Someone asked me today if they could see my blog, and I said, uh, sure. My blog. I still have that, don't I? If pressed, I would have been sure that I hadn't posted here since June 22, 2009 - 'the day' the twerp stood still. I would have guessed that I hadn't posted more than once in 2009, since I had been so busy, and also so dizzy, during those 6 months. But I would not have said that the last post was dated September 22, 2008. On September 22, 2008, I still worked at Eventful, Nana was still alive, Shrub was still President, and [personal fact here that I'm just not going to share with you, even though we're close. We're just not that close; don't be upset about it, no one is that close, OK?]. I posted a lot while I worked at Eventful, because political events were eventuating, as Caribou Barbie might have said, and maybe did say, and Mom and Dad and I were emailing one another at a furious pace, and I was posting some of it. I was waiting for the avalanche of support to come in from the google group that my posts go to, along the lines of, wow your parents are old-school, good thing they have you to set them straight, and keep fighting the good fight. Somehow, the avalanche got lost in the mail, but I will have to pursue that line of thought another day.
Because a couple of days after the last post before this very post, Dad called to say that Nana was not recovering from her visit to the hospital the way she had from every previous visit to the hospital, and that he didn't think she was going to recover this time at all. This was difficult to swallow, the way it must be difficult for Woogie to swallow when I open his mouth with one hand, and put his pills all the way down his throat with the other, then close his mouth, and rub the outside of his throat with my other hand. His front paws come off the ground, and he pries with both of them at the hand that's holding his snout closed, not hard enough to scratch, but hard enough to let me know that he's really uncomfortable, that he would really have preferred another pill delivery method, and that I'm surely the meanest mother in America. I would love to work together on this medication problem, but he always finds the pills no matter how they're disguised - in the soft cookie, in the gooey pill case, in the pumpkin mash - and he always spits them out. And he needs the medication - so I do what every mother has to do, which is force pills down her child's throat even though it hurts, and it's sad, and surely there's a better way to do it.
I flew to New York on September 30th and said goodbye to Nana, and when she died the next day, Mom lost her best friend. Although they were best friends in the same way that Frodo and the ring were best friends, and we all miss her, Mom misses her most of all.
There's more to 2008, and a lot more to 2009, but I'm not sure I want to cover it all, and I know I don't want to cover it all here. A la Oprah, there's one thing I know for sure that I learned in 2009, and then I will close the curtain, only opening it again at my whim: I
don't have a brain tumor.
