I just saw a familiar name in the Obits today.

But first, let me tell you about a woman whom I’ll call Annie.  Annie was a middle-aged woman – over 50 - who was active in her church.  She was from what is called the lower-middle class, which I would guess describes that end of the working class that gets by on their own efforts with nothing left over – pretty much the class of folks I came from, economically speaking.  Annie was a quiet woman, acknowledged by all who knew her as having modest good taste in clothing, something of a stretch for her, I’d guess, given her budget.  Because of her folks’ economic situation, Annie was unable to attend college, nor was she afforded any opportunity to better her education in another manner.  With her quiet demeanor and other personal qualities, however, Annie had the good fortune to land a relatively decent job waiting on folks much better off than herself in a good hotel, which she probably considered a real break, since Annie had a whole bunch of kids. 

So you get the general picture, right?  Classy lady, poorish, but well regarded by her associates; hard working, decent, having the self-respect to behave and dress well enough to hold a job where deportment and appearance counted.  Maybe you’ve known a few Annies in your time; maybe you are an Annie, at least in many respects.

Now, there are probably people who think there is some glamour in being able to wait on the wealthy and celebrated, in a well-regarded and generally upscale hotel.  But it has its downside.  People who are wealthy, especially people who grew up wealthy, often reserve their good manners for each other.  For the hired help, not so much.  The sort of hotel at which Annie worked has its slow times and its busy times, and when dealing with the upper crust who deem themselves worthy of instant service, busy times can be pretty tough.  I was reading only today how many times there have been riots at Inaugural Balls; it seems once the Prez has come and gone there is such a crush at the coat check table or window, that the police have been called on a number of these occasions.  This is nothing new; Lincoln himself lost his hat in the crush at President Taylor’s Inaugural.  But I am digressing. 

An interesting side-effect of inherited wealth is that it allows people, who would be kicked to the curb in a society based on individual merit, to prosper and thrive and to lord it over persons whose shoes they are unfit to shine.  One busy night after a social event elsewhere, just such a lout came to finish a drinking bout, already very far along, at the hotel where Annie worked.  As the evening progressed Annie was kept hopping in order to keep the drinks supplied to one and all of the revelers.  When this lout ordered yet another drink and was unhappy with the speed at which it was forthcoming, Annie told him, “I’m hurrying as fast as I can.” 

Shock!  Consternation!  How dare she give him what he called “this shit”?!

The lout’s name was of course William Zantzinger, and Annie’s name wasn’t really Annie, it was Hattie Carroll.  You may have heard of her.  Old Willie, of course didn’t have to take that shit; while Ms Carroll, of course, did.  So Good Old Willie did what anyone of his ilk would do in such desperate straits – he raised the toy cane he had brought with him (Good Old Willie – always up for a laugh!) and gave Ms Carroll a good belt with it.  Within hours Hattie Carroll, mother of eleven, was dead from a stroke brought on by the stressful encounter, and –oh yeah - the assault with the cane.  The court recognized and ruled that the assault was a cause and Ms Carroll’s death its effect at Good Ol’ Willie’s trial . 

Nearly all of us who recognize Ms Carroll’s name do so because Bob Dylan wrote a song about it the year it happened.  I heard this song – probably the same year or the next - and knowing nothing of the events chronicled, I assumed this was an event that happened in the late 1800s or early 1900s.  I was shocked a few years ago to hear that it happened in 1963, at a time when I was living about 35 miles from where the event occurred.  William Zantzinger was three years older than me – at the time of the murder he was 24. 

There may be those – in fact, there were those, including the judge at his trial – who would note the occasion, the booze, the man’s age and think, “Unfortunate, but the boy was young (the judge’s word was “immature”), bad things happen.”  Drink was, in those days, an excuse for much – just six years later my brother would be mowed down by a drunk driver who was barely fined.  So let’s just accept for the moment, that logic (horribly wrong though it is) and see if Old Willie led an otherwise upright life, giving to the poor, visiting the sick, comforting the dying.  Well, um, not exactly.

You see, years later, Old Willie was renting a whole bunch of substandard housing to poor Blacks.  And by substandard, I don’t mean the walls weren’t as smooth and well-painted as one might wish, but rather that there was no heat and no running water.  And make no mistake, Maryland gets mighty cold in the winter.  And folks, even when they are poor and black, do need their water now and again.  Like, to survive.  And being the inherited-wealth-made man that he was, Old Willie saw no reason he should be paying taxes on the money he got from the renters.  The state, which had been remarkably forgiving in the matter of Ms Carroll (more on that soon), was far less so when it came to getting its cash.  So the shacks and the land they sat upon were taken from Old Willie; he no longer had any more claim to them than do you or I. 

Well, this never bothered Old Willie; he just kept right on collecting the rent and even more egregious, he hauled any of the tenants who fell behind into court, and had them evicted.  Maryland being what it is, and white courts being what they are in many areas, the courts there just assumed that those damn blacks owed Mr. William, and that no one of Mr. William Zantzinger’s pedigree (and race) - Mr. William whose roots went back to earliest white Maryland settlers - would ever do other than tell the whitest of truth in court as he set about teaching the underclass folks a much needed lesson. 

Eventually, one way or another, the matter got into the press – not so much because black folk were being put out onto the street but because of the conditions in the housing that they were being put out of.  Those looking into the matter soon noted that Old Willie hadn’t owned the housing in question for years, despite his collecting rent and instigating evictions.  I do not know whether or not he was paying taxes on this land he didn’t own, but at a guess, I’d imagine he’d figure why should he pay taxes on land he didn’t own, particularly when he saw no need to do so when he did own it. 

The court presumably found this fraud three times more heinous than the murder, since Good Ol’ Willie’s sentence for this latter peccadillo ran three times as long; even more painful I am sure, Ol’ Willie had to cough up $62,000 this time.

At any rate, when the court recognized at the trial which resulted from Ms Carroll’s killing that the cause of her death was indeed the assault by William Zantzinger, it rumbled and frowned very sternly and sentenced him to six months in jail.  The jail term was, however, delayed and did not begin until a couple of weeks later, because Mr. Zantzinger needed to get his crop in.  Mr. Zantzinger could not afford Hattie Carroll an extra minute to do her job; however the court saw no problem in affording Mr. Zantzinger a couple of weeks to do his.  What Mr. Zantzinger specifically said as he struck the blow that killed Ms Carroll, after she had the temerity to plead that she was working as fast as she could, was, “I don’t have to take this shit from a nigger.”  So y’all use that word as freely as you want: claim it means ‘friend’ or that you can spell it with an ‘A’ or pronounce it differently, or say, “I am just quoting what so-and-so said”, or it’s OK, because I am Black and I am taking ownership of the term, or whatever you like.  But please, when you do, admit at least to yourself, that by doing so you acknowledge and agree that you are seconding the opinion that the life of a working mother of eleven children is worth six months at most, to be served when convenient.  Because that is what, among other things, you are saying.  Mr. Zantzinger’s sentence for the killing was handed down on August 28, 1963. 

Do I hear anyone saying, “Hmm…  August 28, 1963; that’s seems so familiar somehow.  Where have I heard that date mentioned?”  I hasten to enlighten you.  On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King made the “I have a dream” speech to a crowd of more than 200,000 people, most of them black. 

Virtually every news account at the time noted that the crowd was “orderly”.

So 2008 is finished, and I am cautiously raising my head to peer warily at 2009, a year which once was planned to be the year of my permanent liberation from work.  Not gonna happen, I gather, unless a miracle occurs, or (much more likely in my case) I suddenly take a whim into my head to just go ahead and see what happens.   I spent some time yesterday switching all my future 401(k) contributions to go into a stable value fund which made over 4% last year; what I was putting it into previously lost over $7,000 last year. 

Mehitabel the Cat used to tell Archy, “There’s a dance in the old dame, yet!”   While I wouldn’t exactly put it that way, (the gender’s wrong for starters), I must brag that I have had an offer that I have thus far refused, which would, if accepted, take me away from all this.  And how many gents of my vintage can say that?  My off-again on-again ‘special friend’ Tiko, has told me that if I were to agree to become his One and Only, he would not only pay off my mortgage, but pretty much keep me in the manner to which I only wish I had become accustomed.  This is no idle threat, for Tiko is currently experiencing a decidedly upward ride on Fortuna’s Wheel.  The new government in his homeland is headed by a personal friend of his and he is back in that unfortunate land dusting off old deeds on the 200-plus properties he inherited from the family holdings; each of his brothers has inherited a similar amount.  The revolutionary government is gone, and the good times are apparently rolling once again.  He has already leased out a couple of holdings, receiving enough to completely pay off his mortgage in the U.S. – a mortgage which was a good deal larger than my humble debt. 

I wrote a couple of years ago about the downside of the Tiko relationship, and for those of you who can endure two of these overlong entries in a day, that entry can be found here: http://pastdue.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!148B0A2ECFD36181!1407.entry.  (My good pal Jeankfl told me the right way to do a reference, and I can't find her instruction anywhere.)  After reading this, anyone with a modicum of sense would ask, “Why are you even talking to that guy? 

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the grave, as is sometimes the case.  I endured years of stalking, invective, and – let’s be honest - mind-boggling sex.  A main motive in going to Saudi was to get to a place where Tiko could not follow.  Tiko’s own circumstances fluctuated wildly for years; he would one day be owning or renting a fantastic house, the next day out and broke and barely getting by.  He had no sense whatever of reasonable financial practices.  I believe that when he paid a utility bill, it came as a complete shock that next month they wanted more money.  His plans were always based on everything going exactly right.  And they never did.  One thing that kept him going was that he has always had a host of men dazzled by his looks, and his air of being a shy, valiant immigrant in the grip of misfortune, and these were happy to help out in the hope of getting themselves a piece o’ that.  This is still true, even though he has reached 50, and as Shakespeare warned us, every fair from fair sometime declines. 

He was never lazy; he always had a job at which he worked hard; it is just that he didn’t grow up surviving on the paltry sum he could earn, and he just has no idea of how to do so.  He keeps his house very neat and is far more prone to clean and cook than I am.  He never dodged the hard stuff, in terms of effort involved.  He is just convinced that he should have what he wants, and if he can’t afford it, then someone should get it for him – usually me. 

Anyway, around the year 2000, I finally had enough of the harassment; the side benefits just didn’t equal the stress.  I had consulted over the years with a number of people who deal with this sort of thing, and the consensus was that in cutting this kind of tie, the person being harassed only gets killed 10 per cent of the time.  Who could resist odds like that? 

So one day when I was receiving one of his interminable harangues via telephone – he lived in California and I had just bought my house in New York and was living there, I just laid down the phone and walked away.  Now, the last time I had hung up on him years before, he was so enraged that he came and broke through a plate glass window with his bare hands to get at me, and the police had to be called.  So this was a real laying down of the gauntlet.  As it was, this time all he did was fill my answering machine with enraged threats and accusations.  I never answered the phone again when he called and he stopped calling; then I got various jobs in Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin and Alabama and for some years, I never heard a thing from him. 

During those years he underwent some life-changing events.  He had not two, but three hip replacements – his medical smarts, when picking a doctor, were no better than his financial acumen.  His closest friend, on whom he depended a great deal, was diagnosed with cancer and Tiko wound up being the person who had to undertake the responsibility in that friendship for a while.  Probably most devastating to his self-image was a botched side effect of the long and unusually painfully series of surgeries on his hips – a catheterization miscue - caused extensive damage to an area very central to many men’s self-regard.  Tiko finally experienced the sensation, heretofore known only to mere mortals, of feeling physically imperfect. 

One day in Alabama, when I was bored and ripe for mischief – about the same time as I began blogging – I tapped into a former e-mail address and discovered an old friendly e-mail from him sent during our long hiatus.  I wondered what would happen if I said, “Hi” – never let it be said that I did not have some complicity in the long relationship that had preceded my decision to brave his threats and walk away from his angry phone call.  One thing led to another; I learned he had relocated to a small city in Nevada, and heard for the first time about all the surgeries – even the botched business, which I am certain he would confess to no one else except possible the friend with cancer.  He said he had accepted that we were not in a relationship, but he would like to be friends.  We met in Reno a couple of years ago and, indeed, it seemed that in his forties, Tiko finally had grown up in many respects and was no longer the over-aged demanding teen-ager that I had known for so many years.  We got on well, had a nice time together, and despite the physical alteration caused by age and the worst efforts of the medical profession, he still was hugely attractive to me – and I to him.  We have met several times since: he has visited me in both Smallville and Reedville.  There have been disagreements, but none of the threats and so on – one could say they remain well within the normal range of behavior. 

So we remained friends with benefits.  Tiko is intensely aware of the dangers of casual sex, and I am fairly confident that I have been his only outlet in that direction for some time; (his embarrassment over his surgery mishap, which is esthetic rather than functional, is probably even more compelling as a motive to discretion).  Meanwhile, the government back in his homeland changed and his fortunes have been steadily rising.  He has made a couple of long visits home, and some of the things he has done there lately imply a good deal of money to spend.  And as I said, he has fully paid off his mortgage in Nevada. 

Then, before he left for his latest visit home a month or so ago, he told me that if I would agree to enter a monogamous relationship, our fortunes could be joined; he’d pay off my mortgage and so forth.  But don’t worry, he said, I’ll still want to have sex if you say no.  (I told you he was lousy as a negotiator, didn’t I?)  He is thinking of living primarily in Africa, with several visits per year to the U.S. – he has no plans to give up his citizenship here, or his home in Nevada.  He has a place on the beach in his homeland, among the many other parts of the country to which he has a deed.  I demurred, and before he left he informed me he had found a new bf who would join him for a couple of weeks in Africa and who would be the lucky recipient of all his love and worldly goods. 

Since his return to Africa, he has called me several times; the new bf has come and stayed his promised two weeks and has returned to the U.S., but will return in May.  You missed your opportunity, he told me.  I do not know exactly how Tiko thinks, but I do know how he behaves.  First, he has that line of thinking through and through that sex is sinful outside a relationship, and worse, a kind of weakness.  All of his harangues against me in the past have been centered on my refusal to make him the sole recipient of my affection and lust.  I am almost certain that the new bf isn’t getting any; Tiko has in the past kept hopefuls dangling for years with the implication that maybe he’d come across one day, but I am 99% sure he never has.  Second, this bf is a relatively new name in the list of his admirers and I am almost certain he would not so quickly allow the lad admittance to survey the physical damage he has endured.  Moreover, with his insistence on monogamy and the heavy importance he places on is own behavior in this regard, I can’t imagine he’d continue to want to see me or even to talk to me if he had indeed transferred his affections. 

I know that, as much as I genuinely believe in the change I have seen in the last several years, all bets are off if I agreed to enter a relationship.  I had a straight friend who was a great guy as long as he dated a woman, but who became a whole different person toward women who entered into a relationship or marriage with him, jealous, suspicious and controlling.  I don’t want to re-open that can of worms.  I have no pride or complaint about living on the largesse of another (much of which would be no more than my due, since the shoe was on the other foot for a long time).  But I know the demands that I be not only monogamous – not much problem, there, at my age – but also divest myself of friends and family would soon follow.  And that I will not do, especially since Tiko and I have almost zero in common other than our enjoyment of each other carnally.  And he would be suspicious even were I to be as virtuous as Caesar’s wife.  He never reads, likes soap operas and gossip about HIS friends and we just have nothing to talk about except my failings.  (OK, I might mention his failings once in a while, but only under the greatest of pressure, and only in the interests of mutual improvement!  - As if…)  

So I am not really tempted.  It is just when I look out at this 7-degree weather and think of that place on the beach near the Equator; when I face another day alone and remember how very hot he can be, when I feel old and recall that he absolutely cannot see any change in me from the day we met; when I know I must rise tomorrow and endure another day at work in which I have no interest and to which I see no end; well, it does give one food for thought.  If he were only a little more tolerant of the other folks in my life – but he isn’t.  If only he were a little more affectionate outside of the bedroom – but he isn’t.  If only I had a little more trust in his ability to keep living within his means – but I don’t. 

He wants me to come visit this year, and I am toying with the idea.  I am well aware I would be on his turf.  While I do believe that people can grow, I don’t believe they change fundamentally.  I’d visit him in Nevada without a qualm, but in a place where he has powerful friends, and where I am just a foreigner, I am not so sure.  I have zero fear of Africa itself – I always do fine in places like that – and I have been to other parts of the continent before; the issue is Tiko himself, and the power that venue may give him in our nearly 30-year push-and-shove. 

So I guess 2009 need not be entirely boring…

While not as sick as a horse, I was sufficiently sick – let’s say as sick as pony – to quail at the thought of a 2.5 hour drive to Reedville to a house that – let’s face it – is not kept as warm by my brother George, who pays the heat bills – as one might wish.  Moreover the weather people – the forecasters, not the radical underground group – were suggesting that the drive back might be unpleasant, and as I gaze out my window, I can only think they might not have erred in this prediction. 

Since I, sadly, am not one to ‘get ‘er done’, nor one with infinite – or even any – inner resources, a weekend in Smallville where I know no one, is a weekend of sitting slack-jawed in front of a screen of some sort.  However, even I have my standards in viewing what the great screen offers, and Saturday found me watching – as the least of 130 evils, a series of HGTV makeovers, home improvements and general messing about with furniture, paint and power tools.  And whereas a couple of years ago I had reason to complain of a universal desire among the shows proffered to have the paint, furniture, and general décor  to “pop” , the word du jour these days is ‘unique’ incorrectly used to mean rare or unusual.  For those of us who speak English and who blanch at the idea that one thing can be one-er of a kind than another thing, this would be grueling enough; but when, in fact, the one thing that the various designers and clue-free home-owners want to avoid at all costs is anything which hints – even obliquely – that said homeowner (or designers) have a single thought that is not shared by even the dimmest of the general public, it is painful to hear this word applied to the projects.

“We shall start,” declares the designer, “by brightening up the room with a bold color-choice,” and he or she proceeds to paint the place a whitish-yellow color that is barely distinguishable from the off-cream color that has adorned every apartment in every one of those cracker box complexes that specialize in providing more rules than space, in which I have had the spiritually deadening ill-luck to have been forced to dwell.  Upon arriving at the home to be “re-made”, the decorator will have his or her attention drawn to the sole manifestation of a previous owner’s individuality or interests; “What were they thinking?” he or she will squeal.  What these shows are touting as “unique” is pretty much the same exact thing found in every new house or apartment, but done either better, or more quickly or more cheaply.  I suppose, in a society that has no concept of the word “home”, but which frankly discusses property values and resale value where once people spoke of warmth and continuity and love as the chief components to be desired in a domicile, this pablum conformist mentality is no surprise. 

It is bad enough that so many people claiming to value their ‘difference’ wish to be as different from others as a single Lego block is to the rest of the box, but what is infinitely worse is these same people’s enraged reaction when they actually are exposed to a dash of real difference in their community.  Paint your house purple and you will make the local news, if not the national news on a slow day.  On this same morning of dispiriting home improvement, there was a half hour show on improving the grounds of a rather grand house that had been sitting unoccupied amidst one of those housing projects made up of other rather grand houses of fairly similar appearance, designed to imply the owners have a great deal of wealth, and an utter lack of imagination.  The prior owners of this house had apparently spent around six figures trying to construct a rather Romanesque water-park type of structure in a steep back yard.  There were pillars and stone slides and a cement cave of some sort and so on.  My first thought upon seeing it was, “How cool!  It looks like a Roman ruin,” and I began to fantasize what I would do with this, were I to find it in my back yard, and if I had the hundreds of thousands that the new owners clearly had to spend.  It would not have been something I would have put in originally (I wouldn’t have thought of it, for starters), because my personal taste is for way less cement and lots more green in my yard.  But the horror of the owners – and not only the owners, but the entire community – seemed to be aimed at its unusual look.  “Eyesore”, was the common motif that ran through every comment.  It was hardly an eyesore, other than in the way that all these pretentious ‘estates’ spread across the once verdant cropland are.   But even the head of the Homeowner’s Association was on hand to speak brokenly of what a boon to the community a change to the backyard of this house would be.  Let me say right here that Homeowner’s Associations are one of these things I despise with all my being, as I do the current Administration or eating seafood or death by flesh-eating bacteria.  Of all the things that are threatening to reduce America to the rank of a third-rate power, the kind of thinking that finds it desirable to extort large sums of cash from homeowners to force people to live in their homes in a manner approved by the most aggressive and least imaginative persons in a community surely takes the biscuit.  If you ever catch me moving into any place which requires joining one of these entities, please shoot me or make me eat crab.  I thank you beforehand and absolve you of any guilt.   Suffice it to say when the gobs of dollars had been spent to improve these grounds, there was a great deal more greenery (as well as tons and tons of cement less imaginatively configured) and amidst all that greenery there was not so much as a leaf or a twig that would occasion a start of pleasurable surprise. 

Mediocrity is everywhere, and people are so damn proud of it.  It was somewhat shocking to me that one of the areas in which Obama had to brook some criticism was the suspicion that he was guilty of pursuing excellence, or ‘elitism’.  Whatever may be said for or against Sarah Palin, it was dismaying that a huge element of her popularity seemed to be that she was ‘just like us’.  This was not said in order to extol her humanity or her common touch or her awareness of the trials of the common man, but rather her (imagined) thinking and behaving just like we do.  Then rather unfairly, she was criticized because, when given access to a high-limit credit card or two she went out and bought what at first seemed to  be about $150K worth of clothes , but is now looking closer to $200K.  But wasn’t that just like us?  Isn’t that behavior EXACTLY what we all did to wind up in our current mess?  So why is it we want leaders that are ‘just like us’ and then complain when they prove to be, well, just like us?  Personally, I would prefer someone smarter than me, who had a clue how to behave differently from us and could get us out of this mess.   Call me eccentric. 

I HATE potluck dinners.  While there are few things nicer than being invited to real dinners where the host supplies the victuals, or having folks over to my house where I do the cooking; a potluck would be better described by substituting the word 'bad' for 'pot'.  A man or woman, or a couple, deciding to host his/her/its friends might roll out something special: an upgrade to the meat they usually eat, or a great salad they discovered or a special dessert; but in the midst of the bounty, if the meat turns out to be squirrel or the salad has great slabs of wet bread, or anchovies in it, or the dessert has unfortunate lumps of unknown provenance, one can discreetly dispose of one item and concentrate on the others.  Usually the talk is interesting and no one is keeping score on how many bites one takes of something.  Anybody who knows me is aware of my aversion to fish or seafood of any kind (I make sure of it!), so I can accept dinner invitations with a serene faith that it will be largely edible, and just may be delicious.  I do seem to have whittled my acquaintance to largely good cooks who enjoy traditional food well-prepared.  This wasn't an intentional process, but maybe subconsciously I was being deft and purposeful - or I'll throw a bone to jeankfl and allow the possibility of divine intervention.   True, since I have moved to the semi-sticks, I may have to add to the  publishing of my anti-piscine bias, a rider to the effect that I also do not care to eat anything that has been shot.  This is not because I oppose hunting; with the constant attacks on my landscaping from voracious deer, I applaud hunting and offer opportunities to engage in it upon my property at all times, in season or out, to any hunter who feels that knocking off the local Bambi is a whale of an idea.  If people shot only cows and chickens and pigs and sheep - and occasionally each other - I could attend dinners at the houses of manly men or of Sarah Palin without a tremor, but sadly, when the entrée has been shot, it is always more exotic fare.  Basically anytime the meat can be described as 'gamy', please exclude me from the invitation list.  Fortunately I don't have many vegetarians in my circle, because those folks tend to fall upon innocent legumes or leafy greens which are delightfully edible in themselves and, probably from deep motives of carnivore-envy, render them by way of creative cookery into appalling messes that require removal of one's tongue, or at least the taste buds thereon, to enjoy.   

But in a potluck event (calling it a potluck dinner implies an edibility which I have never encountered), there are not a bevy of dishes concocted by the same hand.  Each guest reaches into his or her special place where he or she keeps a set of recipes (most often just one recipe actually, labelled "My specialty") and pulls forth a treasured dish that is expected to 'knock 'em dead'.  In most cases this is no idle threat.  Not only do a series of crimes against humanity appear in dishes covered with tinfoil or Saran-wrap, but the authors of these enormities have eyes for nothing save the quantity of this mess that is consumed by each and every guest.  No tucking the chocolate tuna fish and turnip dessert into one's pocket, as one might do at a normal meal, where one would not have encountered it in the first place.  No pushing the venison and prune sausage into a napkin.  Even that final refuge of the trapped at normal dinners, of taking small bites and minimizing the tongue-time given to the foreign substance as much as possible while one gulps vast quantities of alcohol or Pepsi to wash it down quickly and unchewed, because the diamond-drill eyes of the provider of that particular pot watch every movement of the jaw that holds the special treat.  

I have, this summer, begun attending meetings of a men's group over in Broome County, and everything was going along well enough until it was decided by the majority of the group that nothing would do but to have a potluck dinner - and to make this a monthly event.  Having said 'men' and 'potluck' in the same sentence, I feel it would be de trop to say this is a gay men's group.   Whereas these folks are nice enough in their way, (although I have not found the love connection for which I had secretly hoped), the group is more or less led by a vegan and his equally vegan significant other, and many of the members are of very limited income.  When a potluck among the carnivorous and comfortably circumstanced is dreadful, I can only imagine the extent of harm that can be inflicted by the flesh-deprived and the impoverished.  And imagine it I will have to do, because there is no way in hell I am going to attend this orgy.  Unfortunately the group is quite small, and if I plead a prior commitment, they are perfectly capable of re-scheduling to fit my supposed schedule.  There is no depth to which folks will not sink, once they are seized with the fever to hold a potluck.  I really think potlucks are an alternative for those who are deeply stressed to going on a shooting rampage, so fiercely do the perps cling to the plan through any sort of cavilling and demurral.  I am torn between ceasing to attend the group altogether, and rushing in with MY special dish and dropping it off and claiming a workplace emergency that calls me right back to the office instantly.  But I can't really do this every month, though; suspicions will be raised.  

Any hope that this event could be somehow endured were laid to rest at the last meeting when a guy attended whom I had not seen before.  In the endless discussion of logistics (gay men can talk anything to death once they find themselves in any kind of organizing mode), the lad piped up with, "Can we do any cooking on site here?" and went on to aver that he had a recipe he called "Poor Man's Surprise" ("and I have never found it written down anywhere!") that "everybody loves".  My heart was sinking like a mafioso encased in concrete, when he added dismissively, "unless they, like, don't like tuna fish or something."  Oh. My. God.  I don't know where the "surprise" comes in in the name of the dish, but I totally get the "poor man" part.  Poor, indeed!  Poor anybody that has to eat the shit.  Here's a tip: just as a matter of self-preservation, NEVER eat anything with the word 'surprise' in the name.  It will be a surprise all right, but not of the type for which one might hope.  More like the manner in which Pearl Harbor was a surprise.  

I have, in my long life, been trapped surprisingly often in doctors' offices where the reading material consisted solely of some dreadful medical treatise and tattered copies of Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal.   In desperation, I have opened one of those magazines for the homemaker, and regularly found 'quick or 'easy' or 'inexpensive' recipes.  And without exception these recipes have required tuna fish and that other gross offense to the tongue, cream of mushroom soup.  These are two things that I simply will not eat.  They are disgusting in and of themselves, and combined and added to anything else they pull it down to their level.  I firmly believe you can taste a single drop of mushroom soup dropped into a vat of hot chilies.  And you can smell tuna a furlong away, even when the intervening distance includes a hog farm and a sewage plant.  What is it with women and the eating of gross substances?  

Have you ever had the pleasure of dining at the home of a woman who is on a diet?  Of course you have - despite the billows of flesh around us which would argue to the contrary, virtually all women spend large portions of their existence on diets.  Certainly single women do; there is a tendency among the married of both sexes to feel that once the deal is sealed, the advertising can be dispensed with in matters of appearance, manners and just about everything else.  The mate is now enjoined to love one for “who they really are” and not for how they look, and 'how they really are' tends to reach levels of behavior and tonnage that are not for the faint of heart.  But for those of us who are perforce single, there is a high likelihood that our friends will include a large portion of females who are similarly circumstanced.  And it is a scientific fact that in any group of three single women, one, at least, will be on a diet at any given moment.   Since few members of either sex would dream of actually eating less, the fairer sex has developed the strategem of "substituting". (Vegetarians are also adept at this - think 'tofurkey' if you can do so without throwing up in your mouth.)  So as you wanly pick at the meal served by a friend who pre-diet was a wondrous cook, she gleefully regales you with such newly-discovered dieter's secrets as "instead of beef, you just use parsnips" or '"you just replace the butter with tofu paste".  A woman on a diet is an angry woman, and everybody's gonna suffer, damn it.   (There are two other strategies engaged in by the average dieter: 1) weighing everything, which would work if they weighed it instead of eating it, but alas! they tend to do both; and 2) talking endlessly about the diet and portions and carbs and grams and slip-ups and rewards until no one is willing to come near them, which does reduce the amount of food they are offered by others, but unfortunately also results in them eating the share they had planned for the guest who sadly found an emergency that required his or her absence from the feast of dietary factoids and low-cal substitutions, at the last minute)

I had a friend (a slim friend) who was a gourmet cook - and I mean she really was the finest cook I have ever known.  She remained slim largely by cooking, which she loved better than eating, and then inviting others to eat her end results.  She was so good a cook that she actually induced me - a famously picky eater - to eat several vegetables that I had hitherto refused to even try - mostly those of the brassica family: Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli - which are now among my favorite vegetables - by making seemingly plain, but actually devilishly clever dishes from them.  Only once that I know, did she slip into the substitution mode.  She served up a faux potato salad which substituted equal measures of cooked broccoli and cauliflower for the potatoes.  The secret, she said, slipping into Family Circle mode, is using celery seed in the salad.  I loved it, although I have never been able to make mine taste as wonderful as hers did.  No matter, it is still pretty good.  It is my secret specialty.  I bring it to all the potlucks to which I am forced to go.  Everybody hates it - few people really like cauliflower or broccoli anyway.  Some take a tiny dab, but some take none at all.  

And don't let these latter folks think I don't notice.  I take names; I have a list.   

Despite the rumors, my prolonged absence is not because I am busy counting lottery winnings, nor have I gone off my meds and begun the killings again.  The sad truth is that I have a complete lack of time management skills; were Mrs. Cox, my happily-remembered first grade teacher still grading me on part two of the old report card where my personal traits and skills were listed, “Uses Time Wisely” would be receiving a resounding ‘F’, if Fs can be said to resound.  The sad truth is that I find it impossible to do anything that relies on my own initiative and skills as a ‘self-starter’– particularly writing – unless I have an open-ended block of time, which means days without work.  These being two per week, I must write on either Saturday or Sunday, preferably in the morning.  Because I work all week in Smallville, then drive two to three hours on Friday to Reedville to one of the most paradisiacal spots that exists on old Gæia, and must use a goodly portion of Sunday driving back again to an apartment which has won awards for squalor, and because the family tradition of Sunday breakfast at Mom’s has been modified to Sunday breakfast with Mom but at David’s, I am reduced to Saturday as an option.  This was fine as long as snow blew and rain fell and lowering clouds made huddling indoors warming my fingers over a smoking computer an attractive option, but lately it has been Summer (you may have noticed), and the stately gardens and messuages have been a-tweet with birds to feed and watch, with rapidly growing lawns to be kept in trim, with windows of opportunity opening and closing within minutes for planting and pruning and mulching and weeding and the murder of several thousands of Japanese beetles which would rather eat my cherry leaves than mate (although from the evidence they do plenty of both), with sheds to be painted and trees to be cut, firewood to be stacked, AND all this lurking in the dark recesses of my calendar while both the hammock has been hung beneath two o’ershadowing ashes and the garden swing has been swung beneath an ancient willow. One can appreciate that there is competition for the Shaughnessy Saturday which is fraught enough to begin with, with competition from my overweening indolence.

There are little logistical things – such as the annoying fact that I have an Apple in Reedville and a PC in Smallville, and my blog was set up on the latter, meaning that none of the formatting that occurs on computer A remains in place on computer B when I actually post, so that I write on the Apple, e-mail it to myself on the PC, reformat it – I can’t write without italics, etc. – so that I require two surges of energy to get ‘er done, which, when both occur within a single weekend, is enough to blow most of my internal circuits.  I refer to those circuits which reside within my cranium; my computers seem perfectly able to cope while carrying on their rivalry which results in them barely speaking to each other.  Happily I don’t have a sex life to take up my time (Sister Mary Frowniface would be so pleased), but otherwise, I am a mass of conflicting impulses.  I have e-mailed none of my friends in months, and the energy required in dealing with the guilt is daunting.  I did start an entry two weeks ago, but it remains incomplete.  I swore I would get a blog, as well as other things done this weekend, but on Thursday I got a ‘sorry for the short notice’ e-mail from my niece-n-law Guinevere (the one with the two sets of twins) saying that she’d be in town from KY (the state, not the lubricant) for a few days, and would greatly like to see me Saturday at her Mom-in-law’s place (my brother Gary’s widow, Joan’s house) which is a good twenty miles or so from Reedville.  Well, what am I to do?

So no blog this week, either.  I was at Lowe’s garden department last weekend and was aghast to see it full of chrysanthemums.  This is the surest sign of Summer’s end that I know.  When I was young, we had a host of those brick-colored chrysanthemums in front of the house, and I was always depressed when they began to bloom because it meant school and the end of all hope for another 9 months (Usually it meant I’d be having a new brother soon, too, but that’s another story).  This week I saw a few goldenrod blooming, and even, on my trip back to Smallville, no less than four maples with an orange tinge, so I guess I’ll be having more time indoors soon.  That is, if a dream I had on Thursday can be safely ignored.  I dreamed I was having an acrimonious argument with a monk who was not supposed to leave his cell, but who became so irate at me, he did so and came right up to me.  “I hope you realize,” he sneered, “that you have only 24 days more to live!”  It was one of those dreams that kind of stay with one all day, and later that day it occurred to me that those 24 days brought me exactly to my birthday – which was a thought nearly as unpleasant as the monk’s prophecy; it would be particularly galling of Fortune to make me have to go through a birthday and my demise on the same day – a two for one dose of nastiness that would be entirely typical. 

As to loose ends, or late-breaking news, there is little, except that my first Social Security payment arrived exactly on time as promised.  Mom has totally fallen in love with her new apartment at Desolation Pines.  “They do everything for me,” she says – and then as if to demonstrate her complete divorce from reality anew, she adds, “and it doesn’t cost me a cent!”  But her memory has improved.  She is content and happy.  She has told us at various times that she lives in a school and in a church.  She even went to some church thing there where the “priest” performed the service with a toddler tucked under his arm resting on his hip.  This would be news indeed, were the ‘priest’ of the religion she imagines him to be.  They even have got her doing those senior calisthenics – although not, one hopes, during the services.  She has gained weight – much-needed – and looks ten years younger, which is still old as hell, but in a nicer way.  It is working out so much better than any of us dared hope, and she loves her visits to my house for breakfast; admires the house, the kitchen, the grounds – everything is just A-OK with her.  She even remembers being there before; she especially loves an old corkscrew willow we have in which I hung one of those terra cotta sun-faces I had when I lived in Texas, and which has begun to dissolve in the rains and snows of NY until it has this sort of goofy, leering grimace where once a smile was displayed, rendering it a surprisingly good likeness to several of my less savory cousins.  She tells us she “remembers” seeing that tree when walking with her mother which, I guess, means at the least that she is dwelling in the Happy Place. 

And so I miss another week of the old blogamy.  I will do better soon, I promise both of you.

A year ago, our nation’s foreign adventurism was no more than something I saw stories about on cable TV when there was nothing better on, and now I suddenly have no less than three relatives dodging bombs and rockets in the desert wastes of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In a family which had a combined total of exactly three weeks of presence during the Viet Nam hi-jinks, despite having eligible male members up the ying-yang at that time, this seems like a high degree of carelessness.  I cannot account for this sudden collective lapse on our part.  I have spoken of my cousin Warren and his IED-removal activities during which he witnessed the death of his group leader, and I believe I touched on another cousin, who in his mid-fifties suddenly finds himself seeking and destroying poppy crops in Afghanistan, driving up the value of our personal heroin stashes, making them a hell of a lot better investment than any of the stocks in my 401(k).  Now I suddenly find that the spouse of George’s daughter Graciela, he being a lad of Mexican heritage from Texas (who inexplicably speaks nary a work of Spanish while Graciela is fluent), who has been happily hauling in the Yankee dollars by the bushelsful in Kuwait for one of the major American players in infrastructure projects, is IM-ing me from Balad in Iraq.  “What ho?” I queried, and although I never learned exactly how the geographic shift came about, I have learned that his IT career currently consists of time on a computer punctuated by the donning and doffing of flak jacket and ducking for cover.  It certainly makes my current IT position look even more wan and boring than I had felt it to be hitherto.  I would be totally green with envy, were his work schedule not consisting of seven-day weeks of 12 hour days.  He tells me he works, goes to a gym, and sleeps (the sleeping and gym are two different activities, he does not sleep in the gym).  He fails to mention any pauses to pick stray bits of shrapnel from his epidermis, but one reads between the lines.  Even I would not accept a job in such interesting surroundings if it meant a work week of so many hours.  One does not, parenthetically, think of there being gyms in Balad, Iraq; I wonder if he lifts sheep or tries camel-pulling.

Alberto has found a position back in Texas which he will be starting after this month, although he is considering a position in Nigeria on an oil rig where he would earn $140K a year, and better yet, have three week vacations after every 8 weeks.  Now that sounds more my style, except that he will be out on a rig, and the whole point of these jobs for me is getting to meet the local populace.   One of the more pressing reasons for Alberto to leave his current location is that the USA tax exemption for offshore earnings comes to a crashing close this month.  This exemption was always under threat, since it was portrayed as a gift to the corporations which had overseas business.  Indubitably it benefited those corporations, but even more it benefited the nation.  My facts are from the mid-nineties, when I was more concerned with such things, but I doubt that much has changed.  Other than Korea, NONE of the industrialized nations tax offshore earnings of their citizens (by offshore earnings, I am not speaking of investments, but of earned wages by citizens who are actually working and living outside the country).  The reason for this is simple: very few people are willing to live in foreign lands, especially those of the Third World, without a compelling financial reason to do so, and any money earned by company or individual there and sent back here is pure gravy for the nation.  Other than me, few Americans in Saudi would have stayed a minute longer if they were not making substantially more than they could earn at home.   This difference largely arose from the fact that their earnings were not taxed.  So companies from the U.S. remained competitive because they could bid on projects knowing that their labor costs were not out of line with those of their foreign competitors.   Though American wages were still somewhat higher, this was offset by the generally good reputation American companies had for expertise and jobs well done.

Now, in a time when our economy is crashing and unemployment is rising we have, with good old American know-how, set up a situation where 1) our companies must pay double the wages of their competitors and/or 2) our companies must hire non-American workers either from lands which do not tax their offshore citizens (such as Britain, Germany, Ireland and so forth) or where the wages are so low that even with taxes, the workers are happy to get the wage offered.  I do support the idea that offshore workers should pay Social Security taxes, since most will collect Social Security at some point if the system doesn’t crash, but income taxes should remain exempt.  The U.S. exemption was only on the first 80 or 90 thousand dollars per year anyway, which is not so generous as one might think since one had to include the value of company-paid travel, lodging and other company supplied bennies.  So just when jobs are becoming scarce, a bunch of experienced workers, workers like Alberto who have proved they are willing to work under adverse conditions will be coming home to compete with our recent high school and college graduates.  And our companies may be losing bids which put some money into the economy; although you may be sure that this new law may be closing the loophole which most benefits the actual workers, it surely is not closing anything that is really allowing old Exxon-Mobil or Halliburton to screw the body politic.  Much of the money earned abroad is spent back in the USA; many of the younger workers I met overseas were putting in an unhappy two years solely to get the down payment for a house.  We all know that the real estate market here is so robust that the loss of new entrants into the market is no cause for concern.  Way to go, Uncle Sam! 

On a more local note, I seem to have lucked into the one company in America that is growing by leaps and bounds when I came to Smallville Solutions for Everything, Inc.  It turns out that everything is just what the country needs solutions for, and the village here is humming with the vigorous effort of my company to supply them.  Our revenue has been doubling yearly and we had, last I knew, some 150 positions seeking workers.  We are at it 24/7, and any day that our computer is not working at full blast (it tells all the line workers what to do next, and directs some highly complex manufacturing processes) we lose a couple of million bucks.  So the management views such natural disasters as a national holiday much as the residents of New Orleans viewed hurricane Katrina.  “But wait,” they cry, “Maybe we can save something from the wreck!”  And reviewing their options, they realize that the IT department is on salary, and that such upgrades as require a computer shut-down can be done while the wage-earners are relaxing on their yachts with about ten tall cool ones, with no overtime costs.  And the cry goes out: “Let Dave do it!”

Thus it was that I worked yesterday evening, and will shortly be headed workwards on this fine Saturday to work until 11 p.m. if all goes well, and until next week at this time if all goes badly.  Ah, Retirement, where is thy sting?  While Alberto is about 20 days from a return to his homeland, I am a similar number of days from my first full social security cheque and I am lovin’ it.  The additional cash will be used to pay off the last of my debts (other than my mortgage) which should take about 3 months and then I will make one or two discretionary purchases I have in mind and then FREEDOM!!  I have heard of folks complaining that retirement gave them a big bunch of time with nothing to do, and I ask, “And what is the downside?”  Nothing is my favorite thing to do.  What part of retirement don’t they comprehend?  Some days I will do nothing in a hammock; some days I will do nothing on my deck and maybe, if I can still afford gas, some days I will visit folks and do nothing at their houses.  And don’t think, if I find them cleaning their gutters or mowing their lawns, that I will be guilted into some foolish remark like, “Is there any way I can help?”  John Milton was a terrible human being and a boring poet, but he did pen the single greatest line in all of poetry:  “They also serve who only stand and wait.”  (He was bitching about being blind at the time – he fails to mention in the poem that he kept his daughters home and treated them like servants at the time, but hey, we all have our flaws).  I plan to serve my ass off, in the deepest Miltonian sense.

And now it is time for me to go to work.  Today.  Saturday.  Our nation’s ‘morning after’ when any decent American is lying in bed with a cold towel over his or her eyes. 

Do you believe that shit? 

No one is more keenly aware than I  that I have been sadly remiss in my bloggish duties, and that, all over America, ones of people are crying, "What ho?"  And it would be nice to say that I have had a life so full that my time had calls upon it that were unrelenting.  But the truth is that I am and have always been a lazy and unreliable correspondent, and that I have actually done rather better blogwise than I had any reason, based on experience, to expect.  There were, of course, a few things that kept me from slipping into a coma these past weeks, but not really all that many.  Faithful Shaggarati will recall that me dear auld Mum has been slipping into dementia, and one thing that has happened in the past weeks is the resolution of that issue.

I have always wondered what it would be like to send one's child off to his or her first day of school.  I remember well my own first day - the trepidation and feeling, quite correctly as it turned out, that life was about to change forever.  But I have not had the opportunity to send my own child off alone to a new part of his life to be lived among strangers – to see him embark looking so small, so innocent, so poorly armed against adversity.  And now, in a way, I have finally had that experience in an unexpected way.  There is a well-regarded assisted-living facility on the outskirts of the town my mother lives in - and by outskirts, I do not mean on the edge of the central village, but rather a two-mile trip through farmers' fields and patches of woodland, past ferocious attack deer and killer rabbits to the sunny isolation of Desolation Pines, which we shall call this facility.  And in this facility, a room had become available, which after a zillion interviews, financial reviews, doctor's exams and so forth, Mom was declared qualified to occupy.  Getting Mom through all the fore-mentioned requirements was a task akin to, but infinitely more difficult than, herding cats.  And no, it was not me who helped negotiate this maze, but my brothers George and Luke, and the latter's girlfriend Carol, urged on and facilitated by the considerable skills and patience and investigatory skills by phone and internet of my sister Lucy in California. 

But last week the day came, and after Luke suddenly balked, and said he would in no way act against Mom's expressed wish, which he then proceeded to maneuver into doubt and recalcitrance.  Luke is the only one of us who has never lived for long periods in other states and he has had a close and bewildering relationship to Mom for his adult lifetime.  He was transferring the reluctance and doubt he holds for this move, to her.  Mom's growing debility has been far harder on him than the rest of us, because he has not really had a period of time away in which to move his relationship with the parental unit from that of child to parent to that of two adults.  He is what is called, I believe, a man's man - full of physical courage and knowledge of how to get grown-up things done - he can re-wire, build, plumb and grow anything, he can negotiate good deals in cases that leave me gibbering and paying a premium just to get it over with, and he went far in the Golden Gloves competition during his youth.  And like most of these strong silent types, I find to my astonishment, he has the ability to deal with emotional issues similar to that of a two-year-old.  I have often heard women say that their men, when sick, are like babies, and I have come to see that for those men most stalwart in life and battle, this seems to be true.  I bet when Ike had the sniffles, Mamie had to spoon-feed him cut up veggies and wake up to soothe him at all hours of the night.  It seems that the less manly of us in day-to-day living seem to be the most grown-up when it comes to issues of the life internal.  Be that as it may, it looked like we were headed for impasse in a situation where all reason cried out for Mom to receive more care than we could give her.  And then, on the appointed day, Carol went behind Luke's back and deposited Mom at Desolation Pines and left her there.   That night when I heard that Mom had been left at Desolation Pines, I felt I finally really knew what it was to send someone I loved: small, weak and incompletely armed, into the care and company of strangers.  I lay awake much of the night feeling very sad, though I have not an ounce of doubt that Des Pines was the only right solution.

"Where's Mom?" Luke asked in agitation that evening of his beloved when he found Mom's home empty.  "Oh, I left her at Desolation Pines," quoth she, airily.  Now that the deed is done (and by other than he), Luke says it feels like a ton has rolled off his shoulders.  Lucy has flown in and has been going through Mom's belongings, deciding what to send on to Desolation Pines, what to dispose of, and what to hold for the rest of us to consider.  In the process she has found over nine hundred dollars hidden here and there, as well as some, but not all, of the more expensive jewelry her progeny had bestowed upon Mom over the years, all of which Mom had long ago pronounced 'stolen'.   We found, in Mom's mostly empty jewelry box, a note in her writing, no longer attached to the pin to which it referred, that read

"Frankie traded one of his trucks to a boy in school for this pin for me when he was little.  I wonder if the boy's mother ever missed it." 

George thinks the pin in question was a shiny silver pin that Mom used to wear.  It is characteristic of Mom to append that wry last observation to a note that she must have written in a sentimental or sad moment.  She was not in the habit of keeping notes on where her possessions came from, and probably wrote this note after Frankie died. 

The folks at Des Pines, who seem extremely kind, competent and friendly, have urged us not to visit for a week or two, until Mom has acclimated.  Luke has called every day and apparently Mom has made a friend with whom she eats and takes walks.  She has missed no meals and has participated in all the activities available.  We shall be able to visit soon, and to take her out for meals and visits.  We had the usual "Breakfast Club" at Mom's place last Sunday, although without Mom, of course, and it was actually a lot of fun.  Missing Mom was compensated for by relief that the right thing had been done and a serious concern was laid to rest.  Lucy's task of going through Mom's possessions had revealed a mind that was even more confused than we knew.

The other things which have been vying for my time involve the arrival of May and June weather, mowing and planting and hanging up - then lying in - a hammock.  I have been circumambulating my estate, marvelling at the vast quantity of peonies we have acquired here and there.  The number of blooms this year is astonishing - by the mailbox, and in the front, side and back yards.  The clients of the landscaping company for which George works are constantly having him tear out old perennials for some new scheme they have, and George brings home the displaced plants.  Peonies are the king of perennials; a single plant can last 100 years, which is far longer than the attention span of the wealthy, who seem to prize novelty above all else.  Thus our humble estate is awash in pink and purple and white blooms - some of these plants have as many as 50 huge blooms at a time. 

At work we are having a major upgrade which is costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and which is occupying every waking hour of most of the folks there.  I am singularly untouched by this and have not worked a minute more than my accustomed (and reluctant) 40 hours per week.  I have seen so much of this kind of thing; one is expected to behave as though the entire future of mankind rides on the outcome and frankly I care as little about the project as I do about the future of mankind, neither of which I expect to partake in for very much longer.  I have spent some time doing the math over and over and I do believe that next year at this time, I will be job-free at last.  And then the world will indeed know what a dance of joy looks like.  It would be extremely annoying if I simultaneously shuffled off this mortal coil, although there is no reason to think I will, other than my awareness of Fate's over-developed and malevolent sense of irony. 

(Later addition) – It is well that I am aware of the malevolence of Fate, since I had a nice taste thereof this morning after the Breakfast Club, when I stopped at Desolation Pines en route to my dreary abode in Smallville preparatory to beginning the workweek, to see Mom for the first time since her move.  She was all in a doodah.  Unfortunately, she is forced to share a bathroom with one other lady there, and it seems she opened the door when said lady was enthroned.  The lady was understandably agitated and complained to  the management.  It is unclear whether the complaint was made within the same minute – the lady hopping frantically down the hall with her pants about her ankles, but the impact on Mom was as if this were the case.  Back in a rush has come all her paranoia and fear of offending or of fearsome retribution.  She was in her room door closed when I arrived, and is afraid now to use the bathroom.  What she has done to relieve the necessary problem in which this results is best passed over in silence.  I had a talk with a really nice woman on the desk, and she is going to check frequently to make sure Mom is having her needs taken care of.  But this has changed Mom’s feelings about the place radically (“It used to be so nice here,” she told me.)  and I very much fear that when Luke makes his first visit tomorrow it will set him in a doodah greater than hers.  There is no good solution to Mom’s illness other than Desolation Pines; she simply cannot return to where she was before – even if someone moved there with her, she is rapidly moving beyond the abilities of a non-professional to cope.  There is no room available at Des Pines with its own bathroom, and I am not sure it would be affordable were one to open up.   So here we are back (nearly) at square one. 

Ah, well, Fate is not our friend.  There is, of course, another being reputed to be in charge of these things, but it – or he – of course, is all about love.  Maybe I have learned not only how it feels to send a defenseless loved one off to a new life, but also what if feels like to be in an abusive relationship.  I know for sure I can’t take a whole lot more of this ‘love’. 

Well, we shall see what the future holds.  I can’t wait.