Stormy Weather

Hurricane Season officially starts tomorrow.


Also, know how to
get the hell out of town, if necessary.


Normally, opening day is noted by the newspapers and weather reporters and we all continue on about our business as usual only now with the reminder to stock up on canned goods, bottled water and batteries* rattling around in the back of our minds. The season doesn't usually peak until August and there are often many incipient storms that just remain low pressure systems off Africa before then.

This year may be different. Although the prognosticators are prognosticating a low-to-normal season, we've had two named storms already even before the starting gun was fired. Neither hit us (Alberto stayed out to sea and Beryl landed up north along the Florida/Georgia border) but based on the low-end forecasts we've used up 25% of our named storm quota before the season opener.

In the meantime, we're getting patchy rain and scattered thunderstorms forcing me either to close my car windows or bail in the morning.

*We have both a hand-cranked radio and a hand-cranked flashlight so batteries are optional in our house.

Preparing to Leave Home

My brother mentioned, as we were enjoying our Memorial Day picnic, that there were no baby mockingbirds visible in the nest anymore.

No sooner were the words spoken than one mockingbird parent swooped down into some tall grass awaiting weed whacking surrounding one of Mom's life-size ceramic rabbits out back and began feeding the fledgling hidden there. The other one dove under Neighbor Mike's orange tree where a second young mockingbird was waiting. The parents each made several passes bringing insects and whatnot to the kids. The little ones were hard to see due to still being dun colored and had neither the very long tail feathers nor their black and white coloration distinctive to the species.

Eventually, the one by the bunny statue moved up under the nest tree. Shortly thereafter, the one under the orange tree flew the thirty feet back home. So all was well and they were just out exploring the big world.

Hooray For Patriotic Capitalism

My brother ordered from a home and garden catalog some bunting to go on the picket fence along the walkway out front. He ordered it Monday. It arrived today, in time for him to put it up for Memorial Day.

My brother is ecstatic. (He's relatively easy to please.)

That is one catalog company that will definitely see repeat business.

New Directions, Assessed

Well, that was interesting.

There were 12 people RSVPed for the meeting Thursday night including me, six showed up (including me but not counting the presenter's young son, who is also a member of the group but slept through most of it). It was a two and a half hour trip and I arrived late thanks to a blinding downpour in St. Pete that brought highway traffic to a near standstill.

The main presentation, which was the theme for the evening, was very. . .ad hoc. . .but I did get the chance to meet the folks who were there and introduce myself and, although there was no time to go into any detail about my game idea, they all expressed the generalized interest in working on some game at some point. I think my best approach may be to create my own presentation and offer to do a meeting but first I'd like to see how many people actually show up to this thing on a regular basis.

At least I was treated to a spectacular lightning show over Tampa Bay and southward on my way back. Enormous arcs crisscrossed the sky both through the clouds and along their undersides with occasional ground strikes for the first half of my trip home.

New Directions

This evening I'm going to do something I wasn't able to do while Mom was alive. Leave the house.

I'll be going up to Tampa to meet with a bunch of mobile app developers to talk about my idea for a phone-based game. I think the mobile part of the game will be relatively easy; it's the back end support that's going to be tricky--but, then, what do I know? That's why I need to meet these guys.

Anyway, this is just the first howdy-do so I expect it'll mostly be just a bunch of butt sniffing.

It still feels strange to leave the house empty for whole hours at a time.

Mom, A Life: Part Nine

Mom, A Life: Part Eight

The Final Years

Dad was in a serious car accident just as they were building the new house. That, and the fact their contractor absconded with several thousand dollars necessary for the finishing work, meant the move was delayed, drawn-out and a little traumatic. They stayed with first one son and then the other (both of whom were living in town at the time) and eventually the place was completed.

In late 1997 Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent cryogenic surgery. During follow-up another tumor was discovered and he began chemotherapy. As Mom described it from the x-rays, "It looked like a loaf of French bread wrapped around the back of his stomach." At first he responded well and they could see the tumor shrinking almost daily but suddenly something the doctors called a "wildfire" took over. In less than a month, on March 22, 1998, Dad died.

Mom continued to teach ceramics at the Senior Center and occasionally took on jobs either when she wanted extra money or just because she was bored. (She did a short stint as a dispatcher for a rental car company out at the airport one time.) She gave up driving and my brother, who had sold his house and moved in after his girlfriend died, chauffeured her around. In 2000, my brother managed to pull off a surprise 80th birthday party at the country club that included her children, grandchildren, most of her nephews and nieces, surviving sister and brother-in-law and a host of friends.

The remaining dozen years passed quietly. Mom's back had been giving her problems for decades. What with slipped and disintegrating discs and severe scoliosis she became hunched over at the waist and barely four feet tall. (She was 5' 6" most of her adult life.) As her mobility decreased she stopped going anywhere except ceramics class and doctors' appointments. We had always planned for Mom to live to at least 100, both because she thought that was a nice round number and also in hope she'd passed on longevity genes to the rest of us, but in 2008 I received a letter from her hinting at imminent problems. I moved in with Mom and my brother to help him look after her. The letter turned out to be a touch melodramatic.

Mom talked about moving to an assisted living facility but, although we got brochures and made some visits, her heart wasn't really in it and she stayed home. Her mobility became worse and she was plagued by occasional incontinence and so stopped going to ceramics out of what might best be called anticipatory embarrassment. She most definitely did not want her friends to see her deteriorating.

Mom was diagnosed with moderate Alzheimer's in 2010. She never discussed the diagnosis and I often wondered if one of the effects of the disease was that the implications never really sank in with her. She was put on a drug that noticeably slowed its progress, and for the six months immediately after the diagnosis she showed real improvement both physically and mentally. We even made one last visit to the ceramics class at the Senior Center.

Eventually, though she spent her days mostly on the couch reading and watching TV, although she no longer enjoyed watching sports as she found she didn't understand the rules or the point of the games any more and had no patience for anything lasting longer than a half hour or so. She read continuously, both magazines and large print books from the library.


She still dressed herself (with an increasingly eccentric creativity), made her own bed and did her own laundry (or tried to. We took that last chore away from her after she washed some disposables and filled the dryer with cubic feet of fluff). She had a great appetite and ate everything we made for her enjoying the occasional glass of wine with dinner. Although she had more and more trouble finding the right word, she never lost verbal capability and always recognized people. Her biggest problem was insomnia which could keep her bouncing up and down all night long and exhaustedly napping all the following day.

In February 2012, I noticed a decline in Mom's cognitive abilities. Despite the doctor's warnings about the inevitability of Alzheimer's, Mom had been so stable for so long that it came as something of a shock. During an appointment in early March, her GP noted a spike in her blood pressure and asked if she had a living will and DNR order on file. He recommended we post it on the refrigerator. Mom's insomnia was worse and she was a little more agitated than usual over the following weekend and then, sometime over night or, more likely, early Monday morning, her heart just gave out.

Mom died at home, in her room, Monday March 12, 2012, fourteen years after Dad. She was three months shy of 92.


Post Script

This sketch of Mom's life turned out to be a lot longer than I'd originally planned, yet it is still far, far too short to do her any kind of justice. I haven't mentioned her sense of adventure and willingness to try anything at least once. She'd go out in the woods with us kids to explore the "cave" we found. She had us all grilling Japanese food on hibachis and eating with chopsticks back in the '60s. She taught tolerance (no excuses) and encouraged intellectual curiosity. She's why I was listening to Stravinsky and Berlioz at age eleven and owned the complete Yale edition Shakespeare at thirteen (best junior high school graduation present ever!) and why I can cook for myself well enough to entertain in several different styles. ("You're either going to get married or stay single. If single, you're not rich enough to eat out every night so you'll starve if you don't know how to cook. And if you get married I'm not going to have some other woman complain I gave her a helpless son.")

Thanks, Mom. I love you, too.

Multi-Cultural

Two different worlds.

On the same day (almost at the same time), NBC Nightly News presents an obituary for Robin Gibb. PBS News Hour offers a retrospective on the late Dieter Fischer-Dieskau.

Surprisingly, the BBC also mentioned only Gibb.

New Things

I saw something new today. Two of these birds were in the grass in front of the town library.



Glossy Ibis



I thought, "Huh, black ibis," but a little research showed black ibis are native to India (and have a little red splotch on the tops of their heads) so apparently these are glossy ibis which are found in this area.

Red-Headed Woodpecker

And yesterday we were visited by a red-headed woodpecker that found good eats in the palm tree out back. Palms being very soft, there was none of the rat-a-tat-tat typically associated with woodpeckers just a happy full bird. It eventually moved up the tree and picked bugs out of the crevices where the leaves sprout from the bole.



Eurasian Collared Dove



Also, thanks to the bird bath, we have a chance to study the various doves up close and it appears we have at least two, and maybe three, different species hanging about. I've definitely seen the Eurasian Collared Dove and the Mourning Dove. I think we also have the White Wing Dove. It's hard to tell because it gets crowded out there and we have to keep replenishing the water because the crows just love to splash everything.



Mourning Dove



White Wing Dove



Mom, A Life: Part Eight

Mom, A Life: Part Seven

Sunshine, Real Estate and Art

Using the money from the sale of the Connecticut house and the property in Arizona, Mom and Dad built a new, small ranch house on the property they had bought on the north end of town. Unfortunately, the developers had opened up huge tracts all at once and so people moving into town bought and built all over resulting in isolated houses on barren streets across the peninsula.

The city was billed as a planned community but it was really just an artificial one. No plans were made for any commercial development commensurate with the expected residential population. Hundreds of miles of canals were dug across the city but, in an attempt to save money and with total disregard for future traffic growth, bridges across the canals were intentionally built narrower than the roads. To this day the city hall, police department and post office all sit in the middle of nowhere, miles from the naturally developing center of town as does the library (but in a different direction).

So, of course, Mom and Dad got their real estate licenses. At first they sold houses and condos as agents for a larger firm. Mom's heart wasn't really in the profession and she ended up mostly sitting open houses and model condos. After a couple of years they realized it would be decades before their "neighborhood" filled in and they bought a condo in an 8-unit building "downtown." At least it was within walking distance to stores.

Mom requalified as a nurse in Florida and did some work at the local hospital but didn't enjoy it saying the profession had changed too much over the years for her to really keep up. The technical aspects were difficult as were all the new drugs to memorize.

It was about this time that Mom and Dad came back up north and kidnapped my brother and his dog. My brother had moved in with me after mustering out of the Air Force and brought the dog with him from California but he was showing symptoms of depression, partly from his military experiences, including scraping two of his pilot friends off the runway when they'd crashed, and the death of his best friend, an innocent bystander in a high-speed police chase in Connecticut. They thought a change of scene would do him good, showed up one weekend, packed him up and took off. It worked.

Dad opened his own agency but it didn't really go anywhere until he met some commercial developers and started specializing in buying up and consolidating lots into workable commercial size properties. Mom left the business and concentrated on her artwork. She had enjoyed painting over the years, mostly still lifes in oil on canvasboard although she did a huge owl with glowing yellow eyes in acrylics on cloth and hung it at the top of the back stairs in Connecticut where it scared her grandson so much he would only ever use the front stairs. They moved again, this time to a larger higher-end condo where Mom figured out how to make beads from rose petals and began creating necklaces and earrings, some of which she sold, some of which she gave away and some of which are now in the local historical society collection. It was also around this time that she became interested in ceramics.

At first Mom was content to decorate premade greenware, experimenting with paint effects and glazes. Soon, however, she started creating completely original works, mostly flowers: roses, chrysanthemums and lily pads although she also did some dessert dishes and rice bowls. She took lessons at the senior center and eventually the staff asked if she would teach the class, which she did until her fine motor skills started to go and her work became clunky. Eventually she went back to using greenware and finally stopped when her painting started getting muddy, too.

Succumbing to the Gypsy urge one last time, Mom and Dad sold the condo and built a last house, the one my brother and I now share, in a neighborhood that was finally filling in.

The Wild Life

The mockingbird couple that built their nest in the backyard have been going berserk all day. Despite having cleverly positioned their home in such a way as to be pretty much blocked from sight by adjacent branches, we can see movement in the nest even when both birds are out.

The baby mockingbirds have hatched!

Apparently, mom and dad are zooming out and about and back and forth all around the home bush frantically trying to find food for the little ones. We can't tell how many there are, yet, but at this rate the parents are going to be exhausted by the end of the week.

On a completely, irrelevant note, I got into a big fight with the stupid opossum last night when it visited the cat again. I let the Bartleby into the house while I yelled at the 'possum and then threatened it with a nice big walking stick. That had no effect so I had to actually use the stick and started poking and prodding the invader. It hissed and growl at me and backed itself into a corner so I bopped it a few times in the direction I wanted it to go. Of all times for Bartleby to become curious about anything. She came back out into the lanai to see what was going on. I had to use one foot to keep her away while prodding the stupid marsupial out the door. At least now, maybe, the 'possum will take the hint.

Dexterity . . . and Discretion

It appears Bartleby the Bad Penny is right-handed. Or right-pawed. She will eat her solid food from the bowl like a normal cat but prefers to scoop her water up with her paw. Apparently, enough liquid stays within the folds of her pads to be worth the effort. On the rare occasion when she does drink directly from the bowl she does so by parking her entire body over the bowl and licking up the far side pushing the water over the edge and onto the floor.

Bartleby also believes herself (mistakenly) to be a psychokinetic kitty. She will stare for long minutes and with ferocious intensity at the edge of the sliding door willing it, in vain, to open. She keeps trying at various distances and angles but with no success, at least so far. Eventually, she gives in and knocks. (She does, however, use her left paw to knock on the door.)


Actually, I am glad her ferociousness is limited to her staring contests with the sliding door. I've mentioned before that we leave the lanai screen door to the outside partially open so she can answer nature's call as she needs. Last night a 'possum noticed the opening and came in to steal her food right out of her dish while she was plonked in her chair directly above. I only noticed the critter as it was leaving. Bartleby, true to her namesake, did nothing. Which is just as well since the 'possum was bigger than she is and probably would have killed her in a fight.

Useless (but sensible) Beast.

True Names

I love finding places or things that have True Names.

A True Name is given to a place or thing by the people who find it or create it or use it and not by some marketing guy. The town where I grew up in Connecticut was pretty good at True Names. Within the town were neighborhoods named for the original families: Mungertown was where the Mungers lived and had their lumber business. Nortontown and Allentown were where the Nortons and Allens had settled. (I went to school with kids from all three families.) I lived on Durham Road which, logically, was the road from our town to Durham where the name changed to Madison Road since, for them, it was obviously the road to our town.

Almost any place name given since the opening of suburbia has not been true. This goes for the streets, developments, malls, etc. Places without True Names are artificial and lacking in history (or really any context at all).

Around here, the developers who created this town from scratch in the late '60s at least tried to avoid the cutesiest names. Most of the local streets are merely numbered and given compass coordinates. This allowed for a lot of repetition and avoided the need for imagination. We live on SW 23rd Terrace (which is not a terrace by the normal definition) which is one block away from SW 23rd Street in one direction and SW 23rd Court in the other (also not a court in the normal definition). There are, of course 21st, 22nd, 24th, 25th, etc. versions of all of these as well as NE, SE, and NW copies of the entire lot. Only the major streets are named. A few are actually functional, i.e., Country Club Road, Pine Island Road, but most are meaningless although they do avoid the saccharin overload syndrome: Del Prado, Santa Barbara.

However, if you can get out of town into the rural, or even better, wilderness, parts of the state it is possible to find True Names. One of the original ways off our peninsula is via Burnt Store Road. There's some history there. There's a neighborhood in Ft. Myers called Whiskey Creek. No marketing guy ever touched that. Southeast of us is Corkscrew Swamp. To the northeast is Nicodemus Slough.

All this came to the fore when I saw a newspaper article yesterday about people objecting to the state pouring sand into Cowbone Marsh because it could disrupt navigation on Fisheating Creek which flows through it. Those are True Names for real places. (And I'm confident the "g" in Fisheating is silent.)

Mom, A Life: Part Seven

Mom, A Life: Part Six

A Fresh Start

After the bankruptcy, we downsized for a while. The "new" house was a mid-1800s Federalist fixer, a two-story square box, three rooms down and three up. Heat came from a converted coal furnace situated in the center of the cellar with a yard-square grate directly over the furnace vent. The property was on an acre of flat land and the money from the sale of the old house (and the cheap price of the new) allowed a fresh start.

Mom, who had quit her job to raise her kids, went back to work for Dr. Adams. Dad got a job as Art Director for a large printing company in New Haven. They bought a fold down camper trailer and the family took trips throughout northern New England.

Within a few years they built an addition off one corner, making the building ell-shaped, and, although only adding one room down and one up, doubling the size of the house. By this time, I was off at college.

In the summer of my freshman year the entire family took off for a whirlwind cross country tour, camper trailer in tow, to a not-yet-realized planned community south of Tucson, Arizona, stopping at Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest and various lesser sites along the way including camping next to a Gypsy caravan in Ohio one night and the worst steak ever in El Paso. Mom and Dad had bought building lots in both Arizona and Florida and wanted to check out the places before deciding which one to retire to. Shortly after my brothers also left for college or military service (or both).

In their spare time now that the kids were gone, Mom and Dad started a small printing business in the detached garage specializing in business cards and letterheads. Mom learned all aspects of the business, specializing in typesetting, proofreading, billing and running the hydraulic paper cutter while Dad handled sales, paste-up and plate making. They hired a journeyman printer by name of "Pinkey" to run the press.

After college and a few years in D.C., I returned home and worked with them in the printing shop before starting my own business and buying the house from them. They shut down the print shop, sold the land in Arizona and "retired" to Florida. Mom was 55 and Dad was 57.

Moon Walk

Our skies were mostly clear these past two nights so I took advantage to stroll around.

The moonlight was so intense some colors returned to the evening, the sky slate blue, the grass deep olive green but only when out from under the trees. All the shadows remained shades of gray. The few clouds were bright chalky white above and mithril silver below.

The moonshadows were almost as deep as the ones from a nearby streetlight but more delicate. When the hazy edge of a cloud partially obscured the moon, the moonshadows faded although the moon itself stayed visible. Otherwise, the only way I could identify the lunar shadow was because it was shorter, the moon being higher in the sky.

Some birds began singing, the opposite effect from a solar eclipse when the sudden loss of light sends animals into night time mode. If the night-blooming jasmine had been ready I might have stayed out there 'til sunrise.

Hello, Kitty

Well, that didn't last long. Either the young lady realized ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, that's not my cat! after all, or the cat decided the young lady was not her human. In any event . . .

The cat came back.

I came home late yesterday afternoon just after my brother had left for work. The screen door out of the lanai was still set at partially open, which I thought was now superfluous and an invitation to less welcome critters. But, when I went to close it, there was the useless beast, as innocent as could be, sitting by the cushioned wicker rocker. I asked her what she thought she was doing back here but she just wrapped herself around my legs and purred, so I fed her.

When my brother came home from work, I asked him how long the cat had been back but he knew nothing about it. Apparently, she slipped in during the five minutes when neither of us were home. Unfortunately, by the time my brother came home she had slipped out again so all he had was my word to go on.

She was out there again this morning curled up on a folding chair. My brother has decided he'll have to go buy some more cat food after all.

Forget "Bartleby." I think I'll name her "Bad Penny."

Goodbye, Kitty

I was going to propose naming the cat "Bartleby" after an incident last night, notwithstanding the cat being female, and also notwithstanding that naming a cat, in the first instance, is an exercise in egotistic futility.

I have already related how the cat lies around playing dead all day, will not defend her food from thieving birds and ignores lizards scampering around her. She also couldn't be arsed to get up and out of the way of my car whenever I'd leave or come home. I had to physically push her out of the path of the tires. Then came last night.

The crow that has figured out how to get into the lanai returned. Usually, he comes in the morning, but there he was. And there was the cat. The crow freaked out when he saw the beast and panicked, fluttering about in a corner with no exit directly above the cat. The Useless Beast, that lump of calico, managed to raise her head, stare at the bird, look at me, and then telepathically say, "I would prefer not to." And didn't. The crow found the door we leave partially open for the cat's convenience and took off. The cat went back to sleep.

Thus the proposed name. Which is now moot.

The cat went home this morning. She slept most of the morning away in the lanai, but just before noon suddenly got up, went to the partially open door and began yowling. She paced along the screened in wall and yowled. There's been a beautiful young all-gray cat coming around occasionally and I thought maybe he'd returned. Finally, she went out under the mango tree, stalked over to the fence separating us from the folks in back (who I have not mentioned before because we don't really know them except for their slime green pool, passel of obnoxious dogs and, now, a single solitary chicken) where she rolled on her back as if to be petted.

Just as she did this a young couple (not sure of the relationships over there) came from behind one of their bushes. The woman saw the cat and began shouting, "Ohmygod! Ohmygod! Ohmygod!"

The young man said, "What? What is it?"

The young woman said, "That's my cat!"

I thought, Say what?

She hopped the fence. The cat hopped into her arms. She climbed back onto her own property and disappeared.

My brother took the news very well. We were at the bottom of that bag of cat kibble and the little mooch left before we bought a new one.

Miscellanea

A brand new amaryllis has bloomed by the front door. This one is a deep garnet or ruby red.

The mockingbirds nesting out back have had to fight off an attack of crows. Three or four of the raiders swooped in, probably to steal eggs, but, as far as I can tell, were unsuccessful.

The mango tree, covered with blossoms earlier this spring, has lost most of its fruit, partially due to the high winds we've been having for the past week and partially to birds. We may end up with only a couple dozen mangoes this year. My brother already picked two smallish unripe ones off the ground. At least we still have bags of frozen mango from last year's bumper crop.

My brother kept saying he was going to cover the blueberry bush but never did so now the birds have had all of them, too. (I think this should be filed under the last Redneck Studies post.)

We joked about the inch long $3.00 plum tomato he "harvested" last week but another one just ripened so they're down to $1.50 apiece now.