Tag: anniversary

Lucky 13 Years of Marriage

I am lousy remembering people, but she’s much better at it.

Carol and I have been married 13 years today. I’m surprised; I figured I’d have driven her crazy long ago. (And maybe I have.)

That’s not to say she doesn’t have a few quirks of her own. To wit:

If I am reading a newspaper or a magazine, and set it down to get something, I’ll come back to find that she is almost always reading it. And it doesn’t matter what it is: Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, it will have moved from where I was sitting to her locale. I can’t very well be upset about it because she’s keeping up with the world. When I met her nearly 20 years ago, I noted that there were current events she was oblivious to; not so anymore.

When she tidies up, I really CAN’T find anything. More than that, she can’t tell me either. Whereas when I clean up after her – the kitchen counter is a magnet for her stuff – I have about a 98% retrieval rate.

She’s often late. She HATES that I say that, but it’s true. If she says she’ll pick me up at 5:25, I’ll turn off my office computer at 5:26 and be downstairs before she arrives. I recognize that she’s always squeezing in one more thing.

On the other hand:

She’s amazingly gifted at financial stuff. I have no personal debt. The first mortgage on the house is almost paid off. My sisters both want to marry her.

She’s a decent cook, but a great baker.

She’s way more handy with tools than I ever will be.

I am lousy remembering people’s names, but she’s much better at it. And when there’s someone I feel that I should recall, but don’t, she’ll introduce herself to the mystery person.

Did I mention, a couple days ago, that she’s a great mom?

But more than the particulars, we seem to have reached a certain degree of being in synch that I wouldn’t have thought possible. I don’t want to say we finish each other’s sentences – that’s only a sometimes thing – but we seem to find a way to empathize with our partner’s stuff.

Since we’ve been together, I’ve become a bit more patient and tolerant. She, in part from reading the news more, is more cynical realistic about the ways of the world.

Love you, lovey in the middle. (Mysterious family code)

Blogoversary Number Seven

I doubt I ever mentioned this here, but I loved Russell Baker.

I was reading the comments for Ken Levine’s sixth blogoversary about five months ago when I came across this:

“Russell Baker, in my opinion, the best columnist ever to adorn a newspaper, once said that he became a columnist with the thought that now he had the freedom to disgorge the contents of his brain. After three weeks of columns, he realized that he had already disgorged the entire contents of his brain.”

I doubt I ever mentioned this here, but I loved Russell Baker. I used to follow his column in the New York Times religiously. I’ve read at least three of his books; Growing Up, one of his autobiographies, was one of my favorite tomes for a long time. I still own it, so I probably should reread it, but probably won’t.

Anyway, I disgorged the contents of my brain six years and 49 weeks ago, and yet I’m STILL writing this blog. Some people just don’t know when to quit. As a buddy of mine, who’s been blogging about as long as I, but not quite as proficiently, stated recently, “Yeah, but you’re a tad, shall we say OCD on the whole blog thing, Rog.” Well, maybe. I’ve been known to be writing three weeks ahead, when the muse strikes, to make up for those weeks when I write almost nothing. At least I stopped multiple blog posts per day.

The one thing I did this year that made sense was to get this blog on Networked Blogs, which allows automatic tweets, and (I think) Facebook posts to be generated. I think social media is fine – just don’t sign me up for Farmville or the like, because I WILL block it – but I just don’t have the time to actively use them much. Writing the blog every day is a lot easier/more interesting to me than promoting it.

Happy blogoversary to moi.

And because I always need a song to celebrate just about everything, here is 7 and 7 Is by Love, featuring Arthur Lee.

Expect more navel-gazing throughout the month.

 

The teller of secrets

I muse how my life would have been if, instead of being the eldest child, I had had an older brother.

 

Today would have been my parents’ 62nd anniversary. But my dad died a few months after their 50th, in 2000. I always remember the date, though, because my mom always referred to me as an early anniversary present. I was born five days shy of their third wedding anniversary. Coincidentally, my eldest niece was born five days short of HER parents’ anniversary. Also, since my parents were married in 1950, it was always easy to calculate how long they had been hitched.

The odd thing about my parents. My father revealed almost nothing about his past. My mother, though, starting when I was nine or ten, would drop tidbits about her past, my parents’ joint history, and, more peculiarly, events from my father’s past at which she was not present, to my sisters and to me. So she told us stuff about him that he never told us about himself. Some were so spotty that it engendered more questions than answers. A few things fell into the category of “We REALLY did not need to know that.” Other bits were useful; WHY my father didn’t particularly like Christmas made a certain amount of sense.

One item she mentioned was that she had experienced a miscarriage in April 1951, in the second trimester of the pregnancy; it was a male. She was rather matter-of-fact about it in the telling, but she noted that my father was rather devastated by the situation. So when my mother got pregnant again, in 1952, she reported that he was a bit at arm’s length emotionally about it. It wasn’t until the baby arrived safely that he could even think about coming up with names.

This explains the frantic calculation of names he did on scraps of paper at his cousin Ruth’s house before he came up with Roger Owen Green, with the initials ROG. From time to time, I muse how my life would have been if, instead of being the eldest child, I had had an older brother.

The first anniversary of my mother’s death

I was there when Mom died shortly before 9 a.m.

I realized that, while my mother’s death naturally made me very sad, and especially that “adult orphan” thing weirded me out, there were some things that mitigated the pain somewhat.

To recap: my “baby” sister called me at work on Friday, January 28 to tell me our mother, Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, had gone to the ER with a severe headache. It was latter determined that she had had a “brain bleed”; I don’t think I understood that terminology until I got down to the hospital. What Mom had was a stroke; there are two kinds, one which constricts the blood, and the other, less common, but more problematic, where there’s too much blood.

I figured that I needed to go down by train because flying was too expensive. I remember getting a “sick or bereavement rate” when I flew down to Charlotte, NC before my father died, but it was hardly helpful. Since I didn’t know when I’d return, taking the train to Charlotte seemed to be the best plan.

I was initially planning on leaving on Tuesday, but when I saw the forecast for a massive snowstorm, which did arrive, I knew I needed to leave on Monday. I called work on Monday morning from the train station to tell them I wouldn’t be in for several days.

Tuesday, my sisters and I spent the day in the hospital, and my sisters tell me that she was doing much better, giving a couple of one-word answers.

Wednesday morning, she had a Cheyne-Stokes breathing episode that sounded terribly distressing, but apparently was not, at least for her. I talked with my doctor about this last month when I was feeling unwell. She notes that hospice nurses are good at bringing comfort to the family, but that sometimes, hospital nurses forget that, when death is near, they still need to try to make the family feel OK. My doc theorized that perhaps they gave my mom a bit of morphine to control the sounds, for my benefit.

I was there when Mom died shortly before 9 a.m. I was told to call my sisters before I was told that fact; very odd. When my sisters arrived, they thought she was only sleeping before I had a chance to tell them otherwise.

I was having this electronic conversation with my blogger buddy Arthur recently about the euphemisms for death. He doesn’t much like them, and I’m inclined to agree. But, in my mom’s case, I understand why they say that someone “passed away.”

It so happened that I wrote a blog item that posted on Wednesday, though I had written it on Saturday, Take the Train to Charlotte. All the posts prior to 2:05 pm EST indicated hope for my mom’s recovery. But somewhere around 2:12, I started getting condolences. Denise, the ABC Wednesday diva, had IMed me at some point after we got home from the hospital around noon, to ask how my mom was doing, so of course, I told her. The outpouring of support I got from people I had never met was astonishing. Jaquandor and Arthur both wrote posts about my mom and me.

I was intrigued by one comment to a brief post I wrote the day after she died, describing my account as “dispassionate”. I suppose that was true; it was a coping mechanism.

So it was tough, but it was made palatable by folks from work and church, and by friends I’ve known in person, but also from a whole lot of people I have never met. My friends Jason and DeeDee placed a small obit in my mom’s hometown paper in Binghamton, NY, which was the first time some of her friends and relatives heard about her death. I read the comments from various posts I wrote during the month, and they make me (past and present tense) both weepy, but at the same time, comforted. The aforementioned Denise sent flowers to our house; it is amazing how well flowers from England held up.

Oh, some mundane stuff: got $561 from my mother’s Social Security in December, as did my sisters; not quite clear exactly why. That’ll help with paying off some of the debt I incurred for the funeral and Charlotte newspaper obit.

George Harrison: 10 Years Gone

George was executive producer of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a film I just picked up on DVD.

 

Unless I am misremembering, the first TIME magazine cover after September 11, 2001, that was not about 9/11 or the subsequent war in Afghanistan was the one announcing the death of George Harrison. I was sad that George died, of course, but I knew he was sick and not likely to get better. The top cover was the US version; the bottom one, the UK take.

This is obvious, I imagine, but one deals differently when someone dies expectedly or unexpectedly, by disease or by murder. John Lennon’s death a couple of decades earlier was a jolt; George’s was just sad.

In fact, George’s passing made me melancholy the more I thought about his contribution to the world, especially around the time of what would have been his 59th birthday the following February. He was a Beatle, of course. But he also organized the first of those superstar extravaganzas, the Concert for Bangladesh. He put out some great music as a solo artist. And he was executive producer of a couple dozen movies, including Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a film I just picked up on DVD, I liked it so much.

There was a Martin Scorsese documentary about George this year, which I haven’t seen. Here are some photos from it, and a piece from the New York Times. Also, there was an article Living in the Material World – 5 Things I Learned About George Harrison from the Scorsese Documentary, four of which I actually knew.

Other recent articles about George:
Rolling Stone magazine AGAIN did one of those 100 greatest Beatles songs. George had two in the top 10.

George had an Indian soul, according to his wife

The unseen GH photo album

George Harrison exhibit at the GRAMMY Museum

Borders liquidators sell off George Harrison guitar

And, of course, some music:

A couple of songs where George namechecks the Beatles:
Living in the Material World – GH
When We Was Fab – GH

Two versions of the Wilbury Twist by the Traveling Wilburys
1990 version, with lots of then-current stars
2007 version, which dumps most of them

A cover version of one of George’s best songs as a Beatle:
While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney, both of whom played on the original.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial