Slip Sliding Away

I don’t think I raised my voice once with my mother yesterday, although she unswervingly remained in the ‘new normal persona’ that has replaced the mother I knew, a reasonable woman, who left this obstreperous old imposter in her place.

Glaciers have reshaped continents, I feel, in the length of time it is taking me to realize that my mother has been leaving me synapse by synapse for years and that I'm not going to get my Mom back, ever. She and I have both been really angry about this. It's not like she purposely went out and bought a ticket to dematerialize so my anger is really a foreshadowing of sorrow to come and hers, a testament to how much she has loved her life.

I'm beginning to grasp that a part of me is always going to be grieving for what is irrevocably lost and a part still expecting that entropy will reverse it's progression even as I come to understand that it is only these losses that save us from being blind, uninformed, impervious to the extent of our vast love of each other and this earth.

I watch Nova with my hair prickling, anger and awe battling sadness, as the latest statistics on Asian elephants or leopards are released along with videos demonstrating all we are just learning about their true value to the world, their social complexity, ‘loyalty’ or capacity for ‘joy’ etc.

There are no more Banks Island Wolves but, thank God, I never knew one or understood anything about them and so am spared the sharpness of the more personal loss made inevitable with familiarity. And yet it is personal loss that saves our hearts from oblivion.

Mother, that pristine mid-west beauty, that bone-honest independent spirit that raised me and my two sisters, looks at me archly through her ‘new’ sunglasses, her unwashed Howard Hughes hair is lifting in the breeze like a flying cat and she ignores me pointedly as she tries to pet it into submission with her shaky 91 year old hand. We are on our way to one of the three eye specialists required by her condition and for whom she has little respect.

“I don’t think they know what they are doing,” she says acidly.

I know in the deep recesses of her shabby old purse is a fist full of clippings about developments in eye care she’s cadged from the newspaper and is dying to show Dr. X as proof of this incompetence.

All I’d done was ask her where she’d gotten her new sunglasses. She seems to have a different pair each time I see her. Assisted Living doesn’t sell them so it’s a mystery along with the sudden aversion to shampooing that she developed upon landing there. I am momentarily uncomfortable with the suspicion that somewhere, close by, some old man is groping around for his missing aviators and feeling incompetent and decrepit because he can't find them. But Mom is not revealing her sources or reasons and if you want to seriously annoy her, just mention hair salons or eye doctors or try to pin her down about sunglasses.

Mother selected this particular sanctuary for her retirement home just a few years ago when she was still happily tooling around in her little blue Honda, having the savvy to park with the most recent fender bender nosed into a bush so perhaps the mishap wouldn’t be noticed, and so I’m still surprised that she has to pause and consider, each time she leaves her apartment, hoping to get it right with the first guess, which way the dinning room is likely to be found.

What about this phenomenon can I embrace? I am awash in gratitude that she lived long enough to demonstrate creativity in dealing with loss. As I scrub food scum off her lapels, which she is vigorously asserting is not there and no one will notice anyway, I’m secretly as proud of her feistiness as I am vexed by her unwillingness to be guided in anyone. I can let myself be charmed, as I accept my birthday present of a carefully wrapped box of candy prizes she has scored at Jingo. I've begun a gratitude list. It is evolving. Even when we think we do, the truth is we don't begin to suspect the value of what we have until it is sliding out of existence.

My mother has found a safe harbor. As long as she can avoid infections, be respectfully herded through her routines and read the newspaper with scissors in hand, we can maybe keep her with us. But the membrane between her being here and her not being here is monstrously thin. Like an endangered species in a narrowing ecological niche, like our very personalities, we're okay today, maybe. For tomorrow, like the rest of the planet, all bets are off.

Secret and Private

Saturday night we got a couple inches of snow. The night before we got just another frosting, one of a series, that are beautifying this winter without requiring the effort and expense of snow removal. Most of the animals are snug in their private lairs. Of the wild animals only the birds and the deer have to gut it out above ground.

If I had constructed my front porch two feet wider I could have parked my car there gracefully. As it is, I can get the Legacy under shelter within two feet of the front door but, well, it does look odd and there is always a moment of high risk in the maneuvering but I acknowledge that, for me, this just adds spice.

My sister said recently that she was never clear on the difference between the concept of ‘private’ as opposed to that of ‘secret.’ I’ve given it some thought.

Two of my newer neighbors are policemen and their families. They built homes at about the same time. Early in their first year here I glided down my driveway and caught them, off duty, using what appeared to be a drug dog to assess my trash. They were standing just off the property watching him work.

Surprisingly, I was amused, not offended. It told me a whole lot more pertinent information about them than my trash was ever going to reveal to Sergeant Rover. Not that I don’t have any secrets from society. I’m human. My neighbors think only their own secrets are benign. They are human too.

Popular wisdom deems ‘secrets’ as referencing a leaking toxic barrel of hidden fact within a relationship of trust while ‘private’ ideally refers to a sanctuary where non-injurious thought and behavior are protected from the presence of uninvited others. We all know that the last decade has decimated our privacy and the dignity that should attend it. Strength of character is needed to maintain a reserve where all is not shared and now, in this age of constant observation, only the thoughts in our head are allowed privacy and the door is being forced even on that most essential human right.

But, of course, it is point of view that determines whether a behavior is, or is not, injurious to others. The rabbits secrete themselves from the foxes. No doubt the foxes would welcome motion activated surveillance cameras trained on the territory of the bunnies but there would not be universal concurrence on this innovation and I doubt if even a dumb bunny would buy into the idea that it was all for their own protection.

No doubt, if asked, the police commissioner would assure us that drug dogs can only be used with due cause.

Is there a law that says you are not allowed to park on your porch? Will my trangression show up on Google Maps? Will someone report me? But that's my private bad weather parking spot! What business is it of yours?