I seem to have inherited a grown up sister.

Well, she's actually been my sister all along, but it's just been of late that I've come to see that she's somehow not my little sister anymore.  I blame my mother.

You see, my mother is now 89, and disappearing. 

Disappearing in the way that most old folks do, in the sense of being less ‘there' mentally -prone to asking you how the family is, minutes after asking you how the family is.  And she needs way more care than she did just a few years ago.  This is what changed my sister.

When my mom's health started to deteriorate a few years back, it was my sister, who was the only one of four kids that lived near enough (a few blocks away in her case) to do much good on a day-to-day basis.  And as a result my sister had to do everything.

At first my sister objected - she couldn't travel when she wanted to, she had to make twice a day visits, act as taxi driver, get pills, find gardeners, talk to doctors and physical therapists, and plead with her brothers for help.
But somewhere along the line she changed.  I don't know whether it was her Buddhist nature, her supportive husband, or what, but she turned the whole experience around into what she now calls a ‘wonderful time'.   She now sends all three brothers a weekly update, and it's this that made me realize she's changed.

So, with apologies to her for sharing, I give you the email she sent to the brothers on mother's day.  Note: my mother (‘Ellie'), to add to her difficulties, recently fell and broke her hip; she can now only get around with a walker.

Happy mothers day everyone,
 
I hope you are well complete with a robust spirit.
 
This week held more new territory for Ellie as we explored the events held on our mother earth. We checked up on the baby geese and heard quite a conversation between the breeze and the leaves on the trees, of course then the geese had their say. We purchased seeds as well as a few plants for her planter boxes. Ellie was timid about getting in the dirt, so I fearlessly lead the way by playing with it, then there was no stopping her and we planted everything in those two boxes...tomatos, strawberries, lettuce, beets, carrots, chives, nasturtiums, zinnias, oh, many more. Intensive gardening...all will be a surprise. We tried out a watercolor class held at the senior center on Friday mornings. Saturday was a trip to the coop for sparkling cider and Swiss cheese, and today we went to the arboretum and soaked in the pastoral scene complete with families having picnics on the grass. Later on it was exercise time and another walk, followed by green tea ice tea mixed with a soda called squirt. What a name.
 
Hope you enjoyed the full moon on Saturday.
 

We're All Gonna Die!

We're all gonna die from the Swine Flu pandemic, outbreak, epidemic, epicenter, or whatever you call it...or on second thought, maybe not.

Those of you over 40 might remember this, at least those few of you who are lucky enough to have survived the last panepioutbreak of swine flue.

1976 Gerald Ford is the president.  Swine flu is found in the U.S. the NYT Headline reads:

U.S. FLU ALERT SET ON EPIDEMIC VIRUS"

What?  We had the swine flue back then?

March 1976: Ford asks congress for $135 million to make a vaccine and inoculate the entire U.S.

Boy, he was surely on top of it.

April 1976: Senate votes for the #135 million.

May 1976 Race for vaccine begins in a Manhattan Lab.

June 1976 Europe wonders why we're running around in a panic.

Those naysayers! What do they know?  Don't they know we're all gonna die? Probably the French as usual.

October 1976:

SWINE FLUE PROGRAM HALTED IN 9 STATES AFTER 3 DIE FROM SHOTS.

Oops.

Dec 1976:

SWINE FLUE PROGRAM SUSPENDED

People were apparently getting sicker from the vaccine than the flu.  Side note: this whole debacle helped sink Ford's re-election chances.

Feb 1977 First lawsuits filed.

Nov 1978 a total of $2.6 billion in claims filed in the swine flu program.

Oct 1980: The government destroys $49 million in swine flu vaccine.

I read yesterday that 36,000 people die every year in the U.S. from the flu.  First thing that happens when you read that is that you calm down considerably, and you begin to wonder why the media has latched on to yet another scare story.  The second thing that happens is that you think ‘Holly crap, 36,000 people!  That's a lot of folks, why don't we panic every year?'

But, for now (putting that 36,000 number out of my mind) I think I'll wash my hands a bit more and go back to whatever it was that I was doing before this thing was mentioned every 5 minutes on the news...

Much thanks to Hamilton Nolan's original column on Gawker

Playing for Change

Every now and then you come across something that just feels really good, and the video on this page is one of them.  Take a look at it and I dare you not to come away just a bit happier.

It was done for a documentary called "Playiing For Change: Peace Through Music".  Now I don't know how, or if any of these videos do any lasting good, but at the minimum, it's a break from the daily newspaper headlines, forever reminding us how stupid we all are.

If I take the high road, and think that they do help, I have noticed that more and more of these efforts are global, and just maybe we're entering a time when we can be just a tad bit more tolerant and understanding of other cultures.

Slumdog Millionaire, Kiva, Palestinian and Jewish college student's LendforPease, are all small cultural indications that we  might be in another Copernican time.  The Astronomer Copernicus, as you might remember, was one of the first to suggest that the earth wasn't at the center of the universe... an idea that got you in a whole lot of trouble if you said out loud -a fact that Galileo discovered some 50 years after Copernicus, when the Church 'commanded and enjoined' him from saying any so heretical. 

They so wanted the earth to be the one and only celestial body picked by God, and no way he could have picked it and not made it the center of everything.

Well, most humans now admit that the universe doesn't center on earth, but most humans still have trouble admitting that their own faith, culture or race isn't the 'chosen' one.  It's going to be truely fun to watch how, when the inevitable happens and intelligent life is discovered elsewhere in the galaxy, various religions accomadate that into their theologies - Actually I suspect we will figure out a way to rationalize still be the chosen species...

In the meantime, I'll accept the slightly schmaltzy tenor of videos like 'Playing For Change' and hope that it's just the beginning.