hospice volunteering

I recently saw an ad on boston.craigslist.org about volunteers needed to be Vigil Volunteers, those who sit with hospice individuals in their active stages of dying. I inquired about doing this kind of work but didn't hear back, which I'll admit was a bit of a relief.

I recently read a front-page New York Times article about such volunteers (though for a different organization): I didn't think of the fact that the volunteer also works with the family in those trying times. It's one thing, though a big "thing," to sit alone with a patient at the end. But to also help and console the family members adds a whole other layer onto the work.

I'd still like to learn more, but in the end I don't think I'll be mentally and emotionally strong enough to commit to this kind of volunteer work. Petting shelter cats and washing shelter puppies might be the most intense work I can manage. We'll see how it goes.

best/worst or worst/best movie

H. G. Wells' and 1976's Food of the Gods: giant wasps, earthworms, chickens, and rats! What more could one want?!

stinky puppies ho(sed)!

Here's a description of my new volunteer job. I would've never thought there was such a thing as this!

Puppy Washers

Overview: We want our pups to be squeaky clean before being presented to the public for an adoption day. Puppy washers help to achieve this.

More Detail: After spending 72 hours in state-mandated isolation, the puppies are often stinky. This isolation does not allow them to be outside of their cage or even in the outside runs at all. We wash each puppy before taking them to participate in adoption days.

Wash, dry, and kiss stinky puppies!

starfish...and worms...and caterpillars

"Making a Difference"

One day a man was walking along the seashore. He noticed that during the night many seashells and starfish had washed up on the shore. Thoroughly enjoying the morning sun and cool sea air, the man strolled for miles along the sand.

Far off in the distance, he saw a small figure dancing. The man was joyous that someone was celebrating life in such a grand and uninhibited manner. As he drew closer, however, it became apparent that perhaps the figure was not dancing but was repeatedly performing some ritual.

Approaching the small figure, the man noticed that it was a child. The girl was methodically picking up starfish from the shore and tossing them back into the surf. The man paused for a moment, puzzled, then asked, "Why are you throwing those starfish?"

"If I leave these starfish on the beach," she replied, "the sun will dry them, and they will die. So I'm throwing them back into the ocean because I want them to live."

The man was silent for a moment, impressed with the child's thoughtfulness. Then he motioned up and down the miles and miles of beach and said, "There must be millions of starfish along here! How can you possibly expect to make a difference?"

The young girl pondered the man's words for a moment, then she slowly leaned over, reached down, and carefully picked up another starfish from the sand. Pulling back, she arched the starfish gently into the surf.

She turned to the man and smiled. "You may be right," she said, "but I made a difference for that one!"

my brothers and sister: 1973-ish

The picture of us children is from around 1973 or so, though I'm not sure. Mary's got us all beat on cuteness here, I think!

L to R: Fred, Jamie, Mary, Carroll

Requiescat In Pace, "T-Rix"

My nephew Cameron borrowed his mother's car today and pulled out of the driveway to see my girl (in fact, Mary's cat) Trixie lying dead in the road...I suppose from having been hit by a car...I always knew that something bad would happen because of that close, busy road in front of Mary's house. I'm really sad about Trixie, and especially will be when I go back to Biloxi to visit. Trixie was my girl, enough so that I gave her her own personal rap name, "T-Rix." ;-) but moreso :'-(

Any time I went over to my sister's house, the first (and last) thing I did was track Trixie down, which could be difficult, given that she liked to lie in weeds, flowers, bushes, the clothes dryer, etc. And she was the only cat I knew who could meow without making a sound, or, at most, no more than a squeak. Trixie had a little head on a lumpy squishy body, just like me, so maybe that's why I liked her so much!

"burnish it" or "burn that shit"?

My father apparently has a piece of rusted metal in his eye (?!). Since it's rusted, the metal piece can't just be pulled out. So my mother said they were going to "burnish it out." I thought she said that they were going to "burn that shit out." She laughed and laughed.

I suppose "burnishing" is a lot less traumatic than what I thought was going to happen!

my family...1980-ish

The picture of all of us is from around 1980, give or take one year.

L to R: Fred, Jim, Jamie, Jane, Carroll, Mary

drugs and legs

Heard on TV this sunny Monday morning:

"Requip (ropinirole HCl) helped me make peace with my legs." I suppose some wampum was exchanged and a peace pipe smoked between the woman and her legs.

Good news, seriously I know, for those with restless leg syndrome, but unintentionally funny for the rest of us!

Jamie

I figure I ought to put a picture of my brother Jamie up (some have said he and I looked alike). He'd be 40 in August, two weeks before Jerry'll turn the same age. Jamie's 16 in this picture, in 1982, 10th grade at Biloxi, MS High School. This was 6 years before he was hurt while co-oping at NASA in Virginia, and 9 years before he finally died, of heart failure, in Slidell, Lousiana.

I asked my mother once what it was like to have a daughter who was 40. And I remembered she'd asked her parents the same thing once, except about what it was like to have a 70-year-old daughter!

Then my mother told me that she met someone once and told her that story. The woman responded by saying, "That's nothing: my mother's 80 and her mother is still alive!"

current Maine highway project or new horror movie?

On the way to Freeport, Maine this morning, Jerry and I were fixin' to go through a toll booth when we saw a state sign, letting people know about an upcoming interstate project. The sign said, "Think Ahead: The Widening."

We both laughed and Jerry said, "That sounds like a new Stephen King book." Then he guffawed, grabbed my hand, and said, "I guess that's (the widening, that is) what's been happening to me the last twenty years!"

my grandparents

This picture is one my mother especially likes, because my grandparents seem so happy and comfortable with each other, something that wasn't always the case as they became older. In this (1993) picture, my grandmother is, or is almost, 86. My grandfather is soon to be 88. They both (Carroll Hardy Long, after whom I'm named, and Lucinda Ann Strong) lived well into their 90s. My grandmother died 10-, and my grandfather 8-, years later.

I've always been sorry that I didn't learn more about my grandparents, but I was too shy, and a bit cowed by them, to ask more. I regret that, of course.

turning 30 and into my mother

Someone recently asked me about some conversations I had with various people in Chicago, and if I remembered any of those conversations standing out in my memory. One did: talking about how I felt about turning 30.

It didn't bother me to turn 40, other than to think some, I imagine, common things to all of us climbing the ladder into middle age, like, "I remember turning 30 and it's already 10 years later," and, "I can't believe it's been almost 20 years since I graduated from college."

While growing up, I never thought of my parents as being a certain age, never comparing my age in relation to theirs. They were just my parents, something different from what I was. I knew that when I was grown up like them, I'd be different than what I was at that point. Later on I realized, of course, that they were regular people, just like me. Still, it was hard to really believe that.

Obviously, once I got older, I realized that my parents were people just like me. I didn't become a different person when I went from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, or 30 to 40. My life was different, but I thought the same things, in pretty much the same ways. My looks changed, unfortunately!, but otherwise I was the same as I always was.

The point where the above dawned on me most emphatically was right before I turned 30, in 1994...30 being the age my mother was, of course, when I was born. That's why I felt _____ (I don't know what word to use there) when I turned 30. In a way, I felt that I was becoming my mother (for lack of a more insightful way to put that)...not in the sense that I was becoming a homemaker, or a musician, or a whatever. It was that I now knew what it was to be what I never thought that they were before...again, regular people, just like me.

Anyway, I knew at 30 that I was officially grown up, and I knew then what it felt like to be my mother or to be the age of someone who was, in her case, or could be, in my case, a mother. It didn't feel any different than when I was 10.

(The picture of me is when I was 7, in first grade. The picture of my mother is the only one I have scanned of her. She's probably only a senior in high school when that picture was taken.)

new super power discovered!

To add to my earlier list, here's my newly discovered super power!

5. guessing birthdays/ages

Jerry was looking at a book, showed me a picture, and asked,

Jerry: "Do you know who this is"?
Carroll: "Ho Chi Minh."
Jerry: "Do you know when he was born?"
Carroll: I had no idea, but thought about it for a few seconds and said, "1890."
Jerry: looked dismayed and said, "Yeah."

mother's saying

I know more than a couple of people, who might read this, have already had this exclamation made to them. Here it is, yet again, in another context, from today:




Carroll: Well aren't YOU something?!
Jerry: I am something. No one knows quite what, but there you go.

No, there YOU go.

one more thing about the garage...

...see the "hen pecked" post a couple of posts down for the back story...

All the stuff in my father's current garage (he's got at least three arc welders, four motorcycles, two jet skis, and two four wheelers) used to be in the house's regular two-car garage. Every morning it was a huge undertaking to move all that stuff (at least, at the time, there were no jet skis or four wheelers yet) out into the driveway, so that my father could move around in the garage.

My mother and father tell of the numerous times people would stop by to (in all seriousness) ask, "When's the garage sale?"!

(In the picture, there's much, much more stuff in there now!)

He has so much stuff, in fact, that, at his 70th birthday party last month, one of his friends bet the other friends that he (the friend) had gotten a gift that my father didn't have out in his garage. There were peals of disbelieving laughter from the men, but it turned out that it was something my father didn't have...some soft of hose cutter.

John 11:25

I can't believe I'm quoting something from the Bible. Since I admit I am, I like the following, because of its being etched on my great-grandfather's (Edwin Augustus Long, my maternal grandfather's father) tomb, in Johnson City, Tennessee. He, and his son and daughter in law) was a life-long Methodist there, and so I respect his devotion to his religion.

"...I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live..."

• John 11:25

70...the 8th decade

It was hard for me when my mother turned 70, two years ago. Even though her parents lived till their mid 90s, I still felt depressed about the change from her being in her 60s, versus beginning her 70s.

It's hard to explain why I felt that way, since I'm not sure myself. I imagine it was because I'm so used to the reality that the average life span for us IS somewhere in the 70s. Though I know women tend to live a bit past that, I couldn't help feeling like 70 marked, in a way, the beginning of the last phase, or decade, of my mother's life. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. I don't want to find out.

I've felt a little less anxious since then, but still feel sad when I see obituary pages, and their columns and columns of men and women who've died, as the averages say, in their 70s.

as a child...

...I was a cowboy, first and foremost (I always had my boots, hat, and guns on, though with a dress I only wore my boots), then Batman (complete with cape, helmet, and care).

Then I decided I would go out, with my rope and bag, and go to the end of the rainbow (it was out that day), to get the gold. I didn't get very far...that rainbow end was a long way off! ;-D

Christmas gifts...of sorts

My father isn't the most in-tune gift giver to my mother, though he tries hard, I know. Here are a few examples of Christmas gifts over the years from him to her:

• a mailbox made out of checker plate (aka diamond plate)
Actually, it's pretty cool looking, and is the only one on the block, indubitably!

• floor mats for her van
Need I say more?

• and the greatest of all time...
One Christmas my grandparents were down and we were all unwrapping presents. My father was very excited and kept hinting that we all needed to go out to see my mother's gift from him. It was a big production, since we had to parade down the street, to a friend's house (see post below...Tom is one who brings up the "hen pecked" idea often), where the gift was stealthily hidden.

My father went around back, and as proud as could be, emerged with a metal cart, with four bicycle wheels attached: it was a three-can garbage-can holder!!! I don't remember what my mother's reaction was, but her mother quickly exclaimed, "Where can *I* get one?!" She was serious.