Lost & Found: a Letter

As Remembrance Day approaches, a letter one hundred years ago to a pilot who spent months in Germany's Holzminden POW camp:

FEC Old

Most FECsters have something in common besides raging preening self-indulgent egos and a pervasive but vague mantra of penning an autobiography: being SENIORS.

"Most" ... since FEC does harbour an invisible faction of middle-agers who have real jobs and generally ignore participating and volunteering in activities shouldered by the halt and the lame and the autocratic. One Senior did some meditation:

When you are old.

Old is a new place. Time speeds up and you slow down. Time that once stretched out endlessly, busily, productively, now perversely quickens. Yet the morning ritual of waking body and brain takes three times longer.

When you are old.

That growing cache of surprise aches, pains, and symptoms interferes with your gratitude for another day of life. Even as you ambitiously make plans for next year, next month, tomorrow, your options and finances dwindle. Old hurts.

When you are old.

The time you want to grasp and hold is so often frittered on health issues, medical visits, diagnostic waffling or shock revelations, counting pills, learning assistive equipment, relying on strangers for token services. No more high heels. No more dancing.

When you are old.

Friends move away. Friends die. Loss. When you are old, making new friends is laborious. People your age are just as opinionated and suspicious as you are. Young people inhabit an alien world only faintly familiar. Or are you the alien?

When you are old.

Your senses dull. People get impatient with your hearing impairment, your unsteady gait. You get impatient. You forget things. Focus and concentration, listening, conversing, reading, all take conscious effort. Socializing might be painful.

When you are old.

Creative introverts and hermits win — those who live alone, adapt to it, prefer it. They like themselves, have inner resources, are not lonely. They share when the spirit moves them and energy complies.

When you are old.

Time has no time for you.

 

The Christmas Letter

Be it on record: I am not ready for this thing called Christmas. I have not been ready for it since about 1985. That might have been the year the festive suckling pig was four inches too long for my oven. Mercifully I forget how we made the adjustment but a bit of trimming was involved and artful placement of windfall crabapples. We used to get the succulent wienies from Mr. McDowell, the inarticulate but terrifically competent farmer on the Escarpment above Campbellville. Times past.

We had traditions. Dinner was the customary noisy scenario with assorted family ― the good china clattering around, crackers and dumb paper hats, assorted wines flowing, fights over never-enough stuffing, in-laws with their uninvited dog, outlaws with dietary problems, teenage drama, always a small child bawling. We could count on Mr. Host, well-marinated in Beaujolais, crowning the event by face-planting into his dessert, raising his head at moments to mumble non-sequiturs.

One time in the festive season a grown child delivered caustic remarks to a full house about the current (admittedly rather unwise) choice of my ... man-in-residence ... and in the heated escalation I had to threaten both with eviction, Christmas or not. Strained relations? Oh yes.

Another time my children ran away from home. Together. Maybe not exactly at Christmas. It was a protest against The House Rules. My shite cousin thought it was hilarious and enjoyed elaborating on it to his own ends every time we saw him thereafter (much less often than he expected). Naturally, none of that was reported in the carefully composed Christmas Letter.

Remember them? When we used to exchange those cheery photocopied letters tarted up with poinsettia stickers and family photos? We had to assume the distant relatives and friends ― the ones we never saw from one year to the next ― had a consuming interest in what our kids did at school or how many parties we had or whether husband's boss gave him a bonus. Hello moi: just as guilty as the rest of the '80s parents.

The Christmas Letter is what I used to call it before I humbugged Christmas. Now I call it The Annual Letter, in which I shamefully, unnecessarily apologize all over myself for forgetting not even doing it every year. At least the subject matter applies to the misbegotten title of my blog here. In a way.

Because my household, my family, now consists of moi seule ― no more adorable children starring in glorified accomplishments, bad behaviour completely omitted (be thankful, all quarters). No more lists of sparkling family activities, ignoring Murphy's Law normally prevailing at each.

Trust me, it's much more difficult to spread the exaggerated cheer from a solo life perspective. A solo senior life. Plus, potential recipients dwindle down to the luddite few who haven't been terminally bored at seeing one's pathetic life daily exposed on Facebook. Oh sorry, Google+ ~~ you too.

So. Serious concerns. Aside from appalling apathy at the prospect and a yawning black hole of inspiration, can I once again pull together a year or two's worth of embroidered incidents? Can I rekindle past bonding by relating the root canal that made me miss choir practice and forget about the concert? ... or how many times I forgot anything anyway without a semi- valid invented excuse? Can I elicit the old heartwarming kindred spirit with my latest strategies for thrift store shopping? ... or by describing my paranoid neighbour forever in pyjamas who shouts daily prayers to the Samhain goddess ... or a drug bust waiting to happen two blocks away? Never mind my letters to the editors of obscure but inflammatory e-zines that never get published. Who cares to hear the pain of learning Windows 10 ... or pondering which is the better choice ― a digital barcode tombstone (listen to me: you thought you got rid of me) and cremating oneself into diamonds (wear me: you'll never get rid of me).

Or should I just send a collage of Maxine cartoons?

Nope. It's for me alone to wage war on internet grammar atrocities, to worry about my nephews' addiction to bacon ice cream, to master selfies (and/or photobombing) at important historical civic moments. The good news ― not exactly good but you know what I mean ― is that possibly I have outlived all the potential recipients of such tripe.

Ahhhh ... The Christmas Letter. Is there a point anymore? Do people still do that? Is blogging the answer? Do people still do that too?

You guessed right. This could be It.

                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  

Words 8

Sundowning.

New one to me. Noun. Verb.

One evening Peter was wandering the fourth floor hallway of the apartment complex, knocking on doors. His live-in partner Shirley watched him, slumped by the elevators. I greeted him as I passed.

"He's sundowning," she said. Doors were popping open.

"Why are you knocking on doors, Peter?" Shirley asked for the benefit of the audience.

"I'm trying to find out what's going on," Peter said mildly.

Sundowning is a subset behaviour of confusion, anxiety, or belligerence in people with dementia, occurring at a certain time of day, usually evening. Wandering may be part of it.

The coinage elicits mixed feelings. Whereas one could say what the symptoms mean, i.e. "late day worsening," sundowning is a gentle word, quite apt. 

But it also carries that connotation of approaching end ... not simply the end of the day but the increasing loss of familiarity in a loved one. And naturally, the closure of life itself.

I visualize Harry Chapin "All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown ...".

Like cancer and depression, dementia affects almost every family in some way.

"Seems like I've been here before, can't remember when ...". Music has power.

  

Skeletons for Four Closets

Coming soon: All Saints Day and All Souls Day.

Prepare yourself.

These creative designs come from Biscuit Box:
http://bisqytbox.blogspot.ca/2012/11/inspirational-panel-dia-de-los-muertos.html.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos!

Been There Already

February 2014

I submit more graphic details as evidence of the high degree of insanity accelerating on a certain block in Crazy Town (title not claimed by me).

April 2014

 We've had promises, we've had delays and reconfigurations, we've had obstacles and NOISE and traffic lunacy, we've had numerous upheavals, and we've had the impossible pharaoh ants.

May 2014

Then, nothing. For weeks.

What we don't have is trees.

WHERE ARE OUR TREES?!

My Ants

That’s ants. Not aunts ... but pronounced the same way by me and of which I had a few before they took the cemetery rest. Ants in my kitchen. Pharaoh ants throughout the entire building complex around me. Googling was a mistake because I didn’t want to know this city is infested with pharaoh ants and it doesn’t stop there by a long shot. North America is totally blighted with them unless I’ve succumbed to a hoax on tiny little feet.

Not precisely as pictured

Now back when I took the New Testament course in fourth year at St John’s, I’m pretty sure I passed it although I couldn’t give you a quote from the Book of Revelations to save my life. It only comes to mind for some cloudy, sinister images of pestilences to be visited upon us signalling imminence of The End. Speaking of Mayan calculations, did anyone get that right yet? Are they working on a new calendar? I’m telling you, the ants have their own agenda and they are marching.


Along with rats, cockroaches are a given in a big city. At least the sneaky buggers have the wily brains to stay out of sight in daylight. If not, a swiftly well-aimed boot can result in a deeply satisfying crunch. We’ve had them so long, can we really include them as harbingers of End Times?

By my own calculations, ants are the finale in a parade of plagues. Successive waves of  insect control freaks. 

There were the clothing moths. The ones that nested secretly, snugly, under carpets and in your prized sheepskin boots. Treatment: Months of moth balls and wafting camphor fumes as you slink about the outside world on your daily rounds. 

 Fruit flies that multiply like ... well, like fruit flies. Treatment: Months of creatively baiting the little suckers and renouncing bananas for the duration.

 

Bed bugs, driving helpless people to insanity. Treatment: Intense heat. Set fire to everything you own, optionally to yourself.

Now pharaoh ants. Treatment (experimental stages): Read the ingredients on the ant traps. Do not unwittingly supplement with careless bagel crumbs or smears of peanut butter. On the other hand, co-existence may be permanent so think cooperation: new pets? They’re not entirely mindless automatons, y’know. Get a dialogue going. Their leaders might be into sharing space. You will never be alone again. 

Apocalypse ... or attitude adjustment? Are the trumpets of doom blaring? Or sounding a brave strange new world? Whatever. They are coming to get you. Life as we know it is on its way out, folks.