InMotion

Several years ago, I read an essay by Zadie Smith in The New Yorker  .  In it, she tries to explain her encounter with Joni Mitchell's music, which for her was apparently nearly a life-changing experience. Her piece inspired me to write, and I titled my piece  Reflections on Reflections on Joni Mitchell: Blue and Green.  An excerpt is included below. I am currently having trouble doing something I want to do: write.  So I dug this out and offer it as a stimulus to me, and you, to be receptive, and expressive in whatever ways feel real.  Music is a vehicle, and it is hard to describe what it is exactly, and how it works.   What is the mechanism of its magic?   It must be a resonance that occurs, a harmonic vibration between the performance and the listener. This is no doubt what Zadie Smith is talking about when she talks about attunement in her New Yorker essay, Some Notes on Attunement, a Voyage Around Joni Mitchell .   When the lis...

My wife Carol and I have returned from an extended (23 day) live-in experience with my 92 year old father in his apartment in the Memory Care unit of his retirement community.  He moved into memory care a couple months ago, and for a while before that, it appeared that he was nearing death. Carol and my sister Cindy decided that we would stay with him for his last weeks, and we took turns living with him.  We appreciate more deeply and better understand the work staff in these places do. Lots of bathroom time.  Understatement.  Now Dad's recovered some physical abilities. He is still able to walk, talk, and laugh, but has very little short term memory.  His thoughts and memories and present experience seem to blend and twist into surprising shapes and utterances that challenge one's ability to make sense of anything.  Being his son and having all those shared years with him at a tender young age the things he says and does often trigger emotions and tho...

What do you do when your father is 92 years old  and his equipment (heart, kidneys, structural supports, brain) starts going on the fritz big time?  Well, I have concluded that there is something I can do to help, and here I am trying to do that. After my mom died in 2004, he lived alone for 12 years  in the independent apartment section of a 3-tiered senior living facility in Spring Park, Minnesota, 20 miles west of the Twin Cities.  3 years ago, while walking in his apartment he fell and broke one of the vertebrae in his neck.  He's never made it back to the independent living he enjoyed, and now my sister Cindy and I are here seeing what's what and hoping to return to our  "regular lives" in the not too distant "future".  My parents raised my 3 sisters and I in Michigan, and 2 of the sisters still live there. I live in Louisiana, and Linda, the oldest of us 4 sibs, took a long life journey that finds her currently pretty much home-bound with disab...

 After 2 weeks back in New Orleans, on Nov. 15 I arrived here in Spring Park Minnesota, where my dad resides in a dementia unit of a care facility.  This is a unique and intense emotional as well as physical journey.  I am squeezing this post in early Sunday morning, while dad is still sleeping.  Soon we will begin the day, and I promise to return with another post and will try to report from this very different place I find myself in now. From New Orleans' newest bicycle bridge, Wisner street City Park

Monday: Quick moment between very slow trips across the apartment and other aspects of life with my dad here in Minnesota. We're getting it all together as we the family take over all the care from the care center, with spectacular help from my wife Carol and sister Cindy. I'm back (Tuesday afternoon), had to stop writing because I am too distracted here in the studio apartment with dad.  I am just here.  I don't have a profound insight on the end of life or my relationship to my dad, but being here is just what it is, is important, is real. He's now finally drifted off for an early afternoon nap. He may awaken anytime, so I'll just post these pictures, taken on my bike rides.  I will continue trying to write when I can.  I have been able to ride for an hour or more on 6 of the 9 days we've been here so far.  I liken it to plugging into a charger, beautiful.  Late afternoon, Dakota rail-trail, Mound, MN (across the street from dads place) bridge ...

I'm going to try and do a stream of consciousness piece.  Last night I slept pretty well. I like curling up under the covers and feeling as if I'm in a cocoon, safe and sound while metamorphosing.  Only 3 times up with dad during the night, to help him with the bathroom.  He and I might have synchronized bladders at this point in time.  Dad is having markedly reduced cognitive function, as a result of heart, lung, and kidney functional depletion (old age). Carol and I along with my sister from Michigan have decided that for the next few weeks at least, a person will be here and with him 24 hours a day.  As you might imagine, we are taking this one day at a time.  Will this plan last until his 93rd birthday in April?  That last sentence is not in keeping with the previous one, which gets priority, so enough said.  I do feel peaceful about this, and I am happy to be in a position to do it.  Our good friends Jim and Annie are trailer-sitting ...

Here's a short post on something we've been reading and want to recommend.  As we head west in our Toyota 4-runner and Airstream Sport (collectively called "home"), we've been listening to Michael Pollan read us his book, How to Change Your Mind .  Today's installment concerned reports of the drug psilosybin used at high doses in subjects that volunteered for the study.  They could be enrolled in the trial if they had a diagnosis of cancer carrying a life-shortening prognosis and were anxious about their impending decline and death.  I found the report astounding.  As a life long "dabbler" and current practitioner in eastern philosophy and Buddhism, the descriptions of what might be going on in "the mind" of the participants as they have a drug-induced trip were familiar.  Not the hallucinations and all that, but what might be happening in the brain and the mind to change what we accept as the "truth" of our  experience of reality...