One of the last Alzheimer’s posts; it must be..

When Dad died, my brother and I
cleaned the basement,
handing off the chapters of forty years
to cousins who played with us so long ago—
Hide & Seek in those same dark corners
from where we now pulled old tools and
cans of long-dried-up paint.
The dumpster we rented filled quickly with
that stuff Dad thought he would need,
but which he, nor we, never did.

Mom, upstairs, busy remembering in 11 rooms
still filled to bursting with her own and the together life
of her and Dad.
Every kitchen drawer laden with knives, spoons,
measuring cups, spatulas, and tools that we looked at over the years
never knowing what/how/why they were owned by her/ kept by her/
or ever even used by her in the quiet, private preparations
of obscure and intricate recipes involving ham,
or pink cakes with blue icing,
or any of a green-to-red rainbow of jams and jellies.

Even the stairwell between the kitchen and second floor was filled
with cake pans, Jello molds, and trays for everything that she needed
carried, moved, transported from her kitchen
to the tables of others.
(“Is this for here?” we had learned to ask as children, seeing dozens of cookies
cooling on the table after arriving home from school, and learning to deal with
the answer which came too often: “No, these are for church” or some wedding,
or some party, or somebody whose name we didn’t know and didn’t want to
know who was going to pay Mom for all these cookies, leaving my brother and
me with a few broken ones, or none.)

Later, once then twice,
in two years then three years,
we would move and cull more;
then move farther and cull further.
First, it was out of the upstairs,
then down to just three rooms,
then out of the house altogether when Mom
remembered the cakes but not how to make them.

And then she forgot, most of the time, about the cakes themselves.

And here we are now too few and too many years later,
hollering, my brother and I, “Mom! Mom!”
…not so she will know we are home from school,
…not so that she would come and see the pile of blocks we have built ten high
on the linoleum floor of the dining room,
…not so that we can show her the fish we caught
or the grandkids we are bringing home for her and Grandpa to see,
This time we’re hollering “Mom! Mom!”, first me, then my brother,
we’re hollering “Mom! Mom!” so that she will know that we are beside her
and so that she will know—somehow, please God—through
the defilement of Alzheimers
that she is going
to die


“Mom! Mom!”
(I’ve written in the past about this journey with my mom:
Aug.25, ’07:
Nov.11, ’07:

Things I Believe; Things I Wish For..

(from the 2006 firstmorning newsletter)

Things I believe..(you can quote me!):

  1. There’s nothing wrong with ignorance. It only becomes bad if you build a fort around it to defend it against new information.


1938 Book Burning in Germany

  1. If we didn’t know we were going to die, there would be no reasons to paint pictures or compose music.

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Cave drawing-France, Mexican String Art, Painting by Toulouse LaTrec

  1. The worst moment in Christian history was the day, in 325, that the Emperor Constantine marched his army through a river, pronounced the men baptized, and declared the Roman Empire to heretofore be the Holy Roman Empire. On that day, Christianity ceased being a movement and became an institution.


  1. The Bible is not a god. It is a collection of documents inspired by human interactions with God. It is the best place to learn about God, but not the only place. Wherever there are birds and wildflowers- those are excellent places for doing that, too.

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  1. Anything that is done to intentionally hurt a child is evil.

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abandoned- Honduras; propagandized- Libya; overfed- United States

Things I wish:

  1. I wish Bill Watterson was still doing “Calvin and Hobbes.”

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  1. I wish Oxfam America, Doctors Without Borders, and Kairos Prison Ministry could have the money that is flushed down the toilet every time a check is written to a televangelist.

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  1. I wish the world wasn’t being homogenized into the image of an American suburb.

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Krakow, Poland London, England Kyoto, Japan

  1. I wish there was a really good home for every single dog.

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  1. I wish Europe and the United States were willing to clean up the three centuries worth of mess they made in Africa.

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Refugees in Darfur, Sudan..the world is too busy elsewhere..

It’s Texas. It’s July. It’s Hot…(not the good kind of hot, either!)

(from the 2006 FirstMorning newsletter)



It’s July in Texas. The heat is like a horsehair blanket laid across the land- it has its own disabling and dense weight; it slows us down to a ragged crawl as we make our way through it, when we must. It even itches like a blanket; the heat penetrates our skin, our eyes, our hair. We feel like we are in the first stages of the ancient Chinese torture “Death by a Thousand Cuts.” We are slowly cooking, like slices of beef turning into jerky, drying up from the outside, inward.

The grass turns crisp- the color of fried pork rinds. The leaves of trees and even weeds, droop in derisive mockery of our own sagging shoulders and squinting, downcast eyes. It’s too hot under this immovable blanket even to breathe without the heat clawing its way down our throats and into our chests. The only sounds against the stillness outside are the cicadas, high in the treetops, hotly buzzing their reproductive siren songs. Even they, though, despite their newly uncurled wings and their few days of freedom to fly before dying, stay strangely still on their tiny branch landscapes, unwilling to move any more than they must to to effect their own perpetuating instincts.

Each year at this time, I ask myself why, how..why for God’s sake, how in God’s name.. did people dismount from their horses, their wagons, their stage coaches or railroad cars and, setting down their bags, say to themselves, “Let’s live here”? Perhaps when the artificially cooled air of air conditioning was not a possible-to-consider option; perhaps because the horses themselves were too exhausted to take a single step more; perhaps because they had heard about and believed the stories of deep, undisturbed topsoil covered by springtime’s flowers; perhaps those were among the reasons they stopped here to plant and establish homes.


Or maybe they were just absolutely, flat-out nuts.

clip_image004I must admit there is- despite the obliterating, withering, relentless nature of Texas in July- there is a certain shared community charm to this place which metamorphosizes from a Garden of Eden every April into a summer hell. The heat holds all of us in its grip; it respects nothing about our bank accounts, skin color, age, status, politics, or our need to breathe. The climate has a universal, non-discriminatory grasp on us. None of us is able to stand up oak-like to it; we are all pansies against its onslaught.

The heat slows us down. To walk fast through this heat is to increase the abrasive friction of hot oxygen against flesh. Walking slowly allows a perfect balance to be achieved between the production of sweat and the evaporation of same, thus allowing one to stay alive. Moving slowly also makes it possible to perceive, so slightly, the tiny breezes that waft our way, however intermittently, however weakly. Summertime, and the living is all in sloooooow motion. Lest we die.

I remember when I lived in Ohio. Every summer, some local Youngstown reporter would, on one of the many slow summer news days, crack an egg on the sidewalk so we could watch it fry in the day’s “bristling” 85° heat. It never did. Here in Texas, in July, I could fry that same egg on my head. I made the mistake of leaning against a metal flagpole yesterday and branded myself.

I know some preachers would use this description of the heat to crank the discussion up a notch or two and begin warning about the fiery bowels of eternal hell. Let them. It’s too hot to think about hell right now. There is already something worse than July in Texas to think about, anyway: