Mother is aging, 3

Last weekend I drove down to Big City to visit Mother. (I'm writing this on May 2. I visited her April 25-27.) It's starting to worry me, how much she is aging. (See by comparison this post, or this one, or this one.)

The ostensible purpose of the visit was to go through some of Father's old clothes, to see if I wanted any of his old shirts so that she could clear them out of the closet to make room. Father died almost eleven years ago, but it always took my parents a long time to get around to things. Well, we found something like two dozen shirts which both fit me and more or less matched my taste. (Brother and SIL had been there the day before, and had pulled out only two or three.) So I was able to clear a lot of space out of her closets, and it saved me the trouble of having to buy more shirts. That's not where the problem was.

First story

The first morning I was there, I woke up before she did and wanted to check my email. But my computer couldn't find her network. I looked around and saw that she had a new router. But unlike the old one, it did not have the network's name and password on a sticker. So I waited for her to get up. The after breakfast, I asked her about it.

"It looks like you got a new router."

"Oh yes, I did."

"What's the network ID and password? I want to check my email, and I can't connect."

"Isn't it on the router?"

"No, I checked." (But she went to check anyway, which was fine of course.)

"They never gave it to me."

"That's not possible. They have to have given it to you."

"Well they didn't! You know, Brother and SIL were here when they installed the router. Maybe the man gave it to them."

"What?"

"Oh yes. They handled it completely. They did all the interaction with him. So they must have gotten the password from him."

"But then they would have given it to you."

"Well they didn't! I don't have it, and I never got it."

"That's crazy. You have devices that connect to it. All those devices must have been reprogrammed with the new password."

"You'll have to talk to Brother and SIL."

"OK, but they're not here. I can text them, I guess, but they might be busy."

"Well that's what you have to do."

So I texted Brother. I also poked around on Mother's desktop computer to see if I could find any place the new wifi password had been stored. Mother went to get her handwritten password book, and looked up the name of the service provider. There was no entry, and she showed me that to prove that she had never been given the password. I never heard back from Brother. Finally I paged through the rest of her password booklet. At the very end, under "Wi-Fi," was the new password for her new network. I tried it, and it worked.

So I texted Brother, "Never mind. She found it." But wow. How is it possible that she could have concocted this story that they never gave her the new password? Was it a confabulation? For that matter, is it true that Brother and SIL were the ones interacting with the guy from her Internet service? Or did she make up that part when she needed a way to explain why she "never got" the password?

Outtakes from a Day of Mindfulness

The UU Sangha that I belong to held a Day of Mindfulness today. Days of Mindfulness are a practice in the Plum Village tradition, which is the tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. Basically we got together for about six hours to practice sitting meditation and walking meditation. We also ate lunch together in silence, and we spent some time talking about what we would like to see from our Sangha in the future. Most of the attendees were regular Sangha members, but the event was open to guests as well, and we had two or four.

My point here is not to tell about the Day of Mindfulness per se, nor yet to talk about the aspirations that people expressed for the future. What I want to capture are a couple of the "outtakes"—moments that had nothing to do with anything else, but that I want to remember. And I guess the best way to remember something is to write it down.

The guest who stopped me was a woman
and not a man; but how can I pass up
the chance to use an engraving by
Gustave Doré?

One moment was sweetly serious. I think. A number of us arrived early to help set up. (In fact, because of technical difficulties with the Zoom link, we started late anyway.) Someone asked me to help set out tables in the other room. And as I was on my way, a woman put her hand on my arm to stop me. I don't know if I'll need to give her a name in the future, but maybe I can call her Laura. 

Laura was a guest, not a regular Sangha member, and a friend of Debbie. I didn't recognize her. But she said she recognized me! (Cue "the curse of the Tanatus.") Where had she seen me? She said she thought there was some kind of UU service I had attended many years ago. That's highly unlikely, but I might have been there for a special occasion. I attended Janet's Celebration of Life last year, for example. I volunteered to do dishes one time long ago when the Sangha was responsible for hosting some UU Congregation event. It might have been one of those occasions.

Why did Laura remember me? Or what was it about me that she recognized? That was the sweet part. She said I had a kind face—in fact, a very kind face. (Or "remarkably kind," or something equally extreme.) She said, in fact, that if we were both sitting on a park bench as strangers, my face is kind enough that she would end up spilling all her deep, dark secrets to me. Oh my heavens, really? Part of my mind wondered how many deep, dark secrets an elderly Unitarian lady could really have? But then I remembered that D regularly dressed in a style that was conservative, prim, and matronly. So maybe appearances aren't everything.

Hmm. If appearances aren't everything, then maybe Laura was misled in attributing all that kindness to me on the basis of my face. Oh well. The thought was nice while it lasted. 

The other story is shorter and funnier. During a break, Laura was talking to one of our regular Sangha members, an elderly woman whom I'll call Lynn. (I'm not sure how old Lynn is, but she must be at least a decade older than I am, and I'm in my mid-sixties.) They started talking about cats (because Laura was wearing cute cat socks) and Laura explained that her cat had recently died. She made a joke out of saying that she was still trying to get all the sympathy she could. Lynn started offering sympathy, when Laura went on to clarify that her cat had reached the age of seventeen years old before dying, a very respectable age among cats and one at which death is no surprise.

Right away Lynn shot back, "Seventeen years? I've never had a partner last that long!"

Umm, gosh. Is it just me, or does that count as TMI for other people too?

Oh well. We were all among friends, right?  

      

Dream with Wife

Last night I had a detailed, layered dream, and it took me a while to realize it had been a dream.

It all started at work. I was working at Some Company, as the manager of Some Department, and a young woman came in for a job interview. Wife also worked for the same company, and may have been there to sit in on the interview as well. Anyway, we started normally enough, but after a couple of questions we were interrupted by something else that wasn't a disaster but nonetheless distracted us from the job at hand—very much in the normal way of dreams. But the interruption still involved all the same people. So in the process of the disturbance, I got to see the young woman in action: what kind of a person she was, how she reacted to others, and so on. After this had gone on for a few minutes, I pulled Wife aside and told her that I wanted to hire the young woman. Wife agreed.

Not long thereafter, I woke up from that dream to find myself lying in bed next to Wife. Of course she had been in the dream that just ended, so I began discussing it with her as if that were the most natural thing to do. First, I confirmed that it had been a dream, and that she had been there with me. "Yes." "And we both worked at the same place?" "Yes." Then I asked her, "At that job, did you work for me or did I work for you?" She thought about it for a while as if really trying to remember, before finally saying that she thought I worked for her. (And while I hadn't been able to remember myself, that sounded right to me once she said it.) We talked some more, and agreed that the girl in the dream would have made a fine employee. So I said that if I went back into that dream again, I'd hire her.

Then, reflecting on it all, I said that it seemed like it had been not "just a dream" but some kind of alternate reality or parallel possibility—nothing we could ever reach from here, but somewhere we might have been able to get to if we backed up thirty or forty years, if we had made different decisions and if chance events had gone other than they did. I specifically pointed to two things that would have had to be different: one was her health, which precluded any corporate management role for her; and the other was our respective career arcs, since even when Wife was working (before her health got too bad) there was no way we would ever have ended up at the same company. As I was saying these things, I thought to myself that there was a third factor which would have had to be different, but which I wasn't going to mention aloud: viz., her mental illness, which I took in a broad enough sense that I included with it all the dysfunctional and alienating parts of her personality. Again, I didn't mention that one aloud. But Wife agreed with the two factors that I had spoken of.

A little while after that discussion, I slowly awoke into reality, or perhaps I had better call it this reality here and now. I realized that there was no one else in bed with me, talking. I was lying in my single bed, in my bachelor apartment, all alone. And yet in a way I had the same sense I had had before, in the second (or "outer") dream, with respect to the first (or "inner") dream. In other words, it did feel like there was something true about the possibility. It could never transpire in this reality, not here and not now. It would have required significantly different branching many years ago. But it felt—and still feels, I guess—like the scene where I could lie quietly, rationally discussing with Wife some dream we had both shared and then woken from could have been a possibility along some alternate timeline; and indeed that the scene where Wife and I worked at the same company and I was hiring the young woman in the first dream could have been another. When I woke into this timeline, I did feel awfully alone.

Just as a memo, here's what I did when I woke. It was still dark. I don't know what time it was. First I went into the bathroom to pee. Then I got some paper and a pen—and my glasses, which I now need for anything close up. I avoided looking at a clock, or turning on any artificial light; but I lit a candle, and wrote down as much of the dream as I could remember by candlelight. After that, I blew out the candle and lay back down. In time, I fell back asleep.