Morning word: Adult Protective Services in Tucson spent two hours talking to Helen, then upset my sister in Los Angeles by calling about all the same bullshit: Helen told them she has five kids, but no one will help her. No one will help her? Oh, please. I expect they’ll be calling me too. The [...]

When last I typed that title, I told how I’d decided to let Helen do whatever she wanted…
The old woman wouldn’t budge and wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t fool a social worker. Never mind “the voices” and losing $2,500 in cash. Never mind paying too much for an awful trailer she didn’t need with [...]

Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.
How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to [...]

I think it’s always been there, though rarely mentioned, this cold, black thing that kills all love and joy. Always! Though in my memory the first remembered taste of it came in Abilene, Texas when I was barely 13 years old.
This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly [...]

Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.
This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with [...]

Who did this, and how did this happen?
The dynamic is this: Helen is too sick to realize she can’t take care of herself and refuses to go to a nursing home — in this circumstance, however, every authority supports her instead of me. it’s as if you take your dearest loved one bleeding to a [...]

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.
Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced [...]

The old woman is circling around the flame like a demented moth.
What drives her now? Is it Death? No matter what we call it, there’s nothing I can do about it. Her lungs are a pneumonia-ridden mess. She’s probably had it for a long time, low-grade, and now her chest is filled with secondary [...]

Thanks to everyone who’s left a message or sent me one!
Yes, it’s here, the actual calendar anniversary of my birth long ago in the wartime summer of 1945 in Bryan, Texas, YE GODS!!! And here’s a picture of me (look hard) with my mother, pretty young Helen Masson from Middle River, MD, taken [...]

In a very real sense, absolutely!
Today is my “actual” birthday (from AstroDienst), with the sun lining up precisely with where it was when I was born in 1945 (!) at 9:25 p.m. tonight, rather than tomorrow, my calendar birthday. This has to do with the imprecision of the numbers, things slipping, the impossibility of our [...]