Believe it.

Would you believe me if I told you I was sitting in my kitchen eavesdropping on my mom having a conversation with dead people? If you're a regular reader of this blog, of course you would. You might even know that you can click on the labels in the sidebar and read other posts about my mom talking in her sleep/talking to the dead.

Would you believe that the weather app on my iPhone says it's going to be 85 in Margaritaville  tomorrow? That's okay, I don't believe it either. It won't be 85 here, a mile from the sand.

Would you believe that I'm cleaning out my garage and that in the 3 years I've lived in this house, I've amassed bags of stuff that I don't need or want and that probably no one needs or wants? Sure, you'd believe that. You could probably clean out your garage and come up with just as many bags of stuff.

Would you believe I'm falling in love? I can hardly believe it myself. But it's true.

Report from Pillville: Living in the Future

I got up around 5:30 this morning for a little extra time to myself. I'm working on an essay. I have more painting to do to finish the laundry room. I'm still scrubbing the grout in the front hallway. You know. Stuff. Stuff I'd prefer to do alone.

It was some time after 7 (well over an hour earlier than usual) that my mom woke. Yes, I sighed a guilty ugh. I was sitting on the couch with my computer on my lap when I heard her go from her room into the bathroom. Clatter-crash-thump. I flew to the bathroom door.

She'd dropped her cane.

The booster rockets of adrenaline had already fired. It's impossible to call them back once they've left the launch pad and I orbited around mad and crazy for a while, grumbling about what a shitty way it was to start the day. Of course it would of course been a lot shittier if she'd fallen.

I've been exchanging caregiver communiqués with a new friend for the past couple of months. I wrote to him immediately. I told him I was seeing into my future and it looked just like the present. He wrote back and told me to stay the heck out of the future.

This is how I survive. Writing it all down. Writing it here. Writing it to this friend who's been taking care of his dad, reading what he writes back.

Things go bump and thump and moan and groan quite frequently here in Pillville. I'm in this house most days for 21 hours. Some days it's a little less. Some days it's all day. On Thursdays, I'm out most of the day. But even when I'm sleeping, I'm listening, waiting for the next moment that requires me to propel myself down the stairs. So guess what?  I'm always living in the future. Hell, I'm even sleeping there.

I need to rocket back to the present.

How I Spent My Mother Vacation and.....Waffles.

I've done a lot of things since I dropped my mom off at my brother's house in Maryland. Mostly, I feared that these two months would be filled with procrastination for the real life tasks I'd planned, and that I'd spend way too much time curled into a fetal position with the occasional foray into the kitchen to make popcorn which I would then return to bed to eat. I feared I might walk in circles around and around my house, wailing and tearing my clothes, or burrowing into Dan's ashes, begging for an answer to the unanswerable why. Okay, I did some of that.

But I also road-tripped to a niece's wedding with my daughter C. I flew to Hawaii for two 50th birthday parties on two different islands, and visited one of Dan's friends on a third island. I went to a T'ai Chi Chih retreat in New Mexico, and spent a week getting accredited as a T'ai Chi Chi teacher in Santa Barbara. I drove north 5 hours to my godson's wedding and drank a barrel of wine with two of my oldest friends. I've had lunch with friends, drinks with friends, dinner with friends, long talks with friends, gone to various plays with daughter M, proving, I guess, that an introvert can socialize when  it's a matter of life and death.

The domestic-doer me threw it into high gear. Kitchen and patio deep-cleaned. Bedroom decluttered--which involved shredding seven or eight bags of paper. (Didn't I just do that before I moved two and a half years ago? Why, yes I did. And yes ,I still have the six document boxes of divorce documents in my garage, thank you.) I got a new book shelf so all my T'ai Chi Chih books and Dan's T'ai Chi Ch'uan books can get cozy together in an organized sort of way. I cleaned out my closet. Again. Honest to god, I'm at one of those mid-life (Ha--why do we say that?-- Last quarter of life) junctures where I loathe all of my clothes.

I shopped. This is big. I bought two nice dresses and a pair of shoes that are not flip-flops. I bought a red toaster/toaster-oven combo that I hope my mom will love because the previous toaster was a pain in the ass and I'm not sure why she or any of my house guests put up with it. I bought this: supposedly handmade by a local artist. I hope it is.

And in my never-ending quest to make my house brighter and more colorful, I've ordered fabric to have my dining room chairs recovered.

Because, well....this is what my living room looks like after I went berserk in there a couple months back--except now the tray is bright turquoise. Stay out of my way; I still have some of that paint left. Didn't Monet paint everything redder and redder as he aged and began to lose his sight? I want everything to be orange.

Oh, and I wrote stuff. And stuff got published. And well, I wanted to write about waffles and about what the yoga teacher said this morning, but I have to go now. Tomorrow. Waffles. I promise. 

Namasté.

Pillville--Where the days are getting longer.

More daylight at dinner time enhances the conversation between my mother and me. "I think I see a light on in the 3rd floor condo across the way," becomes 'Look at that dog!" or "Don't you think that girl should be wearing a jacket?" Soon there will be hummingbirds and more boats going out, more joggers, more babies in strollers. It's probably just enough to keep both of us from going insane.

Simple observations in the moment are much easier than discussing what's gone on in a day. My mom asks a lot of questions about current goings on that she doesn't remember getting answers to. And I  either don't correct her at all, or I simply answer the question as if she's asking it for the first time--M is taking the plane, not the train to New York. Our houseguests left yesterday, not today--I do get to feeling a bit looney myself. Wait? Did they leave today? Or sad. As the tide lapped into the marina last night, my tears began rising too.

I walked after dinner for the first time in a a couple of months. It seems a workable compromise if I walk around and around the block. When I get to the marina side where the sidewalk passes by the patios of all the houses, I can look in and see my mother tidying the kitchen or standing at the end of the kitchen island reading the newspaper on the iPad. If she disappears, I stop walking and go inside. Last evening, the fresh air and the water was enough to settle me and bring me back to realizing things are really working out pretty well here in Pillville.

Still, Friday evenings are the hardest. I think we all have these rhythms. Tide in. Tide out.  If I am going to wake worrying, it's always between 3:00 and 3:30. I am almost never grumpy or pessimistic in the morning. At 4:p.m. I would like all the cake in the world. To myself. Go away. Or bring me coffee--then go away. I am incredibly thankful, however, that Friday nights are not as hard as they used to be.  I'm pretty sure I would not have survived without my dogs.

But, as always, Friday nights turn into Saturday mornings. And they pretty much always look like this here in Margaritaville.

My mother has had four or five good days in a row--outside of some tiredness, she hasn't had any severe pain or nausea. For the last couple of nights, she's stayed awake and engaged all through dinner without the narcoleptic moments that can come on so quickly it's as if someone has exchanged the salt for slumber dust.

And it's almost springtime. I have the urge to clean things. I took up the very dirty carpet squares in front of the couch. I bought some new pillows and a pouf at the Cost Plus sale. Orange! Orange! More daylight! Orange! I am drunk with light and color. Drunk on the beauty of Margaritaville, sans the Margarita. Which is kind of a miracle.

Waving, Not Drowning

We all managed to stay afloat during this weird New Year's visit that involved keeping the child recuping from the chicken-pox away from her great-grandmother--and the other children as well just in case they were incubating it. It involved a lot of waving and smiling through patio windows, evening get-aways with glasses of wine in hotel rooms, children sequestered briefly in my garage, and on my boat dock (thanks to C) and explaining and re-explaining about chicken-pox and shingles to my mother. Having had shingles once before, her eyes grew huge every time we talked about it. Absolutely not--she didn't want to go through that again. It was inconvenient and wonderful, this visit. Four generations got together--sort of--for some of the time with some of us actually in the same room. C traveled from Minnesota by plane and bus and train to get here. My son drove his mini-van stuffed full of family from Arizona. M worked us into to her impossibly busy schedule, coming and going. We laughed and talked. Planned and reminisced. And if I were quizzed, I could not tell you how much time all of us actually spent together. My son and his family were the last to leave, and when five people pull out of your driveway your house is instantly very empty.

But I did what I had resolved to do: I began. I ordered the fall detector button for my mom. Of course a fall preventer button would be better. I imagine it would work something like THIS. I called the Ventura County Area Agency on Aging and had a 47-minute conversation about everything with a wonderful woman who took her time answering all of my questions. Tomorrow my mom and I will go to see two adult day care places whose emphasis is more social than medical. I have familiarized myself with the spend-down rules for Medi-Cal. I have a list of resources for home care and caregiver support. I called a friend of a friend who has been taking care of her father, who has Alzheimers, for 7 years without much of a break. I have no idea how one does that. The four of us plan to get together. 

My mother did not seem enthusiastic when I first broached the idea of day care and in-home care, but she's on board now. I actually think she's looking forward to it. Honestly, I would look forward to getting out of the house away from me because I am introverted and boring. I like to read, write, and putter around with various home improvement/organizing/cleaning projects. Today's projects included moving all of my sewing stuff from the garage to the upstairs and all of the single bed linens from the upstairs (where there are no single beds) to the garage (which is where the grandchildren camp out on air-beds during a normal non-chicken-pox visit.) I also cleaned and organized the cabinet under my kitchen sink. That's how interesting I am.

I also finished cleaning out my closet (see previous post) which involved going through a bin of stuff that included a notebook titled "NYC Summer 1984." That was the summer I left my husband behind in L.A. (by mutual agreement) and moved to New York and took classes at HB Studios because it was something I had wanted to do for quite a while. In addition to a wonderful acting class with Bill Hickey, I took a play analysis class with a man named David Fittleson, and the notebook, which I at first  thought was empty and had retitled "Mom" still had notes in it on a bunch of plays including Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard" which is a play that seems to keep popping up with an uncanny amount of relevance for me. This is how my notes on that play begin:

Inaction??!! Bah.

I Don't Care--A Cautionary Tale

I slept in this bed just as it appears here for two nights this past week. One of them in my clothes with sand in the cuffs of my jeans. Outside the frame of this photo are heaps of books intermingling with dust bunnies and that trail of books continues down the steps to the front hall where my mother has stacked the books she wanted out of her room. Until the man who loves me arrived on Sunday morning, the bathroom trash had begun to overflow onto the floor. Suffice it to say that I had motivational problems this week. While downstairs I managed to keep up appearances as my mother's cheery cook and companion, upstairs I became surly and apathetic muttering about all the things I didn't care about. Just like Pierre. My daughters would gasp when I read this book by Maurice Sendak to them. I loved the fact that Sendak had the balls to let the lion eat that miserable little boy. Of course, Pierre got a second chance when a doctor was able to retrieve him, whole and unscathed. And I'm giving myself a second chance too. Of course, this being real life, that would be for this week.

Last evening the man who loves me and I arrived at the beach just as the big orange ball of the sun dropped behind the islands. We approached the sand from the park and walked through an opening in the dunes with palm trees at a tilt framing the vista you see below. "This looks like the set for a movie where people are seeing California for the first time, blown away by its beauty," he said--or something like that. Even native Californians cannot believe how beautiful this place is.

Each day the beach is different in dozens of ways. The waves, the wind, the sky and its clouds, the birds. Is the tide in or out? Are there dolphins? Whales? Sea lions?
Behold, the beauty. Where every day seems like second chance.

Happy Vernal Equinox to you!

Have you ever seen a dust bunny as big as a mouse?

I nearly leapt onto the couch when I moved an end table while vacuuming today. The "grand-doggy" came visiting with his family last week, so there was dog hair combined with the cat hair produced by the ancient cat. Not that she willingly came out of her hideaway in the laundry room, but I think her ancient wisdom allows her to send her cat hair throughout the house even while hiding under the laundry room sink. Long-haired humans are to blame, too, I think. Six Rapunzels with our combined tresses resulted in  every chair and barstool leg looking like it was wearing the sort of mittens one might buy in a boutique on a llama farm. I'll bet bald guys vacuum a lot less.

So I got out the edging tool and vacuumed under and between and behind. I took my cushions off my decrepit leather couch and got rid of all that crud, too. Honestly, I just did that three weeks or so ago, and it looked like I've been using the thing as a bird feeder. I got under the dining room table and wiped down the legs, and vacuumed the upholstery. It's clean.... but ack! to Ethan Allen furniture. I bought the couch and the dining room chairs after the divorce thinking that I should invest in some quality stuff. I recommend a bonfire upon my demise, children. Really, how is it that when you buy a "distressed" leather something it looks so vintage and cool, but when you and your pets do your own distressing, it looks like hell. And how is it that I can buy raw silk throw pillows out of a close-out bin for $5.99, and machine wash them fifty times and all they do is look so good that my couch looks even worse? Ethan, you piss me off.

So, yes, I know Obama is in Israel, and I listened to the NPR piece on annuities and a bunch of other stuff, and there are still plenty of insightful articles and commentary on the Internet about rape culture, but I cleaned my house today. I'm feeling happy and...well....as balanced as an equinox.

And here's a close-up of the plants outside my dining room window.

Happy Spring!!!

How I Came to Have a Glass of Wine at 9:45 a.m.

Yesterday I washed all of my downstairs windows. I bored myself with speculating about how much it would cost to hire it done, and finally went to Home Depot and bought a combo sponge/squeegee thing on a pole along with a bucket a bottle of "professional" window washing stuff and just did it. Then when the closet remodeling guys finished I sped back to Home Depot and bought a quart of flat white paint and painted all the parts of the closets that needed re-painting. My closet is so fabulous I should throw a party in it. Girlfriends only. We should hire someone who does nails and sit inside at a little table with a white linen tablecloth and have tea and sherry while we get our toes painted.

But I digress.

After the painting I realized there was absolutely no reason for me not to move into the master bedroom now that the floor and the closet are both finished, so I hauled the airbed+dogbed (yes, I've been sleeping on the orthopedic foam that used to belong to my now deceased dogs) up the steps. I might as well move the rest of my stuff up there, too, I said, at sometime around 9:00 p.m., so I did--and mind you, it's not a ton of stuff. A bunch of sweaters, two pairs of pants, two skirts, my favorite cowboy boots, and a bunch of t-shirts and some workout pants that I have not yet worn here in my new location because who needs to work out when you're moving things up and down a flight of stairs? And finally, I vacuumed once again re-cleaning the leavings of a troop of workmen. Oh, they try with their fancy shop-vacs that look like tool-boxes, they do, but, alas.

Am I digressing again?

So after I breathed enough paint fumes for one day, I went to bed.

I woke early to the light that seemed silver as it came in my curtain-less windows and, I woke to the sound of water lapping, because unlike at my old place when one frequently wakes to a police helicopter flying in or out after a shift change, here it's the harbor patrol making their rounds, and after they putter by, the water laps against the boat docks. Invigorated by the idea of waking to lapping water, I hopped up and moved all the now very dusty boxes of books in my garage into the laundry room/entryway and stacked them on the counter while mourning their dustiness. Then I organized the crap (which is not really crap at all) that the former owner left. I have great squares of travertine or tile that looks like travertine; (how do you tell the difference?) I have extra stone tiles, and smaller squares of travertine, and now they are all in one  place, neat and tidy. After that I tore up dozens of cardboard boxes that the wood for my floor came in and fit them into the recycling bin. (I could have had the hauler haul them away with other debris last week, but gosh, no, maybe they would be useful, I thought. Arrgh) Then I thought about all the other things I wanted to do here today.

And I realized the bowl of blueberries I'd had for breakfast left me starving. So I poured out a mound of crackers, spread them thick with my favorite cheese, D'Affinois.....and, well, what does cheese need? Wine. And I thought of years ago, when I was in France for a semester, and how the proprietor/chef of the little hotel where I stayed took took turns taking each of us American students to the open air market  to shop for what he would cook that day, and how afterwards we'd stop in a bar for a breakfast of eggs and steak and red wine. That was how Monsieur Camarani started his day.
One glass, mind you.
It was perfect.
Then--and now.
I ate a yam with butter afterwards, and before I drive back to my old place, I'm going to work some more, and then make a fabulous salad with avocado and strawberries.

Gawd, I've become one of those people who use the Internet to tell the world what they're eating.

Which has some merit if your grow or hunt what you're eating. Or if you're a wonderful cook.

How the Hearing to Recover Attorney Fees Went

I had my day in court on Wednesday.
But not really.
I was there, as were two of my attorneys and Mr. Ex's attorney, too.
Mr. Ex himself had better things to do. Which is what
the judge said. Surely, it was time to wrap this case up, he said,
because Mr. Ex, the big name L.A. attorney from one of the biggest and fattest law firms surely had better things to do. 
The judge scolded my attorney for a technicality. She did a decent job of defending herself...and me.
I was not allowed to speak. I did not say
that I, too, have better things to do than sit mutely in a courtroom
on a
Wednesday morning in March.

On Thursday I flung doors and drawers wide and
threw paper away.
Not motions, nor declarations of income and expenses, nor schedules of assets
and debts, nor stipulations for the divsion of joint assets. Not
the final decree--but notes for stories already written and early memoir drafts, handouts from classes, rosters with names of
people I can't quite remember. I didn't throw away the things I don't want to remember, I threw
away what I am finished with. I am not finished
with you, millstone of a  husband. I will print out every email, bind them into a book
and then
I will burn it at your feet.


The judge has taken the matter under submission.  I don't know anything yet. Meanwhile another godzilla of a bill from my attorney is weighing down my desk.