The Dao of Dishes

Doesn’t she see these dishes? They’ve been in the sink for two days. Getting that viscous science experiment look to them. I’m busy. I have to drive to Bellingham today plus make the dogs’ breakfasts and our breakfasts and coffee, start the laundry, take out the recycle that just piles up unless I take it to the bin. If I leave dirty laundry on the floor by the washer she picks it up and folds it. And I mean towels that have dog pee on them from Charley’s accidents! If I leave one there it will be folded and smelling of ammonia amongst the clean towels! Ick. Her senses are so muted that she can’t smell it. Because I was at class all day yesterday she didn’t eat. I left her a sandwich in the fridge and it was just sitting in there when I got home. No sign of eating anything else, either. Brought her home a hot halibut gyros on the way home from class and she ate half. Gave Bix the other half mixed with his Iams. She won’t wear a sweater and it’s November! Okay I need to while putting away the clean dishes and filling the dishwasher with dirty ones I need to cheer up. To switch my brain into service mode, that I am doing a spiritual service here. Why is it so difficult for me to flip that switch, the one that goes from ‘annoyed’ to ‘grateful’? What is the benefit I get from not doing that? It’s because then I would be in the flow of life, I would be dealing with dementia on dementia’s terms. I would be so in the flow that I could maybe even see death on the horizon. Without all the bunched up sheets in the way, like when I watched the moon landing from my parents’ bed so early in the dark morning. Without resentment in the way one can see forever and ever more, like Barbara Streisand singing “On a Clear Day,” from Funny Girl? God, I love that song. But not enough for it to be the theme song of my life. But not enough to want to see clear enough to have the end right in my face. My panicked face, panicked because I haven’t chosen anything. Because I am so scattered I only skim the surfaces and I want the illusion that…I have endless time to finally delve deeply SOMEWHERE. Unless…maybe this is as deep as I can go? I may be a puddle vs. a Crater Lake.

HA!

Family Patterns

For my very famous monthly Queen Anne/Magnolia NEWS column “From the Bluff” I am focusing on a new, local shop called Fabric Crush. What is more seductive than fabric? It is a perfect love story between beauty and utility, form and function. I could write about the joint in standard, informative article form but…I want to get more personal and so will hybrid the deal and write an informative column. Rather like the hybrid fabrics of unique weight that Fabric Crush carries that can be used for both upholstery, clothing and bags.

My mother taught me to use her Singer treadle sewing machine when I was five years old. My mother also made most of my clothes. She made really crazy stuff for being so conservative in most other ways! For instance I remember a couple of jumpers. One was of shiny, navy blue vinyl with matching, drawstring purse. She used marigold colored thread atop the navy and I wore this ensemble atop a marigold colored blouse and matching knee highs. Another jumper was out of faux lamb wool, tight curls of gray synthetic ‘hair’ all over the jumper. She also bought me a white denim outfit — jeans with matching jacket — where the fabric was printed to look like colorful paint spatters. I was so beautiful! Also, she bought Barbara and I matching bell bottom jeans that were of psychedelic colors and patterns, like something out of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour.

The funny part is that as I got older my mother was always shocked at my outfits such as the motorcycle jackets and high tops I wore to weddings, or the daily vintage 1940’s suits and velveteen dresses. I remember sewing pants that had different colored legs. At age 18 I made a leopard skin jumpsuit before faux leopard skin was IN (I got the most nasty hangover in that outfit; I had made it to wear to my friend Keith’s 21st birthday in Portland and I drank so many different genres of alcohol that I could not lift my head from the pillow the next day due to the crush and spin).

My outfits were at one time bizarre enough to get honked at by passing cars. I never owned a car until I got married in my mid-thirties so I walked all over town back then (and later bicycled). But I am just saying, there was a time in Seattle when odd outfits were not as ready-made and available in the stores.

Anyway, I always thought it ironic that my mother got upset at my clothing choices during my ‘teens and twenties (back when I cared enough to take time to look…something) when she is the one that started it.  

Now I am ashamed by how my mother is dressed (the ironies just pile up, don’t they?). She needs new pants desperately yet have I gone out to buy them? I hate shopping for my self let alone someone else. But I must. I can’t buy her pants online either because I need to measure waists since a Gloria Vanderbilt (isn’t that Anderson Cooper’s mother?) size 6 is the SAME as a Liz Sport 8.

What is a caregiver to do!?

Above is a sketch I made (and dolled up in Photoshop) with measurements of mom’s pants that I can take to the store. I mean, my poor mother is wearing torn, burgundy stained jeans…and it is too much for her at this point to actually take her and make her to try stuff on in the little waiting rooms.

God, please help me to be willing to shop so that my mother doesn’t resemble Oliver Twist!

Break Up to Wake Up

Shannon and D.W., members of the band Katharine Hepburn's Voice

On the pity pot today because the band I have been documenting is breaking up. It isn’t so much about the documentary –I was going to drop it anyway because now that I am in filmmaking class I realize I’d have to get more serious and upgrade my production values because people don’t accept crappy looking videos anymore. No, my sadness is due to the fact that the band has everything it needs to be a big success except for chemistry. There are personality differences between the two main members that sound…so large can’t get under ‘em, so tall can’t get over ‘em, so wide can’t get around ‘em must go out the exit door. Rocka my soul in the bosom of potential. Potential: such a stupid pipe dream that hooks fantasy addicts.

Speaking of video! Today I clicked on a facebook link to a short that was sub-titled from Russian (I think). It was about an old man sitting outside of his house with his son on a bench. The son was reading a Russian newspaper while the father kept asking his son regarding a sparrow that was flitting about the area ”What is that?” The father kept asking and the son kept answering, getting more and more peeved each time. Finally the son blows up, “It’s a sparrow! S-P-A-R-R-O-W — can’t you SEE!” Then the father goes into the house and comes back with a diary kept when the son was little. He has the son read an excerpt where the father had written, “Today at the park my son asked me what a sparrow was 21 times. Each time I told him.” Then the son felt all guilty and everything.

Why is it that way? That the parent answering a child is not the same as a child answering a parent who is suffering from short-term memory loss? Is it because your energy in answering a child is going into the future, is headed toward something whereas the energy going in to answering a parent is headed down and out into death and nothingness.

I guess if we lived in the moment it would all be the same.

Don Your Changing Mantle

Fireplace Mantle Collage

One of the grooviest things about mom’s dementia is that she doesn’t care how stuff looks as much anymore. For the decades leading up to this Era of Dementia everything had to be just so, kept in the place and in the configuration it was.  Things like that drive me crazy, the way that, say, old worn tins in their counter cluster stacked and standing in rows like soldiers…when you try to clean the counter they clatter and clang. After cleaning under them you are then forced to put them back in exactly the same place — you have to stand in the shoes of Cleopatra in order to get them right. If you rush, you screw it up. If you don’t put them back then each time you pass their chaotic state of abberation you feel guilt as strong as hunger pains.  Which isn’t good for your health so…might as well just keep everything where it is supposed to be!

Let’s just say that my mother and I have a very different aesthetic. Or, I should say, she has one and I don’t. I am rather like my father that way and will most likely soon begin donning a velveteen maroon blazer over plaid golf pants (what my father would attempt to leave the house in until mom met him at the door and sent him back upstairs).

The fireplace mantle is a fine example of the hybrid aesthetic going on around here of late. Tucked in-between the tins are now photos of my nieces and nephews’ kids, bulldog figurines, greeting cards, children’s drawings, a framed stealthily taken photograph of Bartell’s Judy crossing a street in her long brown sweater, cups full of forgotten Burgundy and a pair of cowboys on stallions that Cid sent from Montana. These things would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell of staying up there even just a few years ago.

One could see this change as akin to god lessening Degas’ sight near the end of his life; he loosened up, his paintings became timeless because any artifice was let go and his drawings filled double with life.

Chinese Food can be Spooky

Just like life: sweet, sour and FLUORESCENT!

Just a normal day. 

I had a meeting at noon and was late. The house is full of steam from my cooking vats of dog food which means rivulet marks down the insides of all the windows. While sitting doing a watercolor for a restaurant gift card with Charley on my lap he glanded on the leg of my just-washed jeans (ass-bath for him in the sink).  Mom used the fragile indoor broom outdoors (again). I labeled a bag near the back door for peanut shells as Cleopatra keeps throwing all of hers in the recycle box. The sea-gull on the garage roof  — her name is Space Chicken! — was only, due to her slick webbed feet on the roof slant and my rotten pitching arm, able to get half of the peanut butter sandwich chunks I threw before the crows got ‘em. My sister and Jerry are coming in for dinner and Jerry wants to go to Gim Wah, the spookiest Halloween news yet! (Gim Wah is our local Chinese Food restaurant that only serves food as a way to legally run their rollicking bar!). Mom has gone back to bed, says she doesn’t want to go out, gestures across her stomach area and makes a yuck face. There is unfolded laundry on the den couch since I felt it was more important to report in here. I have received the kindest notes from people who love me regarding my last post. D. dragged me to an outdoor haunted house thing on the eastside last night and it rained like hell so my ‘dress shoes’ (black tennis shoes) got all muddy (I thought we were only going to the indoor one in Tacoma, the Black Lake Asylum house, but that one was SO LAME that we had to drive to the other one out near Klahanie!). Obama still hasn’t decided what to do about Afghanistan (isn’t this Iraq/Afghanistan tragedy the worst foreign policy decision(s) EVER?!). I STILL haven’t run into General Barry McCaffery who moved into my nephew’s house just two blocks away! I’ll need to get myself to the gym tonight at 9 PM. Charley still hasn’t learned how to use his dog door (but he looks so CUTE staring out of it, his eyes in the little clear area like a painting…). I had dreams of men trying to rescue me from real life haunted houses all night long.

Like I said, another day to be damn grateful for!

The Dirt on Reality

Last night D. and I shovelled the last of the dirt pile into the back of her Element and drove it to her house to wheelbarrow into the garden. Another project done! A visible nagging thing vanished! According to James Arthur Ray it looks as though our collective unconscious decided that my dirt pile should no longer holographically exist. Yeah!

We were on our first trip back to my house to load a new batch of dirt when the phone rang. I fished it out of the pocket of my dirt-kneed jeans and saw my sister’s name in the little window. I always answer when she calls. After our hellos she says, “I have some bad news. I have breast cancer.” Then I get quickly focused on her voice forgetting everything else around me and I ask her what the surgeon says, how far along is it, etc. Luckily they’ve caught it early and it is not an aggressive form of cancer and she’ll have a lumpectomy next Wednesday.

Me, my sister Sally and Cleopatra at Moclips, WA a few years back.

How old was mom when she had hers? my sister asks
I think she was in her late sixties or early seventies, I say.

When my mother had her breast cancer I can’t recall where I was living or what I was doing but she never told us anything about it until the night before she went into the hospital! She didn’t want to worry or bother us. She may have had her neighbor Jen drive her to Ballard Swedish, just being all independent and medically modest and everything! Geez.

My sister tells me that she isn’t going to tell mom. I say I won’t either. When Bix had his recent throat surgery I told her what was going on and she didn’t recall the specifics but instead she seemed to carry these shapes of worry, these general sad feelings about something. And so I hold this news inside of me and carry it wherever I go.

I made my sister a card last night and it went out via post today. A silver sided flower with white out polka-dotted center and a few neon green leaves of various sizes thrown into the envelope. On the back side of the flower I wrote: “Sal, I am sorry that you had to worry and be afraid! I am so glad that they caught the cancer early. I am always here and I love you so.”

Your Brain on Plaques and Tangles

I attended an Alzheimer’s Association support group this week. It takes place twice a month at a church at the bottom of our alley. I head up side of the church from the lower parking lot, up a trail that we used to call the HMT (Horse Manure Trail) as teens where we smoked pot and I got beat up by Jeannie Mucklestone since she always wore tons of silver and turquoise bracelets which are the brass knuckles of the stylish!

Vanessa leads the group she wears off-white and has off white hair. She is so sweet and must be in her 70’s. I was there once about a year or so ago. My seductress-brain thought, ‘hey maybe they’ll be some men caring for their mother’s who are my age…’ and then when I got there everyone was 80 and their wives were in nursing homes. I give myself a chance to be humiliated every day!

The meeting consisted of Vanessa, myself and a woman named Donna who was probably older then me and very stylish. It was terrific to hear from someone going through similar experiences with their mother. Donna’s mother has Alzheimer’s and lives with her second husband and is talking about roaming leaving and gets mad. My mother is still as sweet as ever which I am grateful for as I have said.

Donna has had a facelift and facelifts are strange because they are done so that nobody will realize how old you are but make things worse by making people look at how vain you are by trying to avoid aging! She has a very strange ridge of skin under her chin and those really smooth, high cheekbones. She’s very pretty with long hair and a slim build. I told her if she needs any witnesses for paper signing by her mother that she could call me.

For some real fun check out the Alzheimer’s Association site and click on ‘Alzheimer’s Disease’ and then ‘Brain Tour’. I took a virtual tour of a brain that has dementia and it is very amazing because…it makes one more objective, to not personalize what people with dementia say and do because you can SEE it really is a brain disease that one ought to have compassion toward.

Image from AA web site.

The Nipple Effect

It’s weird seeing my mother naked. Maybe because I never had kids and so didn’t go through all that ‘natural bodies humble family as clan’ business.  I was never exposed to a bunch of naked bodies at once like swimmers in locker rooms are. And I may be more comfortable with it all if I’d been part of a nudist colony. I saw a headline online the other day that said something like, “Hillary Swank: My boyfriend’s six year old son sees me naked.” No, that just doesn’t work for me.  (Although, I wouldn’t mind seeing Hillary Swank naked.)

People with dementia are famous for not wanting to bathe. I am lucky that I can still get mom in the water with enough gentle prodding. In the book I am reading about becoming a resilient caregiver (hey, I’d go for simply staying sane!) an example is given where a husband instead of fighting with his wife to get into the shower takes off his clothes and dances her into it and takes the shower with her.

Don’t EVEN get any ideas.

A few days ago when I talked mom into taking a shower I kept down my head down in respect and she held my arm in order to step over the tall tub’s side (what am I going to do when she can no longer step over that?). Guiding her in I saw her nipple. It looks just like my nipple! We both have the same, beautiful nipple! I know it’s crazy but it made me feel better about everything for a while, just that split second of finally being part of a naked family clan.

Page from a book I made entitled "Favorite Foods for Each Year of My Life."

Keep calm and coolant

A bag like the one mom cut open and poured into a bowl tonight.

Before I left tonight to go to a meeting and then head to White Center to videotape Katharine Hepburn’s Voice at Full Tilt Ice Cream (I ate a scoop of the Blue Moon because there is simply not enough blue food in the world and this tasted of Fruit Loops and was the color of a Tiffany’s bag!), I left Bix’s food in a glass bowl atop an Ice-Brix ice pack that I had placed inside of another bowl. See, if I leave Bix’s dinner in the fridge Cleopatra will forget it is there because she won’t see it and then Bix doesn’t get a meal and then he gets an acidic stomach and throws up a pool of neon Chartreuse bile.

So I come home and there in the glass under bowl that I’d placed it in were the innards of an ICE BRIX FREEZER GEL PACK  — “The leak proof gel refrigerant!”  Yeah? Well, it isn’t leak proof when you slice it open across the top! Mom had cut open the thick plastic bag and emptied the weird grainy white translucent blob of refrigerant into the bowl. It sat there shining and was still COLD AS HELL! Glad she didn’t try to feed THAT to the dog (Bix would have eaten the Brix!). What is that stuff, anyway?

ICE-BRIX®is a viscous gel refrigerant specially formulated with food safe non-toxic materials, and hermetically sealed in a heavy plastic pouch that stays colder than ice.

Now I am only down to plastic bottles filled with water and frozen. No more freezer packs for this household it appears.

That’s the way the matriarchy crumbles

Tonight Cleopatra had absolutely nothing to do. She kept asking me if I needed any help. But I didn’t. Maybe I ought to create something for her to do? I was making chili dogs for her, D. and I. I could have had her dice the onions but when she first started asking me if I needed help I had finished that. Earlier the dishwasher was full of clean dishes while the sink was filled with dirty dishes so she could have rectified that situation but I ended up cleaning that just to get it over with. She sits in the window seat for hours looking over the same three pieces of junk mail, pouring over them as though they were personal letters from the Queen. Not sure which queen I mean.

“Mom, we need to get you a hobby. You have nothing to do!”
“What do you mean?”
“It seems like you need something to do.”
“Well, when it’s nice I go out and sweep.”
“Yes, but winter is coming.”
“Well, I’ve been through plenty of winters…”

After dinner D. went upstairs to play with her new iPhone (hrumph!) while I decided to finally whip up a batch of mom’s filled cookies, a confection not made in this house for many moons. The recipe is on a torn page in a green leather-bound cookbook that weights a ton and whose photographic illustrations have had all the reds leached out so now their roasts and cheeses are green. Green eggs and ham.

These filled cookies that my mother used to bake were legion and so delicious that all of my friends from school remember coming over and eating them. They were her signature cookie. She even had, when I was very small, this grinder aparatus that clamped to the side of the pull out wood cutting board. Into this she threw raisins and stuff and made her own mincemeat to put in the center of the cookies. Mostly she used plain old raspberry preserves (and sometimes apricot?), a flavor that can’t be beat. 

Tonight I make them and they taste floury and I realize what I’ve done. See, at the beginning of the recipe it says to sift the flour and then sift it twice more with the baking powder and salt in it. Then you’re supposed to re-measure it because by now it has fluffed way the hell up and there is too much of it. Well, I didn’t re-measure because I like to skip steps and not do what others do in order to be better than them, an egotistic flaw which causes everyone to suffer through inferior cookies! Dummy, baking is a science! It is exact! It isn’t like goulash or soup. Damn. So when I finally added the dry to the wet ingredients I had too much dry and made up for that with a ‘little’ milk but that f***ed up the dough.

So here I am trying to recapture my mother’s signature cookie, trying to get back or continue something of hers that was distinct and seemed so simple. But I can’t. The dough is tough. And mom won’t remember how she did it in order to correct me. 

That’s what makes things so special – they only happen once.