Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

OK, I am a big moron. I JUST checked the Yahoo account I set up months ago and then ditched in favor of an additional Comcast account, while trying to figure out how to help a patron report Yahoo spam. There are like thirty emails! I wasn’t ignoring you all! I wouldn’t do that! I just forgot about that account. Don’t hate me because I’m an idiot. Grrr. Sorry. For future reference, my actual email is babelbabe(at)Comcast.net.

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My cousin called me Saturday to let me know that my 84-year-old aunt is in the hospital. Not, as expected, for a hip replacement surgery scheduled for two weeks from now, but for a blood clot. And in addition, probably due to the fact that she is scooching up and down stairs in her two-story house in which the bathroom is on the second floor on her butt, for some sort of fungal bedsore-like wound that is jeopardizing the hip replacement surgery. Because you know, those fungi? They like to spread. Now, my Aunt K is and always has been very active. She taught just about every niece and nephew she’s got to swim; she travels all over the world; as of a few months ago, she was still swimming several times a week but had to give up playing tennis because – get this – all of her tennis playing friends are dead. So understandably she hates to give up her independence and her very cool little house, and move into an assisted living facility. But she agreed to it. My cousin D - who herself is in her mid-fifties - is closest to my aunt and takes care of her. But D is afflicted with my family’s strongest trait – we can call it procrastination or we can call it denial but it is the same thing that kept my mother – who was a NURSE for God’s sake – from admitting that she was sick and with something way more serious than the flu, for almost a year before she was finally diagnosed with cirrhosis. So here’s my aunt, in the ER, in an incredibly stupid long story that I won’t go into here, needing to be in the hospital, then intensive rehab, then assisted-living NOW. Do not return to your house, do not pass Go. My mom was the youngest of 11, and she’d have been 73 this year. So this begins the long slow decline. I will find myself driving back and forth to South Jersey to attend funeral after funeral in the next few years. I always knew this day was coming (although I NEVER thought it would begin with my mother) but still…it doesn’t make it any easier, you know? The knowing. Not that this particular instance is life-threatening, but she is 84, and will spend time in the hospital, and is not out playing tennis and traveling to the Mongolian steppes like she was this time two years ago.

Also? I am three hundred miles away, which renders me exactly useless. And I hate that, because she has been very good to me. Also, me and my other cousins are trying to break the long-held stance of our family that you must not accept help from your relatives. That in fact, to ask for assistance is unforgivably weak. We call on each other often, even if only for emotional support. If not for my cousin P I would have lost my shit altogether when my mom was sick. So we don’t understand the older generation and their …indifference…to each other. It is infuriating. But my aunt belongs to that older emotionally-warped generation - she wanted gum in the ER and P got her some and my aunt K tried to reimburse P for the thirty cents it cost. Because we should “not spend our money on her.” Because she didn’t want to be “beholden” to P for THIRTY CENTS. This is so typical of my family, of my aunts and uncles, that I could scream.

Apparently my aunt is a tad confused too. P helped her settle into her hospital room and found out what she’d like to eat and called the kitchen to order lunch (did you know that most hospitals today handle meals like room service? Pretty dang spiffy.) My aunt said, “But you don’t know what kind of bread I want.” P explained that she had asked her, and she’d said rye, and P was on the phone with the kitchen ordering it now. My aunt paused, looked at her, and asked, “Why are we talking about bread?” Saints preserve me from getting that old. Or that confused. Or something.

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This weekend I went grocery shopping. I carried all the groceries in, whereupon H. handed me the squalling baby. I sat down to nurse, and H. went back UPSTAIRS leaving all the groceries lying in the entryway. Was I wrong in being crazed?

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I finished Facing the Light and picked up Robertson Davies’ The Merry Heart again. And put it down. Then I picked up Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and read a few chapters. Very biblical. I put it down again. I am carrying in my bag today that, and Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man.
Because I? I appear to be the Queen of Indecision.
Even if the Queen did awake this morning at five-freaking-thirty and get herself on the treadmill. Yay, Queen! It IS Fat Tuesday after all – how very appropriate. Go eat some beignet, my sweet Internet ones.