Mom was back in the nursing home Friday evening. She'd been gone nearly three weeks, long enough to make the bus trip from Main Street seem almost nostalgic. I marveled once again at how no two homes along the route looked the same, how close and intimate the yards and shaded windows looked even as the bus driver expertly maneuvered around parked ( Read more... )

Yesterday was one of those peculiar Fall days that call for every contingency in clothing. I began the morning on my way to St. Mike's wearing a tweed jacket, some hiking shoes and a pair of daddy pants. And, over all of it I draped a light-weight, roll-up raincoat that I keep in my book bag. It had rained shortly before I hit the street and looked ( Read more... )

I didn't like the way Mom looked yesterday. Her cheeks appeared sunken. The metal hatrack which should have been holding the plastic bag containing her liquid food was empty. For a very long while I entertained the notion that someone had decided to stop feeding her. But, surely Bro' or Sis would have contacted me if that were the case ( Read more... )

The nursing home had given Mom's room away. We've learned that is the policy after a resident has been hospitalized 10 days or more. Such is the business end of long-term geriatric care: no bed stays empty for very long ( Read more... )

It's odd to think of the nursing home as Mom's home, but, in truth, that is what is has become. Five years is nearly as long as all of us lived together in our first apartment. We thought about changing facilities just in order to get Mom away from Dr. Javert, and to cut down on our travel time. But, in the end, it didn't seem worth it. Our ( Read more... )

I am truly convinced that one of the great items that should go on anyone's bucket list is to ride a half-empty, elevated, New York City transit train in the middle of summer. With the A/C cranked up to full blast and a wall lined with picture windows nearly everywhere you look, the views of rooftops and trees flashing by in the depth of August is ( Read more... )

The second Saturday of Pentecost, brought sis, big bro' and me all together at Mom's bedside in the early afternoon. We hadn't planned it that way. We normally go at different times. I was hoping to get there early enough to recover a nice 400 percale sheet that I had left behind the previous day before it was whisked away forever to be recycled by ( Read more... )

Mom pulled out her feeding tube for the umpteenth time early Sunday morning. I got the call from Big Bro' around 6:AM and never fell back to sleep ( 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... )

I almost began this piece by saying, that if Nat King Cole is remembered at all today, it is probably as Natalie Cole's father. But, then I realized that probably no one under the age of thirty would know who Natalie Cole is either. Be that as it may, Natalie Cole's father was an African-American band leader of the thirties and forties who was ( Read more... )