For the second time since the pandemic began, my mother's nieces and nephews put together a zoom get-together, this time to celebrate Kelvin's retirement. Not sure why my dad's side of the family is so different; I can barely name more than two or three of his surviving nieces and nephews. We lost track of them after the last of his Baltimore ( Read more... )

Took a quick trip Down Home this weekend. Supposedly, it was to attend a funeral, but the relationshi was so distant and so obscure that even my first-cousin Kelvin who grew up there couldn't ecplain the relationship. Suffice it to say that everyone is relatad to everyone else doen there and that eery death diminishes the community in tangible ways ( Read more... )

Things have been pretty topsy-turvy since The Wedding. Could not drag myself out of bed Sunday morning even though I had very little to drink the night before. Saturday had roared in like a lion only to end in the most desultory of hand waves exchanged from across the room with Mattie, and the rest of the California relatives, after being joined at ( Read more... )

I managed to spend nearly two weeks in May at the summer house, once straddling Mothers Day weekend and another straddling Memorial Day, the latter of which I just arrived from last night. I was pushing the season a little bit; the weather was not entirely cooperative. But, I'm glad I went. It was a total immersion in all things having to do with ( Read more... )

A day after maxing out the number of consecutive nights I can dream about the same romantic interest, Mom came by for a reassuring check-in. The venue was interesting. It started at Mommyland, revamped as it always is with particular attention to landscaping. This time, the back yard seemed pimped out with new saplings along the fence with the ( Read more... )

Thanksgiving was a complete gas. Dropped down to visit Mom's peep in rural North Carolina. The silk flowers on her and Dad's graves are still bright and colorful against the Autumn leaves. Wednesday, I folded up the stand (which had fallen) carrying a huge heart shaped array of red carnations and roses and laid it discreetly length-wise behind ( Read more... )

The moment I woke up I could just tell that Election Day was a legal holiday. Sun was streaming through my bedroom windows. There was none of the sound of doors opening and closing all over the apartment building. I had the distinct feeling that people were sleeping in. Nevertheless, I chose to avoid the morning rush to our polling center and put ( Read more... )

So much for mania. I could feel it fizzling out even as I started blogging about it. In fact, as I should have known, the moment you notice you are manic is probably the precise moment when you are starting to come down ( Read more... )

Woke up comparatively late this morning due to a protracted dream that seemed to continue a theme begun the night before, of a huge, largely apocryphal, above-ground train station located somewhere on the east coast. It could be anything from Union Station in Washington, DC to Jamaica Station in Queens. By the end of the dream, the signage in the ( Read more... )

Took Mom outside today. According to the sign-in sheet, I'd just missed Sis and Big Bro' by a bout ten minutes which was probably fortunate. In nearly five years of visiting, they've never thought of taking her outside and I have to overcome strong reservations about it being either too hot or too cold to do so. One of the things I found out early ( Read more... )