Ah, yesterday was a long day. I started this post at about 10 pm and I opened my computer to see it staring at me – just the title, nothing else. I don’t know what happened really between then and now, except that I obviously closed the lid. For my mother to worry about being sick, finally go to the doctor and come to think she was fixably ill and then, boom, to find out she has advanced pancreatic cancer is a terrible thing for her to have to face. To know you are alive and that soon you will not be so . . . beyond accepting. To go from promising to eat better and build up your strength on one day and choosing hospice on the next is . . .

And that is where we are at this time. We are at life’s grammatical three dots that say we are at a loss to truly describe what is coming in the next minutes.

I got this email from LZP:

This is weird……..

BATHROOM PAINTED FLOOR !!!
*IMAGINE YOU ARE AT A PARTY ….

* Tenth floor of a hi-rise building….*

*AND THEN YOU HAVE TO VISIT THE BATHROOM…. *

*You open the door…. **
NOW, REMEMBER,*

*THE FLOOR IS JUST* A PAINTED FLOOR!**

KINDA TAKES YOUR BREATH AW AY…..* *DOESN’T IT?*

Scroll sloooooooowly…..

to this picture

down

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here.

Colin and his mother above

and below

When I am seriously taken aback, shaken to my roots, I make mindless errors. Just now, when I  went to type in my user name, I typed “a special friend” because she (JE) was very much on my mind. I was thinking of when we went to Shadowlands at Kenwood Mall and there is this speech by C.S. Lewis, (Anthony Hopkins) :

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.

She was sitting on my right and after that last sentence, she turned to me, smiling, and softy commented on the truth of it.

I have often returned to that moment and how she looked and what she said . . . and I have found comfort.

Today Mother is 83 years old and we started the morning off with a CAT scan with IV contrast, after drinking a lot of  the pre-test Crystal Lite mixture just before the scan and 16 ounces of water before that. Did I say we? Oh, I did . . . well . . . Mother did the drinking and since her stomach has not been feeling at all well, it was a bit of a long process, with her lying in an examination room with a vomit pan beside her.

Oh, before we left, while I was upstairs changing clothes,  I heard Sydney barking plaintively and thought he was in the back vestibule, although he sounded closer than that. He was; he had followed Alison two floors below into the bunker (where the cat is) and didn’t make it out before she left and put the gate up. He was trapped with Tiffany, the cat from, well, Mother’s. When I got down there, his little nose was up against the gate like a doomed prisoner.

Mother is sleeping on the porch now, after having watched Angela’s Ashes and I am on the other sofa with traumatized Sydney. We have the electric firestove on and a Macintosh and Peach Yankee Candle burning. And I am drinking a cure: you know, Diet Coke mixed with Coke and sipped after two aspirin.

I have been thinking of soft, spreadable cheese lately. Not the nacho kind – the type I’m using to having on holidays and other special occasions. So I went looking while at the grocery and found a small tub of cheddar and horseradish for $3.99 and I could imagine on my tongue and forgot about the price and put it in my cart. Then I came home and ate it. Not all of it, but a lot. It was so good – almost a transcendental experience. Then I got stomach cramps. It was worth it. In fact, I’ll probably do it again tomorrow. The really cool thing is that when Der Bingle is not here, I am the only one who will eat anything with horseradish in it.

I bought spiders today – electric light ones – that were on sale; I was in CVS getting Mother’s prescription when I saw them and thought, “Aha! Grover would like me to put these up to give Summer the creeps.” So, I bought them and then I went up to Scott with the medicine and on the way back pulled over at the little Sidener Cemetery to see if Catherine Fowler had been buried there in 1851. Yes, she had and there was a broken off Fowler stone leaning against hers – but it was so worn away I could not read all the information. There was a lot of open space in those first five or so rows of white soapstone headstones. I suspect a good many are gone.

I just realized I went from Halloween spiders to dead people – that connection was not my point; my point is the excursion into the chilly wind of the cemetery compounded my fatigue from yesterday’s Apple Festival and I went home and snacked and napped. No spiders were hung. That sounds as if I am stating a disclaimer: No spiders were harmed in this production. The truth is the production got postponed and when I’m climbing around on a ladder tomorrow, some spiders might be whacked against the ladder or ceiling or even dropped. Then again they could tangle me up in the web of wires and I will splat myself off the ladder.

ooooooooooh . . . AmeliaJake vs. Eight-legged Freaks.