Category Archives: Dementia Caregiving Journals

February 20, 2013 — I see that Nora Ephron’s play, Lucky Guy, is in production on Broadway, at the Broadhurst Theater. Her friend Tom Hanks will play Mike McAlary, the New York muckraking columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his columns about New York police officers’ brutalization of Abner Louima. McAlary died later that year of colon cancer. He was 41. Nora Ephron died in June 2012. She was 71, my age.

I don’t remember Mike McAlary, but I do remember Nora Ephron. She was one of my favorite writers, and she wrote one of my favorite movies, “Sleepless in Seattle.” I’m so glad it had a happy ending, an affair to remember. I think I will remember Nora Ephron a long time. She seemed to have always a smile on her face. I think we could have been friends. Hanks and Ephron were good friends. He said he liked to hang with her, one of the reasons he is doing the play. He said about missing her, “It’s terrible, horrible.” So now he will have to hang with her in second place, “hanging with the essence of Nora as opposed to Nora herself.” (I read this today and watched the video interview in a New York Times story written by Patrick Healy: http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/theater/tom-hanks-in-lucky-guy-his-broadway-debut.html?hp.)

When my grandmother was in her sixties, I remember her sitting in a chair in the living room and saying wistfully, “All my friends are dead.” I’ve never forgotten that. It is one of the reasons I value my friendships so closely. I haven’t forgotten my grandmother; I haven’t forgotten either of my grandmothers, nor any of my family members that have gone on ahead of me.

They gave me such a secure childhood and I miss that security. Moreover, they were fun. We laughed a lot. They were storytellers, and their stories were funny. I seemed always to have a smile on my face when we visited. I looked forward to every visit. I miss the humor and the laughter.

Last evening, I had just put a chicken potpie in the oven. The warmth from the oven fended off the darkness outside and the cold wind blowing right through the clapboard walls of this Victorian house. So I felt all warm and secure. The doorbell rang. I thought it was some stranger blown up onto my porch, like the neighborhood trash in the corner of my flowerbed, circulating pamphlets to hand out. To my delight, standing there was my mother’s superb and caring healthcare aide of three years. She had just finished her workday caring for a dementia patient who had reached forward, gotten her in a tight grip and ripped the buttons off the front of her coat. We shared stories and warmed up over a glass of wine. (We each had our own glass, mind you.)

I am so very glad she keeps in touch, a sincere, caring friend, because some of my friends have died, too. I miss them very much. I wish I could pick up the phone or turn to them and say something. When I think of them, is that like posting a thought on the wall of the universe, and somewhere they’ll pick it up? I miss many friends whom I presume are still living. The winds of change over the years drove us apart. I have forgotten none of them. Some I connect with on Facebook after years gusting by like lifetimes. It’s like, “So, hey, how’re ya doing in this lifetime?” It’s very cool.

At times I walk into Emma’s bedroom, look at her king-size bed with its white comforter and white eyelet-ruffled pillowcases, and I sense them there, Emma and her little dog, Jetta. I miss them. Recently I was very sad about the loss of a friend. I sat down to relax and suddenly I cried. Then I felt a comforting presence. It was unmistakably Emma. I dried my tears. I felt better. I feel the presence of various people from time to time; often at that moment they’ll call. This was the feeling of Emma. Sometimes when I was very sad about something, she would comfort me sympathetically. There’s nothing like a mother’s comfort. I thought Emma had moved on, true to her character; but I guess she saw my need and stopped back for a moment. Of course, I will never forget her beautiful face, nor Jetta’s sweet little face, nor that of her apricot toy poodle, BeeGee, whose untimely death at age four preceded Jetta’s arrival.

Of course, some faces we encounter in life we’re glad to have forgotten. Others, not so.

Losing a friend who is living is not only terrible, horrible, it is also tragic, you know, like Romeo and Juliet, but the characters are still living. I have lost a couple of friends during the past year in this manner, over what I perceive as a horribly perverted rearrangement of words. It is despairing to hang with someone over the years watching them slowly die; it is traumatic to lose one over insensitivity and misunderstanding. It’s as if the relationship leapt from the platform in front of an oncoming train. In either case, that loss leaves me feeling bereft.

My writer friend Susan Scott (author of the book “In Praise of Lilith, Eve & the Serpent in the Garden of Eden”) forwarded my blog link to a woman friend whose mother has a form of dementia. This friend read my blog and, in turn, forwarded the link to a male friend named John. He picked up on a phrase in Thomas Wolfe’s poem, in the left sidebar of my blog, prefacing his novel, “Look Homeward, Angel” – the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth, likening it to the mental prison of Alzheimer’s/dementia.

John read my blog and emailed his adult children. His parents, too, suffer from some form of dementia.

Just here as I write this, I smell something nutmeggy; then, a hand on my shoulder. It is Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog. I turn and look up at him. “You’d remember this face anywhere, right?’ he says.

“Oh, how could I forget,” I reply. He is leaning in close, reading my computer screen.

“Tell them the man said this,” says Moriarty, pointing to a line: “‘The woman writes exceedingly well.’” (Thank you, John. May you always travel in the light.) I will be working at my writing into this evening, so Moriarty goes off to make dinner – a piquant Chinese affair, he labels it.

This father in poetic email ruminates to his children, “Will I eventually recede from life worth living in similar fashion as the writer describes?” By then, “it won’t be a simple manner of prior choices in life and their later consequences, nor of having asked politely ‘Please, Sir, may I be allowed not to walk into that dark recess?’ The journal speaks to unease, a recognition this could afflict us … Her account of her mother’s cognitive decline resembles” what John’s friend’s mother and his parents are going through, though each in different ways. Indeed, the unique experiences of dementia sufferers differ within the commonalities of the condition according to their life experiences and genetic makeup.

The sufferers become forgotten faces, in a way. They don’t know where they are, wonder how they got there, plead to get out, they forget how to do things, they may forget the identity of your face.

This kind man emails a thank you to Susan, “My four siblings and I, all of us over 50, will be the better for reading her thoughts, insights, and the cogent advice one can draw from such compelling writing.”

And then this father in his email to his children goes on to touch upon my Russian soul, the face of which is an up-close mystical remembrance of a 19th-century past life:

He says, “Her insights are well worth the time to puzzle through the curious matryoshka-like construction of her journal of dementia and caregiving for ‘Emma’.”

He asks, “Will the two of you be confronted with me having become the likes of your Grandfather, or [his friend’s mother] in my own Anna Karenina way?”

—Samantha Mozart

February 12, 2013 — The wind rattled the windows all night and kept me awake. My head rested on my pillow while inside a corps of Valentine’s blog posts whirled in the corners of my mind like dust devils. The choreography wasn’t right, the arrangement and rearrangement of words; I dozed, the windows rattled, I awakened: the syncopated music of the wind. All I composed tripped short of truth; my mind kept dancing around it. The ball was over, the gown rested on the chair, the cavalier had left the rose. It lay in the dim lamplight inside my mind, wilting, the deep blood-red edges of the petals crisping. I listened to the two striking clocks in the house toll the hour, and the next and the next hour.

Setting back the clocks to standard time last fall, I had turned the hands of Emma’s grandfather clock back rather than taking the time to wind it forward eleven hours. Now it strikes an hour short. I don’t know how to fix that. Is there some lesson here about wishing to go back in time to correct the past or to that one hour of life that was perfection?

So the two clocks are not synchronized. The only way to achieve clock synchronicity – resolving their striking the same correct hour simultaneously is through much thought, effort, and yes, a willingness to give time.

Synchronicity – my definition: a simultaneous occurrence of events, although with no discernable cause, logically previous thoughts and actions are the cause matured simultaneously to produce the effect.

With or without the presence of clocks, time passed this night. If you want to make time pass faster, bundle it, writes Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk, a writer of deep thought and density. Daylight came bundled in woolly gray clouds spilling rain down my bedroom bay windowpanes like profuse tears.

I arose, padded down to the kitchen and made coffee. I poured my coffee, added half and half, cinnamon and nutmeg, placed a homemade scone on a little plate and headed upstairs. Yes, I, not a baker because I never measure ingredients exactly, have learned how to make scones. Although not the perfection of my friend Bettielou’s scones, I make them with Bisquick, toss in some dried cranberries and black walnuts, stick them in the oven for ten minutes, et ici sur la plat – a scone.

Carrying my Delaware Wild Lands coffee mug, that I was given when I wrote a magazine story on that nonprofit, and my little plate holding its marvelous scone, I climbed the narrow winding staircase out of the kitchen up to my studio.

I sat at my computer and took refuge in my music. What to write for my Valentine’s blog, I mused. I sipped my coffee and bit into the scone.

Last year on Valentine’s Day I had received a furry Valentine, the traveling visitor cat I named Keats. He arrived on that blustery, snowy yet tender night just before Valentine’s Day, and stayed, until a few weeks after Emma’s death, just as long as I needed him. Then he returned to his family, I guess, for, still wearing his sage green collar with which he arrived, he went out one evening after dinner and I saw him no more. This year I have no Valentine; that is, no cat, no man, not even a man who owns a cat.

My Valentine gift this year, though, came through many persons – my author profile in our local newspaper: Smyrna/Clayton Sun-Times. It is quite a nice story and through that and my related book signing at our downtown First Friday event February 1 – for my Begins the Night Music: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal, Volume I – I sold a number of books. Not bad for a small town. Moreover, I received encouraging comments from fellow writers around the world. Presently I am working on Volume II, To What Green Altar, and expect to publish it in a few weeks.

At the same time (one might term it synchronicity), someone, without reading past the fold in my email, dressed me down one morning, prematurely emitting a razor-edged response slashing writing, and for that matter, reading, as worthless, self-serving stimulation, as no more than a constant rearrangement of words, like alphabet soup, meaningless to help others, climaxing as sleep inducing; and saying in effect, who cares? This wounded me deeply and will take a long time to heal, if ever completely. I trusted this person as one whom I perceived interested in what I thought and said. My mistake. That’ll keep this cat out of the kitchen.

My friend R sutured and dressed my wound. The next day the wound opened like a fissure during an earthquake and R re-sutured it. The Phantom of My Blog, Moriarty, passed by the open door at that juncture, glanced in and turned whiter than his normal shade of pale. He grasped the doorframe, leaned his forehead against it a moment, and then went on. He could not bear to face the mincemeat heart and the trampled spirit. Moriarty may have nudged me over the edge once, but he doesn’t get off on abuse.

Writing, the thoughtful expression of experiences or imagination in words, helps and comforts others. What if we all just stood around mute as if to say, “Hey. That’s your problem. Deal.”

Later, a member of our LinkedIn writers group wrote that she couldn’t understand why Hospice let a close relative in the final stage of cancer suffer, starved him and why he couldn’t be euthanized to end his suffering. From my experience with Emma and with my stepfather, who died of stomach cancer, both under Hospice care, I replied that Hospice’s mission is to make the patient comfortable, increasing morphine dosage as needed. When you are dying, I wrote, your body shuts down; all the organs shut down gradually. Hospice and doctors do not starve the patient. In that state, too much food would overwhelm the patient’s body. Near to death, one can survive on a very small bit of food every two or three days. Emma’s Hospice doctor and nurses reiterated this.

Next, I welcomed a woman writer to our LinkedIn group who had been caregiver to three people. This woman had questions of frustration and guilt, as many caregivers do. I address this subject when presenting my book to caregivers’ organizations. I told her these feelings are a normal part of the caregiving experience. In turn other writers in our group expressed their compassion and shared the wisdom gained from their caregiving experiences. Our discussion group that I started a year ago now has 5,400 postings from around the world. So, through our writing, we’re helping someone. Caregivers need someone to tell, someone to write it to; no one else will listen; they find it tiresome. We listen unconditionally and give support.

I can only write from the level of wisdom and craft I have achieved. From that station I hope my thoughts and words help, through knowledge, compassion or just plain entertainment. As I experience, practice and become more enlightened, I will write from that higher station. All I ask is that you read below the fold before prematurely emitting a response and then falling asleep.

Sometimes through journalism a chance to physically help arises. I have encountered such situations and have taken action as I could, mostly through writing a newspaper or magazine story. I truly hope my actions and words help others. That is my sole mission. I act spontaneously, without thought of return.

Anderson Cooper, in the midst of reporting on the Haitian earthquake, dropped his camera and ran to pull a bleeding child out of danger during a shooting. I witnessed this event on TV. The child had been hit on the head by a concrete slab thrown from a roof. Cooper saw it happen.

Cooper said, “Some journalists like to be strictly observers, they don’t intervene, they don’t participate, they just document what they see, even if what they see is terrible. But the way I see it, journalists don’t exist in a vacuum. They are human beings, living and working in a very human environment. And that humanity is essential in relating to their stories. When you lose your humanity, you lose any kind of journalistic integrity you have left.”

My point. When you lose your humanity, you are a voyeur to the suffering of others. I consider that selfish.

Leo Tolstoy said, if you help one other person, you are helping the world. Maybe words provide for you simply an escape into a good novel, or a great television series, such as “Downton Abbey,” superbly written by Julian Fellowes. Writers will tell you that you can put more truth in fiction than you can in nonfiction. Storytelling is as old as humankind. Any writer will tell you that if he or she is prevented from writing he or she will explode. You do not want to be around a writer who is prevented from writing, trust me on this one.

Who cares what you read and write as long as your heart is in the right place.

Happy Valentine’s Day, R.

—Samantha Mozart

January 27, 2013 — Today is Mozart’s birthday – Wolfgang Amadeus, that is, not me. He would be 257. He lived 14 percent of that age. He died December 5, a recurring date of the ending of things in my own life. Today is my brother’s birthday, too. He’s lived nearly twice the years as Mozart. The two share a common love for music. My brother, from about age 3, sat at the piano, as did Mozart. He composed, too – pieces from a series my family called “Hammering on the Keyboard”.

I watched Dustin Hoffman discussing in conversation with Charlie Rose the other night the 2012 movie he has directed, “Quartet,” starring Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, and other greats. This movie is about the unintended reunion of four aging opera singers, based on a play and script by Ronald Harwood. Harwood was inspired by Giuseppe Verdi’s “Bella figlia dell’amore” quartet, which he considers one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written for the human voice, from “Rigoletto.”

Of my favorite Charlie Rose conversations are those with Dustin Hoffman. He is an entertaining conversationalist and Rose lets him run on. As I laid my head on my pillow to sleep at 1 a.m. when the TV show ended, I found my cheeks aching from smiling broadly for an hour.

Those of us in our 60s and 70s know how hard it is to find work, no matter how high our achievements and level of education. Hoffman, who is four years older than I, talked about the declining availability of roles for actors as they age, of the short career span of a singer, dancer or an athlete. The actor who romanced Mrs. Robinson talked about how fleeting is life and the wisdom not to waste it. Jane Fonda, born the same year as Hoffman, writes in her book, Prime Time, about the poignancy of the third and final act of one’s life, those years over age 60: relationships become deeper, you realize that it’s the little things that are meaningful, and you have the experience to know that you’ll get through the current crisis somehow. Don’t waste time, live life, fulfill your dreams. I’ve lived a full life, but I’ve also wasted time, discarded opportunities, as I see it. But, all the evidence isn’t in yet, so I cannot judge. It may be that I have composed my life as I needed, that the related early expositional and variational movements developed the requisite preparation for the resolution at my finale.

A friend once told me, “You are always right where you need to be, doing what you need to do at that moment.” I find that thought comforting.

There’s another movie out about music and aging, with almost the same title, “A Late Quartet,” directed by Yaron Zilberman, one of the writers, and inspired by Beethoven’s late composition, String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor (Op. 131), a long piece, the seven movements of which are played without pause. The piece is recognized in music circles for its air of finality, so prompting Franz Schubert to remark, “After this, what is left for us to write?” “A Late Quartet” tells of an aging chamber group, and stars Christopher Walken and Philip Seymour Hoffman, among others.

My information about these two movies, besides from Dustin Hoffman, I took from two New York Times stories, “Two Films in Which Classical Music Is Much More Than a Score” by Michael Cieply, October 31, 2012, and “A Rigoletto Reunion Just Might Save the Day,” by A. O. Scott, January 10, 2013.

The former story cites the Guarneri String Quartet. Among my favorites, I wanted to read more about them, so I clicked on the newspaper link. I learned that, formed in 1964, once considered the world’s finest string quartet, to my disappointment they retired in the fall of 2009. A founding member, cellist David Soyer, died in 2010.

Everybody gets old. Everybody dies. From the instant you are born your whole life is a prelude to your death. You could die between notes, between breaths in the middle of the night while you are sleeping. This scenario, in my third act upstaging my earlier life, prompts me to reflect on what I do, how and what I think, and how I use my time. No matter how conscientious I am, though, I am always behind on emails; so I hope you will have patience.

Born October 10, 1813, nearly 200 years ago, composer Giuseppe Verdi died on the 27th of January 1901. Before his death, he established a retirement home in Milan for musicians, called Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, known as Casa Verdi. The home did not open until after his death because he did not want the acclaim.A documentary was made about Casa Verdi in 1984, titled “Tosca’s Kiss.” It is currently unavailable except from a handful of sellers in the UK. On seeing the documentary, “60 Minutes”, with Morley Safer, produced a 1987 story on it. I am keeping this post short because I think you may want to watch this touching piece. If you have 14.25 minutes, grab a tissue and click on this link: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6282135n

—Samantha Mozart

January 15, 2013 — I awoke this morning thinking about thinking. It is a dark and dreary day, damp and cold, one of those days when daylight never really comes. Such days impel me to sit at my computer and think and write.

This post comes with a soundtrack: go to my player “The Dream” playlist in the right sidebar and click on number 13, Alexander Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 in B, 3. Andante.

Some of us writers seem to write best when we are out of sorts, unwell, or confined – I think of Christopher Hitchens and Oscar Wilde in their last days; there are others. When I posted my thoughts to my LinkedIn women writers group, my writer friend Val commented, “Gee … I thought we’d all earned the right not to have to think so hard.” Wise.

Before reading Val’s words, I visited my blog. It smelled nutmeggy as I entered, like Moriarty, the Phantom, but I didn’t see him anywhere. By his signature aroma, clearly he had been around. Here, it was bright and sunny, so I strolled outside, across the meadow, down towards the stream, crunching on dry little earth balls and broken stems, and rustling through the sweet-smelling tall grass as I went. I found a sun-baked, large, flat tan rock amidst leggy green-brown weeds. I sat upon it and mused. The mid afternoon sun over my shoulder cast my body in long shadow upon the ground.

In the sun of afternoon I sat and mused on the dark shadow of morning I had left. Here it seemed I was in between: it was neither dark nor light, it was neither pain nor pleasure, grief nor joy; it was warmer middle colors, serene. I don’t like being kept in the dark. When I am, I sense that I am. Of course, if I were thoroughly kept in the dark, I wouldn’t know it, would I?

Have I reached the synchronicity of the meeting of the dark and the light? My friend Susan Scott, writes on the potential acausality of the phenomenon of synchronicity in her recent blog post: http://www.gardenofedenblog.com. I invite you to read and explore.

Susan makes me think. In her book, In Praise of Lilith, Eve & the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, she writes of our inner opposites, the dark and the light, suggesting that we allow ourselves to venture into our dark side, our shadow, that we dare to be brave enough to face it.

Oscar Wilde wrote a story called “The Fisherman and His Soul”. The fisherman falls in love with a mermaid and desires to lay down his life to be with her. A witch hands him a knife and tells him that, if he dare, he must cut off his shadow, for his shadow is his soul, and the only way to be with the mermaid his to cut off his soul. The fisherman dares; he takes the knife, stands upon the beach, bends down and cuts off his soul. The shadow is gone. He lives blissfully under the sea for many years with the mermaid. Meanwhile his soul goes off on many adventures. When the soul looks in a mirror, he does not see himself. Curious. Where is the synchronicity? Wouldn’t he, the soul, holding a mirror and looking into it cause the mirror to reflect him, thus synchronizing the soul with the illusion of himself the mirror reflects, like your computer screen mirroring the data that you have called up? This is a paradox. If it can be true, also it can be false.

It turns out that the soul committed many cruel acts. When the fisherman cut off his soul, he kept his heart. I leave you to seek the rest of the story yourself.

Susan Scott climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. She writes an essay about it in her “Lilith …” book. I cannot imagine myself doing that. Oh, the MUD, she says. She found the mud nearly unendurable. Caring for Emma was my Kilimanjaro. So often was I stuck in that deep, slippery, tacky mud; so often I thought I could not go on. But I did. I learned to have patience and faith, to trust and to relinquish some of my independence. It was the only way.

Now, afterwards, I am down off the mountain. Where to now? While I cannot deny my feelings, I would not sell my soul to be with the mermaid; and I’d most certainly want to keep my soul and my heart together. What is a soul or consciousness without a heart? And what of the paradox of twin souls?

I had to allow myself to experience this dark day, to go through it, face it, reflect on it, then take myself out into the light, and then to stay in between somehow. I have left that place of caregiving for Emma, and I have not reached a new place. I feel myself to be in an empty space. So, I strive to understand what I have been taught, that is to stay in between. The silence in a musical phrase makes the music.

The sun now low in the western sky, I must go inside. About to arise from my rock, I look up. I see dear Moriarty’s face filling a windowpane in the cupola, Moriarty who would be dismayed to learn he is but an illusion. Wildly gesturing, waving his arm, he is pointing to someplace over my shoulder. I turn, and there is the Blue Deer, the Blue Deer with her blue and white spotted fawn, Batik.

As I wander back through the weeds and tall grass, I think what if the dark and the light forces do not combat each other, rather that within each there abides a gentleness and a patience of the one for the other?

—Samantha Mozart

January 10, 2013 — I had a long conversation about non-conversation the other day with a friend, a talented artist. We discussed the many subjects on which he doesn’t like to converse. Under one of these topics was something I had done which caught his attention sufficiently some months earlier that he gave me a related gift.

Whenever we meet or talk on the phone we begin talking immediately and talk for one, two, three, four hours nonstop.

My friend R, a very creative artist, and I have long conversations about a lot of things; we can talk on almost any subject – literature, music, movies, religion, politics, art, ideas – for an hour or two on the phone almost daily or at length in person, especially over a glass of wine, or maybe that’s more than one glass; I don’t remember. At the conclusion of our conversations, one of us will say to the other, “I’m glad you got to listen to me” or “I’m glad you got to see me.”

My friend Bettielou and I like to talk, too. They’ve cut back the ship schedule due to the present state of the economy, but when our schooners send a skiff to shore carrying a bag, one that would neatly fit inside a windbreaker pocket, of diminutive doubloons having the thickness of a church wafer, we go out to lunch together.

Bettielou gave me a gift for Christmas related to my tastes – a bag of her superb homemade scones in a variety of flavors as well as little gift boxes of other homemade sweet treats. I hid this bag of scones from my friend R when he came over for Christmas dinner, because he would have eaten the whole thing right there while he was watching me prepare the Whole Cranberry Sauce. He had his own bag of scones that Bettielou gave him, but he ate them pretty much in one sitting.

I see here in my dictionary that the word scone is Scots, the root originally derived, possibly, from Middle Dutch, schoon, meaning fine bread.

Concerning schoon, my stepfather was a successful, esteemed artist. In his youth he spent time at American illustrator Frank Schoonover’s studio in Wilmington, Delaware. Schoonover, one of the Brandywine School, helped organize in 1912 what is now the Delaware Art Museum, located in that same neighborhood, and was chairman of the fundraising committee responsible for acquiring works by Howard Pyle, also of the Brandywine School of illustrators, who had died in 1911.

“An illustration from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1903) exemplifies the “Brandywine School” style.” Image and caption from Wikipedia.

Little more than a decade later on a street corner nearby, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat in his automobile and made up a fairy tale for his daughter Scottie, while wife Zelda went inside and upstairs to see about a dollhouse. Fitzgerald’s tale became his short story “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s”, published in The Century Magazine, December 1928.

I like to talk about music, especially classical music; indeed, have enjoyed crescendoing conversations about music, composers and conductors with Emma’s Hospice music therapist and with one of my LinkedIn women writer friends. Lately, though, I made a long playlist of Electric Light Orchestra music, mostly from the ’70s and early ’80s and have been listening to that – loud. One of the advantages of living in a house that’s closed and sealed with storm windows and doors in the winter is being able to play your music really loud without disturbing the neighbors; it resounds throughout this whole Victorian house of balloon construction. I test the decibel level when I go outside, and I can’t hear it too much. Too, I have been playing Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” ballet music, the complete ballet, one of his best compositions, I think and have heard said by music experts. The performance I have on disk is by Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra. Gergiev is a fascinating conversationalist and sensitively listens to the music he conducts, emphasizing phrases, instruments, dynamics and rubato as if to say, “Listen to this …”, and I am stirred by nuances, instruments and notes I never heard before or hear anew.

About ideas, Gergiev says that the only way the Russians held their country together during the twentieth century was by valuing and supporting the arts. They realized that this was the only way to create cohesiveness from imperialism, through Bolshevism and Communism to the Russian Federation. Food for thought, especially in light of the present United States economic condition and under-graduate educational system – teaching to the test in schools, whereby the students don’t have to bother to think critically or creatively. And since they exhaust so much screen time and don’t read books, their minds are little able to visualize.

One of the best short pieces of literature I have read recently is an essay written by Turkish author, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk vividly detailing the contents of his refrigerator, when in the middle of the night he opens the door and the light goes on inside.

I could serve up a word concoction of my own based upon this essay idea, but—and here I know you’ll be disappointed – I don’t feel like getting up from my computer and going downstairs to look in the fridge. Besides, I just ate.

My friend Jackie, who used to own The Gathering Place store downtown, and I like to sit on my porch and fire up a virtual burgoo of ideas, portions of which we offered as cross-promotional wine and cheese functions for artists and fundraisers when she operated her store. To house her store she bought and restored the historic Odd Fellows building downtown. Now her building houses “The Odd Fellows Café”, a charming, sunny, farm-to-table café, serving generous portions of delicious homemade dishes and exhibiting original artwork on the walls. Check it out at TheOddFellowsCafe on Facebook. I’d put a link here, but when I do, it keeps taking me to my own page, and many of us have seen that.

It’s time to bag up my thoughts and word pictures here and go make dinner. Tonight I am having homemade butternut squash soup. This recipe is in my recipe file on my blog and published in my Begins the Night Music book. Here is my whole cranberry sauce recipe.

Whole Cranberry Sauce

Cranberries – Whole, fresh – one bag

In frying pan, add one cup of water and 1/2 cup or more of honey (I like my recipe a little tart).

1 or 2 McIntosh or similar apple, unpeeled

2 Mandarin Oranges – Clementines, Tangerines or one Orlando or minneola Tangelo

Walnuts – Shelled, chopped – 2 or 3 handsful (I prefer black walnuts)

Bring cranberries, honey and water to boil, reduce heat to low medium for 10 or 15 minutes. Stir often.

While cranberries are cooking and popping, slice and add remaining ingredients, in order given above. When all ingredients have been added, sauce will start to thicken. Remove from heat and let stand to cool. The walnuts will not have had much time to cook, but they don’t need it.

— Samantha Mozart

December 30, 2012 — I have awakened mornings recently to glorious windy, rainy wintry weather and over coffee at my computer to wonderful stories from my LinkedIn women writer caregiver friends about their daily activities, about the weather, their gardens, about letting go of expectations, and about sage philosophical thoughts. I could not be given a better start to my days. Then I walk a few blocks downtown, and as I pass my neighbor’s house, the one with the wrap-around porch two doors down, I see an iris blooming deep purple in their front garden. It didn’t snow here the other day, just rained, although it snowed everywhere just north and west of us. I could imagine that deep purple iris standing tall and graceful, an individual undaunted by the cold, above the pure white mantle glinting in the sun. How magical that would have appeared.

Each of my women friends has a story to tell. Each has stood tall and strong throughout the impermanence of their seasons, filled with grace, undaunted by the cold:

There’s Catharine, sweet, bright, a trained opera coloratura, who lost her dad this year and will begin, this winter, studying for her master’s in child psychology;

Val, who was caregiver to both parents and then found and married her great love in midlife, who thinks I’m whacky because I converse with Anton Chekhov’s “Black Monk”, and she likes that;

Linda, whose teenage son was mortally shot three years ago, in New York where it’s winter and she’s escaping her devastated Howard Beach, Queens, home and going to the Catskills for the holidays, where the snow is two feet deep;

Gwynn, whose brother, and only sibling, a former Buddhist monk, died of a dreaded life-ending disease some years ago;

T.J., who lost her husband in a vehicle crash, and her mom and dad prematurely; whose evocative stories she tells so beautifully and sensitively in her novel A Time for Shadows and about others – everybody has a story to tell – in her Sketch People stories and Catsong about amazing cats;

Susan, with degrees in clinical psychology and her particular interest in Jungian psychology and dreams, inter alia, as she terms it, in South Africa, where it’s summer and she’s vacationing for the holidays at Plettenberg Bay, watching the full moon rise over the sea, going for a swim, and in the evening visiting a club to watch her sons perform in their band, The Kiffness. I recommend Susan’s book In Praise of Lilith, Eve & the Serpent in the Garden of Eden to every woman and to the men who know them. Susan likes and suggests lying on the warm ground and letting the warmth of Mother Earth rise up and heal oneself;

And Beatrice, researcher, author, and retired social worker, in New Zealand, who yesterday took a trip with her family to Otago Bay to watch the seals, cormorants, the albatross soar and plunge in the protective colony established by one of her clients, and the penguins swimming ashore. Penguins. Beatrice wrote today on our discussion board of the New Year’s Eve – Hogmanay – tradition in Scotland where she is from, where you are supposed to stay up until midnight then visit around the neighborhood – “first foot”, first foot across the door, first visit after midnight; then you drink “a wee dram”.

These are women of my thought group; that is, women who think like me, the types of women with whom I have aligned myself over the years, who have supported my thinking, reinforced my awareness of my own inner power as a woman. And so they have this day.

I have other long-time friends both where I live now and in Southern California and around the U.S., whom I have known for many years. These women, all, are my encouraging, supportive friends and my spirit guides.

I could tell them that I am going to take up the business of cleaning sewers and they’d encourage me; or, at the least, look out for my welfare, cautioning me to be watchful not to fall in – and to write about it afterwards.

Interestingly, as usual, I find my writing in my journal and my blog posts to be cathartic and illuminating. That light bulb in my mind went on the other morning while I was still in bed, almost before I opened my eyes: My Christmas story I had just posted on my blog, I had recorded in my journal in 2004-5, right after the events when the historic Maggie S. Myers oyster schooner came home with her restored mast and sails. I wrote the story again in 2008, a much longer story, for publication in a book anthology. Much had changed within that story by 2008. I edited and wrote the story again, now, in 2012. Once more, much has changed within these four years. This recent morning, through that story, I saw my pattern, which has not changed. It’s about expectations and waiting around for something to happen, someone to act. I see that I must gather my own inner power, which I periodically let fall, decide upon my future and move on. Of course, the decision the bank returns about my mortgage, on which I’m still short, will provide a piece to my decision-making as a whole. And, then, I must choose among the solid income generating opportunities I have awaiting me, and there are many. These women this recent morning, December 21, as this morning have reinforced my newfound awareness and how I must think towards my future. The other day may not have been the end of the world as we heard the Mayan calendar predicted; nevertheless, traditionally December 21 is the day of the year my life changes. We’ll see.

My friend Linda said that she likes this “time zone arrangement” and so do I. I can post on our discussion board “Good night, Susan” in South Africa, and “Good morning, Beatrice” in New Zealand, where it’s tomorrow, and “Good morning, Gwynn” in Washington state, where it’s today, simultaneously and be accurate, while eating lunch at home in Delaware.

I have three spiritual teacher friends, men, with whom I am regularly in contact, two who live out West and have been a part of my life for most of three decades.

My friend R, who recently encountered Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog, dozing with a book open on his chest in a warm, sunny corner of my blog cupola, between the windows, tells me I am most fortunate to be surrounded by such enlightened friends. Indeed. And I feel my spirit guides around me, too, the ones I cannot see. I don’t know what I’ve done to be so honored – maybe they see that this bumbler needs special help; all I can do is continue my spiritual readings and continue to cultivate my learning towards the positive. Sometimes, I forget and just as I am about to slip over the edge, catch myself, or a friend catches me and stops me in my tracks.

We of the human condition have experienced many changes this year, devastating changes for some. Emma left this year; that is a blessing. My aunt, my last living relative of that generation, living in a nursing home and still of reasonably sound mind, will be 99 New Year’s Eve.

To you who wish for a sudden and miraculous turn for the better as the New Year dawns, have you considered that the change, not only already prepared for, has also already begun?

As my friend Beatrice put it, she counts our women friends, and I add my men friends, among the most successful people I know, real success at being human.

I wish for you a 2013 filled with the magic of irises in the snow.

—Samantha Mozart

Behold …

We stood shivering in the dark on the dock of the Murderkill Creek as we watched the lights on the top of the Bay float slowly, slowly towards us. It was 6:30 on the evening of December 16, 2004. The historic oyster schooner, the Maggie S. Myers, with her newly restored mast and sails, was making her way into the cut at Bowers Beach, Delaware. The tide was so low that her captain, Frank “Thumper” Eicherly IV, had to cross the bar from the Delaware Bay to the creek at almost a standstill because the Maggie’s bottom was scraping the sand here and there. At 6:45 she tied up at the public dock.

“Oh! She’s beautiful!” we all exclaimed. We were friends and family of Thumper and his wife, Jean Friend, the Maggie’s proud owners. The Maggie had been to the rail to get her sails back and we had gathered to welcome her home. “She’s so awesome!” exuded Jean’s mom, Dot, 82, visiting for the holidays from New Hampshire. “Oh, she’s beautiful!” each of us said again, in turn.

Indeed, she was beautiful with her white-painted, fifty-foot yellow-pine mast and her colorful sail Thumper had sewn, and jib riggings. She looked like the boat she was born to be. She was once again: The Maggie.

Our gathering went back to Jean’s and Thumper’s house a few blocks away, the one with the chimney Thumper built from conch shells. The long table was laid with soup Jean made and bread the guests brought. Thumper said the blessing, and after we ate, he played his guitar and sang a song. Then Dot played the piano; Sadie, Thumper’s old dog, leaned against the wood stove; and a cat jumped onto the table and almost lit her tail in the candle flames.

The Maggie S. Myers, was built by Rice Brothers boatyard in Bridgeton, N.J., as a Delaware Bay dredge schooner and commissioned in 1893. She is the twenty-second boat to get a New Jersey oyster license. She has never been out of commission. She is fifty feet long, eighteen feet wide, drafts five feet and weighs 24.62 gross tons. “She can carry her weight in oysters,” said Thumper.

In the 1940s, like most oyster schooners of the day, her masts were cut and she was motorized.

“Maggie had two masts, sails, and probably some very large oars in case the wind didn’t blow,” Thumper went on. “Maggie is thick-skinned, beefy. Her wooden hull is six inches thick. She won’t get crushed by ice like some boats. In fact, on cold winter days she cuts through the ice in the bay.”

Love at First Sight

The Maggie was not always a part of Thumper’s and Jean’s lives. They rescued her from the brink of scuttling in 1998 when her owner could no longer afford her annual tens of thousands of dollars upkeep. The owner sold the Maggie to Thumper and Jean for five thousand dollars.

“The instant we saw her, it was love at first sight,” said Jean.

“She looks so cool,” Thumper observed. “She’s low to the water and dredges by hand. She turns on a song, like a snow goose flying around in the air.”

Today, with her sails restored, the Maggie is believed to be the oldest continuously working oyster schooner under sail in the United States. She is listed on the National Historic Register.

She is the little schooner that could.

For me it was love at first sight, too.

The Gift of Candlelight on the Snow

A few nights after the Maggie came home with her new mast and sail, many of our gathering were back in Bowers, this time to attend the Candlelight Christmas Carol Service at the little wooden historic Saxton United Methodist Church, which Jean and her friend Lonnie Field had recently restored, where Thumper, who taught Sunday school there, played his guitar, accompanying the organist, and sang two hymns.

All Creation sang for joy, making offerings and gifts, and as we sang the song of the angels—“Angels We Have Heard on High”—the angels must have heard, for it seemed they had come in. A member of the congregation read an abridged O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” Outside it began to snow. We sang “Silent Night,” and in the candlelight, through the gothic church windows I watched the virginal white flakes journey slowly, peacefully, soundlessly towards earth—some alone, some in gatherings. Following the service, women of the church served hot apple cider and homemade cookies.

Then we went back to the house. Jean served vegetarian lasagna and oyster stew made with oysters Thumper had just dredged. It snowed throughout the evening and driving home was difficult, but we made it.

—Samantha Mozart

I excerpted parts of this story from one I published in James Milton Hanna’s  Delaware Bay Stories, Past & Present, published by Cherokee Books, 2008.

Photo by Robert Price.

Maggie Coming Through the Cut

December 10, 2012 — The genius of Mozart in part was his ability to listen and keep an open mind. How else could all that music that he put to page come through to him in such a short life? Suppose he had not bothered to listen to the melodies, harmonies, rhythms and counterpoint, the dynamics coming into his head and just blown them off.

Suppose his parents had blocked him and the scene played out like this:

His Mom: Fulfy, stop doodling on that paper and attend to your schoolwork.

His Dad: Son, stop diddling around on that keyboard. Go out and play football with the other boys. And do watch where you step – the horses, you know ….

Fulfy: But, Papa, the game has not yet been invented.

Papa: Well, then, be the first. Humanity would acclaim you a genius.

Fortunately for humanity, his parents supported his proclivity and Fulfy didn’t invent football.

My uncle was a musician. As a boy he played the saxophone. One evening my grandparents went out, leaving the three teenage boys alone – my uncle, his brother (my father, younger by two years) and my aunt’s cousin. My grandmother and my aunt’s cousin’s mother (my aunt’s aunt) were Sunday school mates. Through this friendship my aunt met my uncle. This evening, my uncle proceeded to play the sax. He kept playing it. My father and my aunt’s cousin told him to stop but he persisted. So they locked him in a closet.

When their parents came home, the boys let him out. He was so angry he swung his fist at them. He missed and knocked a chunk out of the doorframe.

My brother took saxophone lessons for a time. I won’t say he played, because he didn’t. He hated it. One time he got so mad at it his face turned red and he unceremoniously blew into it. The blast emitting from the bell end sounded more like a tugboat pushing a barge upriver.

Another year when my uncle and my father were teenagers living in this same Tudor style house in the Philadelphia western suburbs, they decided to keep their Christmas tree up until Washington’s birthday. On that day they put in the fireplace to burn. The living room in their house was long, the fireplace at one end. Flames shot halfway across the living room.

Grandmother’s & Granddaddy’s House

My grandfather was one of five children, the boy sandwich-filling in the middle of four girls. Some of the sisters were crazy. So, when his two boys came along, it seems he often became one of them. I’ve heard stories of the spaghetti fights they had at the dining room dinner table, flinging the stuff at one another, it hitting the walls. My grandmother, ever the consummate lady, abided it somehow. That was before my time.

Daddy was a musician, too. He played the clarinet and the piano. He wanted his father to set him up with a band like Benny Goodman’s. Daddy even had the name, an abbreviation of his own – The Ward Carroll Band. Granddaddy said no. So, Daddy attended the Wharton School, became a certified public accountant and went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Daddy continued to play the piano, though, and composed music even into my childhood. He wrote a novel, too. He submitted it to a publisher but it was rejected. Fascinated with my publishing my writing, he told me about this novel only about a year before he died. He died in 2004. My sister found the novel and she has it. I have never seen it. I hope to read it before I die. Clearly, my sister, who has published novels and is the daughter of my father and stepmom, and I inherited our writing genius from Daddy. Daddy would call it genius because it was inherited from him.

Grandmother grew up in South Philadelphia and into adulthood attended Methodist Sunday School. She told us the story told her by an aunt or a family friend, who attended Sunday school with John Wanamaker: “That Johnny Wanamaker was really something with the girls.”

John Wanamaker loved music. In 1909 he purchased the world-renown pipe organ built in 1904 for the St. Louis World’s Fair and installed it in the Grand Court of his Philadelphia store. I have thrilled to listen to that organ many times. Once I even sat in the organist’s booth up in the Gallery and watched him play. Thankfully, Macy’s, present owners of that great department store, have restored the organ, now a National Historic Landmark, where you can go hear it played daily. Now through New Year’s Eve Day you can shop at Macy’s Philadelphia, hear the Wanamaker organ, see the light show and visit the Dickens Christmas Village: http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/xmas.php.

I fleetingly thought that if my granddaughters were here at Christmas, we could go to the Macy’s store and share in the experience their great-great grandmothers took me to enjoy. Well, maybe next year. Anyway, they’re busy. They erected their 16-foot live tree this year, began to decorate it, went to bed and it fell over.

I remember one Christmas Eve when I had gone to bed early so Santa could come. I lay there in the dark with my eyes open, listening. And then I heard it – the tinkling and jingling of the sleigh bells. I kept listening and they continued. This was Santa Claus and his eight reindeer pulling his sleigh full of toys, certainly. And they were quite nearby.

My father and uncle were always telling us funny family stories. We laughed a lot. Grandmother told us stories, too. They orally handed them down through the generations. I decided to write them down so that my offspring will know a little of their ancestors if they are so interested. I know little about my great grandparents. Only one, my great grandmother, was still living when I was born, and she died just before my brother was born, and I know nothing of generations beyond them.

“Tell me about our family history,” I’d ask my father and my uncle periodically.

“Be careful what you ask,” they’d say, laughing. “You might find out that someone was chased out of England.” And then they’d proceed, “The story goes that a stable hand fell in love with the lord of the manor’s daughter and the lord of the manor chased him out of England.” That fits with my experiences of being chased out of local stores here, and similar experiences of my close kin. That my 12-year-old granddaughter should get in trouble for writing in the margin of her social studies book “They could make this more interesting” comes as no surprise to me.

Well, children, it is time to turn the page. I have come to the end of my family stories for this day. I think I’ll do something different now and go dig up some nuts, find my nutcracker and listen to music, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, for instance, based on the novella, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” one the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

—Samantha Mozart

This one has a soundtrack: Click on no. 23 in my “The Dream” player in the right sidebar — Robert Schumann’s, “Fantasy, Op. 17, in C”.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012 — From time to time we may feel the need to take stock of ourselves. At this hour of my life I find that the best of times and the worst of times often concur. I liken this phenomenon to the moment in Jerome, Arizona, thirty years ago when I saw the marble angel its sculptor walked me up the long, steep ochre dirt path to show me. There the flat, white angel lay in a wooden box of straw, a foot square and six inches high, on a table in the back of his studio on the edge of a cliff. Through the window behind the table on which the angel lay we looked down deep into a pit, the copper mine. Symbolically I had come face to face with the marble angel of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel: “… Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

I had just read the novel. I wanted to write like Thomas Wolfe, with that lyricism derived from the classics. I wanted to write. My peak experience, the synchronicity of that moment confronting the marble angel on that Jerome mountaintop awakened me, shaping the amorphous stone of my writing dreams, acutely summoning me to set words to page. As Thomas Wolfe descended his Asheville mountain to attend Harvard and then to become a writer, I descended the Jerome mountain to return home to the City of Angels where I became a writer.

Two nights ago I finished reading The Turquoise, a novel by Anya Seton. Based on fact, the story follows the 19th century life of a Scots-Mexican woman, a psychic visionary, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, given in early adulthood a turquoise stone by a Native American medicine man who cautions her to stay to her true path. She strays, and I, frustrated, kept wishing she’d get on with the real meaning of her life, my reaction caused perhaps by her story being too close to home.

The turquoise is said to possess mystical powers: The turquoise is a vibrant stone. It is known as the sky stone or stone of heaven. Its mystical powers strengthen the psychic powers of the wearer. The turquoise provides protection and brings healing, harmony and serenity. The turquoise is the Goddess Tara in her green aspect. The turquoise illumines one’s true path.

The turquoise ring I wear was given me by my spiritual friend who guided me through my uncle’s untimely death from colon cancer. My friend gave me the ring long ago, forty years ago, so long ago it seems like yesterday. It is a Navajo ring, come from Arizona. “The turquoise means friendship,” my friend told me then. And although I have neither seen nor been in touch with my friend in nearly forty years, the ring has never left my finger. It won’t come off. The turquoise has served me well.

I try to serve it well, by staying on my spiritual path, and unwittingly, it seems, I am led. Soon after seeing the marble angel, I saw myself, in vision, as a sage woman wearing turquoise and silver jewelry and a white dress. I became Turquoise. So when my Linkedin caregiver writer friends adopted kangaroos and we began calling ourselves the Roos, we each chose a color. I am Turquoise. Other friends are Purple Roo, Teal Roo, Coral Roo, Little Blue Roo, Yellow Roo, Pale Olive Green Roo or Pogroo, Tartan Roo and so on.

I am also Human. So, my Turquoise presence holds to a point. For example, the other day when my WiFi modem lost its setting, I called our cable service provider to reset it. When I got the guy who sounded exactly like Elmer Fudd with an Indian accent, all thoughts of Turquoise flew from my mind to roughly the same area Amelia Earhart’s airplane went down. I get tested, often unsuccessfully, and it often takes me a while plus a grousing phone call to my friend R to reset my bearings.

Caregivers complain a lot and then feel guilty. This past Monday I gave a presentation of my book, Begins the Night Music to our Modern Maturity Center here in Dover, Delaware. I was delighted by a fine reception of twenty interested caregivers and several graduating nurses. All listened intently to my talk and then asked questions and shared experiences. The experience I hear most often is that of the guilt-ridden caregiver: “Did I do enough? Did I do the right thing? I wish I didn’t get so angry.” Caregivers are human; caregivers must remember that they are people, too, and give themselves a moment to take stock of themselves. Caregivers, you must forgive yourselves, then you will not get so angry:

It can be the best of times and the worst of times—the best of times because you still have your loved one with you to tell you stories of their lives and of whom you can ask questions; the worst of times because they are sick. The times are poignant.

Caregiving by its very nature is a spiritual path, for it is caring that gets you onto the path. It is love that gets you in.

A note: One year ago today the compassionate young woman vet came to our home and put Emma’s beloved teacup poodle Jetta to sleep. Jetta, maybe you’ve come into a new lifetime as a Human. You were sensible enough. I wish you the serenity of the turquoise.

—Samantha Mozart

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 — My book presentation yesterday went better than I expected. I was surrounded by a small group of friends, all sitting in the back of our local Atlantic Apothecary, in the somewhat secluded waiting area. No strangers/caregivers came to hear the presentation, although the owner of the Apothecary had well publicized it on his website, Facebook page and Twitter. Nevertheless, my friends and I enjoyed lively conversation about everything from the use of commas to the impermanence of life, they bought books, and occasionally a customer waiting for a prescription to be filled sat among us joining in our talk. We all (six of us) had such a good time that we stayed beyond the two hours scheduled for the presentation. Emma’s amazing healthcare aide at the end of her life, Daphne, phoned me this morning to thank me for the wonderful time and special friends. To the event she brought me a fruit basket that she had made herself. She’s very creative and has become a very special friend.

Sunday afternoon I went to the home of a friend in a historic oystering town where my friend Michael Oates, Emmy-nominated video documentarian, showed his new documentary, on which he has been working for at least 10 years, “White Gold”, about Delaware Bay oystering, the history, the present and the future. Our gathering were a small group of friends, nine of us (I’m the odd one without a spouse) plus Sidney, the black cat, in an over 200-year-old-home, warmed by the flame of a small gas heater, tea, coffee, pecan pie, pumpkin roll, cheese and crackers, and camaraderie, as the late afternoon sun set embracing us in the darkness outside the windows.

All of us have been friends for about a decade, and have been involved in one aspect or another in this story. I appeared in a couple of cameo shots, pen and pad in hand, as the journalist; but Jean and Thumper and their historic Maggie S. Myers Delaware Bay oyster schooner (1893) played the lead.* Jean and Thumper had the best lines, and Thumper’s sea chanteys provided the soundtrack. The peak scene of the movie, I thought, was the Maggie returning home from the boatyard with her new, restored, mast, under sail, white sails on the gray-green Bay, in a moment of complete silence — Mike had turned off the sound. Pure gold. The next day one of our friends emailed me saying that on the way home he and his wife commented on what a diverse and special group of people we are and how thankful we are to have such friends.

We are extraordinary. Such extraordinary talent you’d think would be surfeited with funds from each one’s many achievements; but no, not in this new economic age. These friends, most of them, struggle to make ends meet; these friends do many things to help others for free, for no thought of return. We just do it. That is how life is supposed to be: the true human condition – an exchange of information and ideas, helping one another. What place has greed in all this? Even the turkey you will eat on Thanksgiving offered its life so you may fill yourself and go help others maybe less fortunate.

Tomorrow I go to another friend’s home for Thanksgiving — Jackie, who used to own The Gathering Place (herbs, teas, oddities, local lore) downtown. A photo I took of Jackie’s storefront at this season currently appears as the header on my blog. Jackie and I held wine and cheese receptions at her store promoting the work of some of these “Maggie Myers” friends.

And then there are all of my Linkedin writer caregiver friends, that special dozen of us we call the Roos. We call ourselves the Roos, because some sponsored kangaroos, and now each has chosen a color: I am Turquoise Roo. I started this discussion group in March 2012 to provide a forum for caregivers. We have received responses from around the world, from places such as Cameroon. And the 12 of us have become such close friends – in New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Canada, and across the United States – that we are amazed. How synchronistic that we have come together at this time. What special friends we are. What would I do without each of them? How would I have gotten through these months following Emma’s death and the birth of my book, Begins the Night Music, to publication, sending it out onto the market.

These are my thoughts and greetings for this Thanksgiving, to each of my family members and my friends, even to you who don’t commemorate our American holiday, who live in those exotic places across the sea that I want to visit one day. These are the blessings I give thanks for.

These friendships, these moments are to be cherished, for they give hope.

My Linkedin friend Linda tells us her husband says, “If life hands you lemons … just add vodka.” Linda and her husband rescued two elderly neighbor couples from Howard Beach, Queens, New York, where they all live, in the face of Hurricane Sandy, driving them in two vans to the home of Linda and her husband in the Catskills only to learn, once they got there, that their own Howard Beach home and entire neighborhood had been devastated, where today still they have no electricity. They have a whole neighborhood without stoves. So, they and their neighbors have tanks of propane and with a barbecue from upstate New York, will roast nearly a flock, it seems, of turkeys.  I wish Linda and her family, friends and neighbors a plentiful supply of vodka to go with those lemons and wash down those turkeys.

Happy Thanksgiving!

*You can read my Maggie S. Myers stories here on my blog – I think if you search Maggie Myers or Thumper, the stories will come up. One, of course, is “The Low Whistle of the Wind”, and there are the July Fourth on the Maggie stories. You will find these stories also in my book, Begins the Night Music.

—Samantha Mozart

November 10, 2012 — Moriarty is my name. I am The Phantom of the Blog. Samantha’s out promoting her book, Begins the Night Music, so she assigned me to writing this one. Uh-only you-u-u—u … O-o-o …. I found a playlist Samantha left here in her computer – “Love Songs We Used to Sing.” Cool. It’s mostly ‘50s songs. I didn’t know she was that old. Did you? Uh-only you-u-u—u … O-o-o…. When I turn the music up it resounds off the walls of the blog. I like to go up to the mezzanine. The acoustics up there are great. I like to stand at the rail and sing. Then, I’m the Phantom of the Opera. It’s like being onstage. Yesterday I was singing and gesticulating and I nearly fell over the rail. I dropped the blog keys. I don’t know where they went. I lost them again, the extra set. They fell down over the rail into some story backdrops. I can’t find which story they are in. I didn’t tell Samantha.

Oh, what was that? Let me spin around in the chair here. Was that the doorbell? I don’t know. Maybe it was the phone. The music’s so loud. Maybe it’s Samantha. She’s probably calling to find out where the keys are. She can leave a message. Uh-oh yes, I’m the great pretender…. Just laughing and gay like a clown. I seem to be what I’m not, you see. I’m wearing my heart like a clown—uh, crown, pre-eetending that you’re still around.

Ihhhhh-hihchoooooo!! [Sniffle.] Bless me, I sneeze. Hhhhh-hhhh-hihcheeoooo!! This blog is so dusty. Samantha hasn’t been around much and I don’t dust. I’ve told her that. I vacuum and I tidy up. I mow the lawn. I will even write a chapter. But I don’t dust. I don’t even like dust. Hhhhhh-chiiiiihhh!! I need a hanky. Excuse me a minute.

* * *

OK. Here we are. I’m back. Come with me to the sea of love. Hhhhh-chiiiiihhhoh!! [Snort.] I want to tell you how much I love you. Simple words. Life must have been simple back then. I wasn’t around then, trust me. Do you remember whe-e-en-n we met? Mmm-mmm….

I’ve met some of Samantha’s friends when they come pad around in the blog. Not a bad group. Just the other day I was talking to her friend R about her. We were saying that, you know, she’s— well, I won’t say.

I should say she’s m-m-m— ihhhhhh-chooooooo!! Bless me. She’s mu-u-u-ch – hhhhhh-chihhoooooo!! I have to go blow my nose.

I’m going up to the cupola. C’mon.

No one could ever sneak up on you up here – creaking stairs.

Whew. It’s stuffy up here. How do you like the rug? It’s that worn, red Persian she bought. It has a fringe only on one end. See? Let me open a window. [Grunt.] Uhh, it kind of sticks. There. Ahh, the scent of drying leaves and tall grass. Soon she’s gonna want me to rake leaves. Today it’s beautiful out there across the meadow, isn’t it?

So, before the light, hold me again with all of your might, in the still of the night… shoo-doot-shoobie-doo-shoo-doot-shoobie-doo-ooo-OOO-ooo—

And there’s this song. What is it? “Unhinged Melody”? Oh, “Unchained Melody”. Good song. Samantha has it woven throughout her playlist. Dum-dum-dumdummm….

What the— What’s that? A water spout? It’s cruising just above the stream. Holy— It’s floating on air. It looks like a— a monk, dressed in black, arms folded across his chest, nothing on his gray head, and bare feet. Uh-oh. He’s coming this way, floating across the meadow, fast. Geez. He’s headed right for me. He’s getting smaller and more distinct as he gets closer.

Whoa! I gotta step back. Through the window. “Oh, hello. Who are you?”

“Greetings. I am the Black Monk.” His smile is friendly, but sly.

“Well, that seems rather obvious. Where did you come from?”

“I have always been around. I am Anton Chekhov’s legendary Black Monk. Once there were many of us and we all floated around together. Now there’s just one. I am a phantom.”

“No you’re not. I’m the Phantom. Moriarty’s my name.”

“I am a phantom, too.” [He digs into a pocket inside his robe.] “These yours?” [He holds up something jangling and sits down in the plain, white, wooden chair at the edge of the rug.]

“My keys. Where did you find them?”

“Down by the stream.”

“I dropped them inside the blog, from the mezzanine. How’d they get all the way out there? Did they float?”

“The mauve and black raccoon handed them to me. Didn’t you know you had a raccoon around here?”

“Where? Down there at the stream by that brown herd of deer?”

“That’s a common herd.”

“Well, no. I didn’t know we had a raccoon. Anyway, mauve’s a synthetic color. Therefore the raccoon must not be real.”

“Nothing’s real; it’s all in our minds, an illusion. It’s the scenes of the play you create on the stage of your mind. You’re the writer and director. You can play out the scenes any way you want. Your ultimate awareness that it’s an illusion will separate you from the Common Herd, the ones so attached to their illusory realities, the greedy ones who judge others by their own fantasies whirling around in their little heads like a herd of dervishes.”

“But I’m the real Phantom.”

“We are both phantoms.”

“Well, then, if we are both phantoms, we are having a phantom dialog. That’s uncommon.”

As I say this, the Black Monk starts to dissipate; little by little he is disappearing until all I see is his black robe and – uh – that’s gone. I, Moriarty, the Phantom of the Blog, am standing here talking to a plain white chair, like a silly fool.

But wait— over there. Do you see that? Look. No, not there. No, it’s not just in my mind. Over there, a little to the right. Over there in the tall, gold meadow grass: The Blue Deer. The Blue Deer has a fawn. It’s blue with white spots. Wait’ll I tell Samantha! A blue and white polka-dotted fawn: the color of the sky with white, fluffy clouds on a crisp autumn day.

Oh, she ends the playlist with Buffy Sainte-Marie … And here I’ll stay until it’s time for you to go.

I’ve gotta go down and get the rake out of the shed now. Watch— don’t trip over that chair.

—Moriarty, The Phantom of the Blog
Samantha Mozart, editor

October 31, 2012 — My granddaughter, 12, got in trouble at school the other day for defacing her social studies book. She came home and told her mom. She wrote in the margin, “They COULD make this more interesting.”

Kellie, my daughter, called me.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I laughed,” she said. “And then I told her I would call her teacher.”

The next day Kellie emailed me: “I had a meeting with the teachers, all of them, including the principle [sic] it was like knights at the round table.”

The teachers said many positive things about my granddaughter including that they all overhear the boys saying she’s pretty hot (she’s a cheerleader).

A day or two later, Kellie phoned me to complain that after a full day of work, in a 40-hour work week, she would have to go home, cook dinner and clean up around the house. She had done the laundry in the morning.

“The girls are eight and twelve,” I told her. “Get them to help you. They’re old enough and it will give them a sense of purpose. And, after all, S——- [the younger granddaughter] is a Girl Scout. Let her utilize her Girl Scouting around the house.”

“But, [the older one], especially, complains and doesn’t do the job thoroughly,” she said.

“Then, discipline them to do it over until they do it right,” I told her. “In the long run, it will conserve your energy once they know they can’t slack off, and it’ll relieve much of your stress.

“Remember,” I went on, “how when I worked and you were that age, I gave you specific chores to do after school, and—- I could always tell when Julie did the dishes; they were all clean.”

“Vicki got water all over the floor when she did them,” said Kellie.

“Oh. And who vacuumed…?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” said Kellie. “I think it was … no— I’m not sure.”

“Was it Nancy?”

“I don’t think so,” said Kellie. “Maybe.”

“Was it Dawn? What did Dawn do?”

“I don’t know,” Kellie said. “I used to tell them all, ‘help me get these chores done so I can come out and play.’”

While the neighborhood kids no longer clean my house and my caregiving chores for Emma are done, as you know I have written and published Volume I, Begins the Night Music, my book based on my blog, journaling Emma’s and my experiences. Now my neighborhood adult friends and worldwide Linkedin network friends help. A caregiver herself in more ways than one, my New Zealand sociologist/researcher/writer friend, Beatrice, who does make social studies more interesting, has written a review of my book to be published in different periodicals; she tells me she is aiming at “INsite, the magazine for elderly care in New Zealand, as well as a slightly different version for Carers NZ newsletter, and Carers World Radio*,” if she can get in.

Currently she is visiting England and on November 1 will meet in London, in the House of Lords, with Baroness Pitkeathley, “baronessed for her work for carers,” Beatrice emailed me. “Jill Pitkeathley is behind the whole global carers’ movement,” said Beatrice, “and am taking your book with me, to hand over to Carers’ UK as she will.” How very kind and thoughtful of Beatrice. One of the major organizations Baroness Pitkeathley founded is the National Organisation for Distressed Gentlewomen.

“But I shall mention your name in the Hallowed Halls,” Beatrice added.

Beatrice thought I, as an American, might not be impressed. I am impressed, and we still have in New York city and state, and elsewhere, a brand of Edith Wharton women, the lives of some of whom overlapped with hers; some of late may have fallen on hard times, even; thus no longer able to pay the rent or the upkeep on the brownstone or the country house, and have become distressed gentlewomen.

Beatrice’s review of my book carries a refrain: “Caregivers are people, too.”

This gracious promotion of caregivers and of my book could only but help alleviate a distressed situation.

—Samantha Mozart

*Their site states: “Carers World Radio is a monthly radio programme produced for carers. Based in the UK the show reaches a global audience. Carers UK is a long established supporter of the show.”

http://www.carersuk.org/community/carers-world-radio: “The show features the latest news and developments on topics relating to caring from around the world. Carers World Radio has also pioneered innovative live broadcasts from events such as conferences where carers at home are able to interact with presenters and the live audience with a chat room. This was sucessfully [sic] used at Carers UK events such as the International Carers Conference and our Carers’ Summits in London and Wales in 2010.”

Friday, October 26, 2012 — I went to our big, local senior center the other day.  I arrived at lunchtime.  The vast hall, reminiscent of an elementary school cafetorium, was filled with large round tables and had come to a rolling boil of seniors dining and chattering over clashing dishware and jangling flatware.  I was there to meet with the various women who would help me set up my two December book presentations (one for the caregivers’ morning group and one for their evening group). I also filled out the form about income and how many meals I eat a day, wrote them a check for $15.00 and joined the center. This is the Modern Maturity Center in Dover, Delaware. It is a multi-tasking, rambling, substantially funded affair: “Oh, we just built that additional building last year.”

I walked to the desk to ask directions to the women’s offices. The woman behind the desk said, “Aoshgjk uioepws.” I thought maybe she was Turkish. “What?” I asked.  My left ear has been closed for two weeks, and with all those people in the room chattering …, I fit right in; I couldn’t hear any better than any of those geezers.  I looked around at all of them.  They’re all so old, I thought.  I will tell you this, though, if you, a woman my age, want to get looks from every man in the room, go to a senior center.

I met with the women to set up my presentations. I learned that there are caregivers centers funded by our state and this Modern Maturity Center hosts one. Through this caregivers organization which has existed since 2002, I could have gotten respite care for Emma, payable based on income, the balance paid with state Medicaid grant funds, before I got standard Medicaid respite care through the state; in other words, they could have provided me with help before I got help – right away rather than my waiting months for our state Division of Aging to get up out of their rocking chairs and away from their computers. Although this caregivers center has been announced and promoted via the media, I think I was so busy and stressed simply taking care of Emma I didn’t notice this availability or didn’t know where to look. So, be aware when you become a caregiver – and chances are good that you will – that you must look beyond the obvious. Go to your senior center first; they can give you the best direction. I didn’t do this. Why? Probably because I didn’t want to get involved with a lot of old people.

Of interest, the center has just initiated, on their enclosed porch, a group called “Front Porch,” for Alzheimer’s/dementia beginners. (Doesn’t that sound awful? – “Oh, I’m just an Alzheimer’s beginner.”) Front Porch is for those in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia, those who don’t quite get the whole discussion or who cannot remember small things. The sessions are geared to their level.

Before I left the center, I made plans to give a writers workshop starting after the first of the year; that is, if anyone signs up.  I understand that at first only a few sign up, and then for the next session, more, as word spreads. I should expect $10 per person per six-week session, they tell me.  That’s my 60 percent cut; the center keeps the remaining 40 percent. So let’s hope I’m a success.  Oh, and I should offer the workshop attendees some sort of premium for signing up – like cookies or note pads from the dollar store, I’m told.

When I got home, my friend Jackie came and candled my ears.  My left ear is still closed, but better.  It will take about a dozen candles to clear, I think.  Hopefully I exaggerate. Jackie is coming back another day.  We have Hurricane Sandy coming Monday and Jackie had to go get her mother-in-law, who has dementia, out of Cape May, New Jersey, supposed to receive a direct hit from the storm, to nearby Maryland here. What a pleasant, relaxing experience the ear candling is.  Jackie is expert.

I primed myself the night before I went to the center by watching one of the best ever movies for old people – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – poignant, humorous, and perfect for us young old-agers – those of us in our 60s and 70s.  It is insightful, honest and very well done – the British return to India, as one reviewer put it – with Dev Patel and a cast of venerable British actors – Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton – the list goes on.

Up until a few years ago, I thought old people just got old and tired and didn’t want to do much, didn’t fall in love, weren’t interested in sex. When I was in my 40s I was amazed that Emma and my stepfather, in their 70s, got divorced. Why would they do that when they’re already so old? I wondered. The truth is, as demonstrated by this movie, that maybe your body gets old but your mind doesn’t; it still thinks like that of a 10 year old, and you still have those desires, feelings and feistiness; you want to be useful in life.

I cite myself as an example. All of my neighbors are out riding bikes in the nice weather. I wanted to go out bike riding, too, so I got a bike, a used one, a cruiser.

I’m a swinger. I attended a potluck near home this past Sunday, when after eating we went to the local elementary school grounds and played a ball game where one-by-one, team members get eliminated, like chess pieces. I was the first eliminated, wouldn’t you know. So being old and tired I walked over and sat on a swing. And then I began to swing. And I swung higher and higher, and higher and higher. How free I was, and felt my exercising muscles massaging my organs. I haven’t swung since I was, oh, I don’t know, maybe 10. What intrigued me was that my mindset that got me on the swing matched my mindset at 10; as does that of my bike riding. I think hereafter I will ride my bike over to the school and go swing.

Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Museum of Innocence has his protagonist, who is counting the days and weeks and months until he rendezvous with his lover again, bundle the time; that way the time goes faster, or seems less expansive. So, six is a small number: it was only six decades ago that I was 10, a bike-riding swinger eyed by the boys.

—Samantha Mozart

October 15, 2011 — “Thanks for the kisses for us,” I emailed my friend who had sent cyberkisses to our Linkedin women writers caregivers group members. “We always need them; at least I do,” I told her. Somewhere along the line very early in my adult life, I effected my moving to Southern California where I was fortunate to meet guides who led me to a room with a big window where I could get a clear picture of my erroneous views. I flung those views into a flaming hearth, and assumed responsibility for my thoughts and actions. But the hearth must be big and ever tended. These phenomena arrive on my doorstep without ringing the bell, often are unwieldy and I struggle with them daily.

I don’t mean to sound overstuffed here; I am humbly offering a view of my cauldron of experiences as I understand them. That understanding could become tomorrow morning’s ashes swept out of the hearth to be replaced with fresh kindling. Sometimes I feel like I’m swimming in porridge.

I am receptive to what comes, think it’s the right way to go, later learn it was the wrong way – or was it? It led me to where I am today. Could I have chosen a smoother path? Maybe. Still, 30 years since reading it, my favorite book on this subject is a little book by Richard Bach, called Illusions. He presents it as “the messiah’s handbook,” and for me it is, no matter how reluctantly I accept the gift it places into my hands.

This is what steams from the brew of thoughts sparking in my awakening head early this morning as I roll out of bed and stumble straight to my computer. My hands are cold and my fingers can barely move to type to keep up with my unedited thoughts that pour out onto this page.

I lean back in my chair. I ruminate.

I take a break from my writing, exit my blog and amble out across the meadow to the broad brook at the edge of the woods. I pick up a long stick and poke at the ground as I wander. The shimmering water rippling over the stones recalls Franz Schubert’s lied “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (D. 774, transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt; currently no. 22 on my “The Dream” playlist, here performed by Evgeny Kissin).

I find a boulder and sit down to rest. I think of the journeyman who upon his wanderings comes to a brook which he follows to a mill. There he encounters the miller’s beautiful daughter – “Der Müller und der Bach.” I look across the brook to the woods. Which is the better side? To contemplate alone in the deep woods or to go out into the bustle of humanity and exchange information and ideas? Which is the better way to achieve enlightenment and ultimately liberation?

Someone said to me of her man friend whom she has met only a few years ago: “I feel like we were stuck together in a past life, and then someone in this life peeled us apart and sent us out into the world separately. Only now have we come together again, yet we remain separate.”

I seem to have reached the end of my path. I don’t know where to turn next. My question becomes Faustian. Do I continue putting one foot in front of the other along the bank of this brook, do I ford the stream, or do I wander into the water, deep into the center until it rises up over my head? How do I bring this together?

The sun warms me here by the brook. I haven’t seen The Blue Deer. I wonder where she is?

My friend who emailed us the cyberkisses sent me a copy of the September 3, 2012, People magazine story about singer Amy Grant’s caregiving for her dad who has dementia. Her mom suffered from dementia and passed away last year. Ms. Grant said that in the beginning she felt angry and overwhelmed because it wasn’t like it used to be. No, it isn’t.

For me, so much of her story rings true, especially the parts where early on her dad asks, “How do I do this?” Or his smiling when she points out nipping the dead buds off the daffodils to encourage fresh blooms and he smiles uncomprehending and says, “I guess.” Emma used to do that. And the look in his eyes: it’s the same as Emma’s. You can see in the eyes an intelligent person (he was a prominent radiation oncologist in Nashville) and the vacuity or opacity at the same time. It is heartrending and frightening, because you know you may be next. As Amy Grant says, she sees him as the person he was; I see Emma as she was – that the one with dementia is not really she. She simply got sick. I find it intriguing that Amy Grant’s mom’s and dad’s dementia showed up in brain scans. Emma’s did not. Odd that there was no history of dementia in Amy Grant’s family – none in ours, either – yet both her parents got dementia so young, in their 70s. I wonder what caused that? Emma was much older, 90.

It’s not only hard to let go of your loved one; it’s hard to let go of the life that used to be or could be.

I glance at last summer’s irises here in the meadow. The long leaves flow lushly and gracefully from the rhizomes, their tips now turning yellow, like elderly hands. Dead buds remain. Maybe I need to stay where I am and pick off the dead buds to encourage fresh blooms.

—Samantha Mozart

September 28, 2012 — The colors of the leaves on the dogwood outside my window have turned from brick to burgundy to vermillion, while within their burnoose of intimate color, the red berries wait. Soon the speckled birds will come find them and eat them on their migration south. Close behind the dogwood stands the tall loblolly pine, its green, lush appendages heavy with cones carrying its seed. Just to the right of the pine the high leaves on the verdant maples are tinged with gold.

Where the sun rises in the east this morning the sky turns orange, while outside my window raindrops fall drooping the vermillion leaves, like scarves ready to drop to the green lawn below, and in the north and west the sky is gray.

The turn of a season awaits none. Today is the day. The plump berries reveal themselves as ripe. The birds have come, just now, in the rain, as I watch. Thrushes and finches, some are speckled, some are blackbirds and the proverbial sparrow, all vying for the best branch, the sweetest fruit.

The turn of the wheels of government grind slowly to pulp those who wait. It will take up to three months for the Medicaid grant to pay my Medicare Part B premium normally deducted from my Social Security benefit: “That’s the way the system works,” they tell me. “But I need the money now,” I say. That’s an extra $105 a month for me. “Oh, you’ll be reimbursed,” they reassure me. But in three months I may be a millionaire from the royalties of my best-selling book, Begins the Night Music.” My book’s not a best seller – yet. Were it not for food stamps, frankly, I would not be able to eat. Not that I wouldn’t benefit by losing a few pounds. I know people, women very close to me, who can’t seem to put on weight; they are as thin as waifs, on their way to becoming as emaciated as Emma before she died. I offer to give them some of my weight, just like I offer to package up and send our humidity to friends who live in states where they have a dry heat. But none accept.

Yes, I received my food stamps days after I applied; I also received free, for the most part, medical care. This is good. Had I not cared for Emma this past decade, when there was no other caregiver nor caregiver pay available, but rather deposited her in a nursing home, I would not be in this predicament now. Family and friends have graciously given me money and goods to cover the mortgage and immediate needs, yet I received the final available means to cover the mortgage payment and will have none for October or future months.

The books I read a year ago, as I have written about and published on this blog and in Begins the Night Music (“What Am I Reading?” and “What Am I Reading? II”) led me through my dark night of the soul. Nevertheless, I do not like leading the life of a mendicant. My purpose in writing my blog, my book Begins the Night Music and more books to come, and in speaking to groups on caregiving, is to help others, because I know others are or will endure a similar situation, experiences of which often will be shooting in the dark. Yes, here I am. It is what it is for now, while I continue to seek additional means, and teeter on the razor’s edge.

In the end, it was the Medicaid grant that paid me to care for Emma and paid Daphne, our extraordinary attendant who came faithfully and compassionately 30 hours a week. It was Medicaid that paid for Emma’s care over the years. As I have stated previously, Emma thought she was going to die like her mother at 72 of a stroke, so she spent all her money. Emma lived another quarter century. How we two would have survived without that Medicaid grant, I don’t know. I do know that a change in our American presidential administration this November would seek to eliminate that Medicaid grant, and then I’d have to buy private health insurance. With what? If I could afford that, I would have done it already.

I’m going to have to live at least another quarter century to pay off the expense of my recent $99 call to Alberta, Canada. I thought AT&T had made a mistake when I looked at my phone bill. The rep, named Johnny, who happened to be in India, told me international calls are $1.52 a minute because I do not have an international calling plan. “Just across the border into Canada?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “That’s unacceptable,” I replied. “Let me get you a supervisor,” he said.

The supervisor, Jason, who sounded like he was in the Philippines, said, “Well, now, as a one-time courtesy I can give you that call for fifty percent off if you sign up for our five-cent a minute international plan for five dollars a month.”

“Fine,” I said, “but why not simply re-price my Canadian call at five cents a minute when I agree to sign up for the International plan.”

“Oh, we can’t do that,” he said. He went on to tell me that should I quit AT&T within two months that half-priced call would revert to $99.

To reduce a long story by 50 percent, I will tell you I have signed up for a Comcast “triple play” package whereby in addition to my present Internet and TV cable service with them, I will get flat-rate, land-line phone service saving myself $20 a month and thus eliminate AT&T, my long-distance carrier, and Verizon, my local phone line carrier. When my phone line went dead recently due to a loose connection in the overhead wires and I used my emergency-only cell phone to call for repair, the woman customer care representative at Verizon replied to my complaint of being on hold for a half hour at 30 cents a minute, that I should not have used my cell phone but rather used a neighbor’s phone.

I went bike riding this morning.  I asked my friend R to find me a pre-owned 26-inch girls’ cruiser, the kind with the foot brakes and fat tires.  He did, for $20.  The bike is blue. He pumped up the tires and lowered the seat and I was off.  I didn’t go far; I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk when I de-biked – my first ride in about eight years.  A good way to shed, not pounds maybe, but years: riding with the wind in one’s hair is exhilarating.  Had our mailman looked at me when I rode past him, I would have suggested he get a bike, too.  I felt like I was 10 again.  Now I can go father than on my walks, and ride over by the lake; that will be pleasant, especially in the autumn with all the leaves turning red and gold.

—Samantha Mozart