I Blame the Barometer

I forked the last little glob of tuna salad onto the last little curve of bread crust, then tore sweet orange slices with my teeth. With a clean plate, save two skinny, naked orange rinds, I had finished the healthy lunch prepared for us by my mother’s caregiver. Normally, I’d be satisfied, but today I brought my mother’s silver candy dish from the living room to the dining table. Mom and I took a few chocolate-covered almonds, and I would have inhaled all the rest, except just then my mother commented, “This is the last of my chocolate.” Knowing I’d feel guilty if I ate the poor woman’s last chocolates, I switched my attention to a jar of M&Ms. These candies were also getting low, but by some inexplicable oversight had been at about the same level in the jar for the last three weeks. I’d be doing Mom a favor if I made more room in the jar for the new M&Ms I’d buy her next week, wouldn’t I? Haha. After popping half a dozen M&Ms, I persuaded myself to stop. People sometimes exhibit unusual discontent when barometric pressure shifts, or so they say, so I blame my rationalization and lack of self-control on the barometer. Oh no, I’ve sunk to rationalizing my rationalizations!

Trying to concentrate on the benefits of a breeze, oppressively humid as it was, I made my way after my excessively indulgent dessert to the nursing home to visit Dad in the Alzheimer’s wing. Wheeling him from a common area to his room, I parked and braked his wheelchair in front of the CD player so that we could listen to his favorite music. His CD player sits atop a three-drawer nightstand. I snapped fingers and he rotated wrists to saxophone sounds and trumpet toots. I pointed out the window to treetops wildly gyrating in the storm brewing outside, and Dad said, “That’s very happening.” Opening a nightstand drawer, I pulled out a small plastic container Mom keeps there for him. I offered him its contents—a few M&Ms, a few Hershey’s Kisses, and a chocolate peanut butter egg left over from his Easter basket. He plucked out a Kiss, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.

This is the point when he normally sits back and never thinks about candy again unless I extend the dish over to him. Today, however, he seemed to have candy on the brain. He stretched out his bony arm toward the dish on the nightstand. He couldn’t reach. His fingers strained and swam in the air toward the dish. I unbraked his wheelchair so he could roll in to get more chocolate. After he had almost polished off the chocolates, he rolled in, opened the top drawer and withdrew a jar of licorice my sister had left him. He started in on fat, black licorice chunks. Then, in another surprise move, he rolled in and pulled yet another container of licorice candies from a drawer. By this time, his lips and chin were smeared black. He pointed his face upward so I could tissue off the smears. After each foray into a candy dish, he replaced it atop the nightstand and rolled backward. A few minutes later, he’d ask, “What’s in that?” and point to one of the three dishes, then roll forward and help himself.

My father has late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. He remembers hardly anything. Yet today he remembered where to find his candy cache. Although he has always had a sweet tooth, in recent years he has been completely passive about satisfying it. I don’t know what was different about today, but I blame the barometer.

Postscript: I originally wrote this in a humorous mood in 2013. As I look back on the sweet tooth history of our whole family in light of recent science that now calls Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes, I realize with soberness that a lifetime sweet tooth may well not be a laughing matter.

Francine Prose and George Saunders ~ extraordinary writers

Francine Prose has the perfect last name. I wonder if her middle name is Evocative. Francine Evocative Prose. Anyway, I feel inspired when I read her prose. Just finished her novel Goldengrove. The summer Nico is thirteen, her sister Margaret drowns, and Nico, Mom, and Dad grieve, each in his own way. Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from narrator Nico:

My mother never got a harpsichord. Maybe she forgot, or maybe the trouble she’d had trying to pronounce it had dampened her desire. Now, at meals, she played with her food, extracting one shred of cabbage from the tangle of coleslaw, one curl of pasta from the mac and cheese. Then she’d lose interest and grow abstract, listening, as if a voice, inaudible to my father and me, was calling from another room. A dim gleam, sort of fish-tank glow, would flicker in her eyes, and, waving her fork like a baton, she’d say something like, “I’ve just figured out the whole thing about Mozart.” [page 175 in my edition]

The family’s fragility is palpable throughout this novel.

Also recently had a George Saunders collection of short stories home from the library. Tenth of December is a great introduction to this imaginative writer, satirist extraordinaire. Innovative formats such as diary entries and corporate memos are perfect settings for his pearls of pointed humor. Some stories I chose not to finish because of violent content, but generally I enjoyed how much fun Saunders seemed to be having.

Francine Prose and George Saunders—two writers who inspired me this summer to be a better writer.

The Story of Arthur Truluv, by Elizabeth Berg ~ my review

Such a sweet story ~ Arthur Moses, Maddy Harris, and Lucille Howard finding each other, taking care of each other. We all should be so blessed. Author Elizabeth Berg’s novel, The Story of Arthur Truluv, is based in the unpleasant facts that life can be cruel, some people find cruelty entertaining, and loss and longing are profoundly painful. Berg then transforms these lonely sorrows into hope.

Eighty-five-year-old Arthur Moses’ beloved wife Nola dies six months before this novel opens at her grave, with Arthur having his daily lunch with her. Maddy Harris, still painfully alone in the world after her mother’s death and father’s distance, hangs out at the cemetery to avoid her high school classmates’ contempt. Arthur and Maddy strike up a conversation. Meanwhile, Arthur’s next-door neighbor, Lucille, is distraught and depressed at losing her recently reappeared high school beau. Despite their differences, these three people extend simple kindnesses to each other. Friendships are born. Lifesaving friendships. Life-enriching friendships. Second-chance-giving friendships.

I enjoyed reading this uplifting novel. Plus, I always enjoy Elizabeth Berg’s presentation of everyday life. A bonus in The Story of Arthur Truluv happens in the symbolic cemetery. A favorite pastime of Arthur is imagining lives of buried persons from minimal facts on headstones. What he comes up with is classic Berg. For example: “When she read, she liked to be barefoot and she liked to lace her fingers through her toes.” [p. 48] Another excerpt: “Even in old age, he and his wife would load up the car with blankets and lawn chairs and go out to reserve a place in the park while the sky was still a smoky red and the birds had not yet begun to sing.” [p. 49] I very much admire Elizabeth Berg’s creative combination of her powers of observation and imagination.

My review of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

No wonder Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility is a classic!

Sense and sensibility, represented respectively in sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, carry them through romantic hopes and dashed hopes in Victorian Devonshire. They both fall in love with men they cannot have and after ups and downs, twists and turns, end up in marriages with reliable men. Their different approaches to romantic disappointment are consistent with their approaches to many other situations among family and friends. Indeed, the foibles of this Jane Austen’s novel’s cast of characters give Elinor and Marianne many opportunities to display their sense (reason) and sensibility (emotionality).

Would that today’s society had the good sense to practice Elinor Dashwood’s Victorian communication habits of courteous truth-telling and thinking the best of others. Sometimes she even has to fight to think fine motivations for foolish behavior. She must feel the fool herself while withholding judgment on such egregious acts of inconsideration. Her reason and good sense also include respecting promises and others’ decisions, even when they hurt her.

Even feelings-led, superficiality-satisfied, romantic-notioned Marianne (representing sensibility) grows to realize that character counts.

Sense and Sensibility is an epiphany enthusiast’s dream novel. Some characters, of course, remain blind, self-centered fools, but others humbly learn valuable lessons from their mistakes. Austen’s dialogue is lively. I would have liked to have known energetic Mrs. Jennings. The warmth of the Dashwood family (at least Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters) inspires. I enjoy Austen’s dry wit in this novel. Often it comes in Fanny’s outrageously convoluted, self-congratulating excuses why she cannot help Elinor and Marianne. Sometimes the humor comes in the differences between sense and sensibility, such as this scene in which Elinor and Marianne reminisce about their former home, Norland:

“Dear, dear Norland,” said Elinor, “probably looks much as it always does at this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.”

“Oh,” cried Marianne, “with what transporting sensation have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.”

“It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves.” [pages 93, 94 in my edition]

Dunn Museum grand reopening

A recent Saturday was the grand opening of the Lake County Museum, now called the Dunn Museum, in its new location. We heard a fascinating lecture by paleoartist Tyler Keillor on how he crafted the museum’s dryptosaurus dinosaur model. Both his scientific research and artistic methods were interesting. This dino is based on bones found in New Jersey in mid-1800s—only about half a dozen bones though, so the model seems fairly speculative.

Museum exhibits take people from prehistoric times, through Native American settlements, through the 1800s and 1900s into this century, all with a focus on Lake County, Illinois. For example, there’s an 1864 letter from a Civil War soldier to his sister in Lake County.

In the simulated classroom are a local family’s ancestor’s textbooks like Appleton’s School Reader, a primer that competed with the popular McGuffey Reader in the late 1800s. My grandma used McGuffey Readers in Indiana at the turn of the century, and I love knowing she learned to read by reading bible stories and classic literature, including challenging poetry. And Dick, Jane, and Spot primers of the 1950s were thought to be an improvement on McGuffey?

Videos narrated by journalist Bill Kurtis depict famous Lake County events (train robbery) and inventions (35mm movie projector).

I loved working at the Lake County Museum eons ago, and Saturday I tracked down my former boss, who declined to be photographed but wanted a photo of the first person (me) she hired to work on the one-million-plus postcard collection with the last person (Rebecca) she hired to work on the collection.