Mom is 84

-
Photobucket
On Monday, my mother turned 84. She lives in a tiny rural Iowa town which is really lucky to have a grocery store where she can buy basic goods. And they'll order things for her if they don't have them. Plus their prices are very reasonable. This is really a luxury - the store's existence has blinked on and off over the past 20 years. Having it is really much better than not, to state the obvious. All of this is an introduction to saying we drove 30 miles on Monday to a larger town to get some things the local grocery store doesn't carry. And unfortunately, couldn't get what we needed there either. The choice was either to drive 50 miles in the other direction or to special order it. And in this manner we spent the whole day.  I'm not complaining - I enjoy my mom's company - I'm just saying there are always trade-offs.  Miles of strip malls do bring convenience along with blight.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fourth Lake Forest Preserve

-
Image
Weezie has definite preferences about where and how far we walk. She also "sees" things I don't see. She takes specific detours on the paths. I suppose she smells something that needs to be avoided. It would be cool to have her set of sensors sometimes, like when Merlin transformed Arthur into a bird or a squirrel. So what would appear - a big coyote urine "Do Not Trespass" sign? And then maybe I would understand why dogs just have to roll in the rankest of all odors. Yesterday at Fourth Lake, we saw a bunch of small birds dive-bombing a red-tailed hawk. They weren't just harassing the hawk, they were making contact - hitting the hawk so hard that it juddered in flight. It was amazing. They were too high for me to be able to tell what the attackers were but they were about the size of robins or blackbirds. There were lots of thistles along the trail which made me think of Monarch butterflies and how their numbers are very low and all of a s
Read more

Seven Pounds

-
Image
We spent New Year's Eve watching the movie, Seven Pounds What a good movie! I commented that it was a "little" movie, like they still produce in Europe, but you rarely see from the U.S. I wasn't surprised when I found out that the Director, Gabriele Muccino, is Italian. When I say "little," I mean "little" as in the trivial little things of daily life, the little happenings that are sewn together to become our lives over time. No need for explosions, shootings, wars.... As in definitely not Independence Day . Not that I disliked Independence Day . It's just that the balance between wonderful "little" movies and the blockbusters has been off here for years. So rent it if you get a chance. And don't forget the kleenex. And if you don't like it, just watch it to enjoy Rosario Dawson's beauty and vulnerability.
Read more

Where Have I Been?

-
Image
I see that my last post was in mid 2014, very shortly before my daughter was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer.  My past three years have been spent as a caregiver, driver, companion, whatever was needed as she underwent the arduous process of trying to get well once again.  The good news is, she has now been cancer-free (that is to say, cancer that is detectable by all the tools modern medicine can bring to bear) for four months.  I say that with some trepidation and a lot of skepticism because of the pernicious nature of cancer.  All the tools - MRI, CT, PET scans, blood tests, etc., can only detect cancer at the macro level, an eye opening bombshell for us (naive as we were) when after her first "cancer-free" party she relapsed for the first time.  However, one thing we have learned is to live one day at a time, no matter how difficult that is, no matter how the mind wants to scurry down the what if path, and no matter how hard it is to get back to "normal life
Read more