Safe to write this,no one reads my blog. Been so many years. The friend who came to visit has died. Aged 90. And recently I got some interesting news from a meurologist, a very nice woman named Catherine Miller. Well, she is nice; her news was not. She thinks I may have Parkinson's. Was depressed and actually coincidentally very ill for a week well nearly two since. But I have rallied. In life it is always NOW which matters, no? Concentrate on the here and now--ignore the tremor in my left hand. Not so bad, is it?

What are our alternatives?

Some while ago, probably 20 years ago now, I read with some interest about a woman who had taken advantage of Oregon's Death with Dignity law. She was relatively young, in her 50's, as I recall, but had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She played a game of tennis, and then went to be euthanized. She left a husband and children.

I have often thought of her since reading of her decision. Certainly in the interim no cure for Alzheimer's has been found. The best that patients can hope for is better drugs, while they are in the early stages, or more enlightened care, while they are still functioning relatively well.

Marc Agronin relates in his book that his patients call to him, "Give me hope! Dr. Agronin. Give me hope!"

Yes, indeed.

The statistics I have read are bleak. 50% of those people who manage to live beyond the age of 80 will develop some form of dementia. Pretty annoying--do all you can to live longer and your reward is dementia?

And people are living longer. But in his book, Agronin tells stories about people with dementia who get some enjoyment from living, even after forgetting most of their former lives--especially when they are part of a group of people like themselves.

Ah, Spring

It is officially STILL the first day of Spring. Tra La! Crappy day, though...high winds--gusts to 30 mi. ph., rain and grey grey skies. But, the crocuses are croakin' and the daffodils are simply daffy--as am I! Have I mentioned that Spring is my absolute favorite season?

Yay! Forsythia! Yay! Redbud! Yay! Misty green willow! Yay! New growth new beginnings!

We have been taking little walks. Yesterday I saw something cobalt blue protruding from my front flower bed, so after the walk I dug it up. A little treasure: a 3 in. cobalt blue Bromo Seltzer bottle. Now I found out that they produced 72, 000,000 of these little treasures, but so what? I am all psyched with having found treasure in my own front yard. The house is old--nearly 100 years old, and it has a history. That feels nice.


I am currently reading a book called How We Age, by Marc E. Agronin, MD. He is a psychiatrist who works in a home for the elderly, most of whom are over 100 years old. He is a wonderfully upbeat person; his mission is to assure his readers that there is life after oh, say 75, not just pain and boredom. I am now 71, nearly 72, so I feel it is required reading. But, one statistic he quoted must have struck home. According to Mr. Agronin, 50% of people over 85 will suffer from some sort of dementia. Well, after reading his thoughts on that subject, I fell asleep and dreamed that I had forgotten the name of a close friend. I tried to cover it (as we do socially) but in the dream, in my mind, I knew...Very unpleasant, to detect one is in the first stages... Better without a doubt when one has moved on to being completely unaware.

If anyone actually read my blog, they might wonder where I have been for 3 years. Or, more likely, why the heck I have come back? I haven't been anywhere and I have come back on a whim, just as I began the blog way back when. I can't explain my need to write this.

Last November I spent a month writing a draft of a memoir of my childhood. That somehow is connected to my resuming this blog. The last two months of 2010 were almost giddy-wonderful for me. The writing I did had weighed me down for so many years--it was so good to get it out, at last. Before it is too late? Well, I don't really think like that. I suppose I did put it off--but I also had a better perspective, I think. At Christmas I was reunited with some very dear friends that I have not seen in 23 years. We were friends for over 20 years, before I moved half a continent from them. Our visit was thrilling and incredible. We could talk as if the time had never passed. And argue--that was still delightful, after all these years. If they lived here they would hone my brain to a sharp edge.

They did have a bone to pick with me, about my having left them.

Now we will talk regularly. Make up for lost time and not let whatever time we have left to slip away from us.

This afternoon my partner and I finished watching The World's Fastest Indian. What a sweet movie! Anthony Hopkins is wonderful in that role. I know he has played evil villains, but I fancy that if God were to speak to us, he would sound a good deal like Hopkins. I hesitate to recommend it because there aren't any murders or things blowing up! It is a tale about following one's dreams, however bizarre and seemingly impossible. And, however old one might be.

Sometimes things are happening...

The complete title of this blog was "Sometimes things are happening even when you don't know it." It would not fit into the little window.

Anyway, I have been getting a poem a day (for Poetry month) in my Inbox from the Academy of American Poets and it has been thrilling. No matter whether the poem has huge impact or not, just trying to wrap my brain around refreshes. I readily admit I don't always have a clue what the poet is saying. Take Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poem, for example:

From Concordance [Our conversation is a wing]by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Our conversation is a wing below my consciousness, like organization in blowing cloth, eddies of water, its order of light on film with no lens.
A higher resonance of story finds its way to higher organization: data swirl into group dreams.
Then story surfaces, as if recognized; flies buzzing in your room suddenly translate to "Oh! You're crying!"
So, here I hug the old person, who's not "light" until I embrace him.
My happiness at seeing him, my French suit constitute at the interface of wing and occasion.
Postulate whether the friendship is fulfilling.
Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake.
Postulate the wave nature of wanting him to wait (white space) and the quanta of fractal conflict, point to point, along the outline of a petal, shore from a small boat.
Words spoken with force create particles.
He calls the location of accidents a morphic field; their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed.
My last thoughts were bitter and helpless.
Friends witnessing grief enter your consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.

It is the shaping of the language, the use of words in new ways and the use of words I am familiar with but never use, like quanta and fractal and particles and morphic (morphic field?) which keeps me re-reading the poem, gently savoring it. There are many images there, and I respond to them, like "eddies of water" and "the vibration of a seed." "Words spoken with force create particles" resonates. But other than a vague identification with key words, do I have the remotest? Uh uh.

Since I am one who always wishes to share largesse, I have been sending some poems to my daughter and to my grandkids, to savor, too. But I don't get any response, so think that the poems arrived and then thud. Nothing.

Today, though, I called my daughter about the catfood recall and she was very excited about the poetry and my sending the poems has led to her checking out a bunch of volumes and reading poems aloud to her daughters. (She has been savoring poems by Emily Dickinson especially, who, as she says, speaks our language.)

While we chatted I sent her some more poems, inc. the one above and when we talked about movies, she recommended "Opal Dream." I will check that out.

So the beat goes on.

Happy Ending, Unhappy Ending or No Ending

On my walk this morning (ahem! yeah, I am preening myself, after making it around only 2 blocks--the first walk in a long time) I was ruminating on books, as usual, and their endings, more particularly. I have read lots of books in the last month. Several were cliff hangers, leaving me saying aloud, "Oh, dear." When it is a book from a series, (like the beloved Jury series, by Martha Grimes, for instance) I am sanguine; all will be revealed in the next book, right? However, (you may not want to read further since I am about to sound off like a snarky Philistine) when the novel is Art, or Poetic, and most esp. if the author is a college professor, then the ending is too often artfully ambiguous and just leaves me wondering. Frankly I don't read books to be left wondering--that is what my life is about, after all, so who needs the ambiguity?

Take the novel Yellowcake, by Ann Cummins, as an example of the artful novel with the--to me, anyway--artfully ambiguous ending. That novel, about the ravages suffered by uranium millworkers, Navaho and Anglo, was quite admirable. Cummins' writing shone on every page. I exclaimed about her skill to whoever would listen. I became immersed in the lives of her well-drawn characters and caught up in wondering what would become of them. For a short time I lived within that novel and liked it a huge deal. Until the ending, when I was left asking myself 'did anyone ever find what happened to Sam--and what did, anyway?' And 'did Ryland manage to hang on a few more years, spending them contentedly with Rosy?'

I was having an email conversation with a friend about "Black Orpheus," which I have not seen in years, in which I said, "I recall it as being disjointed, almost dream-like and incomplete. That is, no nicely tied up ending." (Would have to watch it again to see my memory serves.) Today, after my walk, I read an email from her in which she said she often prefers an open-ended movie, while her mother "HATES them, in fact likes them to go on five minutes beyond the happy ending so she can be SURE it was a happy ending. (Let us not speak of movies with no happy ending.)"

Her comment was so obviously serendipidous that I added it to my ruminating pot and let it stew a bit. So, what about happy endings and unhappy ones? After thinking it over, I think I can say that I am not one who requires a happy ending in order to like a film or a book. I don't like unhappy endings (take "Evira Madigan," for instance) but I see that they have impact and are fitting, inevitable, for some plots. Here is the thing, when I said "Oh, dear," about those three books I think it was that were cliff hangers, in every case something unpleasant had occurred at the end. But I still had hope, if the book was one of a series. (After all the author hadn't killed off the main character, right?) About Yellowcake I can only hope that she writes a sequel. Doesn't leave me wondering.

The way I would score Happy Ending: a 10. Unhappy Ending: say an 8. No Ending: 0.

Are we there yet?

Last night I finally made a stab at organizing my email Inbox. And it only took 10,000 years, said Little Edith.

And Even Less Likely to Blog About It: Ian Rankin

Last Monday I went to hear one of my favorite mystery authors, Ian Rankin, who is Scots, read from his latest book, The Naming of the Dead, which I have actually read, surprise surprise. I like Rankin's novels because he is funny yet he gets into the more meaningful questions about our existence. His protagonist, Rebus, is something of a curmudgeon, a cynic, not unlike myself. More so, interestingly, than Rankin, I think.

I was very excited to get to hear him. He was as entertaining as I could have asked for. He was telling stories from the moment he got to the lectern--obviously his natural element. He described the process of writing The Naming of the Dead. One thing I appreciate about his writing is that he readily comes across on the page as laid-back, even conversational. His process as he described it seemed organic. He mentioned that he wrote to answer certain questions--or to put it another way, he began with just a bit of the story and wrote to satisfy his need for an ending which was satisfying to him. (Truth, but not necessarily the truth.)

During the question/answer period he said some of his favorites among his own books were Black and Blue, The Falls, and the one which proceeded this one, Fleshmarket Alley. (Originally called Fleshmarket Close but changed here in the states because American readers can't be expected to know what a close is, right?) I don't really have any favorites. Truth to tell, it is Rankin's writing I like. He himself said the plot is the easiest thing. Which someone questioned--perhaps a struggling writer?--but he said something to the effect that plots are heavy on the ground--it is the locale and the background--even the title, that comes first. Then comes the question...

Seeing him (eye candy) and hearing him--funny eruditer--gave me a huge lift.

Thank you, Jennifer...

Ready~~ Set~~~GO!

Have to go to work in about 10 minutes, so taking those few for a post. Not a lofty post, just ramblings and meanderings about TA DA! American Idol.

This is partially inspired by seeing Sanjaya on Jay Leno last night. I puzzled and puzzled over the time allotted S., since when Gina Glockston was on, one of my faves, she barely had a moment in the sun. Leno seemed to sincerely appreciate Sanjaya's continued good-natured behavior , in the face of all the adverse criticism he received on the show and the voluminous amount of media attention he has received, good and bad. I am amazed to think that Sanjaya may go on to have a career, based on the negativity.

ION, I have been having ear worms of both the song Sanjaya sang, "Let's Give Them Something to Talk About" (which he personalized with "besides hair") and "Broken Wing," sang by Jordin Sparks. But, with a difference--Jordin's rendition gave me goosebumps.