New Year's Eve

Well, it's really NewYear's Eve's Eve, as far as contiguous life goes, eh. I'm still awake from Friday even tho' it's technically Saturday.

Henry and I think that trying to work out what one should do with the leap-second we'll get tomorrow night is just silly. A National Public Radio program asked folks what they planned to do with their free second. At least two guys said, kiss their wives. For just a second? Henry and I are just going to blink while the second ticks through.

There have been developments with Dad and Frances. A Development: Their friend LMcA is going to convene a group of interested friends, to work out how to monitor and support D&F after I leave, and before D&F decide they need to move into care.

LMcA is not the easiest person. She's very bright indeed, but of the 1950's, and remained a non-careered woman all her life. I don't know enough to say it was a waste that she didn't go into the professional world - she's done an awful lot in the informal and volunteer worlds. But, gosh, she talks a lot. I imagine a career would have diverted her mouth - why do I think that? She talks a lot - one just has to interrupt; I'm glad to have found out she copes okay with that.

I forgive her verbosity: a huge anxiety for me has been, what will happen with D&F after I go back to the UK? For someone to voluntarily address this, someone of such talent, is a blessing. (Maybe I'll talk about grace and blessings sometime - the language has become meaningful for me in the last couple of years. With reference to life, love, energy - not Christic.)

We - the group of friends contacted by LMcA - meet next Wednesday, after D&F and I have met with the agent for their Long Term Care insurance policy. That meeting should yield info about what's covered for whom (they have personal coverage, where one may need Nursing but not the other), when, and how you 'turn it on'. The 'what' includes which local care facilities they can plan for - including the luxury one F says she thinks would do, or not?

On a smaller scale: F and I sorted her linen drawers today. When she and my dad moved last year, linens were one class of possessions that got put away differently in the new place that they'd been in the old place, and she didn't really know where to find what.

She may not remember now which drawer has Kitchen table clothes and placemats, which has Fancy, which Christmas. But at least, when she opens a drawer, it will contain all of one kind of thing.

About my Parent Anxiety: I stayed home, fiddling with getting photos on to the internet and stuff, until late morning. Rang D&F - no answer! Went over to their place anyway, and lurked. The disposition of things didn't look like their leaving was an emergency exit by them, but - WHERE WERE THEY?? If not back by 14:00. I was going to start calling around....

They arrived home about 13:10 all calm but Dad tired, having been for F to have her hair done. We had a few minutes of discomfort, me saying 'a call to tell me you were going out would have been nice'. That pushed F into defense mode - she 'remembered' me saying I'd be engaged all day. She made it up to cover - why can't she just say, 'yeah, sorry....' After all, it takes an amount of courage for me to say I wished they'd called. We got over it. Jill used to described them as solupsistic.

But the defensive theme was revisited. Pastoral Pastor from their Church both visited D&F this afternoon, andlater came to the Open House I attended. His conversation with D&F included F saying she didn't understand why I've made this 6 month sojourne (which is over in 20 days).

She's asked me often if I didn't miss my home, or if I were looking forward to going back, or if people there were in touch with me and wanting me back: All these questions are her covers, generated by her inability to just ask me why I came, why I'm here.

I'm sorry I didn't engineer an ongoing conversation about it: I had clear objectives for this 6 months, but I guess I never told them. (So how alike are we!) My dad, by the way, seems to accept and appreciate this long visit of mine, whether he understands or not. Maybe I'll write it out for F. If she'd get glasses enabling her to read... Gosh, those dime-store magnifiers she sometimes puts on don't always do it.

I do have generational issues with her, eh? That extend beyond issues addressed with my own mother (who died when I was 20, 38 years ago...)

This all goes too long for anyone reading blogs to bother with, but it's helping me.

And I've just lost the miasma of insight (;-) I'd gotten to. It will be invisible to you, reader.

I can say that the same generational differences were startlingly clear with my British mother-in-law. She goes into a 'cut glass BBC' voice when trying to impress or be proper. Like listening to BBC clips from the War (WW2... hello, young people). (Or maybe I betray my Americaness: is cut glass about upper class, BBC about standardised middle class?)

Tonight, I met a man who runs a store. I asked, what kind of store? I thought he said 'book', and was bewildered when O started talking with him about her family's wharf on Taylorsville Lake. He'd said 'boat'... I'd have a learning curve for voice, here - taking time - as I had in the UK. Look, I can get all the way to understanding the voices Northumbrian, usually, and Fife and Cornwall, and that was hard work. Please don't make me have to work on Kentucky dialects... well, maybe it would be fun...

Please, how do people speak at my home? Can I understand them? Can they understand me? Understand my interesting, well yes, it is an accent...

The differences about how to deal with one's own and others' feelings, varying between those born before WW2 and we born after, are harder to pin down than are accent patterns. I will write out for D&F, why I came, Objectives, and how I think I've done. (Not bad. Expensive.)

Beyond the Objective stuff is the material of my relationships with my dad and Frances: The history of my parents' marriage, loss of their second baby (hey, Mom - how'd you deal with that?). My, their, feelings about the divorce. How F felt, 30 years old, dealing with a 40 year old husband and me, 10, showing up for a 6 week visit. She and I had clear barriers: she was my Stepmother, and I her Stepdaughter, to encompass and 'deal with' by burial! our pains that things weren't as in a story book family.

She and my dad lost two babies, and the boy she and Dad adopted shot himself. With the second baby my mom and dad had, still-born, I am the only survivor of five. F carries the residual grief deeply; and somewhere resents it's me that's here, not David, Pam or Tim. She forgets Christine all together.

I will get a revenge: when F and my dad are dead, I will have those babies moved from Alabama and Iowa to the plot here in Cave Hill. D&F did move their own plots there - beautiful cemetary, in which one can imagine rejoicing in natural calm - from the desert-awful place they first chose, and moved Tim's urn. Guess I fantasize a united family at the molecular level. (My mom had her ashes scattered at sea, her memorial is in love in Palos Verdes, California. She'll stay there.)

Sweet Henry's not sure he's followed all this, but he's pleased it's all said now, and I'll let myseft go to bed. He's thankful he lost touch with his family, and has me now. He thinks it will probably be okay...