Reading: The Mother Tongue

Moving: Ooops

30 March 2000: Books I don't need handed to me

Again, no gym, because today I went out to lunch with the editor who set me up with the health book I've been working on. The health department pays for my time, but I really like this editor and am just as pleased to do it as a personal favor to her. We went to the Rialto; she had a spinach & portabello mushroom salad and I had a wild mushroom penne. She asked me why I'm not writing. It's a quandary. I didn't answer, and she could tell I wasn't answering, and I told her about the CU-Denver master's of ed thing and the CFU amusement factor.

Sabrina came over in the evening. She'd had a miserable day and no sleep, and, when leaving Kinko's, some idiot rear-ended her car, but then eventually she arrived safely through the snow chez nous. We promptly gave her a glass of wine and a hug. We talked about web sites and what they can do. I said, "I don't know how much you've explored my site, but..."
and she replied, "Not so much,"
and I continued, "I keep an online journal,"
and she 'fessed, "Well, I did know that,"
and I continued, "...and thousands of others do also, and I can think of a few things people do to make their sites interactive."
Because I wasn't trying to pimp my site but to explain what we could do with hers. But it was a kind of "Oh you mean this gate key" moment.

Also DMB has been reading this journal. She sent me a really sweet Shepard Pooh card, because she's been reading Speaking Confidentially and thinking of me and realizing how much baggage I still have about my mother. Un peu.

It took my mother ten days to tell me the latest about my grandmother. Granny moved into a residential facility in Essex, not as intense as skilled nursing but more invasive than assisted living, a few weeks ago. I knew that. Granny wrote me that when she went to Old Lyme to get more of her stuff, she couldn't get into the house because my mother repossessed her housekey. I had two reactions: "Granny's driving?" and "Why the fuck is that woman on such a power trip she took her mother's housekey?" So I called my mother and left a message saying I'd had a letter from Granny that sounded like she was still driving and was this true, and tactfully said nothing about her being a powermonger. It took my mother ten days to return my calls. My uncle had come up to visit Granny and it was he who drove her from Essex to Old Lyme. Since neither BJWL or BDL was home, no, my uncle and grandmother could not get more of her stuff.

And no, Granny's not driving. Any rational person would say that's because Granny's eyes mislead her, she is far too weak to shift a standard and could no longer coordinate clutch and stick even if she weren't. I don't even want to speculate on her reflexes and reaction time. In contrast, the sole reason in Granny's own head that Granny's not driving is that her Escort is parked in her daughter's driveway, not at her current domicile.

But that's not even the latest. The latest is that her current domicile is not her current domicile. Granny's in a nursing home in Madison. For over a week. Without a card or letter from me, who was kept ignorant of this development.

She was in such pain with her back that the facility called a clinic. Granny went to the clinic. Granny didn't go to a hospital because, my mother the LPN says, hospitals don't admit people just for pain anymore. Stupid hospitals. The kicker is that unless a person is admitted to a hospital, Medicaid does not pay for her medical expenses. So ten days of pain treatment and in-patient residence and care (at the clinic and the nursing home) come from Granny, not from Medicaid, her alleged medical insurance.

By the way, I have no idea at all what that title is supposed to mean. I don't remember when I wrote it or if I had more to say today that I forgot by the time I finished unleashing the latest wrath. She's not only a powermonger by taking my grandmother's housekey. She mongers information as well.