thanksgiving day after

After dinner, most of the food went home with the kids, packed in little plastic boxes that were also nice to be rid of. Food was great, company pleasant and it was good to be home, nowhere to go, nothing to pack and unpack except the bird, which was small. The kids did the dishes. Yay kids.

I don't like turkey. Stuffing? 'nother story. Gravy? Worth fighting over. But as for retaining the carcass, boiling it to bits and making turkey soup? Pass. Turkey soup smells like dirt, like poverty. I think it was all those pots of turkey and rice that we ate for months, from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve when we cooked another one and ate it until New Year's Eve. Then, it was onion dip and potato chips on a good night.

Oh, I'm not bemoaning poverty so much as I am tired of cooking traditional food. Any food. I think I'll become a raw food person just so I don't have to do dishes anymore. A fruitarian. I will not murder any food, but wait until it falls dead from the source.

This will limit my consumption, of course. Will bring this unruly body under some control.

I wish. But I have about as much control over what I put in my body as a tourette's patient has control over language. I have dietary tourette syndrome.

This year I made a mince pie. It was so good. And my motherinlaw took home the carcass. She won the prize for frugality. I waste. I want.

coming apart

I am a listener. All day I listen to people who are coming apart, who don't know where they are or why, or who knows them or doesn't, and they are surprised when I do.

"Its a miracle!" she said. "I have so much less to worry about now."

She was right, but didn't know why.

So when I come home, I don't want to listen, for instance, to other people's health problems, or problems of any kind. I don't want anyone to have problems around me. I don't want to have problems myself, will deny having any if you ask me. I have no problems. Just luxury problems. Like having to listen to people.

I just want to type. It calms me down. It is much better than, for example, watching National Geographic Channel about an exploding whale in downtown Taiwan.

I was watching Oprah earlier and she had this thing on about nuns and their ceremony of becoming brides of Christ. One of them, when renouncing posessions, referred to her laptop as a ball and chain. I've seen it that way, but not today. Today it is my link to sanity.

If you read the last post, the last line. I was right. Sometimes it sucks to be right.

as he lay dying

Sometimes I get too involved. Sometimes I care about the living as well as the dying. I am always interested in the deathbed experience, and it is difficult to talk about it here, here in cyberpublic. But I love this old woman and her husband was dying and she wanted to be alone with him and she, like most, has some kids. And some of them are, shall we say, a little Ozarkian? A daughter with under-developed social antennae and two grown sons, both of them meth cooks if I do say so myself and I do. So the good daugher asks me, as the ruler of the Alzheimer's Universe, to make the cast of Deliverance go home, or at least back under their rock. What a pure waste of subtlety. I couldn't really just tell them to get the fuck out of there. And the old woman couldn't do it herself. So, I guess I did it. You can tell when somebody is there for support, and when they are doing deathbed time to earn something. You can smell it.

The first time I met her she was wheeling down the hall with an irridescent blue hydrangea in her hand. I commented on it and she told me, with tears in her eyes, that it was hers. She had grown it, and they had moved from that home into Assisted Living and she couldn't stand it and she had driven her car back to their house to pick a flower. "I don't know how you women do it," I said. "I really don't. I couldn't." Leave my house? My garden? My stuff? Are you kidding?

So, I helped her husband on his way to heaven. She'll be right behind him, I got a feelin'.