Month: March 2016

Sat 3-26-16

I was pondering what to get my mom for her birthday. Each year is more sad and different as her Alzheimer’s dementia progresses. I would call it “evil” progress if the word wasn’t almost meaningless to me.

Books are out of the question. Crossword puzzle books (easier and easier) are good and quickly consumed but she has tons of those and she likes buying them herself, during every single grocery and gas station stop in fact. In addition my parents have too much household crap that they can’t get rid of.

So I settled once again on fresh cut flowers. She delights in flowers, plants and gardens. Life for her is increasingly a succession of heres and nows, an abiding present. What’s important is that when she looks around she sees pretty, blooming things, and smiling faces, no matter to what degree she recognizes those faces or can put a name to them.

Her joy is quick and evident, but it must be derived from the ephemeral and not from the “stock-taking” and the integration of a lifetime of experiences that other older people enjoy.

Nevertheless those quickly fading flowers represent her most enduring bequest to me: she imparted a love of green growing things, of living things, of nature. This is the memory of generations, the transmission of a disposition and of a mental and emotional outlook on things.

I will never walk in a prairie without thinking of her as a little girl in North Dakota. I will never walk through a garden without stopping to dwell and think of her tending her own garden, year after year, as I grew up. Her brain cannot keep its integrity, it cannot endure like a rock. But there is another way to achieve permanence: through constant renewal. Although she is losing her memories, they will persist in me and in others who knew her.

Included: I finally fashioned a decent soda can stove.

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Frontenac State Park. It was fun. Low around 30 overnight. I was warm and comfy in my hammock. I have perfected the DIY soda can stove. I fully understand now how tents are inherently warmer than hammocks. I still want to learn to stay warm in a hammock, but I am increasingly convinced I need to acquiesce and get an underquilt.

This park is impressive. I am accustomed to flatland so any time I see bluffs and valleys I am impressed. I got a good look at a pileated woodpecker. I saw about two hundred bald eagles hanging out on the icy expanse of Lake Pepin, socializing, eating carp, preening, and just sitting there staring into space.

The week after, I got food poisoning for the first time in my life. It was awful. If it was any worse I would have gone to an emergency center. Sure enough the CDC’s page on Staph food poisoning mentions its potential use as a bioterror agent. I can see why. It felt like I really had been poisoned. I was incapacitated for about 10 hours. Unfortunately I am having trouble pinning down the culprit. There was that Chipotle burrito (they are infamous for the shits but this was something else entirely), a sandwich and fries that sat for an hour and a half before I could eat it, and some room-temperature cream cheese and bagels. So yeah, I made some poor choices that day.

It made for an odd contrast: feeling capable and adventurous on my one-nighter with the whole park to myself, versus cold sweats and puke and weakness later that week.

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This past weekend I went to a circumcision discussion with a professor of medical ethics, three doctors and two nurse-midwives. One of the doctors, an OBGYN, said she was personally against the procedure but did it anyway whenever parents asked for it. She trailed off with some very inarticulate statement about "picking one’s battles." This is alarming coming from a doctor.

I am continually astonished at the cultural juggernaut that is male infant circumcision. The father wants it done because it was done to him. The mother either defers to the father or doesn’t even realize she has the choice to refuse. The doctor does what the parents demand, or pressures the parents based on what their venerated attending physicians taught them to do. The baby boy is voiceless.

It seems like circumcision is a nameless, faceless part of our culture that can only be brought down over the course of several generations. People don’t even recognize it as a cultural practice. It is invisible, done behind closed doors, kept covered by clothing throughout life, never brought up except when the consent form appears. It was pointed out during the discussion how, at the very least, Jews and Muslims who practice circumcision are more honest about what they are doing – they don’t even attempt to use a weak medical pretext, they seek to justify the genital cutting ritual as a religious and cultural practice alone.

I follow blogs and forums and go to discussions like this for ideas to help speed the awakening. I’ve done my part by not cutting my own children, which I don’t have anyway and won’t ever have. I need more ideas.