I was going through some file cabinet shelves in my apartment, and I came across a cache of old marble notebooks containing my written diary entries from the 1990s and early 2000’s. I don’t want to start going through them right now, as I don’t have much time right now for memory lane. Just staying alive and gainfully employed these days is more than enough to soak up my remaining mental and physical energies. But I found one of them in the wrong place, and while moving it back to where it belongs, I decided to take a quick look. So I came across this little mini-story from early September, 2001.

At the time, my mother was still alive but was just starting to lose her ability to walk. Part of that was because she had steadily gained weight throughout her adult life, and was now pushing her aging muscles and joints beyond their limits. She was living in her own house with my younger brother, but she needed more and more assistance. She could still get up on her feet, but mostly needed a wheelchair to get around. We had just hired our first part-time home health assistant, who stopped by for a few hours most days of the week (generally when my brother was at work). One weekend, my brother was having a day out in Manhattan, and I was sitting in at the house so to keep an eye on mom. I would stay until the home assistant arrived in late afternoon.

Here is my diary entry for that afternoon:

I had to wheel Ma to the bathroom before, and while backing her our out (in her wheelchair), I heard the TV, the narrator of a PBS special about polar bears. As I struggled with the wheelchair, I heard the TV man say “now the problem becomes how to move such a large creature”. Couldn’t help but have a mental grin at that moment.

On looking back 15 years later, I’m sorry if I wasn’t being entirely charitable about my mother’s weight problem. But in elder-care situations, a little mental humor often helps to keep you going.

Ironically, this bit of home-care humor came just a few days before September 11, 2001. I wrote about it the next night, and here is how I started my diary note:

Well, Black Tuesday happened. The WTC in lower Manhattan is gone. A symbol of the business world, a place where Top Gun people wind up. [I had recently completed Chubb’s “Top Gun” computer training camp for mid-career people looking to become business programmers; however, the Chubb placement department had failed me, and so I was back at the non-profit agency in Newark where I had spent the past decade before Top Gun] So yea, I was shaking in the office on Tuesday AM after seeing the one tower standing, pouring out smoke like a chimney at a power plant. Chic [the colloquial name that I used for my boss back then, mostly behind his back] was grim, wouldn’t say hello. Our world was under attack [Chic had worked for a big corporation, and had just made a mid-career change of his own by joining with the non-profit group]. The social fabric was torn.

After reflecting on how my cousin Mike and I used to take little walking tours of lower Manhattan while in high school in the late 60’s, and how we had often passed the business district site where the WTC was being built, I concluded as follows:

Maybe its just as well that Top Gun didn’t transport me into that world.

For now, I’ve put the diary books away. Hopefully, though, I’ll be back.

I’m (hopefully) in the last few years of my full-time “professional” career, and at this point, I’m not putting as much effort into maintaining a “power wardrobe” as I used to. Oh, I still like nice suits and sports jackets and dress slacks, and I appreciate a good mix of plain and patterned shirts of different colors, and an assortment of interesting but tasteful ties. But in my heyday, I strove mightily to keep all of that battle armor in top condition. That meant regular visits to the local cleaners. But in recent years, those visits have become fewer and farther apart; unless a garment has an obvious stain or really starts smelling unpleasant, I’ve learned to tolerate a more rumpled and dusty look. To put my whole working wardrobe thru the cleaners now costs close to $200, and I can think of lots of other good things to do with that money.

Nonetheless, I recently pulled out a jacket that really was looking rather sad. So I gathered a few other of my workhorse jackets and two pairs of slacks, and headed over to the local cleaners (I’m lucky enough to have a decent one just up the street from me in easy walking distance). This past Saturday, I went back to pick up my newly dry-cleaned duds. It was mid-afternoon, and one or two other customers were in the shop, likewise dropping off or picking up something. The overall atmosphere was calm and relatively pleasant. The young woman at the register gave me a nice hello, took my ticket and went to the moving rack to dredge my stuff up from the basement. (As a kid, I was always fascinated by those moving clothes racks in cleaners).

While waiting for this, I did some people watching. This cleaners shop was a rather busy place behind the counter. Obviously it was doing a bit more than simple cleaning; a woman was busy at a sewing machine, and at an adjacent table, a gentleman wearing a sports coat and a tie was busy with a needle and thread,  »  continue reading …

Mother’s Day was about three weeks ago, and Father’s Day is about three weeks to come. So we’re in that late spring season of the year when our secular American culture memorializes parenthood. I think that’s a good thing; in fact, the older I get, the better an idea it seems to become. I’m now in my 60s, I don’t have kids, and I’m pretty darn sure that I never will. (I realize that it might still be physically possible, but I believe that it’s morally wrong for an old man to want his wife or girlfriend to have a child for him, given the highly increased chances of genetic defects, not to mention that an old man is less likely as time passes to be able to put up with the rigors of giving a child the parental care that such child needs and deserves.) But as I experience what it’s like to be an aging working adult, I better appreciate what my parents went through, and all the sacrifices that they made to give my brother and me a good childhood and a shot at a good life.

When you are young, of course you see the world thru young eyes. So you have no idea of what the world looks like thru older eyes. But now that I have older eyes, I can better see what they went thru. They were devoted parents, and hardly ever took time off for themselves (I could probably count on my fingers the total number of times when they left us with an uncle or an aunt for a night to themselves). Other than my father’s work hours, our school hours, and an occasional afternoon or evening when my mother was out taking care of her mother, they constantly lived in “kidland”. Well once we were over 10 and spent increasing amounts of time away with our friends on our bikes or just hanging out doing the usual teenage stuff, they didn’t have us underfoot all the time. But only at the price of their constantly worrying about  »  continue reading …