Category Archives: Dementia Caregiving Journals

It is said this house served as a Revolutionary War infirmary and a stop on the Underground Railroad.
At least 3 ghosts live here. Look closely at the 3rd floor windows.

September 21, 2012— A friend blogger commented on my “Our Town” blog post that I should have included some pictures. Why not? She writes a humor blog, “Lame Adventures” (http://lameadventures.wordpress.com/) about her town, New York City, with lots of pictures – iPad boxes of pens left on an apartment house lobby radiator, bags in trees, pigeons on office windowsills; so I wondered why I didn’t think of posting pictures to go with my blog about my town. (You don’t have to answer why I didn’t think. Moriarty, The Phantom of My Blog, goes around mumbling under his breath about that frequently enough. But, look, he’s the one who lost the keys and locked himself out on the blog balcony during a thunderstorm, not I.)

Anyway, here I have reissued this post now with pictures, so you can see what our charming town looks like – or used to before they chopped down the trees.

Pear Blossoms

September 15, 2012 — On a recent Sunday morning I started my day deadheading the roses and geraniums out front. My next-door neighbor was edging her sidewalk. The day was warm and sunny. Mike, the guy who lives up the street in the purple Victorian with the beautiful yard, walked by with his little grandson, now walking, when another neighbor, Brian, rode by hunched over on his son’s 20-inch bike.

“Hey Brian,” Mike called, “they make bigger bikes.”

All my neighbors out playing: it reminded me of junior high.

Restored 19th century opera house. Frederick Douglass spoke here.

Before deciding to buy this historic home in our central Delaware small town ten years ago, Emma and I drove down from Wilmington to see it a second time. We got to the historic district and then couldn’t find the house. We pulled up to ask directions of a guy raking his lawn. He smiled, leaned on his rake, and casually spent ten minutes describing the layout of the town and providing a choice of routes to get to the house. The house, it turned out, was just around the corner.

Our House, Emma & Jetta
Built 1894

I was drawn to the town by the historic charm of the red bricks, brackets, gargoyles and lace of the Colonials, Federals, Italianates and Queen Annes. I like to walk the historic brick sidewalks in the shade of grand old maples, walnuts, lindens and ginkos, smell the aroma of a boxwood garden behind a wrought iron fence or of sun baking well-seasoned wood on the side of an old red barn; I like to see vegetables springing up on a plot of land or flowers frolicking in a bed lining a wrap-around porch, while from porch rafters up and down the street wind chimes toll, ring, and titter in the breeze like a consortium of angels.

Italianate mansion with flying staircase and cupola.

We had no sooner moved in and just sat down at the dinner table that early September evening when a band paraded up the street playing a John Philip Sousa march. I leaped from the dinner table and raced out onto the porch. I was nine again.

“Oh, what a nice, family-oriented town,” I thought as they paraded by. “They have a marching band play for us at dinnertime.”

This 3-story mansion has a cupola, flying staircase, a library and stained glass.

Bearing flags, drums and horns, led by the drum major strutting with his baton, they were a troop of pied pipers drawing families onto their porches and sidewalks and followed by a host of helmeted kids on bikes. It turned out they are our Citizens’ Hose Company marching unit and band practicing for the annual Delaware Firemen’s Conference parade and competition held every September in our state capital, Dover. (That day is today.) The fire company has had a winning history of marching since their founding in 1886. The Citizens’ Hose Company band, founded in 1947, “have won more Governor’s Cups, for the best appearing fire company with music and 25 or more men in the line of march, than any other company in this state,” according to their website. They hold the record for the most consecutive wins – 10 in a row. They march in Dublin, Ireland and numerous cities and small towns along the East Coast. They won the Governor’s cup again this year.

Main Street

Our street.

After the parade, our volunteer firefighters cavalcade home commanding their amazing array of equipment – emergency vehicles and trucks, the hook and ladder, a water tanker, a vehicle for each imaginable emergency, it seems – up the highway from Dover, sirens wailing, big horns blaring. Then they celebrate all evening at the firehall with food, beer and dancing.

Sometimes bands from other countries, often Ireland, come to play and march, too.

Colonial-era building formerly housing the town newspaper. Kids set the building on fire. What they could salvage of the building has since been restored.

Well, the other night I was sitting on the front porch when, on the next street near the firehouse where the band was practicing marching, bagpipes started to play. The player was nimble fingered, too. I sat out on the porch under the guise of reading the town newspaper so I could hear the bagpipes. A new neighbor pulled up in his white and gray pickup and parked at the curb, a young guy. He rolled down the window, and instead of getting out, sat there. Coolly, I continued to read the paper, turning the pages, glancing over the top edge.

Gates designed by local architect Van Gaskin.

I was intrigued that this guy whom you’d expect to be listening to country or rock music or checking his text messages, sat there quietly.

I waited.

He looked over at me. “Do you hear that? What’s that? BAGPIPES?”

18th century St. Peter’s Church belfry may well house bats. Many townspeople have bats in their attics….

“Yep,” I said casually, smiling. Then I explained to him that they were practicing for the parade. “Pretty cool, huh,” I said.

“I’ve gotta go over there and see them,” he said and drove around the block.

***

There are plenty of family events year round in our town. In October there’s our autumn event celebrating our history, when kids paint pumpkins, play games and families enjoy fun festivities. In December our Main Street association has held a Holiday Candlelight Walking Tour of Historic Homes. I took the tour. In one home I settled into a warm 18th-century kitchen, engaged in camaraderie while sampling savory five-bean soup simmered in a kettle over a fire in a brick fireplace nearly big enough to convene the Continental Congress. The homeowner said, “They come back every year and the first thing they ask us is ‘Where’s the bean soup?’”

My friend Jackie’s store, “The Gathering Place.”

My first Christmas Eve in our town I stepped out onto our Victorian porch. The air was fresh and crisp and cold. Snowflakes began to fall, lacing the night sky and fastening to the brick sidewalks. Carolers came by in an old wagon, kindling hearts with song. Santa rode up the street in the back of a pickup, waving and calling “Me-r-r-y Christmas!” The sky wore whiskers of wood smoke curling from old chimney pots above the tall rooftops. “What a magical little town,” I thought, smiling, probably looking like an extra in the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life.”

—Samantha Mozart

Blue Blizzard 2003

September 18, 2012 — You know, it is important to note for us Americans, that yesterday, September 17, marked important anniversaries of two significant moments in our history: The 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (The bloodiest battle in our history – blood splashed everywhere, even on children, so many bodies it changed the way we buried people – in public cemeteries for the first time; the Sanitary Commission were beside themselves until they encountered all the dead horses, an even worse debacle.) Those conditions led to citizens dying of typhoid, as you might imagine. This bloodbath led to President Lincoln’s issuing the Emancipation Proclamation that year, 1862. In 1865, a sufficient number of states ratified the 13th amendment abolishing slavery; while Mississippi might have been fixin’ to ratify that amendment, they didn’t get around to it until March 16, 1995.

The other significant date is the 225th anniversary of the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1787.

I saw author and social historian Kathleen A. Ernst give a book presentation (on C-Span Book TV) at Sharpsburg/Antietam on her book, researched and written with Ted Alexander, Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign. Enlightening. Unimaginable what those people endured. People who were children at the time later recounted many of the stories.

During the course of the Civil War 2.5 percent of Americans died. If they died today, that percentage would total 7 million people, one million fewer than the population of New York City.

Tonight PBS is airing a new Ric Burns documentary, “Death and the Civil War” (for “American Experience”), based on the book by Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust, coincidentally born Sepember 18, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

And you thought my book titles were long, to wit: Begins the Night Music: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal.

The essence here is suffering and the nature of the human condition.

And our social condition, as a friend put it: “The legal niceties of blame.”

We need to think much more about this, we humans; it is enough that there is so much suffering and not enough research funding and knowledge, but then to haul off and bomb embassies and wage wars … I don’t know. I prefer to read a good book.

—Samantha Mozart

September 15, 2012 — On a recent Sunday morning I started my day deadheading the roses and geraniums out front. My next-door neighbor was edging her sidewalk. The day was warm and sunny. Mike, the guy who lives up the street in the purple Victorian with the beautiful yard, walked by with his little grandson, now walking, when another neighbor, Brian, rode by hunched over on his son’s 20-inch bike.

“Hey Brian,” Mike called, “they make bigger bikes.”

All my neighbors out playing: it reminded me of junior high.

Before deciding to buy this historic home in our central Delaware small town ten years ago, Emma and I drove down from Wilmington to see it a second time. We got to the historic district and then couldn’t find the house. We pulled up to ask directions of a guy raking his lawn. He smiled, leaned on his rake, and casually spent ten minutes describing the layout of the town and providing a choice of routes to get to the house. The house, it turned out, was just around the corner.

I was drawn to the town by the historic charm of the red bricks, brackets, gargoyles and lace of the Colonials, Federals, Italianates and Queen Annes. I like to walk the historic brick sidewalks in the shade of grand old maples, walnuts, lindens and ginkos, smell the aroma of a boxwood garden behind a wrought iron fence or of sun baking well-seasoned wood on the side of an old red barn; I like to see vegetables springing up on a plot of land or flowers frolicking in a bed lining a wrap-around porch, while from porch rafters up and down the street wind chimes toll, ring, and titter in the breeze like a consortium of angels.

We had no sooner moved in and just sat down at the dinner table that early September evening when a band paraded up the street playing a John Philip Sousa march. I leaped from the dinner table and raced out onto the porch. I was nine again.

“Oh, what a nice, family-oriented town,” I thought as they paraded by. “They have a marching band play for us at dinnertime.”

Bearing flags, drums and horns, led by the drum major strutting with his baton, they were a troop of pied pipers drawing families onto their porches and sidewalks and followed by a host of helmeted kids on bikes. It turned out they are our Citizens’ Hose Company marching unit and band practicing for the annual Delaware Firemen’s Conference parade and competition held every September in our state capital, Dover. (That day is today.) The fire company has had a winning history of marching since their founding in 1886. The Citizens’ Hose Company band, founded in 1947, “have won more Governor’s Cups, for the best appearing fire company with music and 25 or more men in the line of march, than any other company in this state,” according to their website. They hold the record for the most consecutive wins – 10 in a row. They march in Dublin, Ireland and numerous cities and small towns along the East Coast. They won the Governor’s Cup again this year.

After the parade, our volunteer firefighters cavalcade home commanding their amazing array of equipment – emergency vehicles and trucks, the hook and ladder, a water tanker, a vehicle for each imaginable emergency, it seems – up the highway from Dover, sirens wailing, big horns blaring. Then they celebrate all evening at the firehall with food, beer and dancing.

Sometimes bands from other countries, often Ireland, come to play and march, too.

Well, the other night I was sitting on the front porch when, on the next street near the firehouse where the band was practicing marching, bagpipes started to play. The player was nimble fingered, too. I sat out on the porch under the guise of reading the town newspaper so I could hear the bagpipes. A new neighbor pulled up in his white and gray pickup and parked at the curb, a young guy. He rolled down the window, and instead of getting out, sat there. Coolly, I continued to read the paper, turning the pages, glancing over the top edge.

I was intrigued that this guy whom you’d expect to be listening to country or rock music or checking his text messages, sat there quietly.

I waited.

He looked over at me. “Do you hear that? What’s that? BAGPIPES?”

“Yep,” I said casually, smiling. Then I explained to him that they were practicing for the parade. “Pretty cool, huh,” I said.

“I’ve gotta go over there and see them,” he said and drove around the block.

***

There are plenty of family events year round in our town. In October there’s our autumn event celebrating our history, when kids paint pumpkins, play games and families enjoy fun festivities. In December our Main Street association has held a Holiday Candlelight Walking Tour of Historic Homes. I took the tour. In one home I settled into a warm 18th-century kitchen, engaged in camaraderie while sampling savory five-bean soup simmered in a kettle over a fire in a brick fireplace nearly big enough to convene the Continental Congress. The homeowner said, “They come back every year and the first thing they ask us is ‘Where’s the bean soup?’”

My first Christmas Eve in our town I stepped out onto our Victorian porch. The air was fresh and crisp and cold. Snowflakes began to fall, lacing the night sky and fastening to the brick sidewalks. Carolers came by in an old wagon, kindling hearts with song. Santa rode up the street in the back of a pickup, waving and calling “Me-r-r-y Christmas!” The sky wore whiskers of wood smoke curling from old chimney pots above the tall rooftops. “What a magical little town,” I thought, smiling, probably looking like an extra in the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life.”

—Samantha Mozart

September 8, 2012 — Monday evening, September 3, at the top of the six o’clock hour, “The Robin’s Return,” a piano caprice, began to play on the radio. This was the piano piece Emma played by which I remember her at our black Steinway baby grand when I was a child. For three minutes Emma had returned to sit at the piano and play my favorite piece. This was an awakening moment, in a way I cannot explain. It was fitting that Steve Curylo, my newfound friend from Linkedin’s “Aficionados of Classical Music,” should air it on his radio show, Monday Evening Classics on Valley Free Radio, nine days before Emma’s September 12 birthday. She would have turned 98.

As he promised, Steve accessed the YouTube link on my blog home page with J. J. Sheridan performing Leander Fisher’s spirited arpeggio piece.

When the music ended, Steve, in his rich baritone, identified the composition and said that the link to that music had been sent to him by his friend Samantha Mozart: “Yes, that’s her name, Samantha Mozart,” because Samantha’s mother used to play it. He then announced, “Samantha Mozart has written a book titled Begins the Night Music, a book for caregivers about her caring for her mother who had dementia. He also recited a duo of reader comments about the book “lyrical and hard to put down,” said the book was based on my website, “Salmon Salad and Mozart dot com; that’s Salmon Salad and Mozart dot com.”

I was sitting in the kitchen eating my chicken breast and shiitake mushrooms in sherry listening to Steve’s radio show online at http://www.valleyfreeradio.org (non-profit, listener-supported radio, at 103.3 FM out of Northampton, Mass.) when it occurred to me that I was becoming known worldwide and I was the only one listening who knew me.

Steve deftly segued from Mozart, Samantha Mozart, to Chopin, Frederic Chopin. And, I, the book author, immediately thought of Kate Chopin, the book author, and, of course, the composer’s lover, George Sand, the book author. To me, Steve subliminally planted the connection in the minds of the listeners so they’d remember. This popular Chopin composition for piano and orchestra, “Grande Polonaise,” Steve said, took Chopin four years to compose. Ultimately Chopin added a piano part to the front, “Andante Spianato,” when he received a long-awaited invitation to perform in one of violinist François-Antoine Habeneck’s Conservatoire Concerts in Paris. Often when I am writing, something new will stir me — a piece of music, something someone said or I have read, an occurrence, and I will attach that story to my composition.

“Radio has long been known as a theater of the mind and it’s still that way whether you are listening to Led Zeppelin or a symphony,” said Steve Curylo in an interview for an August 30 Chicopee (Mass.) Register profile. “Something happens and people get an image in their mind.” (http://www.chicopeeregisteronline.com/pdfs/cr08.30.12.pdf)

Later in his radio show, Steve played a composition by Mozart, the Bassoon Concerto in Bb, K.191, which Mozart “put together,” Steve termed it, in 1774. Steve didn’t say “composed.” Again, as a writer, I relate to the term “put together.” Often I “put together” my compositions, especially within my blog posts (you may have noticed), paragraphs blended in rubato, such as in my previous chapter “Potato Chips.” (At least Chopin didn’t write an étude called “Potato Chips.” His “Grande Polonaise” of the potato chip genre would have to have been called “Party Size.”) Before the last half hour of his show, he (Steve, not Chopin) again announced my book. Wow.

While this promotion hopefully will fatten my purse sufficient to appease my mortgage holder, the root significance of the book promotion is the subject matter: More of us will live longer, possibly, thereby in review, making Emma’s age seem as tender as a spring chicken in her last days; presently, fifty percent of people over 90 have some form of dementia, states Nobel laureate neuropsychiatrist Dr. Eric Kandel; more boomers will be caring for loved ones with dementia; and, in fact, as a friend pointed out to me, younger boomers will be caring for older boomers; plus we need more funding for Alzheimer’s research.

While a prevalence of websites and books exist providing information on the stages of dementia and how-to information, significant to the subject of Begins the Night Music is how-not-to. The truth is that when you encounter a loved one in his or her incipient stages of dementia, while you may be annoyed at that person’s occasional behavior, you may not notice that behavior as signs of dementia. And as the mind subtly deteriorates, you, as most caregivers do, will fall backwards into caring for this person; you won’t realize you need help until you are in the deep end and you won’t know until you begin hiring how very long it takes to find good help, whether in-home or in a nursing home. By this time your own health is in jeopardy. Often, even with the best intentions, you will become frustrated and angry with the person for whom you are caring.

And, now … Lights Out, to quote American radio and television personality Frank Gallop from the ‘50s TV program taken from the ‘30s and ‘40s radio show. Blow out the candle. Yes, the night music begins. It is a dark song. It is a song to capture the attention of the curious, the scholarly, the enlightened. What more significant place for Steve Curylo to announce my book than in Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke colleges, the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as other schools of higher learning, and on Valley Free Radio across the Internet.

Steve Curylo loves classical music as do I. He is a classically trained baritone, having majored in opera. I may not have a radio show, but I have a blog: on how many blogs can you listen to selections of classical music? I leave you with Steve Curylo singing “It Is Enough” from Mendelssohn’s “Elijah”, an mp3 recording Steve sent me, from a recital he did on March 11, 2006, in Amherst. Jerry Noble, his accompanist is a staff pianist at Smith College.

Steve emailed me the story of Elijah; I’ve placed it below.

—Samantha Mozart

The story is found in I Kings 19. Elijah just won a great victory over the priests of the false god Baal on Mt. Carmel, and now he’s heard that the evil Queen Jezebel has a contract out on his life. So he flees into the wilderness and begs God to take his life rather than be killed by evil people. This is all in the music, it’s a great oratorio, for chorus, orchestra and four soloists, and Elijah is the baritone soloist!

August 28, 2012 — Looking at the length of the Roman numerals required to document this chapter title makes me wonder if these days Roman numerals become confused with text messaging shorthand; i.e., LMAOROTF. For example, the Roman numerals MDCCCLXXXVIII could mean “My darn creepy computer control left xenophobic Xavier’s xylophone vegetating in India ink” or 1888. This shorthand rolls a paragraph into one word, rendering the paragraph small. If I could write and communicate to your comprehension this way, my posts would be five words long, my books two pages – quick reads.

I had a catering business 25 (XXV) years ago. The predominant part of that was running executive lunch routes, meaning running around with a lunch cart – coolers and plastic storage trays stacked and affixed with a bungee cord to a luggage cart – selling sandwiches and salads to office workers.

I learned that by selling the little things, the snacks, I could achieve the biggest sales; i.e., potato chips, cookies, muffins, candy bars.

I became aware that it was the little things I did for my customers that reaped the biggest rewards – like extending IOUs until payday, taking an interest in the people, learning about their families, their jobs, that they grew up in some exotic place – like on Fiji picking pears from the king’s trees –, asking their opinions on current events, engaging in witty repartee: the exchange of information and ideas; this is what is most important. However I could, I gave them love, concern and support. It was easier that way; it came naturally to me. It is the support and love that yielded me the greatest return. I became wealthy in friendship, compassion and laughing out loud. I could not believe I was getting paid to have so much fun. In turn, on a day when I felt under the weather, my customers bolstered me. Sometimes I literally was under the weather when a rare Los Angeles downpour rendered me looking as if I’d just found their sandwiches and snacks while I was in the bathtub showering.

Now, years later, by posing a simple question this March to women writer caregivers on a Linkedin discussion board, I have discovered a cornucopian treasure of the most beautiful women friends. There exists a core group of us from around the world – South Africa, New Zealand, Germany, Canada, and across the United States. We are open to all, whoever wants to tell her story, and we listen and support unconditionally.

We are blown away by our phenomenal friendship. We are all of a certain age, old enough to be or have been caregivers. Some of us find ourselves in Act III of our lives, over 60. We have reached the age where we’ve come to realize that it is the little things that give life meaning, like cutting cabbages from a kitchen garden, a beloved dog curled up in a basket in front of a log fire, a warm kitty curled up on a tummy, having tea (read wine) with a friend, giving a talk to an Alzheimer’s group about our caregiving experiences, volunteering to help kids, listening to a beautiful classical music composition while scrubbing the kitchen floor or being inspired to write, as I do this story, by an extraordinary performance of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” with violins played by Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Shlomo Mintz, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Israel Philharmonic.

You haven’t heard “The Four Seasons” until you have heard this performance. This is not your usual marching along interpretation, but rather is played with rich sensitivity and expression. These musicians make you stop and listen. I find myself imagining Antonio Vivaldi sitting at his desk or with his violin under his chin, pen poised to paper, saying, “OK, it’s gonna sound like this.” Although, he’d be saying it in Italian, because I don’t think he spoke English. Nonetheless, music is written in Italian, so he was probably speaking Italian, if only to make it compatible. You’ll hear bits in this performance you haven’t heard before. It’s not listening to the same short passage over and over again, looped tight as a garrotte, as I have while waiting 20 minutes for a customer care representative to come on the line, and then witnessing that person randomly pulling cue cards from a small hat. The little things these musicians do make a big difference.

We women writer caregivers discuss everything from writing and caregiving, families and relatives, to the weather – temperature, Fahrenheit vs. Celsius – gardening and recipes. I have a computer application that converts Fahrenheit to Celsius, so I can accurately tell them how hot it is here today – 29.444 degrees Celsius. Recently, I offered to package up some of our Delaware humidity and ship it to my friend in Washington state. She said that while it was most generous of me to think of her, I need not go to all that trouble.

I follow a blog called Lame Adventures, as I have mentioned in previous chapters, written by a woman who lives in New York City and goes to her job every day to earn her “health insurance and a potato.” I credit her recent post and that of her fellow Canadian blogger LeClown for their exchange of ideas on smiley faces and emoticons inspiring my thought on little things and aging for this chapter: http://lameadventures.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/lame-adventure-333-a-brief-history-of-hollow/. She also emailed me a link to a TED talk Jane Fonda gave on aging and our third act, on women and their personal power. You can watch the video, download a podcast or download the text. I highly recommend it. In computer years, my computer is nearly as aged as I, hence does not have an Intel processor, so I could not download the latest Flash version to watch the video. I downloaded the latter two options. Jane Fonda also writes this text in her recent book, Prime Time. Here is the link to her talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_fonda_life_s_third_act.html#649000.

Before you think TED refers to Turner, I learned that TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to “ideas worth spreading.” TED started in 1984 as “a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design”. Conferences are held annually in Palm Springs and Long Beach, Calif., and Edinburgh, Scotland: http://www.ted.com/pages/about.

Jane Fonda states that females are born with personal power. We’re “feisty,” we have “agency,” she says. Then as we get older, we start worrying about fitting in and being popular, and later we become the subjects and objects of other people’s lives. Ultimately, if we live long enough, we reach our third acts. “Older women are the largest demographic in the world,” Fonda says. And I, personally, can vouch for some of them from around the world as my good friends. Each one of these women has realized her own personal power, each one is highly accomplished in her own right, and each one is overflowing with compassion.

I agree with Jane Fonda and with my women writer caregiver friends that one’s third act is the most fun – much to our surprise – and we think that is due largely to having learned we need not sweat the big stuff; whatever the obstacle is, we trust it soon will be resolved and we will get through one more thing one more time. This time is the most fun of my life, equivalent to when I was selling sandwiches; I am surrounded and supported by an abundance of good things, foremost among them richer, deeper friendships.

Therefore, I trust that my current financial dearth soon will be resolved, through my efforts and my friends’ moral and book-promoting support, that I will continue to find myself laughing out loud, and that I not find myself laughing beneath a bridge with the trolls.

Recently I joined a group on Linkedin called “Aficionados of Classical Music” and through a post that caught my attention, commented. The man who replied, Steve Curylo, lives in western Massachusetts, is an opera singer, a baritone, and has a classical music radio show every Monday from 6 to 8 p.m. Eastern time called Monday Evening Classics, on Valley Free Radio, at 103.3 FM in the Northampton area or online at http://www.valleyfreeradio.org. He is the one who recommended this Four Seasons performance I am listening to.

I listened Monday night to Steve’s radio show while eating dinner. It turns out Steve’s Uncle Walter had dementia, and music, as with Emma, was the last thing he recognized before he died.

Steve visited my blog. “I’m going to get something on the air next week about your new book, Begins the [Night] Music, on next week’s show,” he emailed me, “and thereafter, as an ongoing [Public Service Announcement] for your book. You deserve to be known and appreciated. And people around here in the Valley Free Radio listening area, especially the Five Colleges, and Northampton in particular, are very interested in such literature, and would probably react very favorably.” He’s going to announce Begins the Night Music next Monday and will continue through December 31, “which will bring it into the spotlight for the Holidays.”

He also really likes “The Robin’s Return,” he continued, and will open his program with it next week. “The Robin’s Return” piano piece was my favorite that Emma played, and that I feature here on the home page of my blog.

Am I blown away or what?!

Friends are planning to promote my book in many ways: at special events promoting themselves, to Alzheimer’s groups, donating copies to Alzheimer’s libraries; and my friend in New Zealand will write a review to be published in a New Zealand and an Australian magazine. Our Hospice chaplain emailed me a link today to a site Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, started for caregivers after caring for her mother: http://theconversationproject.org/. I submitted Emma’s and my story there today, promoting my book, too; hopefully the editors will publish it.

This is a most amazing time for me. Thank you, my friends, for the potato chips.

—Samantha Mozart

August 21, 2012 — This is a story difficult to write, because I find the situation humiliating. Nevertheless, I believe it must be told; it is the coda of caregiving for many caregivers, the ones who have sacrificed their lifestyles, their means of producing an income; indeed, everything that has gone before, to care for the one in need. It’s like you’re in a dark cave for the duration of your loved one’s suffering. You don’t get to go out into the world often, to socialize or shop, and you don’t have time to follow world and local news details. Moreover you’re old and getting older, most likely a senior citizen yourself.

Caregiving is a lonely business. When your loved one dies, caregiving does not end; your loved one goes away leaving you to clean up the fallout. Just as in the succeeding states of an illness, there exist succeeding states of caregiving. First there are the details of the funeral to attend to, then the death notifications, then the family feud over the deceased’s estate — in my case the quart bucket of money. Now there is the house, it’s mortgage. Emma left a life insurance policy, which paid her funeral expenses. That is all. Her Social Security and pension have ceased, meaning that I have lost two-thirds of the income required to pay the mortgage and the other household expenses. The house was in both our names, joint tenancy. Right outside my window inky, burping bank vultures hover, their wings arched, their red eyes glowering through the panes at me. The caregiving fallout must be dealt with alone. A solo performance is this coda.

While I was preoccupied working with the bank, I hadn’t noticed that the red berries are starting to appear on the North American dogwood outside my window. As I write this I watch a squirrel feasting on them, bouncing on the thin branches, as if on a seesaw.

The bank refuses to work with me. They blew me off. I tried a federal government Housing and Urban Development recommended nonprofit advocacy through which a very kind young man advocated for me with the bank. My only hope was to get reduced mortgage payments for six months (a forbearance) until my Begins the Night Music book sales plus other endeavors I implement – writing tutoring, writing workshops — produce enough income. Should I still fall short income at the end of the six months, then the plan would be to institute a mortgage modification, meaning a refinancing. No cigar.  My income wasn’t high enough.

I made the mistake of paying every cent I had towards the mortgage, leaving enough for food, heating oil and utilities; that payment equaled half the monthly mortgage installment. In one of a series of letters the bank has sent me, they stated that they cannot credit my account with a partial payment. I really needed that money. Did they return it? Of course not. They’re using it. I suspect it will be deposited into the escrow. Nonetheless, I am now a month behind. Someone suggested I skip one month and pay the next—too late now, then I’d be only one month behind rather than the two months I will be two weeks from now. The bank will begin foreclosure proceedings once two consecutive months of mortgage are not paid. Their stinky breath is smoking down the back of my neck.

I was able to through the state Department of Health and Social Services qualify for food stamps. Less humiliating than in the old days with all those coupons you had to tear out of books, these days you are issued a debit card. This one has a pretty photograph of the Delaware Bay marshes on it; it looks like one of the photos I have taken.

I also qualified to have my $105 Medicare Part B deduction from my monthly Social Security check paid for by Medicaid, as well as the $250 deductible.

But these benefits are not just dropped in your lap. You have to deal with the Social Services petty tyrants who cloud you with confused information and are required to undergo bully training as part of their hiring process. For example, the DHSS supervisor informed me that under no circumstances was I to refer to the two young women behind the reception area window – no doubt bullet proof – as girls. I was to refer to them as ladies. As for this supervisor, I was not to call her by her first name, rather to call her Ms. – Ms. Pretentious: “I am calling you Ms.,” she pointed out. I wanted to tell her that it was OK that she call me by my first name; I was not so lacking in self-esteem. But I stopped short: they’d put me in one of the state institutions and then I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping this house.

It’s a shame. This is a nice old Victorian house. It is a happy, friendly, kind, sheltering house. It has good vibrations, quartering friendly spirits. It has been good to me.

I love sitting out on the front porch in the summer beneath the walnut tree growing in my flowerbed there. This is the fourth walnut tree that has grown in that bed. The squirrels exchange my tulip bulbs for walnuts. I have planted one of those trees in my backyard; it is happy, graceful and beautiful back there. I gave another to our Hospice nurse, Tess, for she owns a large property with a woods. The third tree I donated last year to St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, the setting of the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. If they make another movie there, you’ll see my tree. This year’s tree I don’t know what to do with yet, but come November when it goes dormant it is going to have to find another home; and I am not going to destroy it: it is a beautiful tree, about 10 feet tall, reaching above the rain gutter. Hopefully it will leave this house before I do.

—Samantha Mozart

August 12, 2012  — I have published my book Begins the Night Music in paperback. It has been a difficult birth suffering prolonged labor; but my offspring is out on the world market now.

You can buy it by clicking right here on my blog or through amazon.com. Begins the Night Music: A Dementia Caregiver’s Journal, Volume I, was published in paperback August 2 – a Leo, for those of you so inclined astrologically – and is available in paperback and Kindle e-book format. It is also available at Barnes & Noble.

Now I must get to work on Volume II: To What Green Altar.

I apologize for the long delay between posts here. You probably think I was on a cultural tour of Italy, gazing upon gondolas gliding along a canal from some Venetian loggia; visiting Dante Alighieri’s house in Florence; ingesting culinary lessons in Tuscany and Umbria; dining on olives, tomatoes, prosciutto and provolone garnished with sprigs of basil, while idly swirling red wine to coat the insides of my glass and watching white sails hobnobbing among sparkling blue Mediterranean swells; or had dropped by to visit George Clooney for a fortnight.

Alas, this has not been the scenario. Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog, went out to water the geraniums hanging on our blog third-story balcony and the glass door slid shut behind him and locked. The keys were inside. He called me from his cell phone, which, fortunately, he carried in his pocket; but I couldn’t get in because I had given him my keys to go water the plants. He had his own set but he lost them, so if any plagiarism of my blog’s work appears elsewhere on the Internet, it is because someone picked up the Phantom’s keys – and that was the only other set.

Ultimately I had to call the fire company to come get him down, but not before the thunderstorm came and dumped buckets of water everywhere. I then had to show the authorities all kinds of ID to prove that I, in fact, wasn’t breaking into my own blog, so that they could let me in and I could rescue my keys. This took several days because I don’t have a passport and when they tried to identify me by matching me with the size of the clothes hanging in my closet, they didn’t believe me when I told them the clothes shrank right there on the hangers; and the fire fighters were elsewhere putting out fires. Anyway, I’ve had a second set of keys made.

Begins the Night Music tells the first part of Emma’s and my journey into the darkening of her mind. The book also includes a few recipes (not learned in Tuscany) and some humorous essays to lighten the atmosphere.

So, if you haven’t seen my baby, it has arrived. I humbly thank my dear friends and family for purchasing not only copies for themselves but also for friends, libraries and Alzheimer’s groups. I am truly heartened and touched by these gestures.

Thank you.

—Samantha Mozart

July 29, 2012  — I entered my blog. The metal security door clanged shut behind me. Loud music blared throughout, reverberating off the walls, catwalks and even down from the cupola: Puccini’s “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” “The beautiful dream of Doretta” from La Rondine, “The Sparrow.” Someone was singing – the Phantom: “Come eat salad under an umbrella,” he sang off-key, at the top of his lungs, his interpretation of the Italian.

I found him. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Why is the music so loud?

“I salute the insincerity of others,” he proclaimed, thrusting his half-opened hand into the air, as if in effort to remix his plight. “So much for trust and a dream.”

And, then, unexpectedly, he sobbed a shuddering sob.

“Ohhh, what happened?” I asked, and I reached to put my arm around him, but he stepped away, in a kind of a cowering move.

He lifted his head. “I had a friend,” he replied. “We have a rapport, like kindred spirits,” he began. “Or so I thought. We have engaged in a few deep and meaningful discussions recently on matters regarding the human spirit, the human condition. She gave me some reading and told me to contact her when I finished and we’d talk. I did and she never responded to my email.

“Even people like that can be insincere,” he went on. “Superficial. Like a Valley girl. Was she on mood elevators, do you think, or what?”

“Come. Sit,” I said. “I’ve just prepared dinner. Share it with me. We can’t let you become a hungry ghost.” I poured us some wine, a red velvety blend that held a hint of chocolate.

I set our plates before us. We sat opposite each other at the table.

“Not only that,” he said, flaking off a piece of baked wild salmon and lifting it on his fork. He held it midair, as if loaded on a cherry picker. “There are your long-time friends who said they would create the graphics for your paperback book cover, the story of our work here, and after a month, put new, higher-paying jobs first, and then had the gall to say, ‘You didn’t expect your book to sell that many copies, did you? It’s not like you have anybody waiting for it, have you?’

“And then your brother when Emma’s life insurance money came in, divided between you two as beneficiaries — after her former employer’s contracted human resources company dropped the ball for a month, finally telling you it got lost in cyberspace — your brother telling you, then, that he was keeping his half, even though you had told him that the life insurance funds were designated to pay Emma’s funeral expenses.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “What keeps you going?” He swung the fork to his waiting mouth.

“I was stunned,” I replied. “How could my brother, of all people do this? Well, my brother thought about it overnight and decided to pay. It wasn’t his money; it was Emma’s and she paid into it all her life, from the time she was hired by that company in the nineteen fifties until the day she died, just to pay her funeral expenses. Had my brother not reconsidered, at my age I would have been in debt for that five thousand dollars, his half, for the rest of my life.

“I couldn’t be angry,” I went on. “I could only wonder what I had done somewhere in my lifetimes to accrue this karma. I thought, ‘This may have been the last conversation I will ever have with my brother.’”

I reached for another leaf off my artichoke. The artichoke resembled an ottoman. I had whittled the leaves off of it, dipped in olive oil, lemon juice, butter and garlic, and it was low and cushy with a high, pointy center. The tips of some of the leaves were tinted a rich purple, so my artichoke ottoman was multicolored.

“I thought of my friends’ karma and my brother’s karma, and I thought woe are they.”

“Good for you,” he said. With his knife he bulldozed the basmati rice into a heap on his fork, swishing it upwards with a flourish and into his mouth. He grabbed the stem of his wine glass with his other hand and inhaled as he took a draft of the mellow stuff. He looked into my eyes as I spoke.

“But, then I thought, what about my karma? How does this affect me? How am I supposed to work together with my friends and my brother to grow yet again spiritually, after all these years of caring for Emma and all the rope ends I dropped from.”

“Yes, and what did you come up with?” he asked, reaching for the wine bottle and filling his glass halfway.

“Patience,” I said. “I could not allow myself to be angry. I just had to accept the situation, love them for who they are and where they are in their own evolution and go on my way with mine. If I had to deal with creditors and bill collectors and judgments for the rest of my life, then I must, I thought. I didn’t know what else to think at that point. It was like letting go of the end of yet another rope.”

He took a deep draft from his glass. He emptied it and poured himself more. I was glad I had an extra bottle on hand.

“And, then, fortunately, the next day, after my sleepless night, my brother came through.”

“For you, good, he came through,” he said. He peeled off two leaves from the artichoke, scooped them through the liquid dip, lifted them to his mouth and pulled off the meat, leaving teeth marks, like tire tracks across a tender lawn, on the green and tossed them into the bowl I had placed in the center of the table for spent leaves.

“And, for me?”

“Well, maybe as I have thought for my two friends,” I said. “Should they contact me again, I will tell them they need contact others whom they hold in higher esteem than they do me, and bid them go well, with love. Unless your friend comes through with a viable reason for not responding sooner, if I were you, I should do the same.”

He pushed his chair back, laying his napkin on the table. “Come,” he said.

I got up and followed him. We climbed to the upper levels of my blog and from there up the winding staircase with the peeling painted walls to the cupola.

We stood side by side before the windows. “You have to assume you may never hear from her again,” I told him. “Cut the ties of the attachment. It’s liberating, like a breath of fresh air.” I opened a window. The aroma of the sweet summer grass wafted up to us.

“Look,” he said, and pointed.

There across the meadow stood the blue deer. The deer’s head was down, submerged in the tall reeds down by the stream. It was foraging for food, it’s dinner. It did not look up.

“It’s doing what deer do,” said the Phantom, and he began to hum.

Twilight came, wrapping us in a mantle of indigo. A near full moon rose in a gauzy haze above the trees lining the far side of the stream. A distant airplane, its landing lights yellow in the haze, cut across the moon’s path, just beneath it.

Then he sang softly the words, “Sing for me. Sing for me. In the beautiful dream of Moriarty, I sing for myself.”

—Samantha Mozart

July 14, 2012 — You have not loved someone until you make love all night to “Nights in White Satin,” the Moody Blues’ song; until you read pages of lyric prose to each other from the great classic novels; until you spontaneously drink long and deep from each other’s eyes; until you awaken in the middle of the night, lips wet from a dream kiss. This passage is an ode to a friend.

I saw the leaves beginning to change color as I gazed upon the trees lining the road stretching ahead, when at my age I began caring for Emma. I faced then my barren chances to encounter amid the fallen leaves of my life this kind of love again.

Other kinds of love exist. That of caregiving is one.

The most stressful aspect of caregiving is that of dealing with the healthcare agencies and the healthcare aides they send out. I have said this before. So often, in caring for Emma, I was groping around in the dark. I stumbled often. Emma simply fell: I ran and got neighbors to help pick her up. I, the unpaid sole caregiver, often found no response of help from state and healthcare agencies. There were days when I told healthcare aides to leave and never come back, days when the aides left Emma alone for hours without telling me.

Today what I did then seems like a dream. I reflected on this with my Hospice chaplain when she visited two days ago. At the same time a friend in my Linkedin women writers caregivers discussion group told us that presently her problems taking care of her momma were compounded by the healthcare agency and the caregiver they sent to work with her.

My Hospice chaplain reminded me of the role I have played throughout my lost decade: “You are the Lion at the Gate,” she said. Right. As caregiver you don’t think of that all the time when you are in the middle of it, but you are. There is no time to relax, you are constantly on guard, constantly deflecting, correcting, reorganizing, constantly on the phone sharing pieces of your mind; I constantly had to listen to the sing-songy, “Well, now, Samantha … you have to understand that — blah, blah, blah.”

I told this to my discussion group. I was overwhelmed with their response.

One, a social worker who just completed a book with three colleagues on the history of caregiving, said, “We’ve put in every chapter of our book that professionals MUST listen to carers, they are the experts. And you’ve just put that in a nutshell. I think that is a brilliant piece of reflection and a real teaching tool.”

Another, in Canada, said, “Like wow! That’s the kind of thing needed everywhere. We caregivers are always expected to do it all for free and yet other people were paid pretty good money to look after my parents.”

The social worker, who lives in New Zealand, is collaborating on a new book with a woman who united two major movements in the United Kingdom thirty years ago, one of which is The National Association for Distressed Gentlewomen. Don’t you just love that one?! A story on the history of the carers’ movement in the UK tells of a woman forced to give up work to care for her father, finding herself in financial straits because of it. She began to connect with other women and local members of parliament. Is this not I, my history? I have been thinking lately of how to connect here with our United States Congress in the capacity of caregiver advocate.

Another story, coming via my social worker friend quoting Tim Cook tells of The Reverend Mary Webster who gave up her work as a Congregational minister in 1954 when she was 31: “In January 1963 she burst upon the public with her proposal for helping unmarried women with dependants. The charity she was to found, The National Council for the Single Woman and her Dependants, was not formally instituted until 18th November 1965. What is breathtaking,” my social worker friend continues, “is the sheer amount of publicity she generated in the early months of 1963,” she and her cause being heretofore unknown. She recognized the value of a sound bite “describing a single woman caring at home as ‘under house arrest’”. Tim Cook published this history of carers on Carers UK in October 2007.

My social worker friend suggested ways to found and publicize advocacies: “Join local and national Carers’ Associations, for one answer. Set up own group through local hospital? which is what we did in the late 1980s. Blog, as we are doing? Advertise, local newspaper. BUT all these things take energy, which caregivers don’t have!” Just exactly. So, now that Emma is gone, she enables me to continue my caregiving through advocacy.

My New Zealand social worker friend referred us women caregivers in our discussion group to Carers UK, a caregivers’ advocacy [many such organizations exist here in the U.S. and worldwide], who reported on their website on a caregiver income bill introduced before parliament, stating “Significant proportions of disabled people feel they can work and analysis in 2010 found that supporting social care users to access paid employment could generate earnings of up to £800 million [$1.246 million] each year, a reduction in benefits spending of £300 million [$467 million] (as well as extra income from tax and National Insurance). Research last month from Age UK showed that the cost to the Government of carers being forced to give up work to care had reached £5.3 billion [$8.253 billion] in lost tax revenues, lost earnings and increased benefit payments.” –Got that? Lost tax revenues. Plus, of course, these unpaid, unemployed caregivers can’t go shopping: they can’t get out of the house, most likely (under house arrest), and even if they could they’d have no money to spend to bolster the economy.

Also, Carers UK report that it is known that carers take a long time to identify themselves —I did: it took a friend to tell me that I was a caregiver and I needed to find help —25 percent took five or more years to recognize themselves. “By placing duties on health and education bodies,” Carers UK states, “the Bill would speed up the identification of carers and allow help and support to be made available earlier.”

“Plan B” Carers UK reports, “—a private pension plan — because you can deduct half of all pension savings from your earnings too.” Wow! Just look at all the benefits my daughter will receive when she cares for me if we enact such a law here in the U.S. I’m just sayin’.

I step down off my soapbox this time without Oscar Wilde stepping in to polish my expoundings. But, then, I turn and there he is.

“Oh, it’s you,” I say.

“I cannot deny it,” he replies. And then he points out my use of too many adjectives.

Declares our Canadian discussion group member, “Whut! I didn’t know that a woman could have too many adjectives, too much chocolate or too many shoes.”

—Samantha Mozart

Here She Comes
The Maggie at the End of the Workday

The Maggie S. Myers Coming Through the Cut from the Delaware Bay to the Murderkill River Where She Is Berthed.

July 7, 2012 — I spent the evening of July Fourth out on my friends’ 119-year-old oyster schooner, the Maggie S. Myers, under sail on the Delaware Bay off Bowers Beach, Del., eating, listening to acoustic guitar music and watching the fireworks along the coast.

Maggie Coming Through the Cut

Our friends Jean Friend and Frank “Thumper” Eicherly IV, who own the Maggie, invite a group of us out each year to enjoy the camaraderie and celebrate our nation’s independence. Last year someone on shore ended the evening by setting off Chinese lanterns, hundreds of them, that floated in the dark over the bay like spirit flames.

Freedom Flag Unfurled

My friend Robert Price, http://www.etsy.com/shop/assemblage333 shot these photos of our event this year. With his camera he created a beautiful documentation of the night.

Along Bowers Beach — Anticipation of the Show

Jean and Thumper bought the Maggie fourteen years ago, rescuing her when her former owner was about to beach her, and since have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into her each year, maintaining her and lovingly restoring her, in 2004 restoring one of her masts.

Maggie Moored Before the Cruise with the Flag Atop Her High Mast

The Maggie S. Myers was built as a two-masted Delaware Bay oyster-dredge schooner in Bridgeton, N.J., and commissioned in 1893. She is 50 feet long and 18 feet wide. The 24.62 ton schooner can carry her weight in oysters. She is listed on the National Historic Register.

Maggie Unmoored on the Murderkill
Coming to Get Us at the Public Dock

The Maggie has never been out of commission. Thumper and crew work her nearly daily on the bay dredging for conch, blue crabs and oysters. She is believed to be the oldest, continuously-working oyster schooner under sail in the United States. She is living history.

Freshly Painted Lady

“She’s low to the water and dredges by hand,” Thumper rhapsodizes. “She turns on a song, like a snow goose flying around in the air.” I can tell you his claim is true; I piloted her briefly up the serpentine Cohansey River in New Jersey that early morning in 2004 on the way to the boatyard to restore her mast.

At Dock Ready for Boarding

This July Fourth night it was hot out on the boat, but far more pleasant on the water than on land, with a light breeze, the water like glass. A guy with a house on the beach, and apparently money to burn, buys and shoots off fireworks every year. They go on for over an hour. Simultaneously, someone nearby again this year set off Chinese lanterns. The fireworks go on longer than displays in local cities. They are beautiful, too. Deep blues and golds and some purple along with the standard colors. People build big bonfires all along the beach. Someone on shore set off a couple of red rocket type fireworks that sailed right over the boat — over, thankfully. We were getting ready to jump. Awestruck on seeing them, I stepped back from the gunwale, stood between Jean and Thumper and said, “‘The rockets’ red glare’ springs to mind.”

Flower Child Captain Frank Eicherly IV

We had been out on the water in the dark for a couple of hours, when a swimmer was spotted swimming the distance from shore to the boat. “Did we forget someone?” asked Jean.

Holiday Decorated Wheelhouse.
Work Table Laid with Holiday Fare.

“Throw me the ring!” he yelled. He was yet about 25 feet from the boat.

Sailing into the Sun

“He’s nuts!” said Jean in her deep, raspy voice.

Landlubbers Party Hearty

Thumper tossed out the life preserver. The crew hauled the swimmer aboard. He was J.T., another crewmember. He had hurt himself somehow and was in pain.

Marker 7
At the Mouth of the Murderkill

He ate, said “See ya later,” then jumped back overboard and swam to shore wearing a life jacket — hard to swim that way, but at least he wouldn’t tire and drown.

As the Earth Spins

The Maggie’s deck was laid with two Oriental rugs. Tables were laid with food. Jean supplies some of it and guests bring some. Thumper pilots the Maggie from her berth up the creek and brings her to the public dock for us to board.

Crew Looks to the West

At dock in the creek, we have to climb down a ladder (just a household four-step ladder that you would stand on to paint the walls or hang the flag from the porch roof beam) folded and leaning steeply against the gunwale and dock piling — you climb down frontwards, placing your feet on the back edge of the treads of the closed ladder, with two crew members, one on each side of you, firmly holding your hands, supporting you over the foot of black water space between the dock and the boat.

“Sing for Me”
Lonnie Fields, Delmarva Friends of Folk Member
Host of the Annual October Delmarva Folk Festival on His Farm

In order for Maggie’s five-foot draft to make it through the cut from the creek to the bay, we have to start as the tide is coming in and then return at high tide. The cut is silted in because new high-roller residents have built houses and dumped more sand on the beach.

Wheelhouse Paraphernalia

After we ate and watched the fireworks two of the guys, members of Delmarva Friends of Folk, sat at the bow, played their guitars and sang the blues for us. There in the dark, a light breeze came up and a shoal of black mackerel clouds etched in silver light traveled across the full moon.

At the Helm: Captain Frank “Thumper” Eicherly

We were under sail much of the time, but barely moved since there was little breeze. Thumper used the engine to move us around.

“Masthead” — Jean Friend, Captain Thumper’s Wife

At the end of the evening, back at dock, we jumped down about three feet onto land. Crewmembers once again held both our hands to steady us.

“Garden of Jean” — Jean’s & Thumper’s House

What a wonderful, very special time. A very special annual event Jean and Thumper provide for us.

The Conch Chimney That Thumper Built

We never did find the apple pie, however, that the friends I rode with brought and carried aboard.

—Samantha Mozart

High Tide at Bowers

At the End of the Day
Working Maggie Unloading Blue Crabs

June 30, 2012 — My sister posted a large photo on her Facebook page the other day with a note to her husband stating, “I finally found a picture of myself the last time I vacuumed.” There she is, standing in front of the Christmas tree, hand resting on the handle of a small upright vacuum. She was about four years old.

This incident confirms absolutely that we are sisters. Besides being writers and looking alike, although she is 22 years younger and we have different mothers, we share many common traits.

June 26 happens to be my sister’s birthday. My Granddaddy, our father’s father, had four sisters; and they were all crazy. There are just two of us and we are completely sane; trust me on this. And until that day last week, there were four Ephron sisters. June 26 is the day writer/journalist Nora Ephron died (movies: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Julie & Julia; books: I Remember Nothing, I Feel Bad About My Neck; and much more). She bought her freedom from this earthly realm. But for me her death is a loss and a shock. I didn’t know she was ill. She carried her illness with dignity. Recently, she wrote about the urgency of pursuing our dreams, cautioning that we never know how much time we’ve got left. I hear her. She was just my age. Too young. Scary. I regarded her as a generational and writing compatriot: at least we could become relics together, and find the humor in it. Therein, reading her take on the condition, I would find support. She was a screenwriter and essayist of the highest caliber.

When I sat down to write this, I had just gotten done resetting all 30 digital clocks around the house after our storm last night. It seems like 30 clocks, anyhow – plus the VCR (always mystifying until I wrote and taped instructions to the back of its remote) and the digital answering machine (a greater conundrum than the VCR). I hate hearing that little man answer when I call people; I never know if I’ve gotten the right number; so I don’t know what kind of message to leave, whether to give intimate details or be so superficial that my recipient, even though we’re close, hasn’t the foggiest notion what issue I am trying to get across. Making a new announcement is user friendly; setting the date and time is the enemy.

Speaking of little men and film, I watched the movie Albert Nobbs two nights ago. It was excellent: an extraordinarily well-crafted plot, and Glenn Close’s performance rivals that of Meryl Streep’s in Iron Lady.

At the height of the storm, I watched on TV the Charlie Rose remembrance of Nora Ephron while lightning flashed, high winds shook this old, wooden house, large things blew around outside, the tall loblolly pine near my window swayed wildly towards the house, and the fire siren (on the next street) went off. Then the power went off. So, once again, Nora Ephron’s existence was cut short. I will watch the conversation online at charlierose.com. What I saw of the show was heartwarming, though: Nora Ephron makes me feel good. She has a wonderful way of finding the humor in a difficult situation; she said her late mother, as screenwriter (Take Her, She’s Mine, modeled on Nora at Wellesley College), said “Everything is copy.” I heartily agree. Therefore, I promise I probably won’t use your real name in my story.

From the storm, here in our neighborhood we received no damage, amazingly. And the town restored our power after an hour. There for a spell, though, we rode the rapids.

You have to ride the rapids at times. I have. You can’t live life in a vacuum. Life is short. Go for it. Go for your dreams. I have to repeat this to myself, like a mantra. Twenty-five years ago reside just around the corner, as close as our local library; yet 25 years hence I will be two-years short of Emma’s age when she died. That age is just up the block, over the next hummock.

Relative to writers, journalists, and riding the rapids, exists crossing rivers in high storms and dense fog to miraculously survive this life or to win a battle for independence. Our American July Fourth celebration is upon us. The older I get, the closer 1776 appears, just around the last bend, just across our nearby Delaware River into New Jersey. I have lived nearly one-third of the 236 years between 1776, the year we declared our independence from Great Britain, and today. The patriots won, and thus far we maintain, our freedom of speech. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Thomas Jefferson said. I am proud to be a working member of the fourth estate. From me, George Washington – oops, no, no, I don’t have delusions of grandeur – from our illustrious leader George Washington, who sometimes rode a white mule, and Thomas Jefferson, who lent me his “Head and Heart” love letter for my Chapter XXIX “The Overture,” freely enjoy a safe and sane Independence Day! Remember: vacuum after the party.

—Samantha Mozart

(You will find the soundtrack to this story in my playlist, The Dream, no. 19 – “Stranger in Paradise”, in the right sidebar.)

June 21, 2012 — It’s quiet here. It’s the time when everybody who’s been around you during the long illness and in the days following the funeral says “Buh-byee,” and one-by-one or in twos quietly wander off.

It’s going to be 98 degrees Fahrenheit today (with 300 percent humidity, of course). I have lodged myself in a small room, my studio, at my desk about 10 feet opposite the air conditioner turned on high: a good day for finishing formatting my e-book, Begins the Night Music, for paperback, to be marketed on Amazon initially. I look at the North American dogwood outside my window; its leaves are curled on the edges, from the heat and lack of rain, I suppose. In the center of the top of the tree is a tall dead branch that has grown straight up; it has numerous short-branch offshoots with twigs shooting off them, like naked, gnarled fingers reaching heavenward. It’s existed like that for a year. I wonder what happened? Kindling. Then, dust.

I get hungry, so I venture downstairs to the kitchen to see what I can fire up to eat from the refrigerator. On the way, out of the corner of my imagination as I pass by the ballroom of my blog, I see the Phantom manning a push broom with a long flat head (the broom, not the Phantom, although sometimes I wonder) like the kind the men sweeping the streets in West Philadelphia in front of my Nana’s house used when I was a kid.

“What are you doing?” I ask him. He is sweeping party hats, crepe paper streamers, confetti, paper cups and cracker crumbs into a pile.

“The party’s over,” he says, not looking up from his work.

My Hospice chaplain suggested I have a house clearing party four to six weeks after Emma’s funeral. I wondered about it; why I would need it; what would be the effects. But figuring that she, as my spiritual guide, knows more about these things than I, I gave the party June 9. The day of the party actually occurred seven weeks after, but that was the earliest I could get everyone together. And as the date drew near, I began to feel, I don’t know – the best way to describe it is empty, a bit at loose ends even though I had plenty to do and catch up on. In that final week and a half, I felt in need of a positive boost. There was a hollowness.

The party was a potluck and those who came were my closest friends, those who had been with me through the long years of Emma’s continued decline, and my Hospice chaplain, Hospice nurse – Tess, and social worker/bereavement counselor, Geri. Tess and Geri have been with me through the wars the last three years. They patiently listened to my fulminations and supported my meltdowns; they arrived within minutes of an emergency, and later they laughed with me. Together sitting in the living room eating with the two of them and my Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche friend, among others, I could not have asked for more comforting company. Again I thought of how truly fortunate I am. The party lifted my spirits and gave me a fresh perspective on going forward; I feel regenerated; so does the house. I step outside with the last departing guests, and there, beneath my wind chimes and among my plants, lining the front of my porch boards are sand dollars, sea urchin shells along the lower rail and in the flowerbed baby blue-green horseshoe crab carapaces. Leaning against the center support post is a painted turquoise and white starfish. The angels have visited. I suppose this is the work of my friends Jean and Thumper who own the historic Maggie S. Myers Delaware Bay oyster schooner, whose story I have told here many times.

But, now, yes, the party is over, definitely over.

Fortunately I am pressed to reformat my e-book for paperback and maintain my blog. So, these activities keep me occupied.

Now is the time for me to gain a clear focus on my future, on the time remaining in my own life now that Emma is gone: to truly believe that I can fulfill my dreams. And when this angel looks homeward, she sees her love of writing. Writing is and has always been my green light across the bay. I have many stories written that I want to refine and publish and many stories to tell.

While I was working at my computer on just such, my friend R called the other day to say that he and his cousin, Pam, wanted to take me out to lunch at our local Irish pub. I walked around the corner to meet them. There we sat eating Irish stew and Irish brown bread beneath the Irish poets gazing down upon us from their photo perches on the wall – James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and others. Missing was Oscar Wilde; maybe he was in the other room, at the bar. I experienced a peak moment eating there at that pub among the world’s greatest writers. Capping all that I have been through the past decade and especially recent months – the experiences, the struggles, the spiritual revelations, the life changes – I did indeed at that moment feel like a stranger in paradise, as the Kismet song to Russian composer Alexander Borodin’s music goes.

The party’s over but life among the poets has begun. We must do lunch more often.

On June 2, Buddhists and nature-lovers gathered on Slaughter Beach here on the Delaware Bay for the fourth annual blessing of the horseshoe crabs. My Rinpoche friend organized the event. He notified me of it, yet as much as I wanted to attend, I felt too overwhelmed with the undercurrents in the wake of the decade-long storm assaulting my life to navigate my way clear. I told him I was sorry. He said he understood completely. Yesterday he emailed me the link to the online newspaper story about the event. When I viewed the pictures and read the story last night, I cried, sobbing in despair that I didn’t go. It was good that the Phantom of My Blog wasn’t around, for I surprised myself with my odd reaction.

In the news photos I looked at those compassionate humans out there on the beach blessing sentient beings. I thought of my bathtub centipede that I didn’t kill, but set free (albeit from a second story window); of the furry thing looking like a mouse wedged upside down last evening outside my closed kitchen window between the screen and storm window – most likely a bat (the creature is gone, now, probably having taken flight in the dark of night). I thought of the time I went out on the Maggie Myers helping to tag horseshoe crabs for the United States Geological Survey, dredging the 450 million year old species out of the bay, dumping them on deck, measuring them, recording their ages and sex, tagging them, then gently setting them onto the deck and watching them find the direction of the water and slip over the edge back into the bay; I thought of all the sea critters whose empty shells now grace the flower garden and green boards of my front porch.

I replied to my Rinpoche friend’s email telling him that I was so sorry I missed the event, that I should have made a greater effort. He emailed me back, “There is always next year.” I find his words comforting, assuaged of my feelings of guilt; yet at my age I have begun to wonder about next years.

The caring for all sentient beings is likened to the loving kindness of a mother, the Buddhists tell us. The mother of each of us nourished us in her dark womb from the time we were shapeless beings, endured the hardship of bringing us into physical form, fed us, bathed us, clothed us, read to us, taught us about life and the world and right from wrong – at least my mother did. And she was there to listen to me with understanding and compassion, there to support me, patiently sitting on a bench at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, at 84, with her little apricot poodle, BeeGee, for two hours while I got just the right camera angle and shot for a series of photos of the historic town.

The idea is to give what one needs most – care, compassion, love. What do I know? I don’t. Yet, hopefully, others will find useful and supportive my own experiences and feelings. Like those great Irish poets gathered round me at lunch, my humble conveyance utility is often my pen—

“What?”

Oh, the Phantom of My Blog says it’s my keyboard. OK, my keyboard – the words by which I transmit the messages I hear.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. –Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

The party’s over: we wander off, alone or in pairs, strangers in paradise.

—Samantha Mozart

June 16, 2012 — I have a silver-framed black and white photograph of my grandfather and his two boys, my father and my uncle, dressed in shirt sleeves and ties, sitting in rocking chairs and smoking pipes, with their dog, Tippy, at their feet on the front porch of my great grandmother’s summer home in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. The picture was taken shortly before I was born. Of our family collection of photos, this is one most significant to me. This one picture tells the story of my early life – where I was, who was with me, how I felt, what we did and why: where I came from. As I gaze at it now a movie plays across the screen of my mind.

After I was born, in the summertime Mother and Daddy took me to that house at the shore. Aunt Marguerite and Uncle Bob would be there, too, along with my grandparents and great grandmother. When I was two, on Sunday mornings I’d walk with Granddaddy to the corner store to buy the Sunday paper. I remember the bright colors of the funny pages. He held my hand. Once we thought it might rain. I held up my index finger and said, “I have my ‘brella.” I recall the scene, and I remember it because the family thought it was so cute, relating the story over and over. We often walked on the boardwalk, the whole family, of course, and Granddaddy took me for a ride on the merry-go-round. I loved that. That was very exciting for me.

Granddaddy took me everywhere with him. At home, in the Philadelphia suburbs, I often stayed at Grandmother’s and Granddaddy’s house. Aunt Marguerite and Uncle Bob lived with them. During World War II, Uncle Bob served overseas in the Army. He looked so handsome in his brown Army uniform. Granddaddy worked at the bank in Philadelphia, and, in those days, worked traditional bankers’ hours. He didn’t drive. So, in the afternoons he’d ride the bus home, get me up from my nap and take me out for a ride on a bus or trolley or the passenger ferry across the Delaware River to New Jersey. He wouldn’t waste time getting me out of the house, because we had to be home for dinner; so Grandmother and Aunt Marguerite were mortified that he’d rush me out of the house without my hair brushed. He didn’t care; he just wanted to take me with him. He had raised two boys, so I was the first girl. I remember a street corner bus stop. There were blue spruces there on the small green semicircle lawn and old shade trees; there were red-roofed structures built of gray granite; the bus would come and it was red – the Red Arrow company: they ran western suburban trolleys and buses. I remember standing on that corner waiting for the bus, holding Granddaddy’s hand and looking up at him. I loved going on those rides with him; it was an adventure; it was like going to an amusement park. With Granddaddy, I felt secure and loved.

In November or December 1943, before Uncle Bob went off to the war, we got a puppy. Granddaddy owned a black Packard, often parked in the driveway, just outside the living room double casement windows. Daddy and Uncle Bob said the chauffeur only polished the side of the car that faced the house. Uncle Bob drove us to get the puppy. Daddy sat next to him in the front seat. I sat in the back next to Granddaddy. I wore my camel snowsuit. On the way home, the puppy, a black and tan shepherd/collie mix whom we named Butch, kept sticking his paw into Granddaddy’s pocket. The family couldn’t get over that; they laughed and laughed as they retold the story.

For some time during the war both Daddy and Uncle Bob were away. Daddy served at Fort Dix, New Jersey in a desk job. He had worn glasses since he was six. Then they came home. I remember the excitement and the relief. My brother was born in 1945. Uncle Bob brought me a doll back from Belgium. I still have that doll. I cherish it.

I remember standing in the square reception hall of my grandparents’ house amidst the group of men when they were carrying on an animated conversation about some current event or the state of world affairs, listening, looking up at them. It was like standing in a copse of tall, intelligent trees. I always found what they were discussing more interesting than what the women discussed – the sacrilege of the neighbors hanging out their laundry on a Sunday or the state of the linens; how the maid twisted the vacuum cleaner hose.

In 1947 Granddaddy got sick. “Didn’t he eat his lunch?” I asked. They said he had; it was something else. Granddaddy died in October 1948. I was seven. “I’m not going to cry,” I said, though I felt bereft. I’ve never gotten over his loss. Often when I seek solace, I recall Granddaddy. He was a handsome man, too. In his younger days, he looked a bit like Jimmy Cagney.

I know a man who lost his daughter several years ago. I can’t even imagine the emptiness of that loss. Recently, he gave me the gift of music – a CD of arias. I have to close my windows when I play them because I play them really loud.

Uncle Bob and Aunt Marguerite were second parents to my brother and me. One night the four of us and Grandmother came home in the midst of a thunderstorm. The power in the house was out. In that house above the garage was a servant’s quarters, and a back hallway that led to it off the back stairs out of the kitchen. The only upstairs access to the back hallway was through a door in one of the bedrooms, the guest room where I was sleeping. Uncle Bob got a flashlight and led us into the house. Aunt Marguerite, Grandmother, my brother and I  made our way upstairs and then some spook came creeping around the back hallway with a flashlight making scary ghost sounds.

Once, before I was born, Uncle Bob took the family out for a Sunday drive. He pulled the Packard over to the curb, saying “Wait here a minute.” He walked across the street into a drug store. The family waited. A few minutes later he emerged, got into the car and drove off without a word. He told them later he had gone in and had an ice cream. The family recounted that story many times.

The boys, Bud (Daddy) and Bob, as teenagers one year decided to keep their Christmas tree up until Valentine’s Day. They did, and then put it into the fireplace to burn. Flames shot halfway across the long living room.

My brother and I stayed with Uncle Bob, Aunt Marguerite and Grandmother for two weeks when I was in high school and our parents were in the midst of divorce. At dinnertime Uncle Bob would grab the plastic ketchup squeeze bottle and make to chase us if we didn’t behave. Later, when Uncle Bob, Aunt Marguerite and Grandmother had moved to a Center City Philadelphia high-rise co-op apartment, we sat in the living room watching TV after dinner. Uncle Bob got up to get his usual evening snack. He came crawling back into the living room out of the dark kitchen with a Cheeto on each of his eyeteeth, like fangs.

I got married. Our daughter, Kellie, was born in 1967. The U.S. Navy stationed us in Southern California during the Vietnam War. We found lying on the beach in January and the outgoing lifestyle appealing, so we stayed. In 1970 we divorced. In July 1973 I had an awful foreboding. That August, Uncle Bob was diagnosed with colon cancer. He was 61. Too young: he is too young to die; I am too young to lose my uncle. I am devastated. I was attending beauty college. There, my good and spiritually evolved friend Robert M. sat beside me day after day telling me it was my uncle’s time to go: “Let go, let go,” he said. “You must give him clear passage so he can go into the light unobstructed. Let him go in love,” Robert said. I did, but I couldn’t have done it without Robert’s uplifting support and guidance. My uncle died on December 5. Daddy lost his older brother. Aunt Marguerite, who loved dogs, and told Uncle Bob, when he asked her what she wanted for Christmas, said “Something with four legs,” lost the husband who gave her an electric frying pan that year.

Daddy lived a good, long life. He was healthy and got around just fine; he mowed the lawn up until his last years. He sat on the side of the bed one night setting his clock radio for morning when he felt a sharp pain in his chest. His aorta split. He was rushed to the hospital. The next day the whole family stood around his hospital bed, my stepmom, his children and grandchildren holding his hands and telling him we loved him, gently easing his journey. He died September 16, 2004. He was 90.

Daddy spent a lot of time with us when we were kids. He was always teasing us about stuff, making us think. He frustrated me when I’d ask him the meaning of a word and he’d tell me to “go look it up.” He played catch with us, cards, checkers and other board games, and Battleship, in the days when we drew the battleship, cruisers and destroyers on graph paper, before the board game was made. He wrote coded messages for me to decipher. He repeatedly told us his favorite story, scrolling the words and sentences out slowly, setting the scene of intrigue: “It was a dark and stormy night and all of the men were gathered around the fire, when one of them spoke up and said, ‘Captain, tell us a story.’ And so he began, ‘It was a dark and stormy night …’.” He took us on Sunday drives and many road trip vacations, especially up into New England, upstate New York and Canada. He loved it up there.

He played the piano and organ. In the early years we had a black Steinway baby grand piano in our home. I’d often find him sitting at the piano, pencil in hand, writing something in a spiral bound notebook. “What are you doing?” I’d ask him. “Composing music,” he’d say. Before he was married, he played the clarinet. He wanted Granddaddy to set him up with a band, like Benny Goodman. But Granddaddy said no; he told him he should go out and get a regular job to support himself and later his family. He attended the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and became an accountant. After dinner many evenings he’d play his records – big band or classical music. I owe to him my introduction to and my deep interest in and love of classical music.

When his eyesight deteriorated, before he had cataract surgery, he couldn’t read his two daily newspapers or historical novels as he loved to, but he could listen to music. He made boxes of audiotapes and sent them to me in California. I cherish them. What a special gift. To me the gift of music is about the greatest gift I could receive. Music is my refuge. I used to imagine when I was very young that classical music came from the spheres. Then I found out it was made by an orchestra of musicians playing musical instruments. Now I know it comes from the spheres.

After Daddy’s cataract surgery, he no longer needed glasses. He had worn them for 80 years. He loved the TV show “Seinfeld”. It was his kind of humor, mine too. He also loved the “Inspector Morse” BBC/PBS long-running series. It was his kind of cerebral drama; mine too.

We had a lot of fun together in those old days. We were always laughing. We’d have dinner at one house or the other on weekends. If there were three football games on, Uncle Bob would line up three TV sets, and we couldn’t eat dinner until half time. Daddy and Uncle Bob were avid storytellers. Somebody was always telling a funny story of the antics of their youth or about the family, or a joke, or Uncle Bob or Daddy was teasing us – my aunt, my brother or me. When Uncle Bob held our dinner plates and scooped the mashed potatoes out of the serving dish, holding potato-loaded spoon in hand over our plates, he’d ask us, “Do you want them easy or hard?”

Often when I sit on my front porch now and I see a dark-colored car full of people drive up the street, I anticipate it’s Uncle Bob, Aunt Marguerite and Grandmother “rolling in”, as they used to say. I half expect Emma to be in the kitchen cooking a roast, Daddy watching baseball on TV. But, that’s not it. Most likely it’s a big car full of guys listening to rap.

—Samantha Mozart

June 7, 2012 — I spotted an immense centipede in my bathtub the other day. Immediately I adopted the Buddhist attitude of not touching it. Let it live to journey on its way, preferably far away. That was in the morning. By noon it was still there. In the early afternoon it was still there. Late in the afternoon it was still there. Soon I would have to take a shower. This thing was two feet long – well, maybe a generous two inches, with long, graceful flowing legs and feelers like a Burmese cat’s whiskers. It was about the color of a Burmese cat, too.

It was too big to wash down the drain, and anyhow, the drain is slow, so it would just float around in the tub. I could pick it up in a thick wad of toilet paper and drop it into the toilet, but, you know, sometimes they don’t go down with the flush. And then it would just be in there.

I have a writer/gardener friend in New Zealand. So, in either case, I considered that where she lives it would swirl at the drain in the opposite direction from how it would swirl here. That could be fascinating to watch. Possibly.

My third alternative would be to scoop it up in some sort of a jar — hoping that it wouldn’t escape and scurry up my arm in the process —, clamp the lid on, hold it out the bathroom window and dump it out. Later I could go out to my herb garden two stories below and find it crawling on my strawberries.

Or, I could squash it. {{{  }}}

Emma would have squashed it. Disposing of bugs never flustered her. Without hesitation she did away with them. Were she watching me analyze and dance around a necessary procedure here, I’m sure she would say I’m on my own now and I’d just have to deal with it myself. It would be like the time when my daughter was a newborn and I asked Emma over the phone long distance if babies ever stop pooping so much. She just laughed.

On my current issue, I thought of the mess if I were to squash this bug. Whatever I squashed it with – shoe sole, broom, big stick – body parts of the creature would be stuck on the bottom of. I considered my friend Jean’s advice when I told her I didn’t blow the head off of one of Emma’s nurses because of the mess I’d have to clean up: “Ya gotta have a drop cloth.”

Towards evening I returned to the tub to contemplate the fuzzy behemoth. It hadn’t moved – millipede, maybe. No, gigapede. It was alive, though, I could tell: every so often it waved a feeler.

I decided to consult my women writer caregiver friends in my Linkedin discussion group. Some of them are expert gardeners and so I figured someone might know how to deal with this thing.

Answers varied from the callous “Stomp on it!” to the wadded toilet paper method, to – the solution as to what to do with a large, brown, long-legged centipede in the bathtub came from my friend in New Zealand.

“Don’t squash! Poor little thing,” she said. “Hold a jar over, slide a piece of cardboard underneath, and scoop it up. Put it outside,….chances are nature will get it! Will it hurt your strawberries?”

No, it wouldn’t hurt the strawberries. But it would freak me out if I picked one only to discover this enormous creepy creature crawling on it, or even beneath it.

Somebody advised that centipedes eat cockroaches. A compelling argument for saving this critter.

“Centipedes I don’t mind, cockroaches I do,” my friend continued. “Luckily we don’t get these down here. Stick insects I really like!” No cockroaches – a compelling reason to move to New Zealand.

“Centipedes in the toilet! Ugh!” she said.

Another member of the group said that karmically, this centipede might be a female and remember me when it has babies and teach her babies to kill all cockroaches in the area. In our case, it’s not cockroaches, per se, but large black waterbugs. When we moved into our house 10 years ago, we had waterbugs. I called the exterminator. A short time after the exterminator had come and gone, I walked down the back stairs into the kitchen one night in the dark in my bare feet. “How’d these blueberries get all over the floor?” I wondered. I turned on the light: baby waterbugs. I called the exterminator. We’ve been relatively waterbug free ever since. But one can never be too sure.

So, now, I had to size things up. I had to act before it got dark. I went around the house searching for just the right jar. I chose a little blue one and took it to the tub. Too small. I went back and chose another. Too big. Then, a third: just the right size. Next I had to select the right piece of cardboard. Being a writer and environmentally conscious (read frugal), I save the backs of writing tablets. This piece had to be not too big, but flexible, yet not too wimpy. I found the back of a four-by-eight tablet. It still had the top on that the paper had been attached to, so it had a handle. Perfect. I opened the bathroom window wide.

Tools in hand, I approached the critter. OK, now I had to figure under which end to slide the cardboard. If I slid it under the rear, the critter might run off. If I slid it under the front, it would see me coming and scamper up my arm. I chose the rear. I lifted the jar only barely enough to slide the cardboard under, then I clamped down the jar. Then I had to ensure the jar’s being firmly clamped to the cardboard on all sides as I hoisted the apparatus to the window. I reached my arms far out the window. I aimed the jar away from me. I made sure the wind was not blowing in my direction. I separated jar and cardboard. And, down sailed Cindi the Centipede.

I got back onto my discussion board: “Success!” I trumpeted. “Mission accomplished.

“I wonder if the two-story drop hurt Cindi?” I speculated.

My New Zealand friend said, “Well done! After all, they have plenty [of] feet to land on!”

—Samantha Mozart

Listen to The Blue Deer soundtrack in my playlist, “The Dream” in the right sidebar. Scroll down to the last piece on the list.

June 1, 2012  — I climbed the narrow winding wooden staircase into the cupola of my blog, gripping the graying white painted walls as I went. In the small box of a place at the top I walked over to one of the rows of windows lining each side. A cobweb from a yellowing gauze curtain stuck on my forearm. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and brushed it away with other webs lacing the corners of the sill. A tiny black spider suddenly homeless scampered across the sill, over a little ramp, like a mini motorcycle jump, where the paint had chipped and down into a seam in the faded white beadboard wall. I cracked open a window. The curtain lifted on the breeze like a bird of prey from its nest. The sweet smell of meadow grass wafted to my senses, and from somewhere in the coming night a faint music played.

I stood and looked out. In the almost twilight, I surveyed the vast realm of my experiences, and thought of the path I would pursue now.

The refracted light of the setting sun colored the sky orange and before it, across the tall-grass meadow, I saw the mist rising off the broad stream. Down near the stream a bed of irises grew wild – pale purple, deep purple with white centers – they were the most striking –, pink, white, yellow, many colors. Nearby, a lone man with long, dark, reedy hair sat on the bank playing his flute.

Contemplating near and far, my gaze trailed off to the far side of the stream into the distant woods, and as the light faded I began to dream, to drift on a reverie. And then out of nowhere it winged to nest in my senses, music I had never heard: with purity and grace it came – an aria – Chi il bel sogno di Doretta, the beautiful dream of Doretta, Puccini: La Rondine (The Swallow). The aria lifted me into a spiritual space, the heart of where I stay for now.

Just there in the half-light, I felt a draft. I smelled nutmeg. Something brushed against me. I shivered.

“Ah, the music of the night,” a subtle, deep, monotone spoke. A low talker. The Phantom of My Blog. He stood beside me. He laid a deep purple iris on the sill. He smelled of nutmeg. He always smelled of nutmeg. “You shiver. Maybe you need a sweater.”

The aria ended. We stood in silence. The man continued to play his flute. We floated on the evening.

My mind drifted back to last summer. I thought of my little family that I took care of: Every morning getting Emma up and dressed; helping her step down the sixteen stairs with their narrow treads and her iron grip on the balusters; getting her to the table to eat the breakfast she once prepared for herself – orange juice, oatmeal or Cheerios with bananas, strawberries and/or blueberries in skim milk. I thought of the times I’d prepare lunch for myself and run it up the back stairs to my studio, racing Jetta who would run up the front stairs because the back stairs were too steep for her, and we’d see who got to my studio first so she could have her treat. Then Jetta got sick and I had her put to sleep. Two months later, Keats, my Valentine’s cat, showed up, coming tender on the night that cold, snowy, blustery midnight, February 9. He was a sweet, smart cat, as Jetta was a sweet, smart dog. I fed Keats a sumptuous meal Thursday evening, April 26, then let him out, saying, “Now, you be back by ten thirty.” I never saw him again. Clearly he had people somewhere – he came wearing a sage green collar and with impeccable manners. Maybe they came and found him and took him home. Then Emma got tired, so very tired. “I don’t know how I got here,” she said in her agitated state in January. “How do I get out of here?” I could see it coming. So did our Hospice team. Their attention shifted away from her and to me.

Just then an osprey circled the field and flew straight at the phantom and me, like we were in the control tower and it was coming in for a landing. The black mask across its eyes looked like the painted bands that wrap around the windshield and windows of a commercial jetliner.

“The Lone Raptor,” said the phantom, “on his wings of tarnished silver.”

The osprey came close to the window, nodded, veered off to its left and was gone.

I remembered Emma as she was, before dementia tarnished her mind. Now, five, six, seven weeks after Emma’s passing I have found myself thinking, “Hmm, here I am all by myself, no little dog, no Keats cat, no mother to care for, a house that suddenly got really big: Besides my writing, what do I do now? What is my spiritual path? My spiritual advisors tell me to continue my caregiving. How do I do that? What do I do?”

All the old thoughts stacked up on the roof of my mind like factory chimneys.

Emma loved flowers. She would have loved the flowers in our garden this year. They were exceptionally lush – yellow daffodils, deep pink tulips and pure white, fragrant yellow roses, and pale purple irises that grew as dense as trees in a forest. I looked down at the windowsill. “So, you were out picking flowers?” I said to the phantom. “That’s a beautiful iris.”

“I picked it for you,” he said. “Iris is the goddess of the rainbow, thus implying that her presence is a sign of hope, and the wind-footed messenger of the gods to humankind, according to Greek mythology. She flies upon the wind and moves like a blast of bright air.”

“Like an orb,” I mused.

I was surprised that he had thought to pick me an iris. More likely, as had been his wont I suspected he would nudge me over the sill and out the open window. I was touched by his kindness.

“Thank you,” I said.

Then, “Blue, dear,” said the phantom.

“What?”

“A blue deer. Look.” He pointed.

In the meadow, over near the woods, in a shaft of soft light, stood a blue deer, nosing the ground, foraging for food at twilight.

The wind picked up, then. The stream flowed fast on the wind with little white caps like water in a channel. The man had gone from the bank. The music continued to play, slow, meditative, but lush: now strings joined the flute – violins and deep cellos, and satiny brass, and reeds – clarinets and saxophones –, and double reeds – English horns and bassoons –, then an accompanying chorus of voices. Haunting. Where was the man with the dark reedy hair?

“He’s gone,” said the phantom, although I had not asked aloud. “The music of the spheres,” he said. “It emanates from the deer.

“The Blue Deer reminds us that we must be stewards of our environment. The Blue Deer is a dream vision, it is a dream of finding one’s spiritual path and of healing not only oneself but also the world and environment from pollution.”

“I am deeply honored by his visit,” said I.

The phantom spoke: “I vacuumed your blog for you, organized it, hung a new header and cleaned up the clutter while you were outside ruminating on the precise color of tulips, learning that the term tulip evolves from the Persian word for turban, and contemplating the greater meaning of all that.

“You tend towards understanding the realms of wisdom and healing through nature,” he continued.

“The seeds of a summer garden,” I said, “the tender green stalks upon which the caterpillar crawls before it metamorphoses into a butterfly. I’m trying to plant these seeds now.”

“Maybe you’re harvesting them,” said the phantom.

“I seek guidance,” I said, “and thus arrive the flute player, the iris, the osprey and The Blue Deer – stewards. Caregivers are stewards; stewards are caregivers.”

“You forget me,” he said. “Am I not your steward?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I can but imagine.”

Dusk embraced us now. The Blue Deer lifted its head, sniffed the air, and then walked off into the woods. I pulled the window shut, picked up my purple and white iris and we headed down the winding staircase, I behind the phantom. In case I stumbled I hoped he would catch me. If I went first I feared he would push me. I didn’t want to flatten my iris.

When we reached the foot of the stairs, I thanked him again. We parted there. I lifted the iris to my nose. The stem had a nutmeggy smell, like his hand.

“What is your name?” I called after him.

“Moriarty,” he called back.

—Samantha Mozart

Acknowledgements: I must thank my spiritual teachers and spirit guides, and the following creative souls for inspiring the vision of this piece: My extraordinary new group of women writer caregiver friends; T.J. Banks, award-winning author, “Sketch People: Stories Along the Way” and more (find her on Amazon or click on the links on either sidebar here); Philip Glass, composer – Symphony No. 7, “A Toltec Symphony”: 3. “The Blue Deer”; and “Passages”; Coyote Oldman, their album titled “Floating on Evening”, Charmayne McGee, author, “So Sings the Blue Deer”; http://mythagora.com/ for the story of the Goddess Iris; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and, of course, Gaston Leroux for his “Le Fantôme de l’Opéra”. And, oh, Puccini; how could any woman forget Giacomo Puccini?