Memory and Balance

Today, the Great Plotnik is the Great Poopednik. He has to figure out how to stop himself from waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about insoluble things. Everyone he knows who has aging parents goes through the same things. Memory and balance. You can lose everything else but when either of those goes, the other one isn't far behind. How do you maintain a will to live when you're in pain, afraid of falling over, just about blind, hard of hearing, with no friends left and you can't even depend on your own brain to give you a reality check?

What you do is get mad. Down in Stiletto, Mummy P. is alternating between fury and forgetfulness, with enough moments of lucidity to convince herself she's really OK.

This morning she said to Plotnik in great frustration: "Wouldn't I know if I were forgetting things?" Plotnik said "Mom, please don't do this." He listed several recent examples of her forgetting important things. "Well, yes, maybe I did forget those. But listen. Don't you forget things?"

"Well, yes."

"So do you know when you forget something?"

"Usually, but..."

"Well, then. Why wouldn't I know if I were forgetting things? Can't you trust me?"

The rub.

He still believes in her. She's the strongest person in the family. But Plottie needs to pay attention to what her doctor said to him this morning: you attend to what is reversible. And you accept what is irreversible. To do that Plotnik needs better balance himself and sleep is a good place to start.

Coach Rose

She'll never be the player she used to be. She can't jump and she can't dribble. She can't go left and she can't go right. Occasionally she can get off a good shot and it might even go in the basket, but it's getting rarer. And she's got a No Trade clause.

And anyway, we don't want to trade her, we want her back the way she used to be. But when you travel for any length of time on the River Denial, you find it easy to ignore what you were seeing for months, perhaps years earlier. You know if you go back in these very pages you'll find comments about her loss of memory, her inability to handle any but a small gathering, and many other little things, that by themselves are nothing but rain but, when put together, begin to form that cloud that terrifies us all.

So what do you? You make her the coach.

One thing's for sure about Coach Rose -- you never know what she's going to do. All we hope for is a little better yesterday (it was), followed by a little better today which precedes a little better tomorrow. The game is 'way easier when you break it into small steps.

Plotnik could say the same thing about himself. He's got to get back playing ball again.

A Message to Fellow Plotnikkies About TGP

Ducknik asked this morning "Why do you think Mother Nature made blueberries blue?"

Plotnik answered "...probably so they would go with her tablecloth (green)."

Which makes as much sense as anything. There are also red strawberries and purple boysenberries and green gooseberries, and there are black bumblebees who prefer the golden color of California poppies and yellow honeybees who prefer the purple blossoms of French lavender, so the answer seems to be there is a blossom for everybody's bee, which is exactly what GrandMummy P. always said about youngsters who were perhaps not the pick of anyone's litter: "Every pot has a cover."

Down in Stiletto City, the Little Bear is with Mummy P. for the next two days and things seem to be better. Memory, not so hot, but it wasn't all that sharp before she fell either.

So The Great Plotnik has the opportunity to stand on his deck and survey his minuscule empire of flowers and fruits. He finds himself thinking about his garden in Cat's Whiskers, Pennsylvania, c. 1975, that the neighbors all called a "truck patch," because you could pile all your produce into your truck and take it to the market, or into your kitchen to can.

It was always hot and humid during the summer in Cat's Whiskers. The two years he and Duck lived out there, Plotnik hated the humidity, he couldn't move a muscle, he never saw the point of it. But now he gets it. Moisture makes things green, like Pennsylvania in July. Dryness makes things brown, like California a month from now.

Now, looking back at his young, shaggy self, immobile on the porch swing, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and no-see-ums, he sees little of that. He remembers lazy comfort, snoozing in the grass, a truck patch full of sweet corn (raccoons), red beets (deer) and tomatoes (Japanese beetles), an old farmhouse to rebuild and a brand new world of nature presenting itself to two big city kids.

And then a new baby to amaze him, astonished at the depth of feeling that could overcome him in the middle of a dark, starless winter's night, as the cave instinct drew him close to his child, his wife, his farmhouse, his new life.

But you know how it goes. It got boring. The bees needed new nectar.

The point is, fellow Plotnikkies, that everything is beautiful for awhile and nothing is horrible forever. The way things seem to work is that you've got two choices:

1a) Allow yourself to exult in the glory, realizing you will become
1b) Completely fucked up with the misery.

... or

2) Don't allow yourself to ever get too high or too low.

The latter way makes more sense. But these days Plotnik seems to run on the first course.

So don't worry too much when he sounds down like a rock at the foot of a mountain at the bottom of a deep blue sea (he actually wrote that line in a song once). That's the price he pays for trying to burst from the superstitious, Russian dybbuk who wants to keep him from ever truly enjoying anything (it could end tomorrow, y'know). Let the boy jump out of his seat and clap from time to time, or even rate the current situation NO STARS with a BAUBLE of DESPAIR. Either way, you know he will come back to Earth all too soon.