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      "author": "steemitboard",
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      "body": "Congratulations @feralthinker! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@feralthinker/birthday3.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 3 years!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_You can view [your badges on your Steem Board](https://steemitboard.com/@feralthinker) and compare to others on the [Steem Ranking](https://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?name=feralthinker)_</sub>\n\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "body": "The first time I saw this was when I was 8 years old. Ralph Macchio was one slick dude :p",
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      "parent_permlink": "tea",
      "author": "feralthinker",
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      "title": "Making Tea",
      "body": "![Chinese tea ceremony: turning the cups. Photo by Quinn Norton. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Chinese_tea_ceremony.jpg)\nChinese tea ceremony: turning the cups. Photo by Quinn Norton.\nLicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.\n\nUntil I sat down to write this I did not know that the Chinese as well as the Japanese have ritualized tea ceremonies. It makes sense that the Chinese would have a ritual though because, after all, tea is their process. They invented it and kept the process secret through isolation and complexity for many centuries. The British were deeply hooked on the stuff for many years before they used unscrupulous means to smuggle tea plants along with a crew of Chinese tea-making experts out of China to their colonies of and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and southern India to produce tea in their own colonies. And the British experiment did not succeed at first. It took multiple tries before they became self-sufficient tea producers. Even so, the British too had their tea ritual that arose from a complex system of etiquette from steeping, pouring, and serving down to keeping the pinky extended when drinking from a cup.\n\nRitual is important because it helps to restore what we lose as slaves to expedience, production, efficiency, and all the other shackles of the industrialized world. I often dispense with ritual for the sake of efficiency. I don't remember much German from my high school class, but I recall that there were two words, *essen* and *fressen*, and *essen* is when a human eats, and *fressen* is when an animal eats. *Fressen* has acquired a latter-day meaning, though, of eat up, as in to gobble, in other words to eat like an animal. My German teacher had been a little girl in Germany in those days, so she had eyewitness stories from when Hitler was in power in Germany. He was sometimes prone to fits of rage, and my teacher said he would sometimes fall on the floor and start gnawing on the carpet. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not because the meme alone serves my point. This gnawing earned Hitler the nickname *Teppichfresser*. *Teppich* is German for carpet, and *fresser* is eater in the animal sense.\n\nSpanish has analogous vocabulary. Normally when people speak of eating a meal, they use the word *comer*, to eat, as in *Vamos a comer la cena*—Let's go eat dinner (or possibly: we are going to eat dinner—depends upon context). Yet there is a word *tragar*, which is to swallow or gulp—and it occupies the same linguistic niche as the latter-day use of *fressen*. In various parts of Latin America you will find little fast food shops called *tragaderos*, or swallowing places, which tend to sell things like underinflated empanadas, weakened buñuelos (like hush puppies except not as sweet), and so on. Yet you can get in and out of a *tragadero* quickly for about a dollar, so, if you're up for a cheap, greasy, light lunch, they are more satisfying than Hitler's carpets. (*Tragaderos* remind me of Emile Zola's [L'Assommoir](http://amzn.to/29kF1kh), the knocking-out place, but that's an altogether different bottle of absinthe.)\n\nYet what I'm getting at here is that if our eating habits do not distinguish us from animals, we are missing out on the more humane qualities of life. I have in the past unwittingly sold my soul to the efficiency experts and suffered as a result. Now I try to be mindful of the thousand demons around me who think they have privileges to write in my personal agenda. These demons often come in disguises to look like people I love, my family, my best friends. Yet if I do not own myself, I am just a slave to everybody else, and don't think they won't take advantage of me.\n\nI have committed one of the great sins of journalism: I have buried the lead. The lead is the central point in a journalism story, usually in the first sentence or at least the first paragraph, which says what this story is all about. This story's lead is: I've made a [five-minute YouTube documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJxoCZKnyvY) on how I make iced tea. I admit that my tea making may be completely devoid of ritual. Either that, or perhaps what the film documents *is* a ritual, the product of which just happens to be iced tea. You decide, please, and let me know.\n\nTea with ice is a particularly regional drink. And it also depended upon the commercial viability of ice (which I've discussed before). My informal, definitely-not-rocket-science survey of a Briton revealed that the fundamental concept of iced tea is off-putting. I do know, however, that the guys who came to trim the massive tree in my front yard appreciated the pitcher of tea that I made for them very much. It's summer, and it is hot and humid out there: every place has its bad season, and here it is now. Along a filthy beach covered in tar-balls and other petroleum waste, Texas abuts the Gulf of Mexico, and they tell me that Britain is disproportionately warm for its latitude because there is a stream out of the Gulf that rises northeasterly across the Atlantic to warm those lovely islands. Since I live in Britain's boiler room, perhaps I am entitled to put ice in my tea?",
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      "parent_permlink": "picky",
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      "title": "The Girl Who Ate White Food",
      "body": "@@ -2404,8 +2404,525 @@\n r slice.\n+%0A%0ABy the way, I found a %5Breally good book about kids and picky eating%5D(http://amzn.to/2at5SiC). Its French attitude toward food might be helpful to adults as well. Somewhere in this book, for example, you'll find the answer to the so-called French paradox%E2%80%94how can French people eat the way they do without getting fat? Yet hidden here also is a wonderful bit of philosophy, for food lies near the center of happiness, so why not learn how the best epicureans in the world approach food for the greatest happiness. And\n",
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      "parent_permlink": "dementia",
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      "title": "Living with dementia",
      "body": "![My mother at 92.](https://scontent-dft4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13686793_1007483439350015_436272842346179443_n.jpg?oh=3074aed2099da2940a478d5ce15aad68&oe=5826AA27)\n\nMy title refers to my mother's dementia, with which I live as a caretaker. Some of these stories are funny. I don't mean to be making fun of anyone. I mean no disrespect. And I'm sure some of you will interpret this essay as a violation of privacy. But it's important to talk about all the little absurdities that happen as someone disappears into the vacuum of an unraveling brain. Sometimes she is lucid; other times she isn't. Sometimes the aphasia steals her tongue even when she is otherwise lucid.\n\nWitness dementia constantly shifts in meaning. One of the many motifs running through the films of Ingmar Bergman lies in the witness's gaze as someone dies. The witness watches for the slight chance that the moment of death or the eyes of the dying might somehow reveal something beyond death or else confirm the certainties of nihilists that there is nothing there. Dementia is not as dramatic as all that, but it is still a slow-motion unraveling of consciousness, and as such, might reveal some clues as to the nature of the mind and of existence itself, as mind and existence seem locked and dependent upon each other in an eternal dialectic not unlike those two fish of yin and yáng. But maybe I'm over-intellectualizing what is otherwise too uncomfortable to think about.\n\nMy father slid into dementia sixteen years ago with a joviality that reminded me of Slim Pickens, like an eager cowboy warrior, riding the nuclear warhead out of his plane in Stanley Kubrick's *Dr Strangelove*. Yahoo! Does that mean I shall plummet to earth like a fallen angel too? I don't know. Not all forms are hereditary. Nevertheless I want to look at this dissolution of the body between the poles of brain and bladder closely because if it comes to my turn I might prefer to leave while still lucid.\n\nThis is a mostly documentary history with a little bit of commentary woven into it. Names have been redacted to preserve a modicum of privacy. I include scanned copies of her notes to me about quotidian functions of the house, notes I wrote to myself, and some transcripts of text messages, mostly with my brother.\n\nI've arranged the documents in more or less chronological order. The project reminds me of the time I collected as many self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh as I could find. He painted many pictures of himself. I arranged them chronologically to see if there was a visible decline in his self-image as he neared his end. But what ailed Vincent Van Gogh wasn't dementia, and it worked in spells from which he generally recovered and during which he didn't paint very much. When he reached the end, it was swift, and it wasn't about pictures. While my mother's lucidity is up and down, there is an overall downward trend, which is visible in her notes. Her thought processes from a year ago, while sometimes cloudy, were much clearer than they are now.\n\n![28 July 2015. A note about cat food cans.](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yR3nkxyBbKI/V3YMTNyrsGI/AAAAAAABIjc/EDjbIormMZgoeLxW1r_b2xDLWQ16TVORgCLcB/s400/MAT20150728.jpg)\n**28 July 2015.** A note about cat food cans.\n\nIn the note above, the part about the "horrible end" of cat food cans is a lucid joke, but yes, the patio behind the back door was littered with cans that had been scattered by urban wildlife, mostly raccoons, and I went out and gathered them after receiving this note.\n\nTo get cat food out of a can, I am loath to use a spoon that I will later use to eat. We have a good sterilizing dishwasher, but this doesn't matter. With the meticulousness of an Orthodox Jewish wife keeping her dairy and meat dishes separate, I am mightily OCD about segregating that which holds things for animals from that which I use to eat and drink.\n\nI make [good cornbread](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw1-rrNBzuY), and I used to make it often, especially if I was cooking beans. Part of my cornbread ritual involves always using the same bowl to mix my batter. Bowl consistency may be an obsession, but there's a practical side because not all bowls are equal. Some are too small, and I don't want to discover that a bowl cannot hold all the ingredients after I have already started mixing them. The bowl needs to be gripped well when I stir to mix everything, even though I don't want to mix to a point of absolute uniformity—I'm making cornbread, not homogenized milk. The bowl also needs to give up the batter readily when it comes time to scrape and pour it into the cast iron skillet in which I bake the cornbread. So I get attached to the bowl that works well for me, and it becomes part of a ritual not unlike the Zen artist who embraces the happy accident when he makes tea for me in Kyoto.\n\n![The interior paint of the old microwave suddenly began to peel. I replaced it with a wonderful Panasonic, which is the smartest microwave I've ever seen.](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-whZXZd3VNgI/V3YMfXGjb1I/AAAAAAABIjk/DJIXjnfjI_YIJExnip3QvF0OfPL7WIyoQCLcB/s400/MAT20150729.jpeg)\n**29 July 2015.** The interior paint of the old microwave suddenly began to peel. I replaced it with a wonderful Panasonic, which is the smartest microwave I've ever seen.\n\nMy mother loves animals, and never turned away a stray, including a few cousins and me on numerous occasions. Candidate for the neighborhood Crazy Cat Lady, she at one point housed and cared for seven cats. Now life is somewhat simpler because we feed the feral cats and much of the rest of the suburban wildlife, including raccoons, opossums, blue jays, grackles, and squirrels, but we have no pets. At some point sooner than the lifespan of a dog or cat, I will begin to travel again. I think I can guess why my mother doesn't have a pet.\n\nSo one day, when I discovered that my mother had been watering a dog with my Holy Grail of Cornbread Batter, I felt as though I'd been kicked in the gut. In cases like this where I confront her with a grievance, she exercises a complex of what the Behavioralist Nazis call cognitive distortions, or, for the sake of their less than bright clients, thinking errors. She pretends she does not understand what I mean (the thinking error of confusion), and therefore "concludes" that whatever I'm going on about can't be too important (the thinking error of minimizing). And if there is a TV handy, she makes it clear that television is much more interesting than I am (which is probably true most of the time anyway). That incident disrupted my cornbread making for a year.\n\nI missed my cornbread though, and have finally started making it again in a bowl that meets my physical requirements. I have done my best to quell my doubts about the metal mixing bowl's provenance with denial. If I were to ask my mother about this bowl, she would of course deny it.\n\n**Hungry—15 December 2015**\nIn December 2015 my Cousin Jan is between houses and spends several days with us. On days that she is away in the daytime but will likely eat dinner here in the evening, I usually text her when time draws close to dinner time.\n\n**Me:** Are you eating here tonight? Ideas? ETA?\n\n**Her:** What r we having? I'm Leaving now\n\n**Me:** What I used to call my mind is blank\n\n**Her:** Lol\n\nSo at least she is on the way, and we'll figure out the menu after she gets here. Then a few minutes later—it is 5:35 p.m.—my whithered 91­-year-old mother knocks aggressively on my door the way she does when she is angry. I'm tempted not to answer that knock.\n\n"What are we going to do about dinner?" she asks angrily. Translation: I'm hungry so why haven't I been fed already?\n\n"I don't know yet. Jane is..."\n\nHer face contorts to an ugly sneer. "Jane... Uh. Jane... " Then the aphasia seizes her tongue, and she just walks down the hall to the kitchen.\n\nI lock myself in my room. Meanwhile she puts the remaining hash browns on a small salad plate in the oven, and in the microwave, which she can't figure out (though it's simpler than the last one we had), she cooks two frozen steak fingers to some degree.\n\nI warn Jane gently: She's having a fit because we can't eat now. Doesn't want to wait. So she's cooking for herself. Then while I'm not paying attention to my phone, a series of texts arrive:\n\n**Her:** Shes hungry... what shall we have? Spaghtti and meatballs???\n\n**Her:** Craig-­O's Pizza?\n\n**Her:** Mmmmm I'm thinking of ordering pizza. You ok with that????\n\n**Her:** Did you know I'm here. Already.\n\nThis last message I catch, so I come out to check on Jane. My mother is in the kitchen scraping charred hash browns like dead nuked soldiers on a salad plate battlefield.\n\n"She ate already. She may not be so hungry," I say.\n\n"Do you want some pizza?" Jane asks her.\n\n"Huh?"\n\n"She'll eat some," Jane says.\n\nThe pizza comes, and I thank the gods for GPS because once upon a time this house was hard to find with even the best directions. My mother eats two slices of pizza, and Jane and I devour the rest.\n\n![December 2015. I made a hearty beef stew.](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1Qzahahm2fI/V3YQCqKYN_I/AAAAAAABIkE/uEK358c9bPcn7MeD8Y_P6ixgwYX9SY-JwCLcB/s400/15%2BDecember%2B2015.jpg)\n**20 December 2015.** I made a hearty beef stew.\n\n\n\n![](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-INkwI6v_atY/V3YNEKcBkAI/AAAAAAABIj0/1VLy7yovN_8q4hdwKzx6sQAFu-xBVW-NwCLcB/s400/2016%2BMay.jpg)\n**May 2016.** This is a strange note, which I found on the front door. To whom was it addressed? It refers to both me and my brother in the third person. She says that I am ill and that my brother has taken me to the doctor, which isn't true. Also the usage of "DEAD TRIED"— I'll wager that the dyslexic misspelling of tired is an innocent error that anyone can make, yet the phrase choice makes a strong image.\n\nShe's not really losing her mind yet. It's that she's losing her guile. She has always been demanding, close­-minded, and judgmental. She often hated the music to which I wanted to listen, the books I wanted to read, the TV shows I wanted to watch, the movies I wanted to see: no matter that it was I who wanted to listen, read, or see. My existence was not well approved of unless it conformed to hers. She didn't like things that interested me, and judgment was passed. It's just that now she's lost the subtlety necessary to hide her brutish ways. When I filled Jane in more fully on what had happened, she shared her insights based on taking care of her mother who also went down to dementia.\n\n"It's like a baby crying. No matter what time it is, you have to feed it." That baby eats a movable feast. She gets up, like a roll of a die, between 1 and 6 p.m. Typically we eat dinner between 7 and 8 p.m. But tonight her stomach came out and spoke: she would not wait. She would eat now.\n\nI notice later as I straighten the kitchen that on a little salad plate in the fridge are those two chicken strips, untouched.\n\n**20 March 2016. 3:30 p.m.** The workers sponsored by Meals on Wheels to do several household repairs. She knocks on my door just now. "I can't cope with this," she says.\n\n"Can't cope with what?"\n\n"I can't cope with the smell."\n\nSmell is one of the few senses I have in reasonable shape, and the work here has not for me been an olfactory experience.\n\n"Are you having trouble breathing?"\n\n"Yes. I have to go somewhere." She's more like a cat when unusual things happen in its house.\n\nI try to anticipate the questions my brother will ask me:\n\n"Did you do a treatment?"\n\n"Yes."\n\n"Did you do an Advair?"\n\n"Yes...." something gets lost here in her aphasia.\n\n"OK. I'll call [my brother] and see what he says."\n\n"They don't have a bed."\n\n"OK, but he's the only one who can help you with this. I can't help you."\n\nShe wanders off....\n\n**15:49 Text to my brother:** Ok, now she says not to tell you anything, that she's fighting it. \n\n"Are you gonna be ok?" I ask her.\n\n"Yeah," she says, "I'm fighting it."\n\nShe's been cooking and had her mind on other things.\n\nBy the way, the odors of her cooking are a hundred times more pungent than whatever lingers from Friday's construction work. What we're dealing with here is actually some sort of emotional battle played out upon a topography twisted by dementia. \n\n**29 March 2016.** The workers necessarily move things around a bit to get their work done. Sometimes they're doing us a service because I certainly don't want to get caulk or wood shavings all over my nice clean whatever. But it's tweaking her paranoia, and now, instead of me, she has two strangers of another race to accuse of stealing her trash can.\n\nThis morning she couldn't find her TV remote control, and it didn't help that it turned up in the living room, but chances are she left it there when she went out on to the porch for a few minutes, as she is wont to do, to stare out at the circle as if to catch it still in the act of whatever mischief it performed in the night. But every poor boy knows that a remote control isn't worth much unless I steal the cable box too.\n\nShe's still diplomatic enough not to accuse them point blank of stealing her remote or her trash can or that wallet in which she keeps her Social Security and Medicare cards. The workers found the wallet in the living room when they moved the couch out from the wall so they could repair the hole in the ceiling, and they turned it over to me. She swears she last had the wallet in the den, so her suspicions began when they did the right thing. The last time she misplaced the wallet, she was accusing me and searching my room. She's also asked me a dozen times if I have her trash can in my room. She also came to me with a box of spent checkbooks, but she couldn't tell me whether she wanted me to hide or shred them.\n\n Text message to my brother: I'm more amused by all this than anything, but if she's starting to stop the workers to interrogate them about things that she secretly suspects they've stolen, it might be helpful to get her out of here, at least some of the time. Steve has told me to clear counter tops and to empty cabinetry below the counters tonight, and she is particularly territorial about the kitchen (Freud should have written volumes about women, kitchens, and food), so can you maybe get her out of here tomorrow while they start tearing up the kitchen?\n\n**May 2016.** Cooking canned biscuits in the microwave proves to be a nasty disaster.\n\nI put the new Keurig where the old coffee maker was, and I moved Mr Coffee to the other drainboard. My hope is that the Keurig is simple to use that she would take to it because she complained about Mr Coffee's complexity, even though there is little more to Mr Coffee than what she has been doing for the past thirty years (it wasn't really the complexity, was it? It was the novelty, as it is with the Keurig). The kitchen is small and cramped as it is, and now with an extra coffee maker it's almost unusable. Though I push the Keurig back against the wall when I'm not using it, I have to pull it out from beneath the counter in order to open the top. Also we no longer need the little electric oven—a glorified toaster oven—since the new range has a working oven in it. I suggested that store the oven and the Mr Coffee and put the Keurig where the electric oven is now. This would go a long way toward freeing drainboard on both sides of the sink, but she visibly ruffled her feathers. "I just won't drink any coffee then." There's nothing like that old martyr pose to drub someone over the head with guilt. Being this woman's son, I celebrated by drinking both remaining KCups of coffee, all we had left until tomorrow's shipment gets here. I guess the thing to do is go ahead and store the oven and the Mr Coffee and put the Keurig where the oven is. After all, my brother and his wife will shop for us on Thursday, and they'll need a place to put the groceries when we carry them into the house.\n\n Occasionally these days I find the microwave displaying the word "Child." Puzzled, I thought at first it was like a "Check Engine" light on a car—a harbinger of forthcoming trouble. But today it dawned on me that it's more like the locked condition that I discovered on the dishwasher a while back. The microwave, confronted with a nonsense sequence of button pushes, protects and locks itself from any further tampering by what it presumes is a child. Fortunately, this condition is easier to reset than the corresponding condition on the dishwasher: I simply press the Stop/Reset button, and I'm back.\n\nOK, I was close but not completely precise. Here's what the manual says:\n\n> **Child Safety Lock**\n> This feature prevents the electronic operation of the oven until cancelled. It does not lock the door. \n> **To set: •** Press start 3 times. “Child” appears in the display window. "Child" continues to be displayed until Child Lock is cancelled. Any pad may be pressed but the microwave will not start.\n> **To cancel: •** Press stop/reset 3 times. The display will return to colon or time of day when Child Lock has been cancelled.\n> **Note:** You can set Child Lock feature when the display shows a colon or time of day.\n\nSo somehow she's pushing the start button three times and putting it into this locked mode. Or maybe the random pushing of buttons in a nonsense sequence cause the oven to curl up in an electronic fetal position and just say "Child."\n\n**My brother texted:** Obviously someone has been 'diddling' with the controls. \n\nYes, exactly. And what she does just coincidentally happens to be what it takes to put it into this lock mode. In the case of the dishwasher, she puts trash bags that are ready to be carried out on the part of the floor over which the dishwasher door opens. When it opens the trash bag presses against the control panel and sets that lock condition.\n\n**10 May 2016.** The early stages of dementia involve vivid dreaming. My mother on several occasions has asked me who was here. She hears voices (which isn't likely in reality since she can't hear anyone if she's not looking at them to read their lips). She hears knocking or some other sounds. She doesn't surrender the faux reality of these dreams easily. I'm going to tell the story of the most dramatic example of vivid dreaming from the beginning even though I didn't realize what was going on until sometime later.\n\nI was up while things were happening, but working, so I didn't know anything unusual was going on until she knocked on my door.\n\n**Around 4:15 a.m.** she dreamed I was in my room, moaning and dying. Apparently she tried to open my door in her dream, so when she actually got up, she went not to my room but next door, woke the neighbors, said I was hollering or making a lot of noise but not answering when she knocked. \n\n Naturally the neighbor called 911.\n\n**At 4:30** she knocks on my door. I'm at my computer, working quietly, and not even listening to music. "Stay here," is all she says. She doesn't seem surprised to see me standing in the doorway and looking quite normal. Then she walks into the living room. I stay there for a bit, thinking she's going to show me something. But she doesn't come back, so I go into the living room, and, much to my surprise, she's talking to a policeman on the porch. Outside there are three emergency vehicles, including an ambulance and a police car.\n\nI ask the policeman what this is all about. He says that there was a 911 call. I ask if it was her Lifeline button, and he says no, that she had been over to the neighbor's and the neighbor had called it in.\n\nHe asks if I am OK, and I said I was fine, and that was all he needed to know.\n\nI mention to him that she has dementia....\n\nBut fortunately they went away as quickly as they showed up, and nobody got into trouble.\n\nAs we are going back into the house, Mom looks at me and says, "Don't do that again."\n\n**18 May 2016** It's Wednesday, and tomorrow my brother does the grocery shopping according to the list I send him. To my thinking, running out of things the day before shopping equates to a gentle landing in the food management department. But for my depression-era mother, running out of anything is cause for panic and a breakdown of reason. We are out of food for the feral cats. So rather than leaving them to their own devices—they are wild animals after all, and the back yard is a dense menagerie of predators and prey—she's feeding my frozen hash browns along with frozen, oven-ready garlic bread to the feral cats and raccoons. I'm not talking about leftovers. I mean freshly unpackaged food for people. Sigh. I like those hash browns. I'm ... sad is only one emotion ... to see them wasted like that. Krazy Kat Lady.\n\n**25-26 May 2016.** Last night and continuing this morning: Temper tantrum about her phone service and her medication. I tell her that my brother will bring her medication this afternoon, but that doesn't placate her. My sister-in-law, who has become the angel where both my brother and I fear to tread, explains that there's a phone wiring problem. We have what telephone technicians call a broken house loop: the wire is broken and the connection doesn't reach the jacks. The problem is unsolvable short of a $200 repair call. More expediently, we have the base unit of her phone connected to the box where the inside and the outside meet, and she can carry the hand unit of the cordless phone wherever she goes. But that does not placate her either: the only thing she understands is that she wants the base of the cordless phone on the table by where she sits on the couch. There isn't even a jack there anymore. She doesn't care about that. She just wants what she wants. Nothing else matters: I told my sister-in-law, she's not really sure what's wrong, but she's damned sure that it's my fault.\n\n**3 June 2016.** About ten to three a.m., Mom knocks on my door and says, "Look how dark it is."\n\n At first I think that the street light in the circle has gone out—which it does maybe once a year—so I step into the hall so I can see out through the living room windows, but the faithful eternal sodium plasma still bathes the circle in its yellow glow. "Do you know what time it is?" I ask her. "Look at the clock." I point at the verbose clock that I bought her. As much as possible, it spells the date and time out. It finally clicks on her that the time is 3:05 a.m., not p.m., and that's why it's dark. She was embarrassed when she realized her mistake. \n\n![25 June 2016. Lock run locks an lockss.](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-O2WUxX0R_c4/V3YLyeUEHKI/AAAAAAABIjg/dFJSyuquCsImccEZRQacTshR_6D3VOL_gCKgB/s320/20160625%2BMAT.jpg)\n*25 June 2016.* Lock run locks an lockss.\n\nAbout a week ago I was rinsing dishes in the sink and putting them into the dishwasher. I emptied a full cup of what looked like coffee and milk, and the odor that rose up to my nose told me the whole story. She had wanted a cup of coffee, but she hadn't read the cartridge carefully before she put it in the Keurig, so she made mint tea. I'm sure that the clash between expectation and reality forged a horrid dissonance in taste. I went to where she was watching TV and said that the first two drawers under the Keurig have coffee and the last one has tea, but she would not listen to me. In fact she didn't speak to me for a couple of days after that, but finally brought cherries to my room when I had just eaten dinner. My mother is very much into the Freudian thing of how food is love from birth until death, and I'm stubborn about not eating when I'm hungry. Having endured her table through my childhood, I'm particularly obstinate about not being fed against my will now. So her gesture of peace through a bowl of cherries fell rather flat. I did however label the drawers: Coffee, Coffee, Tea.\n\n Anyone who reads this will see how impatient I am and ill qualified for this job. Yet in this house of care I am myself as much a patient as a caretaker. The responsibilities fall to me because I have the ability to respond. I passed through a depression from 2013 through 2014. I pulled out of it by taking baby steps in a simulated life in, of all things, World of Warcraft. That slow progression from noob to warrior made me this house's organizing force. I'm not doing rocket science or brain surgery, but I carry out the trash barrels on Wednesday afternoon and bring them back in on Thursday mornings. I make the grocery lists, and while a lot of that list includes food that my mother likes and can put together herself—she loves strawberries drenched in ranch dressing, and she eats a lot of chicken pot pies—I'm the one who cooks a hot meal now and then or who at least knows how to cook biscuits out of a can in a proper oven. I spot problems that need to be fixed, and I find ways to fix them, or, failing that, I call in my brother who has some know-how and a little cash. Most of all, though, my circumstances in life have burned my every bridge. I am now for all practical purposes retired, and I have no option but to write. Suddenly all the excuses that I had are gone. My bridges are burned, and I have arrived.",
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      "parent_permlink": "dementia",
      "author": "feralthinker",
      "permlink": "living-with-dementia",
      "title": "Living with dementia",
      "body": "![My mother at 92.](https://scontent-dft4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13686793_1007483439350015_436272842346179443_n.jpg?oh=3074aed2099da2940a478d5ce15aad68&oe=5826AA27)\n\nMy title refers to my mother's dementia, with which I live as a caretaker. Some of these stories are funny. I don't mean to be making fun of anyone. I mean no disrespect. And I'm sure some of you will interpret this essay as a violation of privacy. But it's important to talk about all the little absurdities that happen as someone disappears into the vacuum of an unraveling brain. Sometimes she is lucid; other times she isn't. Sometimes the aphasia steals her tongue even when she is otherwise lucid.\n\nWitness dementia constantly shifts in meaning. One of the many motifs running through the films of Ingmar Bergman lies in the witness's gaze as someone dies. The witness watches for the slight chance that the moment of death or the eyes of the dying might somehow reveal something beyond death or else confirm the certainties of nihilists that there is nothing there. Dementia is not as dramatic as all that, but it is still a slow-motion unraveling of consciousness, and as such, might reveal some clues as to the nature of the mind and of existence itself, as mind and existence seem locked and dependent upon each other in an eternal dialectic not unlike those two fish of yin and yáng. But maybe I'm over-intellectualizing what is otherwise too uncomfortable to think about.\n\nMy father slid into dementia sixteen years ago with a joviality that reminded me of Slim Pickens, like an eager cowboy warrior, riding the nuclear warhead out of his plane in Stanley Kubrick's *Dr Strangelove*. Yahoo! Does that mean I shall plummet to earth like a fallen angel too? I don't know. Not all forms are hereditary. Nevertheless I want to look at this dissolution of the body between the poles of brain and bladder closely because if it comes to my turn I might prefer to leave while still lucid.\n\nThis is a mostly documentary history with a little bit of commentary woven into it. Names have been redacted to preserve a modicum of privacy. I include scanned copies of her notes to me about quotidian functions of the house, notes I wrote to myself, and some transcripts of text messages, mostly with my brother.\n\nI've arranged the documents in more or less chronological order. The project reminds me of the time I collected as many self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh as I could find. He painted many pictures of himself. I arranged them chronologically to see if there was a visible decline in his self-image as he neared his end. But what ailed Vincent Van Gogh wasn't dementia, and it worked in spells from which he generally recovered and during which he didn't paint very much. When he reached the end, it was swift, and it wasn't about pictures. While my mother's lucidity is up and down, there is an overall downward trend, which is visible in her notes. Her thought processes from a year ago, while sometimes cloudy, were much clearer than they are now.\n\n![28 July 2015. A note about cat food cans.](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yR3nkxyBbKI/V3YMTNyrsGI/AAAAAAABIjc/EDjbIormMZgoeLxW1r_b2xDLWQ16TVORgCLcB/s400/MAT20150728.jpg)\n**28 July 2015.** A note about cat food cans.\n\nIn the note above, the part about the "horrible end" of cat food cans is a lucid joke, but yes, the patio behind the back door was littered with cans that had been scattered by urban wildlife, mostly raccoons, and I went out and gathered them after receiving this note.\n\nTo get cat food out of a can, I am loath to use a spoon that I will later use to eat. We have a good sterilizing dishwasher, but this doesn't matter. With the meticulousness of an Orthodox Jewish wife keeping her dairy and meat dishes separate, I am mightily OCD about segregating that which holds things for animals from that which I use to eat and drink.\n\nI make [good cornbread](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw1-rrNBzuY), and I used to make it often, especially if I was cooking beans. Part of my cornbread ritual involves always using the same bowl to mix my batter. Bowl consistency may be an obsession, but there's a practical side because not all bowls are equal. Some are too small, and I don't want to discover that a bowl cannot hold all the ingredients after I have already started mixing them. The bowl needs to be gripped well when I stir to mix everything, even though I don't want to mix to a point of absolute uniformity—I'm making cornbread, not homogenized milk. The bowl also needs to give up the batter readily when it comes time to scrape and pour it into the cast iron skillet in which I bake the cornbread. So I get attached to the bowl that works well for me, and it becomes part of a ritual not unlike the Zen artist who embraces the happy accident when he makes tea for me in Kyoto.\n\n![The interior paint of the old microwave suddenly began to peel. I replaced it with a wonderful Panasonic, which is the smartest microwave I've ever seen.](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-whZXZd3VNgI/V3YMfXGjb1I/AAAAAAABIjk/DJIXjnfjI_YIJExnip3QvF0OfPL7WIyoQCLcB/s400/MAT20150729.jpeg)\n**29 July 2015.** The interior paint of the old microwave suddenly began to peel. I replaced it with a wonderful Panasonic, which is the smartest microwave I've ever seen.\n\nMy mother loves animals, and never turned away a stray, including a few cousins and me on numerous occasions. Candidate for the neighborhood Crazy Cat Lady, she at one point housed and cared for seven cats. Now life is somewhat simpler because we feed the feral cats and much of the rest of the suburban wildlife, including raccoons, opossums, blue jays, grackles, and squirrels, but we have no pets. At some point sooner than the lifespan of a dog or cat, I will begin to travel again. I think I can guess why my mother doesn't have a pet.\n\nSo one day, when I discovered that my mother had been watering a dog with my Holy Grail of Cornbread Batter, I felt as though I'd been kicked in the gut. In cases like this where I confront her with a grievance, she exercises a complex of what the Behavioralist Nazis call cognitive distortions, or, for the sake of their less than bright clients, thinking errors. She pretends she does not understand what I mean (the thinking error of confusion), and therefore "concludes" that whatever I'm going on about can't be too important (the thinking error of minimizing). And if there is a TV handy, she makes it clear that television is much more interesting than I am (which is probably true most of the time anyway). That incident disrupted my cornbread making for a year.\n\nI missed my cornbread though, and have finally started making it again in a bowl that meets my physical requirements. I have done my best to quell my doubts about the metal mixing bowl's provenance with denial. If I were to ask my mother about this bowl, she would of course deny it.\n\n**Hungry—15 December 2015**\nIn December 2015 my Cousin Jan is between houses and spends several days with us. On days that she is away in the daytime but will likely eat dinner here in the evening, I usually text her when time draws close to dinner time.\n\n**Me:** Are you eating here tonight? Ideas? ETA?\n\n**Her:** What r we having? I'm Leaving now\n\n**Me:** What I used to call my mind is blank\n\n**Her:** Lol\n\nSo at least she is on the way, and we'll figure out the menu after she gets here. Then a few minutes later—it is 5:35 p.m.—my whithered 91­-year-old mother knocks aggressively on my door the way she does when she is angry. I'm tempted not to answer that knock.\n\n"What are we going to do about dinner?" she asks angrily. Translation: I'm hungry so why haven't I been fed already?\n\n"I don't know yet. Jane is..."\n\nHer face contorts to an ugly sneer. "Jane... Uh. Jane... " Then the aphasia seizes her tongue, and she just walks down the hall to the kitchen.\n\nI lock myself in my room. Meanwhile she puts the remaining hash browns on a small salad plate in the oven, and in the microwave, which she can't figure out (though it's simpler than the last one we had), she cooks two frozen steak fingers to some degree.\n\nI warn Jane gently: She's having a fit because we can't eat now. Doesn't want to wait. So she's cooking for herself. Then while I'm not paying attention to my phone, a series of texts arrive:\n\n**Her:** Shes hungry... what shall we have? Spaghtti and meatballs???\n\n**Her:** Craig-­O's Pizza?\n\n**Her:** Mmmmm I'm thinking of ordering pizza. You ok with that????\n\n**Her:** Did you know I'm here. Already.\n\nThis last message I catch, so I come out to check on Jane. My mother is in the kitchen scraping charred hash browns like dead nuked soldiers on a salad plate battlefield.\n\n"She ate already. She may not be so hungry," I say.\n\n"Do you want some pizza?" Jane asks her.\n\n"Huh?"\n\n"She'll eat some," Jane says.\n\nThe pizza comes, and I thank the gods for GPS because once upon a time this house was hard to find with even the best directions. My mother eats two slices of pizza, and Jane and I devour the rest.\n\n![December 2015. I made a hearty beef stew.](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1Qzahahm2fI/V3YQCqKYN_I/AAAAAAABIkE/uEK358c9bPcn7MeD8Y_P6ixgwYX9SY-JwCLcB/s400/15%2BDecember%2B2015.jpg)\n**20 December 2015.** I made a hearty beef stew.\n\n\n\n![](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-INkwI6v_atY/V3YNEKcBkAI/AAAAAAABIj0/1VLy7yovN_8q4hdwKzx6sQAFu-xBVW-NwCLcB/s400/2016%2BMay.jpg)\n**May 2016.** This is a strange note, which I found on the front door. To whom was it addressed? It refers to both me and my brother in the third person. She says that I am ill and that my brother has taken me to the doctor, which isn't true. Also the usage of "DEAD TRIED"— I'll wager that the dyslexic misspelling of tired is an innocent error that anyone can make, yet the phrase choice makes a strong image.\n\nShe's not really losing her mind yet. It's that she's losing her guile. She has always been demanding, close­-minded, and judgmental. She often hated the music to which I wanted to listen, the books I wanted to read, the TV shows I wanted to watch, the movies I wanted to see: no matter that it was I who wanted to listen, read, or see. My existence was not well approved of unless it conformed to hers. She didn't like things that interested me, and judgment was passed. It's just that now she's lost the subtlety necessary to hide her brutish ways. When I filled Jane in more fully on what had happened, she shared her insights based on taking care of her mother who also went down to dementia.\n\n"It's like a baby crying. No matter what time it is, you have to feed it." That baby eats a movable feast. She gets up, like a roll of a die, between 1 and 6 p.m. Typically we eat dinner between 7 and 8 p.m. But tonight her stomach came out and spoke: she would not wait. She would eat now.\n\nI notice later as I straighten the kitchen that on a little salad plate in the fridge are those two chicken strips, untouched.\n\n**20 March 2016. 3:30 p.m.** The workers sponsored by Meals on Wheels to do several household repairs. She knocks on my door just now. "I can't cope with this," she says.\n\n"Can't cope with what?"\n\n"I can't cope with the smell."\n\nSmell is one of the few senses I have in reasonable shape, and the work here has not for me been an olfactory experience.\n\n"Are you having trouble breathing?"\n\n"Yes. I have to go somewhere." She's more like a cat when unusual things happen in its house.\n\nI try to anticipate the questions my brother will ask me:\n\n"Did you do a treatment?"\n\n"Yes."\n\n"Did you do an Advair?"\n\n"Yes...." something gets lost here in her aphasia.\n\n"OK. I'll call [my brother] and see what he says."\n\n"They don't have a bed."\n\n"OK, but he's the only one who can help you with this. I can't help you."\n\nShe wanders off....\n\n**15:49 Text to my brother:** Ok, now she says not to tell you anything, that she's fighting it. \n\n"Are you gonna be ok?" I ask her.\n\n"Yeah," she says, "I'm fighting it."\n\nShe's been cooking and had her mind on other things.\n\nBy the way, the odors of her cooking are a hundred times more pungent than whatever lingers from Friday's construction work. What we're dealing with here is actually some sort of emotional battle played out upon a topography twisted by dementia. \n\n**29 March 2016.** The workers necessarily move things around a bit to get their work done. Sometimes they're doing us a service because I certainly don't want to get caulk or wood shavings all over my nice clean whatever. But it's tweaking her paranoia, and now, instead of me, she has two strangers of another race to accuse of stealing her trash can.\n\nThis morning she couldn't find her TV remote control, and it didn't help that it turned up in the living room, but chances are she left it there when she went out on to the porch for a few minutes, as she is wont to do, to stare out at the circle as if to catch it still in the act of whatever mischief it performed in the night. But every poor boy knows that a remote control isn't worth much unless I steal the cable box too.\n\nShe's still diplomatic enough not to accuse them point blank of stealing her remote or her trash can or that wallet in which she keeps her Social Security and Medicare cards. The workers found the wallet in the living room when they moved the couch out from the wall so they could repair the hole in the ceiling, and they turned it over to me. She swears she last had the wallet in the den, so her suspicions began when they did the right thing. The last time she misplaced the wallet, she was accusing me and searching my room. She's also asked me a dozen times if I have her trash can in my room. She also came to me with a box of spent checkbooks, but she couldn't tell me whether she wanted me to hide or shred them.\n\n Text message to my brother: I'm more amused by all this than anything, but if she's starting to stop the workers to interrogate them about things that she secretly suspects they've stolen, it might be helpful to get her out of here, at least some of the time. Steve has told me to clear counter tops and to empty cabinetry below the counters tonight, and she is particularly territorial about the kitchen (Freud should have written volumes about women, kitchens, and food), so can you maybe get her out of here tomorrow while they start tearing up the kitchen?\n\n**May 2016.** Cooking canned biscuits in the microwave proves to be a nasty disaster.\n\nI put the new Keurig where the old coffee maker was, and I moved Mr Coffee to the other drainboard. My hope is that the Keurig is simple to use that she would take to it because she complained about Mr Coffee's complexity, even though there is little more to Mr Coffee than what she has been doing for the past thirty years (it wasn't really the complexity, was it? It was the novelty, as it is with the Keurig). The kitchen is small and cramped as it is, and now with an extra coffee maker it's almost unusable. Though I push the Keurig back against the wall when I'm not using it, I have to pull it out from beneath the counter in order to open the top. Also we no longer need the little electric oven—a glorified toaster oven—since the new range has a working oven in it. I suggested that store the oven and the Mr Coffee and put the Keurig where the electric oven is now. This would go a long way toward freeing drainboard on both sides of the sink, but she visibly ruffled her feathers. "I just won't drink any coffee then." There's nothing like that old martyr pose to drub someone over the head with guilt. Being this woman's son, I celebrated by drinking both remaining KCups of coffee, all we had left until tomorrow's shipment gets here. I guess the thing to do is go ahead and store the oven and the Mr Coffee and put the Keurig where the oven is. After all, my brother and his wife will shop for us on Thursday, and they'll need a place to put the groceries when we carry them into the house.\n\n Occasionally these days I find the microwave displaying the word "Child." Puzzled, I thought at first it was like a "Check Engine" light on a car—a harbinger of forthcoming trouble. But today it dawned on me that it's more like the locked condition that I discovered on the dishwasher a while back. The microwave, confronted with a nonsense sequence of button pushes, protects and locks itself from any further tampering by what it presumes is a child. Fortunately, this condition is easier to reset than the corresponding condition on the dishwasher: I simply press the Stop/Reset button, and I'm back.\n\nOK, I was close but not completely precise. Here's what the manual says:\n\n> **Child Safety Lock**\n> This feature prevents the electronic operation of the oven until cancelled. It does not lock the door. \n> **To set: •** Press start 3 times. “Child” appears in the display window. "Child" continues to be displayed until Child Lock is cancelled. Any pad may be pressed but the microwave will not start.\n> **To cancel: •** Press stop/reset 3 times. The display will return to colon or time of day when Child Lock has been cancelled.\n> **Note:** You can set Child Lock feature when the display shows a colon or time of day.\n\nSo somehow she's pushing the start button three times and putting it into this locked mode. Or maybe the random pushing of buttons in a nonsense sequence cause the oven to curl up in an electronic fetal position and just say "Child."\n\n**My brother texted:** Obviously someone has been 'diddling' with the controls. \n\nYes, exactly. And what she does just coincidentally happens to be what it takes to put it into this lock mode. In the case of the dishwasher, she puts trash bags that are ready to be carried out on the part of the floor over which the dishwasher door opens. When it opens the trash bag presses against the control panel and sets that lock condition.\n\n**10 May 2016.** The early stages of dementia involve vivid dreaming. My mother on several occasions has asked me who was here. She hears voices (which isn't likely in reality since she can't hear anyone if she's not looking at them to read their lips). She hears knocking or some other sounds. She doesn't surrender the faux reality of these dreams easily. I'm going to tell the story of the most dramatic example of vivid dreaming from the beginning even though I didn't realize what was going on until sometime later.\n\nI was up while things were happening, but working, so I didn't know anything unusual was going on until she knocked on my door.\n\n**Around 4:15 a.m.** she dreamed I was in my room, moaning and dying. Apparently she tried to open my door in her dream, so when she actually got up, she went not to my room but next door, woke the neighbors, said I was hollering or making a lot of noise but not answering when she knocked. \n\n Naturally the neighbor called 911.\n\n**At 4:30** she knocks on my door. I'm at my computer, working quietly, and not even listening to music. "Stay here," is all she says. She doesn't seem surprised to see me standing in the doorway and looking quite normal. Then she walks into the living room. I stay there for a bit, thinking she's going to show me something. But she doesn't come back, so I go into the living room, and, much to my surprise, she's talking to a policeman on the porch. Outside there are three emergency vehicles, including an ambulance and a police car.\n\nI ask the policeman what this is all about. He says that there was a 911 call. I ask if it was her Lifeline button, and he says no, that she had been over to the neighbor's and the neighbor had called it in.\n\nHe asks if I am OK, and I said I was fine, and that was all he needed to know.\n\nI mention to him that she has dementia....\n\nBut fortunately they went away as quickly as they showed up, and nobody got into trouble.\n\nAs we are going back into the house, Mom looks at me and says, "Don't do that again."\n\n**18 May 2016** It's Wednesday, and tomorrow my brother does the grocery shopping according to the list I send him. To my thinking, running out of things the day before shopping equates to a gentle landing in the food management department. But for my depression-era mother, running out of anything is cause for panic and a breakdown of reason. We are out of food for the feral cats. So rather than leaving them to their own devices—they are wild animals after all, and the back yard is a dense menagerie of predators and prey—she's feeding my frozen hash browns along with frozen, oven-ready garlic bread to the feral cats and raccoons. I'm not talking about leftovers. I mean freshly unpackaged food for people. Sigh. I like those hash browns. I'm ... sad is only one emotion ... to see them wasted like that. Krazy Kat Lady.\n\n**25-26 May 2016.** Last night and continuing this morning: Temper tantrum about her phone service and her medication. I tell her that my brother will bring her medication this afternoon, but that doesn't placate her. My sister-in-law, who has become the angel where both my brother and I fear to tread, explains that there's a phone wiring problem. We have what telephone technicians call a broken house loop: the wire is broken and the connection doesn't reach the jacks. The problem is unsolvable short of a $200 repair call. More expediently, we have the base unit of her phone connected to the box where the inside and the outside meet, and she can carry the hand unit of the cordless phone wherever she goes. But that does not placate her either: the only thing she understands is that she wants the base of the cordless phone on the table by where she sits on the couch. There isn't even a jack there anymore. She doesn't care about that. She just wants what she wants. Nothing else matters: I told my sister-in-law, she's not really sure what's wrong, but she's damned sure that it's my fault.\n\n**3 June 2016.** About ten to three a.m., Mom knocks on my door and says, "Look how dark it is."\n\n At first I think that the street light in the circle has gone out—which it does maybe once a year—so I step into the hall so I can see out through the living room windows, but the faithful eternal sodium plasma still bathes the circle in its yellow glow. "Do you know what time it is?" I ask her. "Look at the clock." I point at the verbose clock that I bought her. As much as possible, it spells the date and time out. It finally clicks on her that the time is 3:05 a.m., not p.m., and that's why it's dark. She was embarrassed when she realized her mistake. \n\n![25 June 2016. Lock run locks an lockss.](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-O2WUxX0R_c4/V3YLyeUEHKI/AAAAAAABIjg/dFJSyuquCsImccEZRQacTshR_6D3VOL_gCKgB/s320/20160625%2BMAT.jpg)\n*25 June 2016.* Lock run locks an lockss.\n\nAbout a week ago I was rinsing dishes in the sink and putting them into the dishwasher. I emptied a full cup of what looked like coffee and milk, and the odor that rose up to my nose told me the whole story. She had wanted a cup of coffee, but she hadn't read the cartridge carefully before she put it in the Keurig, so she made mint tea. I'm sure that the clash between expectation and reality forged a horrid dissonance in taste. I went to where she was watching TV and said that the first two drawers under the Keurig have coffee and the last one has tea, but she would not listen to me. In fact she didn't speak to me for a couple of days after that, but finally brought cherries to my room when I had just eaten dinner. My mother is very much into the Freudian thing of how food is love from birth until death, and I'm stubborn about not eating when I'm hungry. Having endured her table through my childhood, I'm particularly obstinate about not being fed against my will now. So her gesture of peace through a bowl of cherries fell rather flat. I did however label the drawers: Coffee, Coffee, Tea.\n\n Anyone who reads this will see how impatient I am and ill qualified for this job. Yet in this house of care I am myself as much a patient as a caretaker. The responsibilities fall to me because I have the ability to respond. I passed through a depression from 2013 through 2014. I pulled out of it by taking baby steps in a simulated life in, of all things, World of Warcraft. That slow progression from noob to warrior made me this house's organizing force. I'm not doing rocket science or brain surgery, but I carry out the trash barrels on Wednesday afternoon and bring them back in on Thursday mornings. I make the grocery lists, and while a lot of that list includes food that my mother likes and can put together herself—she loves strawberries drenched in ranch dressing, and she eats a lot of chicken pot pies—I'm the one who cooks a hot meal now and then or who at least knows how to cook biscuits out of a can in a proper oven. I spot problems that need to be fixed, and I find ways to fix them, or, failing that, I call in my brother who has some know-how and a little cash. Most of all, though, my circumstances in life have burned my every bridge. I am now for all practical purposes retired, and I have no option but to write. Suddenly all the excuses that I had are gone. My bridges are burned, and I have arrived.",
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      "title": "Starting up with the Rolling Stones",
      "body": "![Mick Jagger on the runway. Rolling Stones in concert at Hyde Park in London, 2013. Photo by Gorupdebesanez. Licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Rolling_Stones_33.jpg/1920px-Rolling_Stones_33.jpg)\n\nIt's been one of those hectic periods during which all I want to do is get in bed and pull the cover over my head until it's over. Leonard Bernstein did a wonderful video series of Beethoven's nine symphonies, and at the beginning of each show, before the music began, he gives a talk brimming with ideas and passion for the music. Bernstein is a genius of such lofty occupation that I cannot fault him for his earthly sins. In one of those fascinating talks he mentions how people often say when Beethoven wrote Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, the so-called Pathétique, he was depressed, and depression colored the music with its fury, agony, and lethargy. But Bernstein says no, if you're depressed you stay in bed. You certainly don't get up and write music. He's right, of course. Bernstein here spots the musical version of literature's intentional fallacy that says it's a silly reader who supposes that the word *I* means the author. My high school students used to say things like, "Shakespeare was broken-hearted the day he wrote this sonnet." Maybe so, but it's foolish to assume so until you know so. But fallacy be damned, I haven't felt like doing much of anything, and I lack ideas. Fortunately, another source of musical genius, the Rolling Stones, have dropped an idea in my empty idea basket.\n\nThe Stones, of whom I am a long-time fan, have newly revised their Android app with several new and wonderful features. They have a message wall (sort of like Facebook) where people can leave Stones stories, and to kick-start that, people who post on the wall automatically become eligible for a drawing for prizes—I haven't worried about prizes because I'm sure there will be so many entrants that I'd have better luck winning the Powerball. My purpose isn't winning but just writing. Everyone has a Stones story, so I wrote mine, which goes something like this:\n\nI saw the Stones in Houston's Astrodome in 1981 by chance. My downstairs neighbors in Houston were Pam and Janet, two young women from Ohio in the "My City Was Gone" epoch. As everybody immigrated out of the "rust belt," they apparently went to Houston, as if someone had handed out flyers like those in *The Grapes of Wrath*. Pam and Janet were surviving in Houston, and at a time when I had no money, they had tickets for the Rolling Stones concert. I had income, but I lived hand-to-mouth. My irregular cash flow meant I had no cash to flow during the six-hour window between the time the Stones tickets went on sale and the time they sold out. In all fairness, though, I should add that I was working at my first salaried job, and when they had offered me $15K in 1981 dollars, it sounded like a lot of money, but I quickly learned how little it was.\n\n Pam was tall and not quite gangling, with dark-chocolate colored hair in a pixie cut and big glasses, which gave her an intellectual look. Though she wasn't particularly intellectual or scholarly, she was smart and perceptive of things most people didn't notice. She had a methodical way of speaking, putting each word down in a carefully considered way, as if she were playing Go, and I love that in a person because I'm hypersensitive to usage. My own linguistic failings notwithstanding, bad syntax and grammar grate on me like sour notes on a violin. I felt Pam was a person with whom I could have had a nice romance, but as some people say, Why ruin it? She was, as the song says, someone with whom I couldn't get started, and I suppose she preferred it that way.\n\n Janet meanwhile was blond, shorter, slightly rounder, and softer. Her conversational style felt a bit like someone rushing through the hallways of my mind looking for a joke that must be in there somewhere. She was an avid hunter, interrogating along one line of thought, quickly abandoning it when she didn't find what she sought, trying another of inquisition, and when she found the humor, she greeted it with a loud sharp barking laugh that sometimes I could hear even though I was upstairs in my own apartment. My social awkwardness and general lack of guile—I have little or no façade or mask to wear—made me easy prey for this hunter, but at the same time, her laughter made me feel good about my own silly faults and weaknesses. She wasn't at all hurtful or judgmental.\n\n Janet had a pathologically jealous boyfriend named Raymond. One night I came home and Raymond was downstairs at Janet's door, crying loud enough for everyone all around to hear, "please, baby, oh please, let me in." I saw little of the private side of their relationship, but what I saw of these scenes in public places frightened me because they hinted of darkness and danger. \n\n Pam and Janet threw a small party for ten people. Raymond did his best to fit into the relatively soft-spoken polite society that even this scruffy working class crowd formed, but he obviously struggled with discomfort, like a tom boy forced to scrub and put on a starchy Sunday go-to-meeting dress.\n\n Pam sometimes came up to my apartment alone—Raymond probably wouldn't have permitted Janet to visit my apartment, even in Pam's company—and we would talk or gossip about Janet and Raymond, listen to music, and have a drink. I always had alcohol in the house, which is another reason I never had any money.\n\n During one of Pam's visits she mentioned that it looked like Raymond didn't want Janet to go to the Stones concert, and Janet was debating between Raymond and Mick, Keith, and the boys. I guess Raymond feared the band would make a Honky Tonk Woman out of her. Pam said I might be able to have the ticket. Besides, I had a car, and Pam and Janet didn't, and Houston is a hellish place without one, especially if you're going to the Astrodome to see a concert.\n\n A few days later, Janet's ticket fell to me and not long after that we were at the show. ZZ Top warmed up the crowd. That "little old band from Texas" had the audacity to ask for the headliners' position. Yeah right. I like them, and they were a superlative warm-up band, but they were no match for the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band.\n\n Then it's "Ladies & Gentlemen..." l don't think they really invited us to welcome the world's greatest rock and roll band. It seems like the Stones just charged the stage, and for the first time in touring history they could open with "Start Me Up" because this was the *Tattoo You* tour. They did all the great songs plus the album. \n\nThe tour was sponsored by a perfume company that had machines emitting sweet scents in the air, to say nothing of what people were smoking. The show was an extremely sensual experience—olfactory, visual, and especially aural. \n\n![Keith Richards. Photo by Ilianov. Licensed by CC by 2.0.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/KeithRichards2007.jpg)\n\nMick yielded control of the stage to Keith for "Little T&A." To my surprise that was the song that played in my head at work the next day. There's an intensity in Richards's performance that cannot be captured in a record. At the heart of rock lies an infinitely strong feeling that is ineffable and that cannot even be recorded, but when I see and hear Richards make it live, it is like getting a tattoo because it stays with me forever.\n\n The next day at work I pretended to be normal even though I'd seen the seraphim pull open a crack in the universe to reveal the Gods of Rock. I've been to hundreds of shows, but this one l remember best, down there on the plebeian floor, close enough to make out the features of their faces and to feel the retinal sting of the lights—or maybe that was the glare of rock itself that these guys channeled so perfectly.\n\n Unbeknownst to me at the time, a salesman from the company where I worked was at this concert wooing a potential client in a skybox with not only the show but various imbibements and some Honky Tonk women of their own. \n\n The object of all this entertaining was a geophysicist who helped his clients find oil, and he recognized me as someone who could keep his multi-million dollar computer purchase in a productive mode, so in my turn I too got wooed and swept away to Colorado from Houston, a city in which, in retrospect, I cannot imagine anyone living voluntarily. I'm not sure, but it seems like there might have been a non-compete agreement with my Houston employer, but if there was, they didn't seek to enforce it. Instead, they gossiped in wicked ways with crudely fabricated stories that shocked me and that worried my new employer. I was certainly naïve—that $15K salary, for example—but I had viewed those people with whom I worked every day in Houston as friends, and the things they said about me—called my new employer up to tell him about me—shocked me because they were not only ugly lies but vicious attacks against me.\n\n![Mick Jagger. In concert with the Rolling Stones in New York City, 1970s. Photo by Dina Regine. Licensed by CC By-SA 2.0.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Mick_Jagger_in_red.jpg)",
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      "body": "@@ -1,8 +1,276 @@\n+!%5BArwyn, The Cupcake Kid, 2009. Photo by Bart Heird, Chicago.%0ALicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.%5D(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Arwyn%252C_The_Cupcake_Kid.jpg/1024px-Arwyn%252C_The_Cupcake_Kid.jpg)%0A\n Once upo\n",
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      "title": "How my world was integrated",
      "body": "![A line of African American boys walking through a crowd of white boys during a period of violence related to school integration in Clinton, Tennessee, 1956. Photo by Thomas J. O'Halloran. Public domain.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Afro-American_students_enter_Clinton_High_School.tif/lossy-page1-800px-Afro-American_students_enter_Clinton_High_School.tif.jpg)\n\n> *A self-ordained professor's tongue*\n> *Too serious to fool*\n> *Spouted out that liberty*\n> *Is just equality in school*\n> *"Equality," I spoke the word*\n> *As if a wedding vow*\n> *Ah, but I was so much older then*\n> *I'm younger than that now.*\n> —Bob Dylan. "My Back Pages."\n\nI grew up in interesting times. The schools I attended before high school reinforced the idea of television shows like [The Donna Reed Show](http://amzn.to/29ViU8Z) or [Leave It to Beaver](http://amzn.to/2a8qhVS) that I lived in a white world with no blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians, or anyone else of color. Segregated education was a lie that denied the very nature of humanity. I was not lucky enough—as some people my age were—to grow up surrounded by friends and families of all colors and creeds. I grew up in a segregated world. If and when we crossed the Interstate below 26th Street, we locked the doors of our cars as if we were passing through dangerous zones of interplanetary space.\n\nThe Federal courts integrated the Austin Independent School District in 1970. They mixed things up with a vengeance and with a brutishness that placed the law over people. They shut down Anderson High, which was the black high school in East Austin, and bussed the students to four different white schools, one of which, McCallum, received its first black students on my first day of high school there. The black students were furious that their old school had been torn apart and that their friends had been sent in so many different directions.\n\nInstead of being allowed to study in their own neighborhood, the blacks were being sent far and wide into other parts of town that were not particularly welcoming. The McCallum administration had made no preparations to extend a welcoming hand or to bring people together into this new community, and that oversight added to black anger. I remember for the first few days of school the hallway out to the math wing was lined with angry black students staring at anyone who dared walk down this corridor they'd claimed. There were near riots in the lunch room. One burly black guy walking between those folding lunch tables grabbed the ends of two tables, lifted them, and flipped them in opposite directions, end over end, food, dishes, and trays flying every which way. Everyone else fled the lunch room. For the next three years that I was at McCallum, I did not eat in the cafeteria.\n\nNobody had taken the trouble to demystify the other in this encounter in our racist world of opposites. The blacks were scared and angry, and most of the whites were frightened by this angry alien presence in our midst. The administration realized how they had failed in this drawing together of people, so they scrambled for a few days to develop plans as they struggled to maintain peace despite the anger about to boil over. So after only three days they held assemblies and began to introduce everyone to everyone else, to welcome the newcomers to our school, to set up committees in which students worked together to establish policies conducive to peace and to making the best out of the new arrangement, and to convince everyone that nobody bites, table tossing in the lunch room notwithstanding.\n\nThere were of course some angry whites, which I am inclined to identify as the white supremacists sector of my school. There weren't a lot of them:\n\nI am in German class in one of those first few tense days, and outside a rowdy group of six white students carrying sticks and rocks and chanting racist slogans come marching down the sidewalk. A guy seated two desks ahead of mine stands up and shakes his fist in the air in solidarity with the demonstration outdoors. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" he says. I feel puzzled because, even as tense as things are, I see no reason to kill anyone. The teacher told him to sit down and shut up, and she called the office to ask them to do something about the marauders.\n\nWhat amazed me then and still amazes me now is that, even though they hadn't had the foresight to do all this before the new students drove up in those bright yellow busses, those assemblies, committees, and, most of all, people talking to each other worked. The effort wasn't perfect, but it did enough to defuse a bomb that was ready to explode. Gradually tensions eased, though it took longer than the three years I was in that school for the students from east Austin to achieve social parity with everyone else. The otherness that each group felt for the other took time to wear off.\n\nThere were some blacks who came to school but did not participate in it. They wore dressy and expensive clothes and patent leather shoes, wandered the hallways, went to their cars, or sometimes left campus altogether, but they never came to class. They were in the school but not of it. This annoyed me because I thought their presence was disruptive. The classrooms in the math wing had big shuttered vents out to the hallway that ran both along the ceiling and along the floor, and one day when I was in calculus class, I saw through the floor vents a pair of patent leather shoes walking up the hallway. I wadded up a piece of paper and launched it through the ceiling vents, and the door opened. The vice principal in charge of discipline stood in the doorway with my wad of paper in his hands. "Who threw this?" Nobody said anything, and he decided not to press the issue and went away. There was an object lesson there for me: not all people who wear patent leather shoes were the non-participating blacks. My assumptions, like most racist assumptions, had led me astray.\n\nI always hated physical education, and in high school I often showed up for roll call then took one of the many halls in the labyrinthine gym to get out of there. One day, though, at the end of the hall through which I was escaping p.e. were a few black guys smoking a joint. These days I would think nothing of it, keep walking, say "Excuse me," and go out the door. But in that time I was into fear mode, so I said, "Um, do you mind if I come through there so I can get outta here?" They said, "Yeah, come ahead." I knew enough about marijuana to know that it didn't turn people into violent fiends, but still it was three black guys and one white guy in a little-used corridor. That was silly and racist of me, I know, yet the desegregation of my school was the beginning of the end of that sort of thinking.\n\nThe failure for which I feel the most shame was during the award ceremony at the Science Fair. I won two prizes, and when the winners were called, they were supposed to go up the few stairs to the stage and shake hands with the judges, who were all science teachers seated at the table, then receive the award certificate. With no animosity but wholly passive racism, the black teacher, who was as legitimate of a judge and teacher as anyone else at the table, just did not register in my mind as a teacher or a judge. I didn't know why she was there, nor did I give her a thought. I did not perceive her as a legitimate person. My passive racism made her [invisible](http://amzn.to/2acglhN). So two times I skipped shaking hands with her. At some point, perhaps years later, when it finally dawned on me what I had done, I felt shame for my omission. I've reached a point now where race (rather than people) is almost transparent to me, but that's nothing to brag about because this is how it should have been all along, and it took me far too long to get to this imperfect stage.\n\nThese days, they tell me, students choose which schools they want to attend, and schools make like flowers out to attract the bees. Schools are made better by having them compete for students with programs and specialties. Instead of enforcing who must attend what school according to racial lines or court-ordered bus lines, schools make themselves attractive by offering programs and specialties, and students choose which school they want to attend. McCallum is a "high school and fine arts academy" with a large auditorium added to it.\n\nI looked at this list of Austin high schools and toyed with the check boxes by which someone can indicate what sort of school they're looking for, and I cried a tear because we have come so far yet have so far to go.",
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      "title": "The Girl Who Ate White Food",
      "body": "Once upon a time in Colombia I had a step-daughter who preferred to eat foods that were mostly white. She drank milk and ate quesito, which is a popular semi-soft cheese in Colombia; vanilla ice cream, and other dairy products; arepas, which are a tortilla-like staple of the Colombian diet; white bread; bananas; chicken white meat; potatoes; rice; pasta; mayonnaise; and fish. She wouldn't eat cauliflower because it was obviously from a plant, and plants were to be avoided at all costs. Avoiding plants, in ten-year-old logic, may have been her reason for eating only white food.\n\nYet she loved ketchup—for its sweetness, I'm sure. In Spanish the phrase for ketchup is *salsa de tomate*, sauce of tomato or tomato sauce, but not to be confused with the tomato purée that comes in cans and gets used in Italian cooking and meatloaf. Mentally, *salsa de tomate* serves as an integral word for what we call ketchup. By integral word I mean that we say it without picking it apart into its component parts—we don't hear sauce or tomato, we just hear a word like you hear ketchup.\n\nI tried unsuccessfully for years to persuade my step-daughter to try a slice of tomato, for it seemed to me—tomatoes being so high on the evolutionary scale that they almost talk—if she tried one slice, she'd try another, for who could begin and end the inevitable enchantment of tomatoes in only one bite? This one particular night we were eating some meat that was appropriate for ketchup, so I asked her just from what she thought *salsa de tomate* was made. I pronounced each part of the world separately: *Salsa.* *De.* *Tomate.* I saw the penny drop in her face as she parsed the phrase... So of course that didn't persuade her to try tomato either, but it certainly dissuaded her from eating ketchup.\n\nOne night not much after that I peeled and sliced an eggplant. I dipped each slice in milk and egg then rolled it in corn meal and fried it. Deep-fried corn-meal-crusted things are irresistible to almost anyone, including my step-daughter. I lied and told her they were fish. She ate one. She didn't put ketchup on it, but she did ask for another slice.",
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