dazzled at least ten times a day
Feb. 24th, 2018 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pondhopThe subject line comes from Mary Oliver's Blue Horses, the full line being "It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day." Blue Horses was a gift to my honorary mama from one of her actual daughters and her wife, and it came to the rescue yesterday when I was visiting her at the nursing home.
I don't have much to say about ALS that doesn't involve copious streams of profanity. HM used to talk enough for the both of us, and now I can't even make out when she's saying yes or no, and it's a struggle for her caregivers as well, and she doesn't have the muscle control or strength even to lift her head. But we carried on as best we could yesterday - the Jewish yoga book I brought didn't lend itself to reading aloud as easily as I'd hoped, but the Oliver poems did, so I ended up reading the entire volume to her.
At any rate, I knew this trip would be challenging from the get-go, and I am adequately equipped in experience, resources, and temperament to deal with said challenges, so meet them we have and shall. My flight left Nashville three hours late, but that meant I could catch up on some work and catch some Olympics on the bar TV. For all her flaws, Ayn Rand did write some things that have resonated and remained with me, one of them her characters' love of cities (aka demonstrations of human mastery), and one thing I have loved about landing in and driving around PA/DE/NJ after nightfall is getting to behold the beauty of so many lights and of ornate factories wreathed in steam.
Also, the young women at both the rental car counter and the hotel desk were both friendly and competent in spite of it being 3:30 and 4-effing-a.m. respectively when I showed up in their lobbies, and last night a man named Luigi saw me out to my car after my meal at his restaurant; a fashionably scruffy man sauntering by cheerfully bellowed, "Was it good?" -- his words and smile transforming him from possibly-sketchy-guy-on-kinda-sketchy-block to guy-who-lives-in-the-neighborhood-enjoying-the-fact-that-people-stop-in-to-enjoy-Luigi's-cooking.
There's more to say, but now it is time to don clothes and makeup and head north for more visiting and some dancing.
This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/146704.html.
I don't have much to say about ALS that doesn't involve copious streams of profanity. HM used to talk enough for the both of us, and now I can't even make out when she's saying yes or no, and it's a struggle for her caregivers as well, and she doesn't have the muscle control or strength even to lift her head. But we carried on as best we could yesterday - the Jewish yoga book I brought didn't lend itself to reading aloud as easily as I'd hoped, but the Oliver poems did, so I ended up reading the entire volume to her.
At any rate, I knew this trip would be challenging from the get-go, and I am adequately equipped in experience, resources, and temperament to deal with said challenges, so meet them we have and shall. My flight left Nashville three hours late, but that meant I could catch up on some work and catch some Olympics on the bar TV. For all her flaws, Ayn Rand did write some things that have resonated and remained with me, one of them her characters' love of cities (aka demonstrations of human mastery), and one thing I have loved about landing in and driving around PA/DE/NJ after nightfall is getting to behold the beauty of so many lights and of ornate factories wreathed in steam.
Also, the young women at both the rental car counter and the hotel desk were both friendly and competent in spite of it being 3:30 and 4-effing-a.m. respectively when I showed up in their lobbies, and last night a man named Luigi saw me out to my car after my meal at his restaurant; a fashionably scruffy man sauntering by cheerfully bellowed, "Was it good?" -- his words and smile transforming him from possibly-sketchy-guy-on-kinda-sketchy-block to guy-who-lives-in-the-neighborhood-enjoying-the-fact-that-people-stop-in-to-enjoy-Luigi's-cooking.
There's more to say, but now it is time to don clothes and makeup and head north for more visiting and some dancing.
This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/146704.html.