

She called my Aunt Peg and told her that "Sam has embezzled my money!"  Mom asked Aunt Peg to connect her with a good lawyer.  Aunt Peg insisted that Mom call me, and I explained that her money was still there.  She seemed reassured.  Aunt Peg wasn't.

Not that she thought I was stealing from my mother, mind you.  I'm not.  If I took her money I would just have to support her anyway, unless I also engaged in elder abuse and abandonment.  Seems a little late in the process to start that whole scenario, and besides, if tables were turned Mom would take care of me.

Aunt Peg is still chasing content.  I explained to her again that after this small storm Mom will again be calm, reassured, and will (I hope) forget that she suspected me of venal behavior.  She forgot she was furious about coming back from Aunt Peg's house and going to a new memory care facility.   She forgot to notice that it was a memory care facility.  Mom's like the weather in Kansas.  She's variable.

All of this is about taking the details of life and drawing conclusions based on linear continuity.  Each day we take in information and sequence it, forming hypotheses, executing them, managing our worries, desires, tasks and ideas with the aid of short-term and mid-term memory.  Mom is still a reasonable person, in that presented with facts she can usually make a good choice.  When she has to hold multiple facts and tasks in her mind simultaneously she is getting to the point where some of her conclusions are a little skewed.

When we moved her up here, I got Mom in touch with a colleague who is a fine attorney, so that we could make sure all her legal matters covered in Iowa.  Jean took Mom into her office without me present and talked through what Mom's wishes were.  She presented me with completed documents and did not allow me to be part of the process.  I understood it then, but I really appreciate it now.  Mom got a chance to speak her mind and express her wishes back when her conclusions were pretty solid.

So much of life is about process.  How we put things together, reason things out, related to common issues, pay the bills.  From here out, in my mother's life, content will be secondary to process.  The future and the past give way only to the moment.   Troubles will arise, dissipate and disappear again, like spring storms on the prairie.

This is sad to see in one of the finest organizational minds I have had the privilege to know.  On the other hand, the tree is falling in the forest, and no one remembers the sound.  So no harm is done.

My Inner Diana

A friend of ours is dying and it is almost not imaginable. It looks as though Diana ("well, what did you think I was gonna die of!") Paulina may succumb soon to cancer of the inevitable. It's enough to make a person ache.

It almost didn't seem inevitable. Diana is a tough, passionate, brilliant bundle of Ukrainian orneriness. I really thought for a very long time that she might beat this. She still might have something up her sleeve. I never bet against dp. But it just kept coming, this cancer.

There are people in our lives who have been part of raising us. I would not be in my profession or know how to work a computer or ever have been beaten at Scrabble if it weren't for Kevin and Diana. Okay, I would have been beaten at Scrabble. I have been my best and my worst with them, and they with me (I suppose . . . maybe they were holding back). Who they are is woven into my sense of myself.

I was driving around today, thinking about this and having vaguely agnostic thoughts about all this and it occurred to me that death will not eradicate that part of Diana that is woven into me. As long as I draw breath, whenever I tell an oblique joke, or solve a puzzle, make a pun, or charge off to tilt I windmill, I will summon my Inner Diana. I will fight and argue, push and advocate, I will cook and cheat at poker (just kidding), and try to live my life with the vigor, intelligence and whimsy that has characterized my good friend.

As long as I possibly can,

I will summon my Inner Diana.

s.

I think I bruised a rib.

The title on this photo is "I beat ski-limia." Over New Year's weekend I cross-country skiied some and, well, I . . . um, . . . urp . . . puked.

Twice.

I was practicing my version of the drinking man's diet at the time. My body apparently found strenuous excercise incompatible with this diet.

Well, that was then, baby, and this is now. That's me to the left, skiing Blue Mounds County Park, which is populated with oak trees and from which one can see 80 miles in any direction. Well, not straight down. You can't see 80 miles that way. In this picture, I have already skiied six miles. I may have felt as though I'd been worked over by a street gang the day afterwards, but I did not puke. Didn't even consider puking. They're going to have to find a new nickname for me now.

Here's my friend Doug. He could telemark ski down a vertical wall. Here he is, cutting his own trail. This is something I can't do and remain upright.























Above you will find my friend Carroll, also cutting some new trail. We had about 5 inches of new powder on a sunny afternoon and conditions were just about ideal. This is so much fun that grown men like me will cheerfully ski up long hills, all for the joy of coasting down again.

On the last hill, I was bringing up the rear (my usual spot) and I heard Kris say "Hey Tuna! This is the hill you broke Doug's ski on!" I probably did not need to hear this.


It was a slow downhill curve to the left which straightened out half way down and then dove down, then up, into a hump, and then down again. I started out very slowly and let my snowplowed skis absorb as much momentum as possible. As the curve straightened, I knew it was time to tuck my skis in and shoot the hill. I remember thinking that it would be good to crouch going over the hump. The next thing I remember is going headfirst, ass-over-teakettle, and winding up on my back with my skis and poles up in the air, sliding down the remainder of the hill.


My shoulder was pretty sore the next day and one of my right ribs has been giving me some trouble. I walked around the office like Walter Brennan for a few days after. It's tough being middle aged. Waah.


We celebrated Chris Berg's 50th birthday that day. He's the first of this crowd to turn. I'm next. I'd like to think I could still ski in 10 years. It seems a little more likely now that I can be a little more active.

We're bloomin' now, kids!

Things are harmonious in the orchid neighborhood. The two Phaleanopsis are blooming nicely (see previous buds, last post) and the terrestrial has a new "foot." The Dendrobium appear to have responded to the artificial "winter" we provided for them (cool and dry). They have new feet or stalks or something starting.

I took these shots at night and I'm going to need sunlight to show you the new buds or stalks or corms or whatever they are.

OOOooooooooo!

Oooohhhhhhhh!

Ah.

I've got stuff to say, too. Just not tonight.

Orchid porn with fuzzy interloper

My son continues to worry about my preoccupation with orchid progress. When he temporarily broke my camera (by playing a catchy rhythm on the on/off button while it was hooked up to a computer trying to interface), he told his friend "he like his camera better than me and the only thing he likes better than his camera is taking picture of his orchids, and I just ruined that!" Having solved the camera issue (it just needed to reboot), here are recent bud updates.

Both Phalaenopsis (moth) orchids are budding, the result of pruning the stalks from the last flowers and getting the flowers to try again. The one on the left has one stalk and the one on the right has two. This happens very slowly and the buds and stalks are very waxy.

The bud on the right just opened last night. As you can see, it's working on a second and third bloom. I'm watering and fertilizing attentively, not wanting to oversaturate or starve the fella.

This set of buds is from the showier phalaenopsis. There is a good growth tip on the end of this stalk and I suspect it'll be busy for a while once it goes. The first bud is about to pop and I suspect it may go today.

Growth at the tip of the stalk.

Okay, I know I have created adequate suspense. . . .

Voila! The first orchid of our new season. He just opened last night and will likely expand a little more with the petals pushed back and the center pushed out, in a display that would make Georgia O'Keefe proud! I think she was actually more into hybiscus, but whatever. . . .

And the reason I'm so into orchids, other than that they compliment my obsessive nature?

Winter. This scene unfolds right out our suburban front window. This rabbit has taken up residence under the forsythia bush and helps himself to any birdseed that might fall his way. I think this fella would be an orchid fan given half a chance. He'll be after my garden in no time, but these days he's heavily into birds.

Fun Fair

I just love this picture. I took it the evening we took three year old Caitlin to the Regina Fall Fun Fest. It rained all day and she was mad because we promised we would take her. The rain stopped and we packed up infant Walker and finally went. Caitlin was scared of the big ride, bigger than the little cars that go in a circle, with big airplanes and propellers that went around with the wind.

Thirteen years and three months later, I picked Caitlin up at the Fareway after her second night as a checkout person. She was talking a mile a minute. She was supposed to have Casey watching her while she worked since it was her second day. Casey went back for a little while for some reason and while she was gone a girl came up and asked to buy cigarettes.

Someone said "Be sure and card her!" Caitlin asked for an i.d. The girl smiled and handed over her driver's license. Caitlin did the math.

"I'm sorry, I can't sell you these," Caitlin told her, and put the cigarettes back. The girl smiled and left.

Pretty soon a man came in and approached Caitlin. He asked if she had just refused to sell cigarettes to a girl, and Caitlin replied that she had. The man told her that she was making his job easier and introduced himself as part of a security operation "blah, blah, blah," Caitlin said. All she knew was that on her second day she got "stung" and that she had just avoided a $500.00 fine for selling cigarettes to minors. She confided that it was a good thing Megan told her to card the girl, because there's a lot to think about when you're learning to check out. I personally still don't know how to check out.

There are a bunch of sappy songs about daughters growing up and how fast it goes. One minute you're at the Fun Fest and the next she's necking on your sofa with a boy from Mt. Vernon. Paul Cunliffe, former bandmate has a very classy daughter who is now in her late 20's, I think. When Caitlin was little he told me:

"You never know when that last push on the swing is going to come."

Schwann's Update: There is an apartment complex on the campus of the agency where I work, for families of recovering addicts and chemical dependent people. I know I have reported on this blog about the Schwann's conspiracy, involving suburban housewives and serial cannabalism. Well, I saw a Schwann's truck pulling into the complex for formerly chemically dependent people! Now I am concerned that Schwann's is brancing out into other socioeconomic classes, the underpriveleged, and the non-suburban. I have heard that Schwann's is coming out with a line of frozen soul food entrees. They are delivering menudo in Hispanic neighborhoods. They're all disappearing, the former meth moms, the mamacitas, the tired laundromat mothers in smocks! Their puzzled husbands abandoned in their Lazy-Boys, hollering for beer, wondering vaguely, "Where did she say she was going?" He comes to the door offering free samples, wearing that smart uniform, talking about "easy and nutritious" but these women don't understand. He's talking about THEM!!

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Remembering a summer night

On summer nights we went out front and lit sparklers off glowing punk sticks jammed into buckets of sand the Tucker's Grandma prepared. It was hot and sticky and the cicadas were sawing away in unison from the elms that lined our streets then, before the Dutch Elm Disease killed them all.



We stayed up late and enjoyed the dry, cool breeze that finally blew across the porch and wrote our names in the dark with our sparkling wands. It was a little dangerous, playing with fire, and we burned our fingers sometimes, and our bare knees, but we didn't care. We were up late, no school, and our parents were up the street having a beer on the porch. We didn't have to be anywhere. I suppose some of the neighbors probably wished we would go in and be quiet but they never said anything.



It's snowing again and I'm smelling sweat and punk and dry grass. Memory is a wonderful thing. These are pictures of Walker carrying on the summer tradition last July.

My camera is again on the fritz. Walker and a friend used it last, and so I interrogated him. They were editing video they'd shot with it. Walker said he pressed the on button repeatedly to get it to beep in a funny rhythm while it was hooked up, synching with the computer. Now the camera thinks it's still hooked up to something and ignores all commands. It's off, in a box, to Canon, since it's under warranty, and I did not mention Walker's funny rhythm to the person at the store. We'll see. I really wanted to take some more pictures of the orchid budding.

Sigh.