Category Archives: Dementia Caregiving Journals

September 21, 2013 — I held Manon’s diary open, Moriarty and I sitting on the folly foundation in the warm September sun, and I continued reading aloud:

[My “Sebastian Quartet” comes with a soundtrack: Click on my “The Dream” player (right sidebar) for no. 32, Thomas Tallis’s ethereal 16th century “Spem in alium” and no. 33, Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice, Dance of the Blessed Spirits” (Italian version).]

I sit now among my roses breathing in their sensuous aroma. I hold his response on my lap:

“My dear Manon,

Read more »

September 21, 2013 — Manon began her diary of Sebastian and their strange, mystifying relationship in the middle, allowing it to fan out from the center to the tips, the beginning and the end, like a sunflower burst into yellow flame for a summer, and then in the autumn, drooping its head, the seeds falling at its roots:

 Sebastian came by this afternoon. It is a fine weather day. We walked out to the little bench in the garden, sat among the roses and talked for two hours. We spoke of our relationship and the closeness we feel with one another, and that it has caught us unawares. We do not know what to do with this. He came by for afternoon tea, he said. But, in the garden, our conversation soon turned to our feelings. I feel so natural with him. I believe he does with me, too. I could tell him anything. We talk endlessly on every subject; we could probably talk for days, almost without breath; yet, our silences are communicative and deep. Kindred spirits. I feel as if I have known him for lifetimes. There is a haunting quality to it, though. Something… something dark, something I see beyond him, as if when I sit looking at him he is transparent, and there’s this dark entity behind him. He has said nothing about it; nor I to him. He may not see it. I sense he is hiding something, or he fears something, something unsettling to him.

Reflecting at this late evening hour, I cannot recall our first meeting. It seems in this lifetime we never had a first meeting, but that he was always near me, an unseen but felt presence, and when we matured on our separate paths, we would become aligned and meet. Thus, this happened: eventually, we evolved into the same group of friends and associates; then we knew each other, yet had little direct contact until recently.

The light burns low now and the air holds a chill. At the hearth, I have stoked the fire, gift of Prometheus, and what remain are glowing embers, spirits of the flame. The wall sconce in the corner hisses with gaslight, and here at my writing table, pools of wax clot around the stunted candle base.

When we will see one another next I do not know. Our meetings are spontaneous and erratic. I have my garden club and the orphan children’s benefit; he has his businesses and men’s club. It is as it should be. It is part of the natural flow of our relationship. I inhale the essence of what it is and expect nothing more.

—Yet, the dark side. It carries a sad mysticism, something from long ago, like something from a past lifetime. I can see bits of it, like faded photographs in an uncompleted album, our loving companionship abruptly and tragically cut short. Why? Or am I having a premonition?

He knows. He doesn’t want to face it…. The hour is late. I must go to bed.

I sat at my blog round table rereading this opening of Manon’s diary when Moriarty entered. He had been in the back kitchen, this time sweeping up enormous droppings of Japanese spam.

He’d brought his fluffy black dog, Dickens, with him. I stroked the white patch under Dickens’s chin, scratched deep behind his ear, finishing by running my hand along his back, ruffling his coat. He shook, then, sending pieces of disconnected Japanese character strokes flying, like loose spider legs.

“He rolled in the spam,” said Moriarty.

“My last post, part two of this story, attracted page after page of Japanese language characters,” I said. “Must have been the keyword ‘masquerade.’”

“I built the foundation for the folly,” Moriarty said. “Come out and see it. A low wall we can sit on and finish our discussion begun the other night over the Chinese.”

We walked across the tall yellow meadow grass to the foot of the folly, parallel on the hill to the blog, overlooking the stream. I carried Manon’s diary.

Moriarty had set a cornerstone into the foundation and carved into it Sept 2013. What a Phantom. I beamed at his thoughtfulness to detail. Sitting on Moriarty’s masterpiece, I tilted my face upwards and took a long draft of the deep blue September sky, the honeyed warmth of sun drenching my face.

Dickens sat next to me and leaned against my leg; and then he lay down, resting his head on his tan forepaws. Crickets chirped and locusts buzzed. The rubber tip of the dog’s nose twitched as he sniffed the air. Maybe he smelled blue deer. I patted his head.

“There was a strange sadness to Sebastian,” said Moriarty, sitting down at the opposite end of the foundation wall and crossing his leg over his knee.

“Sebastian typified perfectly what most humans fear – they are afraid of the light, not of the dark,” I said.

“Clearly it seems,” I went on, “that he was deeply drawn to Manon in the beginning; he drew her in; their association blossomed, becoming close.”

“And then he got scared,” said Moriarty.

“He fell into the flame he had kindled, and then tried to flee; he erected a firewall of superficiality,” I observed.

I opened Manon’s diary and read:

Sebastian has turned. I wanted to know his darkness. We have become very close. Of late, though, he has begun to be controlling. In truth, I want to know if he is worthy of me. Would he always be respectful towards me. Would he accept my work for women’s suffrage? If we are to go forward, I want clear understanding between the two of us. I sent him a note. Would he talk with me? That’s all I wrote: what point would it be to discuss with him in a note what I want to discuss with him in person?

He wrote back: “When I have time. I shall let you know.” I replied that I understand he has other priorities, that such is as it should be. However, I stated, I do find that we must talk presently. I sought to prevent a miscarriage of our friendship, although I did not tell him this latter.

There is more …
—Samantha Mozart

August 26, 2013 — The wine I sip is rich and red. It warms my insides. I sit at the big oak round table in my blog. I have turned the last page. I close the worn diary and stare into the flame of the tall, orange candle, ruminating. This is the diary of a woman. I do not know her name. The woman lived long ago. Her diary chronicles her mystifying relationship with a man named Sebastian. Clearly I need more to do than to sit entranced, venturing into the dark realms of thought to find the hermit down at the far end of the tunnel, holding an LED lantern. I stand, pinch out the flame and take my glass. The aroma of wax drifting off the spiral of smoke from the doused flame precedes me partway up the stairs to the second floor catwalks, dissipating as I climb the narrow winding wood staircase to the cupola above. On the way, I flick off flakes of white paint that fall onto the dark sleeve of my sweater as I brush against the walls.

At the top, I go over and look out the windows surveying the scene across the meadow. The day is late and an orange-gray mist rises off the stream, obscuring the earth-most region of the woods on the far bank.

The blue deer and her fawn, Batik, stand on the near bank. And, then – what? To the left, in the meadow along the bank, is a small herd of deer, all blue, some fawns, blue with white speckles. I am mesmerized. An uncommon herd. Where have all the blue deer come from?

I smell a nutmeggy aroma, hear a creak on the step. I turn. My heart stops beating. I stop breathing. I cannot swallow. In the shadows at the top of the staircase, it is a hunchback man with a frightening face and wild puce hair. In his lowered hand he wields a large gun and something smaller, transparent, with it.

“It’s me,” comes the subdued, muffled tone – my low-talker, Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog. He is wearing a grotesque mask with wild puce hair attached. I take a long draft of wine.

“I saw your bottle of wine and carried it up with me,” he says.

“I thought it was a gun,” I say. I remember to breathe; my heart still pounds; I gulp more wine.

He lifts his banjo, by the shoulder strap, from his back, sprawls in the chaise lounge in the corner between the windows, removes his mask and lays the banjo across his knees.

“What, then, must we do?” he muses, wiping the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.

Balancing his banjo with one hand, he flips out the cork and pours wine into his glass with the other.

“Look at the herd of blue deer,” I say. “Did you see them? Extraordinary.”

“I know,” he says. “I put them there. I ordered them. They came on a Greyhound bus. I had to go meet it. They’re cardboard. I found them on Amazon. Made in China, I think.”

“And, why are you wearing a mask and that hideous hair? I ask. “It’s got, like, mint and mauve streaks in it.”

“Masquerade,” he says. “It’s all a façade.” He plucks a series of strings individually on his banjo and sings, “‘Masquerade, paper faces on parade. Masquerade. Look around, there’s another mask behind you.’ From my favorite musical, ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’” He plucks a final string, giving it tremolo. “Life in twenty-first century America. Thomas Jefferson would say, ‘I told you so.’ So would Barry Goldwater.”

“Masquerade!
Paper faces on parade
Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you
Masquerade! Every face a different shade
Masquerade! Look around, there’s another mask behind you
Masquerade! Burning glances, turning heads
Masquerade! Stop and stare at the sea of smiles around you
Masquerade! Grinning yellows, Spinning reds

“Before they sing the song in the musical, they say, ‘It’s a shame that phantom fellow isn’t here.’ That phantom fellow is always here. ‘Seething shadows breathing lies … leering satyrs peering eyes. … Take your turn, take a ride on the merry-go-round in an inhuman race’: The poetic gospel, the Alice in Wonderland side of religion. The Mad Tea-Party. Move around the table until no more clean plates remain. I’ve got mine and you’ve got yours to get.”

“Their mansions,” I say, “gilded on the backs of the other ninety-eight percent, the peasants whose only expectation is to reap the harvest of their hard work sowing the seeds in what’s become a field of clay. They may as well be pulling weeds from between the cracks in the pavement.”

“R speculated while he was trimming my hair, which he said looked perfect as it was, that ‘they soon will be coming to harvest our organs – then feed our withered intestines to the hungry buzzards.’”

He goes on: “What are the masqueraders afraid of? Why do they hide behind their false faces? Control. Politicians running for office, in office, or to impress a superior or potential investor, move with their spouses in lockstep, like a pair of carved wooden love doves appearing from the cuckoo clock door to tweet the hour. Shenanigans. It’s like a shell game. I offer you an example: They create a fantastic tableau, as I have with my cardboard blue deer out there, perfectly posed for the photo op.” He sweeps his hand across the swath of vacant domain before him, finishing with a flourishing gesture toward the bank of dusking windows.

“Just like Sebas—“ He feels his back pocket, he feels around in the chaise. “Where is it? I’ve lost it. I thought I had it.”

His wide-eyed expression, like that of a surprised cat, or round as doubloons in a treasury, bemuses me. “You mean Sebastian and the diary?”

“Yes – where…?”

“I found it in the chaise after you left the other night. It must have fallen out of your pocket.”

“Did you read it?”

“Yes. All of it. Whose is it? Where did you get it?”

“It’s Manon’s. I found it in a trunk full of stuff in the family attic in Arkansas. I think when they moved there, they just stuck a lot of stuff up in the attic and forgot about it. Manon was my great grandmother’s sister, my great great aunt.”

“Wow.”

He pulls out his wallet. “Here. Here’s a picture of her.”

I take the small photo. In the cupola half-light and although the light and shadow of the image were faded, I can see: “She is very beautiful,” I say. I gaze at her a long time. Why do I feel as if I know her? Was it the diary? Yet, I felt a connection, even when I began reading her words. I hand it back to him.

“I sat down right there in the attic,” he says, “and started reading. The dust on the trunk made me sneeze, but I couldn’t stop reading. I didn’t sneeze on the diary. I became intrigued by her straightforwardness with him and in her prose, her sincerity. I asked my family if I could keep it. They said yes.”

I must admit, I have never seen my low-key Moriarty so passionate about something.

“What was the matter with Sebastian?” I ask. “Why did he—?”

“I’m hungry,” says Moriarty.

It is getting dark, and I haven’t brought a flashlight; I hope I don’t fall down the winding stairs.

“Let’s order out,” he says. “We’ll talk over some Chinese.”

He heads down the staircase and I follow.

—Samantha Mozart

August 18, 2013—The church bells were ringing as I entered my blog this Sunday morning. I came upon Moriarty in the back kitchen sweeping up the spam.

“You let this stuff accumulate,” said the Phantom of My Blog. “It piles up like mountains of greasy crumbs.”

“We’ll have ants,” I said.

“There are some,” said he, “who would create elaborate measures to spare the life of an ant, yet would crush a human, without compunction, without compassion, without giving thought to understanding, too closed-minded to recognize that the other gives thoughtfulness and tolerance.”

The bells stopped.

“A bell can’t ring when it’s intolerant,” he went on. “There’s no leverage for movement, no tangible embodiment of openness to accommodate sound, to bear the clapper strike, thereby to be heard by the sincere.” He bent down, and with a whiskbroom began sweeping the piles of spam into a dustpan.

“I love the sound of bells,” I said. “La Campanile.”

He dumped the spam into a big, black plastic bag. “Let’s build a campanile beside the folly in an iris garden I’m going to build across the field from the blog,” said Moriarty.”

“You’re building a folly? Whatever for?”

“A place to go, to do nothing, to open our minds, to chill,” he said. “A place that means nothing, a place to be taken at face value.” He swept the last crumbs of spam into the dustpan and emptied them into the bag. “There are those who spam you with their minds; they overlay their own emotional baggage on you.” He tied the bag, struggled to lift it and carried it out the back door and to the trash. I held the door open for him.

I followed him. I don’t know why I was following the Phantom of My Blog, but I did, despite his unprepossessing manner – or because of it.

“And besides,” he said, as we turned to go back inside, “from the windows in the top we can get a good view of the blue deer.”

I went up to the cupola. He followed. We wanted to look for the blue deer. He kept talking. He must have consumed a garrulous biscuit for breakfast, I mused.

“Indeed, as it were, the folly is a place to which to take flight,” he said from behind me as we climbed the winding wooden staircase.

I smiled. The “indeed” and “as it were” he incorporated into his speech often. It was a giveaway to his proclivity. He read history much, had majored in it in college; it is peculiar to historians to utilize “indeed” and “as it were” often.

“What’s this?” I asked. Something new had been added to the furnishings in the cupola.

“It’s a record player,” he said. “I found it in Missouri and brought it back with me.”

“Missouri? I thought you said you were going to Arkansas, that your family lived in the Arkansas Ozarks.”

“I did. Arkansas. I meant Arkansas. I drove through Missouri, a corner of it. It stayed in the corner of my mind. Somebody set this by the side of the road there – in the corner of Missouri, actually; so I did mean Missouri.”

He had leaned a few LPs against the suitcase-style player. He pulled one out of its jacket and placed it on the turntable.

“Somewhere in Time,” I said. “I love that soundtrack, and the movie. That brings back memories.”

“History. We must not forget our history,” he said. “If we don’t remember where we’ve been, how can we recognize how to go forward? That’s a mandala, I think. How can you be complete if you keep doing the same stuff over and over? Your circle winds tighter and tighter and in time you disregard the world around you. In fact, you are likely to become too tightly wound and snap.”

He sat down in the chaise, the one with the plastic webbing like a beach chair, between the windows, in the corner.

I stood gazing out over the meadow. It was a gray day. They were calling for rain. I thought of an episode I had just watched of the long-running British TV series, “Foyle’s War,” called “The Hide,” featuring the extraordinary actor Andrew Scott along with the venerable Michael Kitchen portraying the protagonist of the series. Why was Andrew Scott’s character so protective of his secret, even when erroneously convicted and imprisoned, that he was willing to be hanged for it. What was the tragedy he had witnessed as a child and why would he not come forth with the truth? Well, you’ll have to watch the story to learn. I’ll not give it away for you. But, the premise intrigues me; it can be applied to so many instances in life. It may not even be a secret, but we end up carrying it around with us in the quiet recesses of our minds, so much old baggage.

I think I’ve pretty much gotten things out over the years. But, my parents’ divorce when I was 14 left a scar, that and their giving to the SPCA my dog and companion of nine years without even forewarning me. I came home from school one day and he was gone. That was it. That’s crushing a human – and an animal – without compunction. I hope I don’t do that, I really don’t; I have no intention of doing so; if I have, it’s been unwittingly.

“What—?” said the Phantom.

“Did I say something? I didn’t say anything. Did I?”

“You were thinking loudly,” he said.

“Oh. Just old stuff,” I said. “Spam on the roadside of my mind.”

“Somewhere in Time” had ended. “I have to leave now,” he said. He put the record back in its jacket. “I have an appointment. R is going to cut my hair.”

“Well, don’t be late,” I said.

“R says some people’s minds play like a broken record,” he called to me over his shoulder.

He left. I stayed in the cupola. There was a heavy haze in the air, almost like a mist. I listened for the patter of raindrops on the cupola roof, on the leaves of nearby trees. Mourning doves called and responded. They seem to come around here this time of year, late August. Crickets chirped.

A distant church bell tolled, for a late service I supposed. Then … rain began falling.

I was on my way to ending this session and heading down the staircase when I spotted a small dark thing in the corner of the chaise. It was a brown leather-bound book, about five by seven inches and a good inch thick. It was well used. Moriarty must have dropped this. I was intrigued. I opened it. The script appeared to be a woman’s hand, dip pen and ink, faded, old; the pages were yellowed, some curled and tarnished on the edges.

I sat down in the chaise and began reading. It began, “Sept. 15.” No year was added. “Sebastian came by this afternoon. It is a fine weather day. We walked out to the little bench in the garden and sat among the roses and talked for two hours….” I kept reading. I couldn’t stop. It was a diary and the story unfolding on the pages held me spellbound. Outside, evening fell, mingled with the rain. I pulled the light chain on the bridge lamp. I read long into the night.

—Samantha Mozart

August 9, 2013

I thought I’d let myself off the blog-writing-consistency hook by publishing this essay I wrote a few years ago. In the meantime, from a recent conversation I had with Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog, I am in the midst of composing a multi-part story to post, but have otherwise been most unpleasantly occupied with pressing urgencies of a personal nature.

Pink Flower Watercolor by Emma

When I wrote the above paragraph, I had not yet heard the despairing news: Our beloved Hospice nurse, Tess, who took such good care of Emma and who has been there always for me, is seriously ill, for a long haul, and we are praying she pulls through. Please say a prayer for her. I would like to repeat here a prayer my writer friend Susan Scott – who is in her own healing process after a horrific auto accident – offered. The candle I lit for Susan’s quick recovery from surgery yesterday, when I heard the sad news became the candle I lit for Tess, also. “Please Lord, be with this kind woman who has been a source of strength to Samantha and her family when Samantha’s mother was in her death throes. Let her know that she is loved and cared for by us and by You. Please help her be strong and well.”

February 19, 2009 — During the early hours of the morning, just after I arise, I always have ideas for my novels. My ideas play out in scenes upon the movie screen of my mind, a fine, wide, smooth movie screen. And then come the interruptions – flossing my teeth; washing my face and applying lotion; Jetta, our teacup poodle, and I going for a walk; making my bed; making coffee; getting Mother, 94, dressed (I am her caregiver), making her breakfast; and so on, like scattershot, riddling the screen of my mind with holes, the punctured scenes never making it to the page.

The mailman is coming now to take Jeremy Irons away. I watched Jeremy, with Helen Mirren, another of my favorites, in Elizabeth I, the two-part HBO production. For 25 years I have loved Jeremy Irons’s performances, especially in the 1981 Granada Television Brideshead Revisited series, aired on PBS, where I first saw him; the 25th Anniversary edition DVD topped my wish list at Amazon until I bought it.

I say this about Jeremy Irons because as I was writing about all my morning interruptions, he came into my mind – the feeling, in his expressive eyes in his powerful acting that appears as non-acting. Anyway, that feeling, that emotion and those scenes of Jeremy Irons are what play across my mind now. It’s a dark emotion, very powerful, intense, a sense of loss, I think, and going on, of not knowing the future until it has happened and is played back upon the fields of history. Where is my meaning for my life? My intent is shot full of holes. It’s war.

Here I think of a friend and how we think alike – our organization methods, our bartering. “I grew up poor,” he said, “so I’m a wheeler-dealer.” Looking back, as an adult I have had little money and starting when I did hair, bartered – cut hair and did perms for massage, dance lessons, and such: time for time, talent for talent. Beware of bartering, some say. I think those naysayers speak from greed or from an ignorance of positive bartering. Life is about an exchange of information and ideas. That’s the correct method of bartering. Exchanging things you can do is a form of this. One person has knowledge of this; the other has knowledge of that. Each learns from the other, each helps the other, gives to the other, thereby exchanging information and ideas, via questioning and exchanging expertise. It’s a dialog; the drama of the endless cycle of life: turning the field, planting seeds, reaping the harvest.

This concept recalls Adam Gopnik, writer and New Yorker essayist, and his good friend, art historian Kirk Varnedoe, who died of cancer in 2004, who both spoke of the importance of giving meaning to one’s life: Having an intention and a goal, and a timeframe in which to fulfill that intention: this is a means of applying one’s talents to benefit others, and thereby expanding upon that foundation of knowledge and talent and watching it grow to elevate the consciousness and intelligence of society and mankind. St. Andrew’s School, the boarding school Kirk Varnedoe attended, the Middletown, Del., setting for the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, and about which I have published feature stories, teaches this. Through such conscientious planting of thought, soon smiles bloom in a garden of faces.

That’s my little ecosystem for today.

—Samantha Mozart

Friday, July 19, 2013 — I went to Steinway Hall last Sunday afternoon, July 14, to hear a classical piano recital. There I met a Russian concert pianist. The recitalist was a Chinese-American girl, 14, performing works by Bach, Chopin, Haydn, Prokofiev, Ravel and Shchedrin. The Russian I met is her teacher. Steinway Hall is in the back of a piano store.

This girl played amazingly well for her age. Unusual for many young performers today, she played with expression rather than just running through a dogmatic litany of notes. I could tell by her playing that she had a very good teacher, and, so, since he was present in the hall, I sought to meet him.

He introduced himself to me simply as Igor. He said he is from Novosibirsk (it means New Siberia), and came here to the United States in 1995. He told me he teaches his students to perform with meaning, emotion. He is assistant professor at West Chester University. He did tell me his last name, Resnianski, and I repeated the pronunciation so I had it right, rolling the R-r-r-r.

Later, upon researching, I learned that he is a Steinway artist and a prizewinner of many national and international piano competitions, holding his doctorate from Temple University. He has performed across Russia and around the globe and has recorded, transliterating his name as Resensky, with fellow Russian violinist Ilya Konovalov, for CD.

Chosen by the Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association as “2012 Music Teacher of the Year,” Dr. Resnianski is highly sought after, regularly giving master classes throughout the U.S. and abroad. His students are winners of competitions, and he serves as a competition juror.

My daughter and I studied with a ballet teacher for many years, an American Ballet Theatre guest master teacher, of whom when other teachers watched her students in their classes – for we sometimes took classes in other studios on our days off – said was an excellent teacher. You can tell – when the student executes the movements correctly and with the attendant discipline.

The girl in Steinway Hall played Chopin etudes (known for their difficulty) and preludes, concluding the hour repertoire with a stunning performance of Chopin’s “Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise.” Maybe in a couple years she’ll return to perform Liszt. Emma, a pianist and teacher, would have loved this performance. I sensed her there with me. Maybe she was. She bought a medium grand Steinway piano in the 1960s. She could have bought a nice car with that money. She sold it later when she moved from Delaware to Florida. Of course, Sunday the store salespeople tried to sell me a piano, but the one I want starts at about $35,000. Naturally, the store will finance the buyer. I wonder how old I’d be by the time I got that thing paid off…? A friend of mine said I’d be 55. Hmmm…. Curiously, maybe my name is really Benjamin Button. I won’t give up hope of getting an older, pre-owned black Steinway baby grand, though. The best I can do now, however, is look for it to rain pianos.

I found it interesting that on their wall in “Steinway Hall” hung a painting titled “Rubinstein plays for the Czar,” a part of the Steinway Collection. My companion thought it was a young looking Arthur Rubinstein. “No, it couldn’t be Arthur Rubinstein – I don’t think,” I said. I asked the store personnel which Rubinstein and which czar it was. No one knew. I thought it was Anton. It was Anton Rubinstein, it turns out, playing for Czar Nicholas I; he often played in that court. Later, in the 1870s, Anton Rubinstein came to the U.S. at the behest of Steinway & Sons, to perform. Anton Rubinstein founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory. His younger brother, Nikolai, founded the Moscow Conservatory. When Pyotr Tchaikovsky presented his newly completed first piano concerto to Nikolai Rubinstein in 1874, Nikolai declared the concerto worthless and unplayable. Tchaikovsky was devastated. These reactions would be equivalent to my ripping this completed manuscript page out of my typewriter, turning and handing it to Stephen King and having him throw up on it. I hope you, dear reader, feel not so inclined, for I have composed here not such genius work.

Arthur Rubinstein was born in Lodz, Poland (part of the Russian Empire at that time) and not related to the earlier Moscow-born Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein. Anton awed many by his uncanny resemblance to Beethoven. Arthur Rubinstein chose to play the piano rather than a violin or other instrument because he, as I, preferred the harmony and polyphonics of the piano. Arthur Rubinstein did perform in Russia sometime after his 1906 Carnegie Hall debut, but not for the Czar, to my knowledge.

I love Russian composers, musicians, conductors, and literary writers — clearly. Of those today, there’s something about conductor Valery Gergiev and his music. Among the many capacities throughout his illustrious career, he currently serves as general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, principal conductor of the London Symphony, and artistic director of the annual White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, which he conceived in 1993 as a musical gift to the city.

Gergiev’s is not your father’s music. He conducts the same music you have been listening to all your life, yet hearing that music conducted by Gergiev is like hearing it for the first time. For example, I think Tchaikovsky would be thrilled to hear, say, his Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty ballet: he might be saying something like, “Wow. That’s what I meant. And, even I didn’t realize that.” It’s still the way the composer intended, but maybe more what the composer intended; that is to say, that it’s what the composer wished in his wildest dreams. There’s just that subtlety in Gergiev’s interpretations — I speak here particularly of the Russian composers — that is mystical. It affects me in such a way that I never get enough of his interpretation of a certain piece that I’ve been listening to for years. He really listens; he not only calls forth the subtleties in the composition but also achieves this with sensitivity and warmth, with an intimacy. Gergiev gets at the soul of the music.

Somewhere in the 1970s I was walking along The Strand in Hermosa Beach, Calif., on a breezy, bright sunny day, when through the open windows of the top floor of a Spanish-style house turret came glorious phrases and arpeggios of what sounded to me like a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, not his second, but likely his third. It was one of those mystical moments that lifts you off your feet – the piano passages spilling out across the broad beach, shimmering like the spray off the Pacific waves crescendoing upon the shore.

I’ve long believed I have a Russian soul. This I have found best defined by an Amazon.com reviewer’s description of Sergei Rachmaninoff, regarding that composer’s second piano concerto, performed by Arthur Rubinstein: “For lovers of Russian culture, Rachmaninoff’s works also have that mysterious quality – they sound ‘Russian’ – that is, like other great Russian works of culture, they are embued [sic] with essential qualities of complexity, romance, dark and brooding melancholy, passion, and strength, both raw and sophisticated… and are expressed in a manner that is, for lack of a better term, Slavic. http://www.amazon.com/Rachmaninoff-Piano-Concerto-Rhapsody-Paganini/dp/B000003ENO. I am not Slavic, though. I grew up with simply a Russian clock, Russian music in the house, and a Steinway baby grand.

Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin arranged parts of Bizet’s “Carmen” and produced The Carmen Ballet for his wife, ballerina Maya Plisetskaya in 1968. In 1972 he composed the Anna Karenina ballet for her. The Russian piano teacher I met last Sunday told me this story when I told him I had studied ballet for many years. (My daughter’s and my ballet teaching lineage goes all the way back through Balanchine to the Mariinsky. Our early two teachers danced for the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine.)

On June 26 this year, Valery Gergiev inaugurated the new Chamber Music Hall at the Mariinsky-II. The hall is named Shchedrin Hall, “to the Russian genius who shares a long and fruitful history of collaboration with the Mariinsky Theatre.” The inaugural performance was of a new Shchedrin opera “The Lefthander,” based on a novella by Nikolai Leskov – a buffonade through tragedy: There are the Russian emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I, the Winter Palace and the British Royal Court – the artistic contrast of the rational British and the irrational Russian. Fascinating.

Some months ago I searched for DVDs of Valery Gergiev conducting and came up with “Valery Gergiev Conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra” (2000), and thought O.K., I’ll view that; should be pretty good.

I was not prepared for what I saw: Russian violist Yuri Bashmet (b. 1953), back in the Soviet days asked Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) to compose a viola concerto for him. It took Schnittke nine years to begin his Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, and by the time he finished, he was living in Amsterdam and had had a stroke. But it was done, and then Bashmet had to battle with the Soviet government to be allowed to perform it outside Russia so that Schnittke could witness the premier performance. “A very kind person” helped Bashmet unravel the Red tape, and the performance was given. Unfortunately, Schnittke was too ill to attend, so it was videotaped and Schnittke watched it at home. Bashmet played the concerto at the Gergiev Vienna Philharmonic Salzburg Festival performance. You know, the Vienna Philharmonic is considered by many to be the finest orchestra in the world. And here was Gergiev conducting.

The program opened with the Prokofiev “Classical” Symphony No. 1, on the classical style, a Haydn sounding piece, very pleasant, evoking the higher human self, and climaxes with the full version of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” This music for ballet was commissioned by impresario Serge Diaghilev, who would have been pleased with Gergiev’s conducting, so colorful you could almost see the firebird flitting about the orchestra. (In the 1920s, Diaghilev hired George Balanchine as the Ballet Russes ballet master to replace Bronislava Nijinska (Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister.))

At this Salzburg Festival, in-between the Prokofiev and the Stravinsky came the Schnittke concerto: Let me just point out that if I didn’t know who Bashmet and Gergiev were, I would not want to be alone in a small, dim room with these two passionate, wild-eyed men, especially the very dark Bashmet with the Romantic-era length hair and if Dostoevsky were present and some other guy had drunk too much vodka and perched on the sill to jump out the window.

Bashmet walked out on stage, took his stance, one leg forward, knee bent, placed his viola under his chin and began playing the viola concerto Alfred Schnittke composed for him. I was stunned. It’s Niccolò Paganini returned from the dead, I proclaimed to myself. The resemblance is striking. The six note theme of the piece enters near the beginning – it spells out Bashmet’s name (B flat – A – E flat – C – B natural – E natural, the Anglo-Saxon notation), is expanded in the second movement and the third concluding by drawing on the notes from the only chord they contain, the A minor triad. The piece is, to say the least, stirring. It is intense, at times terrifying, at other times, a desolate lament. Schnittke had had a stroke and entered a new, dark phase of his life. You have to listen to it, really listen, like you have to really listen to your life. To make this work even more compelling, in this performance, tears well in Bashmet’s eyes and he cries. No – he doesn’t full-on sob; I thought if he did he would make a real mess out of the beautiful wood on his viola. In the end, the camera close-up reveals not only the sweat dripping from Bashmet’s face and dark hair, but the tears, too, running in rivulets down the viola and presumably into the sound holes. I wondered how long it would take the instrument to dry out.

Although I’m not of a mind to jump out windows when there’s nothing I can do to resolve life’s traumas, my solution is to retreat into my music, especially classical music, and turn it up loud, so loud I cannot hear the phone next to me ring.

That Sunday evening after the concert I came home and watched a new episode of the ITV series Endeavour, the prequel to the popular long-running Morse that starred the late, inimitable John Thaw. This is the second episode of Series 2, titled “Fugue.” This plot deftly interweaves both the musical and the psychological meanings of the word. Opera plays a leading role. I can’t say more without giving away the solution, but the final line held much meaning for me:

“Go home, put your best record on, loud as it’ll play, and with every note, you remember… That’s something that the darkness couldn’t take from you.…”

—Samantha Mozart

*Programme Note by Gerald McBurney on Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra:http://alfredschnittke.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/viola-concerto-2/.

July 9, 2013 — It is disconcerting to see celebrities on the cover of AARP Magazine who are of your children’s generation.

What happened? Is AARP so desperate for funds – I can fill up my tall recycling bin nearly weekly with AARP fundraising solicitations – that they’re letting 10-year-olds into their membership? Or, maybe I’m so old I’ve forgotten the last decade. Yet, again, maybe I would have remembered had I seen it flash by were it not for my developing cataracts.

On a recent Sunday evening I watched a TV tribute Prince Charles gave honoring Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee. He pulled out some old long boxes – not dusty, because in the castle, whichever one he was in, presumably they have people to dust those things; he fingered through cans of film, and selected some old family reels.

He put one on the projector, sat back in a comfortable chair, as interested as I was to see what played, and narrated. Here was Queen Elizabeth as a young girl, Princess Margaret, King George VI, the Queen Mother Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Lord Mountbatten (a favorite uncle); and Prince Charles and Princess Anne as children. Prince Charles is seven years younger than I, so we are of the same generation. I remember when King George VI died and then watching on black and white 1953 TV the coronation of a young Elizabeth II.

Viewing this documentary tribute, I felt as if I were sitting in an armchair beside Prince Charles, chatting easily, alternately chuckling and tearing over the fleeting family images.

I felt so easy with Charles’s unpretentious manner. What could have served as merely a lesson in history for me recalled memories of Sunday evenings past: My brother and I were kids, then. Our family would gather in the living room after a Sunday dinner where we’d draw the shades and douse the lights, the projector illuminating the screen with slides, black and white and color, of family adventures photographed by my father or my uncle. My uncle, in particular, loved taking photos. To watch these slideshows was always exciting for my brother and me. We eagerly anticipated such evenings. Upon these evenings I call now with charmed nostalgia. We were a close family.

Indeed, since our grandparents had been born in the 1880s, my brother and I had rather a Victorian upbringing – not that he adhered to much of it; he was the renegade. I, however, followed, most of the time, that Victorian protocol I was taught. This involves keeping in touch with friends and family, having concern and being supportive, sending RSVPs and thank you notes. Though admittedly I find it hard these days, inundated with information and emails, I do my best. I am, therefore, a relic. I find my typical straightforwardness progressively in time misunderstood, especially by succeeding generations. What I express as a sincere offering is misconstrued as my expecting something from the recipient. These days, who cares? That’s the mantra. The word sincere is not in their dictionaries. They expect that you expect something from them.

Last Sunday the fire siren went off at the hose company a block from my house. A fire truck came to a house a block down the street, it turns out. The firemen put a ladder up to a second story window, opened it and climbed in. There was no smoke. I don’t know what happened. That’s all I saw.

This event reminded me of a few days prior when I had emailed my friend R to see if he was all right. “You’re very quiet,” I said. “You must be into something. When my brother was a kid and was quiet, we knew he was into something.”

R was just busy working; but my brother one day when he was about three had locked himself in the bathroom. Our mother had to call the firemen, who came with a ladder, climbed through the second story window, unlocked the bathroom door and let him out.

While our firemen were attending to the event in the house down the street, three teenagers, two girls and a boy, went from house to house picking flowers from my neighbors’ flowerbeds. They got to my house, “Your flowers are really pretty,” shrilled one girl of my bright, orange-red gladiolus. There were just two blossoms and they bloom gloriously for only about a week. “You’d better not pick them,” I said.

The girl replied, “It’s my mother’s birthday and we’re picking flowers for her.”

“And I’m sure your mother will be pleased with a birthday bouquet you have stolen,” I told her.

She said, “Were the people home?” They got into their car then and drove away.

“Where do these people come from?” asked R.

“Willynilly,” I said. “That’s in Arkansas, I think; in the Ozarks. It’s where Moriarty is from, I believe.”

“Oh, no,” said R. “The Phantom of your blog is more sophisticated than that.”

“Well,” I said, “the other day he told me he was going to visit his family in Willynilly, and he took his banjo and left.

“I think his family is originally from Massachusetts,” I added, by means of complementing his character with an element of historical sophistication. “I think his family retired to the Ozarks.

“Anyway,” I went on, “stealing flowers from a garden someone conscientiously planted for their pleasure and for the beautification of the neighborhood, is like stealing elements of someone’s soul. It’s a metaphor for all the uninformed, callous insensitivity fashionable today, the ‘all about me,’ syndrome. No one wants to take the time to actually think, to gain insight into the situation or to consider history: ‘I’ve got mine and you have yours to get.’ No one bothers to check the facts; they just haul off and spout platitudes. Few care about you; you’re on your own. They prefer looking into the cracked mirror, pleased with the distorted image they see there. It’s like the narrow aisle down a carnival sideshow.”

This is why I have the friends I have. They’re not of this ilk.

“How about the humbug [R’s new favorite word he recites after reading The Wizard of Oz] surrounding Socrates’s death,” said R. “At more than seventy years of age the state condemned him to death for telling the truth.”

Socrates didn’t spout platitudes; rather his method was to ask a series of questions thus encouraging his students to think for themselves, enabling both teacher and student to gain insight into the human condition, to get at the truth. His intention was to lead men to an awareness of their ignorance, out of false common beliefs, using the dialectical – logic and reasoning – in argument and discussion. Ultimately, because Socrates disagreed with those in governmental control, he was accused of being an atheist, corrupting the youth of the city (Athens), and condemned to death. He drank the hemlock and off he went to Elysian Fields.

Well, that was a long time ago. …Wasn’t it? The human condition has not changed, only the superficialities.

Notwithstanding, that’s how my father and my uncle raised me, to use common sense, logic and reasoning, forethought. Many pictures of these incidences flash across my mind. I do my best.

Until recently, nostalgia has been considered a psychological disorder, ever since a Swiss physician coined the term in the 17th century. In Greek: nostos and the accompanying pain algos – a longing to return home. Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. “It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer.” This according to a July 9, 2013 New York Times story by John Tierney, titled “What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows:” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html?pagewanted=all. Moreover, the story states, even though you may be forward thinking, nostalgia serves to give your life roots and continuity. It provides texture to one’s life and gives one strength to move forward. Although nostalgia has its painful side – bittersweet emotion – it makes life more meaningful and death less frightening. Speaking wistfully of the past, studies have found, makes people more optimistic and inspired by the future. It makes us more human, like Odysseus who used memories of family and home to get through hard times. But it’s not homesickness.

This Times story goes on to say, “Nostalgia was originally described as a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause” by Johannes Hoffer, the Swiss doctor who coined the term in 1688. Military physicians speculated that its prevalence among Swiss mercenaries abroad was due to earlier damage to the soldiers’ ear drums and brain cells by the unremitting clanging of cowbells in the Alps.” Heh-heh. I have to snicker. Maybe this speculation is true, after all: nostalgia is caused by the clanging disorder surrounding us today. While bouts of nostalgia may be triggered by an unfortunate event, nostalgizing – researchers distinguish it from reminiscing – helps us feel better, even though the memories aren’t all happy.

A quick way to induce nostalgia is through music, researchers have found. Uh-oh, I’m in trouble. I love music and listen to it nearly all the time; and through that, one may feel warmer. So-o-o, not a preferable summertime preoccupation; although – how could I ever forget my teenage days at the shore (Southern New Jersey) in the summers of 1957-58-59 and the popular songs on the radio: the music was simply a part of the surf and the salt air, the boardwalk, toasted cinnamon buns and canteen dances. Happy memories of physiological comfort contribute to survival, inducing us to seek food and shelter longer. On the other hand, there exists “self-discontinuity” nostalgia, as defined well in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the song by Stephen Stills, letting the past remind us of where we are now, that sense of loss and dislocation. That can make you physically ill; it can make you crazy, delirious perhaps. But this condition is atypical and, generally, people have a healthier sense of self-continuity when they nostalgize frequently.

People who are leery of intimate relationships – “avoidant” – reap small benefits from nostalgia compared with people who crave closeness.

Even people in nursing homes can benefit from nostalgia when they focus on their past in an existential way; that is, “what has my life meant?”

It is therefore important to build “anticipatory nostalgia,” a nostalgia repository of memories to be.

So, plant the flowers and grow them. Even after the blooms have left the stem, the songs their scents and colors sang to you then will provide comforting memories for your future. Nobody can steal these from you.

Journalist John Tierney concludes his story recalling Humphrey Bogart’s quote: “We’ll always have Paris.”

—Samantha Mozart

June 16, 2013 — I have published my new book, To What Green Altar: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal, Volume II, by Samantha Mozart. It is available at Amazon in paperback, soon in e-book format for Kindle and Smashwords.com.

To What Green Altar:
A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal,
Volume II

I took my title from a line in John Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as you probably know, recalled by my inspirational encounter with the Merced River in Yosemite Valley. I immortalized that scene with my photo now on my book cover. Viewing that day, more than 20 years ago, I stand on a low footbridge across the green Merced. Incense cedars flank the river, forming an aisle to the bell-shaped shoulders of Half Dome, sculpted by the glacier so flawlessly 10,000 years before. Half Dome’s granite face stands sentinel at the far end, the apse in the cathedral of the Valley.

When Romantic poet John Keats encountered the Grecian urn, that sylvan historian, that foster child of silence and slow time, he wondered at the carved pattern and the stories immortalized thereon – the paradox of human passions frozen in time, immortality set against impermanence: Who are these brought to the sacrifice and why? What sweet silent tune do the pipers pipe? What are the yearnings of these young lovers? All human passion suspended; all remaining forever young, like Keats himself, who succumbed to tuberculosis at 25.

In that year, 1819, that Keats composed his odes he was making an effort to discuss the relationships among the soul, eternity, nature, and art, using classical Greek art as a metaphor.

Keats was inspired by more than one Grecian urn. He traced an engraving of the Sosibios Vase, though, a Neo-Attic marble volute krater, signed by Sosibios. Sosibios is believed to be one among Athenian sculptors working in Rome around 50 B.C., at the end of the Republic, during an era when Greek sculpture was popular among the Romans. This is Keats’s tracing:

Sosibios Urn Tracing

This is a photo of the same Sosibios urn:

Sosibios Volute – Altar

According to the Louvre description (http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/volute-krater), this vase was once part of the royal collection belonging to Louis XIV, the Sun King, and in whose court classical ballet originated. This urn entered the Louvre in 1797 as confiscated property under the Revolution. It is a marble adaptation of a metal vessel.

This is Louis Quatorze:

Wow. Love his hair and outfit.

Krater is a Greek term defining a vessel used for mixing. Kraters come in several shapes – column, calyx, volute, bell. Some had holes in them, as does this Sosibios urn Keats chose to trace, and were used for fountains or for pouring a liquid. At symposiums the Greeks used kraters for mixing water with wine. In fact, the word symposium is derived from the early Greek sumposion, from sun, “together” + potes, “drinker,” meaning to drink together or, at the least, a convivial discussion.

Speaking of conviviality, Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog, is away currently. He told me he wanted to attend a summer symposiarch seminar up in the Pocono mountains where he would learn to mix wine with water at our blog round table affairs. I told him why bother, why learn to sully the pure character of the wine; nonetheless, he insisted on going, if for no other reason, he said, than to sacrifice himself to the pure mountain greenery.

At Greek symposiums the symposiarch had overall charge, responsible for the ratios of mixing the wine to water suitable to the occasion – 1:3, 1:2, 1:1 – and for overseeing its serving. Drinking wine straight was frowned upon; one who did so was considered a drunkard. —Oh, I don’t know….

The patterns carved on the urn result from the vision of the sculptor; they are illusory scenes: pictures of a life created by the mind of the sculptor. Just so, we sculpt our own lives parallel to our dreams, how we think about phenomena. Therefore, to meet our dreams, we seek opportunities for positive change, our visions hanging suspended until such opportunity arises. But the talent is to recognize the opportunity when it appears before us. We have to keep the door of our minds open. O.K., well maybe a screen door to keep out the flies…. Alas, our personal patterns, frozen in time, sculpted by old programming, old emotional experiences, old hurts, exist in the present as mere illusion. The past mixing with the present like water sullying the wine can cause us, inebriated on illusion, to stumble right past that open door and miss our opportunity. This is tragic.

Bodie Alley
Bodie State Historic Park, Calif.

All of these thoughts filled my mind in Emma’s last days – the relationships among the soul, eternity, nature, and art, the choices I must make thereby. The context of my book, To What Green Altar, encompasses my relationship with Emma at the end of her life, as the Grecian urn encompasses the story of human relationships at the end of the life of the Roman Republic: Where is the music, where are the lost loves, the old friendships, what and for what is this life sacrifice? Is this a sacrifice?

What is the altar? Who or what is the mysterious priest? Why is the altar sylvan green? The answer is pure as white marble in its simplicity: “‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth’ –that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

—Samantha Mozart

May 27, 2013 — I sat on my front porch a few days ago when a big rabbit hopped onto the lawn, came right up to the flower bed in front of the porch, looked straight at me, whereupon I said, “Hello, Bunny,” and then the rabbit casually proceeded to eat the clover. One bold bunny, especially with all the loose dogs and cats in the neighborhood.

I have been Wallie-sitting recently for my friends’ white bichonpoo, Wallie, on two separate long weekends.

When Wallie arrives, he comes with his bag packed with dog food, an array of toys and his little bed. I immediately take out all the toys and toss them around the living room floor. He then carries them upstairs, one-by-one, and that’s where they stay, because that’s where I stay, mostly. He has a knack for matching toy color to rug color, so inevitably I step on them. One night I went rushing up to him, to hug him lying on the couch in the dark – “Wallie, Wallie” – SQUEAK – “what a sweet boy.” Only one of his toys squeaks, thankfully.

Upon his arrival on his first visit, he set up a command post at the top of the stairs, surrounded by his toys, and where, through the window of the front door below, he could reconnoiter the neighborhood and the return of his owners.

I talk to him to tell him what’s going on and what I’m doing; it’s nice to have someone to talk to other than myself; we go for walks where he encounters the chocolate lab, Willa, and they play chase on opposite sides of her fence.

Soon after Wallie arrived the other day for his second visit, I took him, on his long leash, out into the backyard. Instantly he picked up the scent: “Bunny! Bunny! Bunny! BUNNY!” he said, nose to the ground tracking the bunny first to under the hedge and then to the rabbit hole beneath my shed.

There we faced a dilemma: “That’s where the bunny lives,” I said. “I can’t fit down there,” he declared. He looked up at me: “Now what are we gonna do?” He tried every way to figure out how to get to the bunny, until I distracted him.

Once, when it was time to take Wallie out, it was raining. I let him out, on his long leash hooked to his harness, just to the bottom of the back steps so he could piddle while I waited at the top, inside. When he came in he kept trying to shake off the spritz of rain on his coat. I got a small towel and told him to come. “Oh, no, not me,” he said, and stubbornly refused to budge. I used my deep, authoritative voice, “Come!” “Nope,” he said, “I don’t know WHAT color that cape-looking thing is that you’re waving, but I’m not coming.” I had to go to him and dry him off. He loved the massage and felt so much better afterwards, he raced around the house for a minute.

I wanted to know more about this addictively lovable crossbreed, so I researched bichonpoos, sometimes known as poochons. We’re not totally sure what Wallie is, because he is a rescue dog. About the size of a miniature poodle, he certainly exhibits all characteristics of Bichon Frisés and poodles – smart, mellow, energetic, chicken-lover, and this which I read online: “Both are susceptible to small dog syndrome, whereby a dog attempts to become pack leader of its human owners, so care must be taken to establish dominance.” Taking care, it took him no time to establish dominance.

I have trouble remembering the name of the Bichon Frisé breed because, after my years of studying ballet, I get that name confused with the most difficult to master ballet step, brisé volé, without getting your feet tangled mid-leap and falling derriere over dog biscuits.

Here is a good demonstration of the brisé volé if you’re interested in seeing the execution of that step: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpKLTk_J1Dk. This is the Kirov Mariinsky Ballet in 1999, the “Bluebird” Pas de Deux from The Sleeping Beauty, performed by Andrei Batalov and Svetlana Ivanova. Andrei Batalov is considered one of the greatest male ballet dancers ever, and his performance here of this “Bluebird” Pas de Deux, 5:15 minutes into the video for the brisé volés, is one of the best Bluebirds I have seen. Ah, but I have danced into the wings chasing rabbits. Back to Wallie-dog.

A friend, a dog-lover who owns a blue heeler rescue dog, called me a woman of gold for taking care of Wallie. Now, “Woman of Gold” found a tennis ball for Wallie. I bounced it down the steps, he chased it, brought it back upstairs, stubbornly refused to share it, rolled it away, picked it up, tossed it into the air, caught it, played with it at the top of the staircase until — it disappeared. It rolled away from him and fell through the space between the balusters, landing in the hall below. Wallie sat there: “Hmmm….” Woman of Gold had to retrieve it. Then Wallie came downstairs. WoG bounced the ball in place while Wallie ran into the other room to see where it went. He finally figured it out. I tossed it halfway up the stairs where it bounced and he grabbed it mid-flight and took it back upstairs with him. Then he went and chewed on his synthetic bone.

The last time he visited here, he was ASTONISHED to encounter the dog that looked just like him in the long mirror. He stood nonplused, spellbound momentarily and then went on his way, refusing to look at that other dog again. This visit, though, he did use the long mirror to see me, sitting across the room, but did not once look at that other dog.

I laid a fleece blanket on a cushion of the sofa in my studio. So, he can relax near me when I sit at my computer desk, or right up against me when I sit on the sofa to read or watch a movie on my computer. We watched Django Unchained the other night. Like WoG does during some movies, Wallie slept through it but for the part where the dogs barked that captured his attention.

He loves to have his coat brushed and it’s a good bonding measure for the two of us. But I spoiled him royally when I took him up on my bed with me while I watched three hour-long series pieces on Sunday night PBS. I couldn’t just leave him on the floor alone. Later, when I sat on my bed and turned on the TV to catch a moment of news, out of the corner of my eye I saw this white fluffy thing pop up, fleetingly, above the edge of the bed, grab the edge of the mattress with his forepaws, slip off and crash land. Too short to jump up, fortunately for me. Once I turn off the TV he knows it’s time to go to sleep, and he is fine. He’s a very smart dog. Show him something once, he pays attention and he remembers.

Sometimes we just relax and sit out on the porch together, surveying the neighborhood. It’s a pleasant way to pass time with a companion.

Ultimately, Wallie’s owner came to pick him up, and although Wallie greeted me happily when he arrived, on seeing his owner he was so ecstatic, he forgot to say goodbye.

Quiet. The house is empty without him. I miss my little buddy. But, he’ll be back for a ten-day visit in June.

—Samantha Mozart

May 8, 2013 — I enter my blog and sit at my big oak round table, alone. Moriarty pads in and sets an empty wine bottle cloaked in multi-colored wax drippings, remembrances of candles past, in the center of the table. He places a fresh candle, orange, in the neck, pressing it down and twisting it a bit making sure it is firmly affixed. “The flames never stop burning,” he says. Then he places a small clock on the table. The hands are missing. I look at him. The Phantom of My Blog is an enigmatic creature.

“Where’ve you been?” he says. “You haven’t been at your blog in a while.” His hair is disheveled. He looks like he’s just spent an hour in conversation with Dexter Filkins and Charlie Rose, similar hairstyles, looking like they’ve just arisen from an afternoon nap at the last minute, rushed to the studio and forgotten to brush their hair.

“You’re staring at me,” he says. “Where were you?”

“Contemplating your hair,” I reply.

“No, while you were gone; where were you?” He sits down.

“I’ve been sleeping a lot lately and I feel like, well, chicken soup – liquidy. I don’t even know what that means, but it fits; and tired. My head feels heavier than my body, which is saying something, and too thick to get thoughts out of. Allergies, I suppose. I am going to make some chicken soup once I get done here at my blog.

“My friend Susan* wrote about her experiences climbing Kilimanjaro and I was lying in bed reading it,” I go on.

“I already made the soup,” Moriarty says. “I anticipated you might want it. It’s got carrots and onions and fresh ginger in it, besides other stuff. I’ll go heat some up for us.” He pushes back his chair and disappears into the kitchen.

He returns with two steaming bowls of soup, placing them on the table before us. He lights the candle.

I begin telling him of my experiences the past few weeks. He pulls out a large, brightly colored foil bag and begins crackling it to open it. It is annoying. I stop talking.

“Creggies,” he declares. “Crunchy veggie pieces for our soup.” I wait while he gets the bag open. I am getting a headache. He offers me the bag. I scoop some out with my fingers and drop them into my soup – bright, colorful pieces; they are good.

“O, maid of beauteous tresses, and eyes of soft caresses, your glance is all beguiling and your lips are ever smiling….” He sings. “Ketèlbey, ‘In the Mystic Land of Egypt,’” he says. “It’s on your playlist, number 30. Let us float together, forever and forever, to some far distant isle, a-down the mystic Nile.”

“I love that piece,” I say. “It’s so-o-o British Imperialist pomp. A whole movie runs through that music. It’s like watching a Pathé newsreel of the British parading through their conquests. One could write a thick novel about just the British comings and goings in Egypt. It could start with Napoleon who snapped British eyes wide open in 1798, when he defeated the Marmeluke Army at the Battle of the Pyramids, to the importance of controlling Egypt as means to protect their precious India.”

“That story would be never ending,” Moriarty postulates. “It’s all interconnected. And it’s impermanent. It seems beginingless. Relative to your last post, written before your head got funny, Tamerlane invaded Syria, defeating the Marmeluke Army in the Battle of Aleppo on October 30, 1400. He sacked Aleppo and Damascus. Marmeluke is said to be an Arabic designation for slaves. Just call me Marmeluke. Want more soup?”

“You’re not,” I say. “A slave; you’re not. Anyhow, how could you be a slave when you’re a phantom? A phantom slave wouldn’t be of much use to anyone, I should think.”

He crackles open the foil again, tilts the bag and dumps more Creggies into his soup. “Little boats,” he describes, “floating down the soup, past the beguiling carrots, carrying exotic ginger spice.

“I like the kiss scene,” he goes on, sailing into the next port of thought, “the mother’s kiss. While you’ve been in bed climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, I’ve been reading Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust. He wrote it in 1913. So, as this year marks the hundredth anniversary. I thought I would read it – volume one of In Search of Lost Time. The young boy has to go up to his room to bed early without kissing his mother goodnight because she is hosting a dinner party for an important guest. He agonizes over the separation and its coming duration spanning across the long, deep night until morning. She will not come up to his room to kiss him later. He gazes out at her and the dinner party guests from his window. How can he reach her? He contrives to write her a note and send it to her at table through a servant. Once she reads the words poured from his heart, she will come. The servant delivers the note. The mother reads it. She never comes.”

“Why do you like that?” I ask him. “It’s sad. It makes me cry.”

“Because it’s true,” he says. “It’s how life happens.”

“Therefore, by virtue of it’s being true, it is also false,” I add.

“Sometimes it is what it is….”

“Well, I like Proust,” I reply. “His long sentences and flowing rhythms are easy to acclimate to. Most people don’t want to read that kind of deep, thoughtfully dense writing these days. They want their reading served in colorful little pieces, like watching a TV show splattered with commercials every six minutes. It takes patience to read writing styled like Proust’s – a luxurious indulgence in patience.”

“Anyway, how can you search for and find lost time when time doesn’t exist?” he asks.

“What?” I look up from my soup. My head feels lighter and the headache has retreated. I wipe my chin with the paper napkin he has provided.

“Well, look,” he says, waving his napkin around in large aerial circles, attempting to enlighten me of his thought. Suddenly he finds himself waving a flaming torch. The napkin has caught fire in the candle flame. He sinks it in the remains of his soup.

“At bottom,” he says, “there is no mechanistic physical foundation for the cosmos, implied by the quantum theory. None of this exists. None of that happened. The universe closes in on itself, reversing what was just there, destroying it. What is created is uncreated, micro and macro entangle, macro destroying micro: the issue of decoherence.”

“So, then,” I ruminate, “what if the history we just spoke of is all humanity’s mass-minded perception? And what is humanity? How does quantum theory apply to consciousness, as well as to matter?”

“They are two complementary aspects of one reality. Observe,” he says. “No experience takes place outside of consciousness. If something exists outside of consciousness, we won’t know it.”

“Mystical,” I muse.

“The mysterious edge,” he says, “where micro processes are transformed into macro processes.

“I read a scientific paper** on this,” he explains. “Make a footnote at the end of our conversation, so our many followers will know if I interpreted it correctly. They may have some enlightening thoughts on this issue, the wholeness perspective of the Theory of Everything.”

We arise from the table. He pinches out the candle flame. Smoke rises from the extinguished flame in entangled spirals; further up the spiral, it dissipates. In the kitchen together, we wash the bowls and utensils. Together we exit my blog, going our separate ways into the night. We have left the blog empty, ready for the next reader to react and act upon it.

—Samantha Mozart
with Moriarty

*Susan Scott: “In Praise of Lilith, Eve & the Serpent in the Garden of Eden,” available by clicking on the icon here in the right sidebar.

**Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol. 14. JournalofCosmology.com, 2011. How Consciousness Becomes the Physical Universe. Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Deepak Chopra, M.D.

HISTORIC DISTRICT, April 4, 2013 — What is it that’s said about something being a walk in the park? I walk through my studio in the dark at night where my Mac computer resides, sleeping with it’s host of attendants – the modem, the external hard drive, USB ports, surge protector and their array of winking and blinking red, green and white indicator lights. It looks like a landing strip. Mac itself is breathing, its pulsating light indicating life.

As a writer I revel in my ace access to research on the Internet – a couple of clicks, google in a half word, the whole word magically appears; google a phrase and it even asks you if you really meant plumbing puddle or did you mean plum pudding? Lo, a litany of pages of potential erudition pre-researched and published – even way back in the oil lamp days – by someone, who somehow got interested in, for example, the proprieties of tea rituals aboard a flying hippodrome in the Steampunk-Époque.

What a marvelous disposition are these treasures docked at my fingertips, the packet boats to tomorrow.

Not too long ago, I was given a pre-owned iPod Touch. Magnificent. I have yet been able to get it to access the Internet. It keeps telling me to enter my password: I have no idea what that could be and, based on zigzagging research across the Internet, no hope of finding it, even of setting it, of shooting off an email to someone sitting on the other side of the screen to say that I have forgotten yet another password – or user name. Mystifying. Undaunted, I spent a recent Sunday afternoon being quite pleased with myself for finally learning how to work “call waiting” on my home phone.

I was basking in my grand achievement at mastering this new technological particle with what seemed to me the speed produced by the Large Hadron Collider. Then my daughter phoned me that she is sending me their webcam so I can Skype. All my friends are Skyping each other around the world now. I feel left out. They make Skype dates, like play dates. I was so thrilled last autumn to get a used bicycle so finally I could join my neighborhood friends who spend balmy days out riding their bikes. Soon I’ll soar into the Skyping age.

Continuing our phone conversation that I took via call waiting, my ear collided with my daughter’s explaining that they are giving me their webcam because Skyping is passé – my two granddaughters, 9 and 12, use FaceTime on their iPads or iPhones while simultaneously talking on their iPhones and running around the house engaged in other activities, presumably without colliding with one another. Massive to ponder: I wonder if I will arrive at this juncture – I could use the exercise, and quite possibly this fortress of mental multitasking will hold dementia at bay.

Bits of this digitally packeted information dissemination leave me in the clouds. When my brother and I were kids, Emma would feed our family Spam sometimes. Now, even in my most far-flung imagination, I cannot fathom peeling the aluminum top off a can of Spam. Recently, leaving my home early one warm sunny afternoon, I dexterously tried to sidestep the pleasant couple headed right for me, disseminating pamphlets. “Have you received the invitation?” asked the woman. I reflected on the many invitations I have received over the course of my lifetime: “Yes, I have,” I stated, pleasantly. She called after me what fun I’d have at the “thing,” as I pleasantly continued walking down the sidewalk. I’ve determined that the way to address these such information disseminators – since I am not at liberty to press delete – is like a cat: you kind of rub past the humans while being pleasantly dismissive.

My friend sent me an email yesterday. I replied and then saw another from her requesting information. I thought that I had already fulfilled her request; but, then, maybe I only meant to and had forgotten. So I replied saying that I would get her the information in a matter of hours. The instant I clicked on send, I noticed her email was dated July. I had sent her the information. How did that old email arise from the depths, lurking beneath 25 pounds of other emails? It reminded me of the summer I worked at the Florida farm stand and was lifting tomatoes out of a carton, neatly stacking them on the display table, when I reached into the bottom of the box without looking and came up with a rat snake. Mistake. Apparently, I need to investigate my email box and clean it out. Clearly, dredging up a July email was due to a misclick.

New York Times journalist Gina Kolata published a March 13, 2013 story titled, “So You’re Extinct? Scientists Have Gleam in Eye.” I haven’t read it, but you can, if you’d like, by following this link. The story leads with: “It could be years before scientists succeed in bringing species back from extinction, but they are thinking of ways to give new life to creatures like woolly mammoths and frogs.”

Sometimes I feel extinct. I like hiking high up in the mountains, like the Eastern Sierra Nevada in Mammoth Lakes, California. Mammoth was named for the woolly mammoths, whose bones have been found in the area. Wandering in the mountains I love hearing the winds relay messages across the tops of the tall conifers, and rounding a bend to come upon a crystal waterfall.

I find too much screen time to be over-stimulating. Too, I’d rather turn off the TV with its flock of talking heads and watch the flock of speckled birds outside my window jostling with each other over who gets to eat the most red berries off the dogwood tree, or the squirrel hanging by its hind toenails while stretched down to the limb below to grab a kernel for a mid-afternoon snack. Right there in front of me is a window into another world, even without Skype or FaceTime. And when my mind gets tired and I gaze trancelike through that window, the squirrel pauses and says, “Hey. What are YOU lookin’ at…?”

—Samantha Mozart

March 26, 2013 —O.K., let me set the stage here: First, the soundtrack – a piece of music I heard for the first time, I think, last night: 19th-century French organist and composer Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 5 in F minor, the toccata movement. You’ll find this piece on my “The Dream” playlist in the right sidebar, number 28. Those few of us who like to listen to classical music, the allegro molto tempo, while cleaning house, listening to this piece could deep clean our entire houses in five minutes.

Friends and others have questioned alternative ways of caring for an incapacitated loved one – keeping loved ones at home, placing them in nursing homes or frail care facilities, or a combination of solutions. There is no set right or wrong way, as long as the caregiver’s heart is in the right place. Loved ones in advance of their frailties may have expressed, even prepared for, their choices. Deciding what is best is an individual choice, a very personal choice. No matter the choice or the situation, you feel trapped – trapped by the patient, by the healthcare professionals, by your family, by yourself. As my writer friend T.J. Banks says, “You can’t help feeling as though your life has been taken away from you.” The situation bodes ill for other close relationships. I, personally, could not imagine having a man in my life while taking care of Emma. I often thought about it and wondered what I would have done with him.

Some of us discussed this dilemma last night on my LinkedIn women writers caregivers discussion board.

Here is where I lose it and vent: Read my book, Begins the Night Music: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal, Volume I and coming soon, To What Green Altar? – A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal, Volume II, or read my blog.

I set up my LinkedIn discussion board a year ago, March 12, as a place for caregivers to vent, for, after all, none other than caregivers wants to listen; and we listen and support unconditionally. I, so far, had not vented. I suppose I have been too focused on dealing with the fallout of my mother’s passing, all the details to attend to, reintroducing myself to myself; and, besides, I was tired, just plain tired. Of course, you don’t recognize these indications until after they have occurred; I think mostly because you are still in the caregiver mode.

So, I vented, and I recapitulate Emma’s and my story, start to finish, here, for my blog, especially in case you are new to our story. I debated whether or not to publish it. Heretofore, I have spread the story of our journey across two years and in two books, served it like tea with milk and sugar and occasional rough biscuits. This encapsulation is raw. It may be hard to swallow. I write this simply to tell my story; it is like yours yet it will differ from yours. And, after all, it is not about me. It just is. It’s the place where I was, and the dark place where Emma lived during a relatively brief portion of her 97-year life. It’s what happened and now it’s past. I do not wish to go all back into it. This is it. It is finished. I let it go; I move on. This post, as the toccata in Widor’s organ symphony, is composed as the postlude.

Emma thought she would die at 72 of a stroke, like her mother. So, she spent all her money. Nursing home care would have to have been paid for by the state. I have heard horror stories of nursing homes here – patients lie in their urine all night long, and worse. I have visited nursing homes. I walk down the halls and see the patients lying in their beds, alone in their rooms. I cannot begin to describe the hollowness I feel – talk about a view within a room . . ..

People suffering from dementia/Alzheimer’s definitely need social interaction. How fully it helped my mother – it stimulated her, brightened her countenance, made her smile and happy. Even when we were in the room and not talking directly to her, she knew we were there and was as content as was possible.

I came to Delaware to visit family and realized my mother needed help. All my clothes, my library of books and phonograph records, my guitar sheet music, all I have written pre-computer, furniture, everything, was and still is in storage in California. I had no winter coat, even. I had to stay and care for my mother. There was no one else – my brother, living nearby then, rarely came to visit her. My daughter was in California. Emma’s other grandchildren were occupied with jobs, children and grandchildren, and lived at least an hour away. Ultimately I had to give up working, so I had no income other than Social Security. Emma received Social Security and a miniscule pension. She was 91.

I cared for her by myself, no aides from October 2001 until November 2008 when I got five hours a week “respite” care. Our car died. I could not afford to buy another one. Kind friends offered me rides or I walked to the store and became quite adept at packing Emma’s small shopping cart.

Simply, no other way existed to do this. We had neither insurance nor other monies to pay for help of any kind. The state allocated the respite care funds from federal Medicaid grants.

I got Emma a cane, and then a walker; I ran and got neighbors to help me pick her up when she fell. I tried to get more state aid or other aid. Most agencies did not return my calls, nor did the state.

I bathed my mother, changed her, fed her, watched her nose run into her food, rolled her out of bed, pried her hands loose from her bed posts so I could dress her, washed her bed linens – king size sheets, blankets, fluffy comforter often daily; slid in her poop in the hallway in my bare feet. I would make plans to go out to the store, only to have the aide not show up. I went to the mall once – once – only to come home and find that my mother had been left alone for two hours.

Finally, having been turned down by Hospice on the first try, we got Hospice, in October 2009. Eight months before Emma died, we rose to the top of the list in August 2011, after several people had died, for State Attendant Care Services, which meant that I had help 30 hours a week, seven days, including a driver. Emma became the employer; I, as her agent, administered the hiring, firing, wages and taxes. Federal grant money to the state was put into an account administered by a nonprofit organization, and I hired help. And one of those aides was fine until the day she sent her evil twin.

In the end, I had people (aides from hell) creeping around my house in the middle of the night to deal with Emma’s agitation. There were aides I told to leave and never come back. Even those words they didn’t comprehend. I sat up all night one night with Emma, so agitated she was climbing the walls and trying to get out of her hospital bed. “How did I get here? How do I get out of here? Can anybody tell me how to find the subway home? Bob! Bob! Where’s Bob? [my brother] Mother! Mother!” She had gone all the way back. She was calling for her mother. I sat beside her all night and held her hand. This was the only thing that calmed her. I told her it was O.K., that she could go.

My social worker/writer friend Beatrice Hale is right – “Grieving begins before diagnosis, and goes on long after.” You spend years watching your loved one slowly slip away. By the time your loved one passes it is such a relief, a release for you both.

To put Emma in a nursing home would have required Medicaid to pay for it (state aid) and that required having a Miller Trust. I would have had to put nearly all Emma’s income into this Miller Trust fund. That money would be applied towards paying for the nursing home care. Moreover, in the end, since Medicaid likes to be repaid anything still owed, they would have taken our home in payment.

Now, of course, that my mother’s income is gone and we needed both to pay the mortgage (she bought the house in 2002; I added my name to the deed in 2011), and other household expenses, I need to find a way to make up that income to pay the mortgage.

I fully realize that I could be in a much worse situation. I am most fortunate to have a roof over my head, to have good friends, loyal friends and to have had such extraordinary help in the last few years. I really do have a Team of Not-So Rivals, friends who are smarter than I. I have faith, one of the things I learned as a caregiver. If I didn’t have faith, trust, I would sink. Maybe I sound Voltairean: “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Many people have it much worse than I, way worse. I am blessed.

Nonetheless, let me say this: If you have money/insurance to pay for your care, then use it. Decide now what you want for the end of your life; talk it over with your family; put it in writing; get all your legal work in order.

Those who are nurses, healthcare aides, social workers dedicated to their jobs exceed life’s call to duty. I don’t know how they do it. They are extraordinary beings.

Ah, that organ toccata is invigorating. Possibly I’ve drunk too much toccata juice. This needed to be said; this story needed to be replayed. People need to know. This isn’t a walk in the park. My writer friend T.J. says caregivers have that look – I think maybe almost of shell shock. And it does change you, as we caregivers know. So, what do you give a caregiver getting to know herself again after her loved one has passed? T.J. suggests, “Get her a ‘pamper-me’ sort of basket – soaps, books, candy, whatever you think she would like. After all, she’s just starting out on a journey to find herself again.”

Moriarty wants to know if he can come out from under the desk now.

—Samantha Mozart

March 14, 2013 — I sat on my front porch one recent night watching the moon rise from behind a tall, old conifer, through the breaking clouds, reflecting on a friendship, the potential of losing that friendship just where the night goes deepest and darkest, in the middle of a silent woods.

Each of my friends is special, each is unique, none is of the cookie-cutter genre. And this particular friend means a lot to me; a very special being. I had been deeply hurt. I felt alienated, my friend remote. It seemed the bridge had collapsed. I wanted to bond the schism. So I enlisted my brilliant Team of Not-So Rivals and endeavored to understand, to see both sides, to be watchful of what I learn from this situation. Oh, where is my shipload of brains?

Listen to the soundtrack to this story, “The Water Goblin.” Go to “The Dream” player in the right sidebar, scroll down and click on no. 26.

Came Kevin, my surrogate son-in-law. He dug direct and deep below the surface, meticulously lifted the pieces one-by-one out into the broad sunlight, gently dusted them off, sorted and ordered them into a whole picture. His arch support resolved my distress and helped preserve the relationship from crumbling into a messy little mound of desert dust in the wasteland of my mind. He told me to become Team Samantha – “Team Samantha consists of your heart, your brain, your dignity, your ability to do the right things, and include in this team, anyone or anything (i.e. hobbies, tea with friends, brisk walks.) that will be conducive to your recovery and happiness,” he wrote in an email.

Truly, I was stumbling through another dark night of my soul, as my writer friend T.J. suggested, and I was about to fall and break something. I wanted to emerge soon into the sunlit, fragrant field of, well, irises. Lilies are the usual outcome of dark nights of the soul; yet, I prefer irises, though they are not as fragrant. Irises, especially the deep purple ones, symbolize spiritual evolution and healing. Irises waving in the sun were the place I wanted to lay my head.

In fact, I had chosen to embark on this dark journey; I had been standing on the dock waiting for the boat to take me to face the dark side of myself, to view that hidden side, at least a phase; not all, of course, because that darkness is as vast as a starless, moonless night sky. You might expect I thought I was going on one of those Disneyland/Disneyworld adventure excursions. This Dark Night might have to do with pirates, but not of the Caribbean sort. I thought I could be brave. I thought if I understood that part of myself, I’d be better able to understand that part of another. I should have carried a torch.

When I felt bolstered having processed Kevin’s thoughts, I emailed my friend saying I wanted to clear up the misperceptions between us. My friend replied that there was no problem between us.

I emailed a follow-up: “Please call me when it is convenient to you.”

My friend phoned. Our conversation was long. We discussed our mutual misperceptions. I cried. Light came. Now there is no problem between us.

My sociologist/writer friend Beatrice, in email, put it best. “Good for you getting clarity with your … friend – that’s so important, and so many people fail to do it and a valuable treasury of friendship falls away.”

I could not allow this valuable treasury of friendship to fall away.

Then I dreamed one of my Dark Night Dreams: this is the third in a series this year, one just before Emma’s passing and two since. This one: Alone at Night in The Dark City. It is very dark. I can barely see where I am going. The neighborhood is not safe. I walk along a smooth sidewalk, past a dim churchyard bounded by a black, wrought iron fence. I cautiously step down three or four broad steps and cross an alley. Coming toward me in the alley, all alone, is a little girl, dressed in a little dress and carrying her dolly. She is about four years old. I hope she will be safe. I am not in a position to take on the responsibility of looking after this little girl. I hope her mother knows she is out alone in the dark. I need to reach my destination to fulfill my current obligations by deadline. I have no purse, no keys, no jacket; I am just me, I carry nothing. I climb the few gray-painted steps to the gray-painted front porch of the house at the end of the row by the alley, across from the church. Mother (Emma) is there, inside. She is hard of hearing. She will not hear me knock nor ring the bell. Without a key, how will I get in? I bang on the door, three times with the flat palm of my hands. Kellie, my daughter, is there, inside, too. She lets me in. Emma and Nana (Emma’s mother) are there, all lined up in the living room – we make four generations of women on my mother’s side of the family.

There’s always more after your loved one is gone, just as my caregiver writer friends have advised. Your loved one, after passing, will appear out of the darkness to haunt you, periodically and unexpectedly. Would that we had worked out these things between us, kindly, when our loved one was still in human form.

Meanwhile, Moriarty returned from his Voyeurs Congress in Miami. I encountered the Phantom up in the cupola of my blog. He was wearing a green coat and red boots. It struck me as odd. He stood gazing out the window, mesmerized by something down across the meadow, at the stream.

“How was your Voyeurs Congress?” I asked him. I caught a whiff of his nutmeggy scent. “You didn’t seem to get much sun color down there in Miami. Did it rain the whole time you were there?”

His comment was nebulous: “We watched each other watch each other.” Then he pointed down to the stream. “There’s something in it,” he spoke in low tones, like Jerry Seinfeld’s “Low Talker.” “Look, there’s something bobbing up and down, in and out of the water.”

I looked. From our distance, it appeared an eerie creature.

“It’s the water goblin,” he half whispered. Then, upping the volume a notch, “Why don’t you play that music for me,” he requested. And so I have. The music is a gossamer piece I discovered only this past week. “The Water Goblin” (Vodnik) is a symphonic poem by Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. (I know: Vodnik sounds more like an integral symphonic component of an alcoholic beverage.) Dvorak composed the music in 1896 based on the poem Vodnik, originally published with the English title “The Water-Fay.” The poem was found in a collection, Kytice – “Bouquet” of poems written by Czech historian, poet and writer Karel Jaromir Erben (1811-1870): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Jarom√≠r_Erben. The story of the water goblin is haunting. I copy and paste the Wikipedia version here:

Vodník tells a story in four parts of a mischievous water goblin who traps drowning souls in upturned teacups.

A water goblin is sitting on a poplar by the lake, singing to the moon and sewing a green coat and red boots for his wedding soon to come.

A mother tells her daughter of a dream she had about clothing her daughter in white robes swirling like foaming water and with pearls of tears hiding deep distress around her neck. She feels this dream was a presentiment and warns her daughter not to go to the lake. Despite the mother’s warnings, the daughter is drawn to the lake as if possessed and leaves for the lake to do her laundry. The moment she hands down her first garment into the water, the bridge on which she was sitting collapses.

As the water engulfs her she is abducted by the malevolent water goblin who lives there.

He takes her to his underwater castle and marries her with black crayfish for the groomsmen and fishes for her bridesmaids. After the birth of their first child, the abducted wife sings it a lullaby, which enrages the water goblin. She tries to calm him down and pleads to be allowed ashore to visit her mother once. He gives in on three conditions: She is not to embrace a single soul, not even her mother; she has to leave the baby behind as a hostage; and she will return by the bells of the evening vespers.

The reunion of mother and daughter is very sad but full of love. When evening falls the distraught mother keeps her daughter and forbids her to go even when the bells are ringing. The water goblin becomes angry, forsakes his lair in the lake and thumps on the door ordering the girl to go with him because his dinner has to be made. When the mother tells him to go away and eat whatever he has for dinner in his lair, he knocks again, saying his bed needs to be made. Again the mother tells him to leave them alone, after which the goblin says their child is hungry and crying. To this plea the mother tells him to bring the child to them. In a furious rage the goblin returns to the lake and through the shrieking storm screams that pierce the soul are heard. The storm ends with a loud crash that stirs up the mother and her daughter. When opening the door the mother finds a tiny head without a body and a tiny body without a head lying in their blood on the doorstep of her hut.

I am whole, thankfully, head attached to body, at least – Team Samantha. I have stuffed my water goblin back into his bottle and corked it. Maybe he will dissolve.

I saw the water goblin arise from the watery depths where my old emotions reside, those memories you think you long ago flushed downstream, only to have them rise up out of the bottom muck just when you least expect, and you have to deal.

It is my understanding that upon encountering water goblins and their ilk, when you view them as nothing, nothing but illusions, negative attachments, let them go and have faith, they will dissipate and not return. I have experienced this phenomenon, myself – now and beginning palpably during Emma’s last year of life: I learned to have faith, to trust. I have taken only a baby step upon the deck of omniscience; but think what a relief it would be to step away from the controls.

When Moriarty and I looked more closely, we discovered his water goblin to be a small school of trout.

—Samantha Mozart

March 1, 2013 — Moriarty is out of town. The pale Phantom of My Blog is attending a Voyeurs Congress in Miami. As he went out the door, I told him I wanted to hear all about it when he comes back. He turned halfway to look at me, hand on luggage cart, other hand holding the door open, and told me that upon his return to my blog he will not comment. He said the event promises to be a quiet affair and that participants will spend most of their time sequestered.

Meanwhile back at the blog, speaking of affairs, my friend R asked me to write about relationships. Given my lack of experience in relationships, I viewed him pensively across the candlelit tables laid with theories and accepted his proposition.

Before I sit down, I will tell you that in my relationships I don’t care if you are the Pope, I allow zero tolerance for patronization, condescension, control, or lack of interest to hear my thoughts. But if you tell me you don’t want to hear it, then I’ll leave you alone. Treating me like a child, or like someone else, someone I am not, as a trophy friend, with any lack of dignity and respect, will send our relationship up in smoke. Strive to know me for who I am, and I will strive equally towards you.

I don’t burn bridges. I keep an open door and an open mind. People can change; the act could have been due to a simple misunderstanding. Too, perfect as I am, there is a micro chance that I could absentmindedly treat someone disrespectfully. I would hope the person would tell me, for I would not have meant to do so.

Straightforward communications and direct questioning map the shortest route to understanding. Caring and gentleness cushion the journey. I do not play mind games, I do not pout. I say what I mean, that is all. Sometimes I may not make myself clear, unwittingly – you know, like I know what I said; how could you not? But, mind games? Life is confusing, complex and difficult enough. I rarely get angry; frustrated, maybe, but that’s because I don’t understand. Once I understand, my frustration ceases.

I seek nothing more from you than your companionship and support – and laughter. I may not agree with you on every issue, but I value your thought, nonetheless. I choose to abide in a home with windows on all sides, so I can view things from various perspectives. I like the cupola of this blog – I can get a good overview of things.

And I do try to keep in touch. A good friend told me years ago that she puts much effort into keeping in touch with her friends. Good advice.

Emails comprise a terrible way to communicate. Misunderstandings abound via emails: “No, I wasn’t angry; I didn’t mean it that way; my intonation was like this, not like that; I was not shouting – my caps lock is stuck; not thinking, I simply left out a word intrinsic to meaning.” It’s much better to talk to someone in person; then you can tell what he or she is thinking. Second best is talking on the phone, then at least you can hear the person’s tonal.

I wonder how well people communicated back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they wrote letters and mailed them far away, across land or across the sea. If you mistakenly or absentmindedly with your quill or pen wrote something that left the recipient angry or deeply hurt, or maybe you just ran out of ink, couldn’t finish and wanted to get the letter off, given the protracted delivery time, weeks or months would pass before you could write back your reassurance that you unwittingly made a mistake. By then, the person could be dead – or married to someone else.

Occasionally the caldron of a relationship may need to be upended to clear it of refuse; I believe in cleaning out the cause for the misunderstanding, without blaming one another, listening, being willing to change, not just superficially smiling and reconciling; rather, confronting the issue. Deeply discussing the cause, being honest, clears it out and strengthens the relationship.

This that I’ve written so far sounds like a contract. But, little that I know of relationships, these ingredients I follow I believe combine to serve most relationships well.

My aunt and uncle made a pact that they would never go to bed angry at one another. They had a great marriage.

My writer/sociologist friend Beatrice in New Zealand wrote on our LinkedIn writers caregivers group discussion today that it’s taken her until her seventies “to learn to appreciate the people we are, rather than demand to be the people we are not,” and that maybe that is the essence of forgiveness.

My writer friend T.J. seconded Beatrice and suggested a “wonderful book … called Forgiveness: A Bold Choice for a Peaceful Heart. It’s by Robin Casarjian, who was herself a rape victim in her early 20s and who later began doing workshops and lectures on the subject of forgiveness,” said T.J., adding that it’s a very wise book, definitely worth the read and keeps her from getting on her high horse too often.

Oh, I don’t know. I like to ride that high horse at times. But, seriously, no sense in riding the horse to death: in my seventies, I have begun to believe that when we forgive ourselves we place fewer expectations upon others. Therefore, we more readily forgive others.

Oh, and as for voyeuring here? I welcome your presence. I know you are here or have been here – I can smell your cologne, the garlic from the fabulous Italian dish you just ate, or see your fingerprints in the dust. Do me a favor, though, and leave a flower, a tear, a smile or a hug and kiss at the gate, will you? In fact, pour yourself a glass of wine and venture out across the field, amble down by the stream and pet the blue deer and her fawn, Batik. See if the irises are getting ready to bloom. No matter what, I am always glad for your visit.

—Samantha Mozart