Paradigms...where shift happens!

Additonal thoughts on the Now What post

I chatted with my good good friend Alain late yesterday and after I told him about my mother's passing he just happened to have this poem at hand.

Promissory Note

By

Galway Kinnel

"If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star's
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion."

Now what?

My father died when I was eight years old. Fifty-four years later my mother’s heart stopped. That was Friday night at about 6:30. She lived with my sister down in Birmingham, Alabama but has been in a nursing home for the past 6 months in what was a nearly vegetative state I think. Try as I may all those memories that I feel obligated to have at a time like this just won’t come…the cookie baking, the Halloween costume making , the warm motherly moments like when I had the flu or a cold etc. My mom wasn’t a bad person or an inadequate mother or anything like that. I know there must have been times like that. It's just that in my memories of my childhood we were never a particularly close or demonstrative family. That now comes back to haunt me and a better writer than I could probably turn this into something vaguely Shakespearean….”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

None of those moments present themselves right now and I think I feel almost as badly about that as I do about her passing. It seems one is obligated to have those warm and fuzzy thoughts about one’s family at a time like this, should feel a more piquant sense of loss. I suppose that’s just one more little hash mark on the guilt side of the ledger for me.

Finally, I am now the eldest in our immediate family and I can’t help wondering if that means that I am next. Will my children and grandchildren have the same feelings of insufficiently defined loss that I have? Will they have to struggle for the good memories? If I can offer anything of any earthly use to anyone else at this time it’s the same question…will yours? 

First Snow!

It's here, our first snowfall for the winter of 2007-2008 started a couple of hours ago. Judging by the traffic reports from the Northern Virginia/Washington DC area this is the first time some of these drivers have seen snow!

I haven't looked at the TV yet today. I know I'm not missing anything there except the young and pert assignment reporters delivering breathless video cutaways every 10 minutes as their camera crews focus on the same sign post or bush as in the last cutaway to impress us with the accumulation which as best I can see right now is close to zero. But I know the reporters are out there just in case this becomes a real event and not an imagined one.

Bottom line is if you read about anything at all happening in my area of the republic as a result of this snowfall you can rest easy that it was the ultimate slow news day around these parts.