It is tax time, if you hadn’t noticed, which is going to be increasingly onerous in the years to come. I jetted up from the Capital to help out on that and other things, since Mom is confronting that, and with it the growing cloud of uncertainty here in the little town by the bay. The nice lady at the airport in Traverse City noted my reservation, and asked if I would prefer to have a Caddie SST rather than a mid-size, same price.

Some things go right, completely unexpectedly.

I got a note from one of my right-wing colleagues (being a retired military guy you can imagine I have more than a few) and he went off on me about Friedman and the Radical Center and the one before that. He is convinced we are headed for State socialism, and that the beginning of the end might be at hand.

I sighed when I read his note. You know where I am coming from; I would be a Powell Republican, if such a thing existed anymore: strong national defense, fiscally conservative, liberal on social policy. There is no such thing anymore.

I think, if this trend continues unabated, we are headed for violence. It is not completely inevitable, but the lines are being drawn in a way that fills me with dread.

That violence will fix nothing, or rather, may usher in the sort of society that is exactly what we both fear. I am also too old to run, but unfortunately not too old to fight. I do not want to have to pick up arms against the state, but we shall see.

I am dealing with too much death and sadness as it is.
 
My Sister has been here on and off- she jetted out to go back to Alaska for a week or so and I am here in the middle, like a sandwich.
 
I flew up yesterday without enough outer garments. The change in the weather down in Virginia has not happened yet in Michigan. The sky was bright blue, but the air was still crisp and penetrating. There is a fuzz of new life on the trees, but the ice has only been off the bay for a week.
 
It is painful to watch this change in the folks. Dad was poised in one of the dining room chairs as Mom prepared to run the electric shaver on him. He sat poised with one hand raised, still as a stone. Fingernails disconcertingly long. Not Howard Hughes long, mind you, but unsettling.
 
Mom is still Mom, but I have never seen her with uncombed hair. She was always impeccably groomed, but this afternoon it seems as if she had just come through a great storm. She says she has arranged for someone at the Senior Center to clip his fingernails and toes next week, part of a comprehensive set of services for the seniors here in town.
 
Things have gone downhill since Christmas. I have to say things twice or three times or it never does register. She is still acute, but trying to discuss the missing 1099s from the taxes with her was impossible. She did the taxes for the family for years.
 
She believes that they are new things, never seen before.
 
Dad is in Depends now, maybe not full time, but I saw a package in the bedroom, when Mom was handing me the files with assorted receipts and statements. She has always been meticulously organized. Now the files are sort of random chronological assortments of unrelated papers.

Dad said once that he would rather be dead than in diapers, when a P-51 pilot from the Great War was in the last days of his life.
 
Clearly we are now at a place where the highly complex is falling away and the simplest of functions is a challenge. Dad is not eating and very thin. He was a skinny kid, according to the pictures, and it is coming around full circle.
 
The trip to the grocery store I took them on to get them out of the house was a trip.
 
I bought chicken and potatoes and green beans- a dinner I thought was middle of the road, and showed him what would be for supper before I cooked it.
 
He only picked at it, pushing the plate in a plaintive manner toward Mom, asking her to eat it. Mom finished her chicken, but snuck the green beans into the salad bowl in a furtive manner so she would not have to deal with them.
 
My sister made an appointment for me to tour the Freedom House, the oxymoronic name for the assisted care facility, but Mom says she will tell us when she needs help and nothing will happen before.
 
The house was pretty clean, but I have never seen Mom without her hair combed. She mentioned that 85 is the average age for women to die, and she is 85. I asked her when her Mom passed away and she said “92.” I told her if we worked things right she was good for another decade, almost.
 
I will get used to this today, probably, as I adjust to the new place they are on this road, but it really hit me walking in.
 
Man, this is weird. Part of life and all that, but just flat-ass weird.

And with the backdrop of the seams of the Republic fraying, it is just plain scary.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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