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Well, I'm sorry about the gap in the chronology of this weblog. I think I just needed to take a break from the relentless passage of time. Maybe I thought I could make time stop by stepping out of its current, but I can't.
A lot has happened. My mother turned 90 last month and we had a little birthday party for her.
"How old am I?" she asked me.
"You're ninety, mom."
Her eyes widened. "I am! That's unbelievable! How can I be ninety? I don't feel ninety."
"How old do you feel?"
"Forty."
She was perfectly serious.
I laughed. "You can't be forty. Even I'm older than forty."
"You are?" she exclaimed. "That's terrible!"
"Gee, thanks."
She shook her head. "You know, I must be getting old. I just can't remember anything, anymore." She looked up at me and blinked. "How old am I?"
Later on, I asked her, "How does it feel?"
"What?"
"When you can't remember things. Does it frighten you? Do you feel sad?"
"Well, not really. I have this condition, you see. It's called osteo...ost..."
"You mean Alzheimer's?" I said, helping her out.
She looked astonished. "Yes! How on earth did you know that?"
"Just a guess..."
"I can never remember the name," she explained.
"Of course not."
"It affects my memory..."
"...And that's why you can't remember."
She frowned and shook her head. "Remember what?"
"There's not a single thing I can do about it," she told me, when I reminded her. "If there was something I could do and I wasn't doing it, then I could feel sad or depressed. But as it is...." She shrugged.
"So you're okay with it?"
She looked at me, patiently. "I don't have much choice," she explained, "so I may as well be happy."
mom, at 90.
photo by ester strijbos
posted at 5/25/2004 09:53:00 AM
[::]
As will be gathered
from these notes of mine,
I am the sort of person
who approves
of what others abhor
and detests
the things they like.
—Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
circa 1000 AD
Clearly,
if Sei Shonagon had had access
to the Internet,
she would have had a weblog
instead of a Pillowbook.
—Ruth Ozeki, Weblog
circa 2000 AD
It starts with the earth. How can it not? Imagine the planet like a split
peach, whose pit forms the core, whose flesh its mantle, and whose fuzzy skin
its crust - no, that doesn't do justice to the crust, which is, after all, where
all of life takes place.
©© Ruth Ozeki 2003 under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License