4/15/23

 Saturday, April 15, 2023

Mom's 101st Birthday

In bed at 10 awake at 4, considerable PN right big toe, CPP left side, up at 4:30.  54℉, high of 80℉, 50% chance of light rain, wind SSW at 6 mph,  6 to 13 mph today, gusts up to 22 mph, average humidity today will be 67%.  Sunrise at 6:09, sunset at 7:34, 13+24.

Battery OK.  Every Saturday morning I have a date with a disembodied female voice who tells me "Battery OK."  She lives within the med-alert device I wear around my neck every day.  I wear it mainly to be able to summon help if I become like the old lady sprawled on a floor at the bottom of a stairway, moaning "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up," the old lady kids make fun of.  Since I took a tumble on ice going to get the mail a couple of years ago, I haven't considered the old lady so funny.  I wasn't able to get up by myself from that fall because there was nothing to hold onto to give me support and steady myself trying to get up just with weak leg strength and a weak sense of balance.  So my weekly date with my "Battery OK" girlfriend has become some comfort to me.  Geri took a tumble in the garage yesterday and she looked at her AppleWatch that asked her "Did you fall?" or "Have you fallen?"  She told her watch she was OK so no call was made to 911.  That experience makes me wonder again whether I should get a similar watch for 'belt and suspenders' protection.  My concern is not with falling down and dying (or dying and falling down) but with falling down and living, unable to get up, to go to the bathroom😱, etc., or having a stroke and not getting to an ER quickly enough to prevent major damage and then living much more impaired than I am now, trapped in a living but non-functioning body.  "Brain and Body Not OK."

Last Things.  The car I own is the last car I will ever own.  The house I live in will be the last house I ever live in.  The laptop computer I type this on is the last laptop computer I will ever own.

Mom's Birthday.  Thought of my blessed mother today, how she deserved a much better hand in life that the one she was dealt.  Too many thoughts and feelings to express. "And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief."  William Cullen Bryant, The Death of the Flowers

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,

The fair, meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side:

In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:

Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,

So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

Steve here to mark Geri's upcoming birthday.  As usual, we put the poor guy to work almost as soon as he walked through the door.  They cooked a favorite pasta dinner together.