Don’t Even Think About Trying To Escape

In July, my family acquired a new assistive device called the Hoyer lift. It looks like a torture machine with its dangling chains and numerous metal bars. I half expected it to work the way the machine in The Princess Bride worked, with me as a whimpering Wesley watching the six-fingered man turn the dial up to 11.

I think I’m mixing up my Christopher Guest movies. Also the lift doesn’t work anything like what I described above. Obviously.

As an aside, any time we watched The Princess Bride in my family when I was growing up,
my brother and I would tell our sister that the creepy white-haired dude from the pit of despair was her husband. That’s just the kind of nice kids we were.

The way the lift actually works is that I am rolled onto a mesh net every morning, and my dress is pushed up to my lower back, leaving my bare ass hanging out of a hole in the net so that I am able to use the toilet. It is the height of dignity. But it’s also critical, because lifting me manually takes a toll on my caregivers. I will happily swing around in a perverted hammock if it means taking better care of the people who are taking care of me. Read More>

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Still Life

There is this man sitting on a camel colored leather couch in front of a giant flatscreen TV that hangs on a white wall. He has a computer in his lap and a cell phone next to him and an iPad sits on the round wooden coffee table. It looks as if someone has been carving into the coffee table, and there is really only one potential suspect for this, but another possibility is that this is the way the table has always looked.

Sometimes we look around a familiar room or even a neighborhood and see things we swear we’ve never seen before. Entire houses seem to have appeared overnight. We search for children who exist only in picture frames. Children who turned into something different and moved away.

But back to the man. He has information coming at him from at least six different directions. He looks down at the woven rug beneath his feet and remembers trying to return it because it was just a little more pink than he had anticipated. But then he got used to it, and the sun from the tall window faded all the colors anyway. The rug is worn down, fraying at the edges, and this is a little bit like the way the man feels. The hair on his temples has gone gray and he feels frayed at the edges. In fact, he feels like throwing any number of devices at the window or the wall or the TV. Read More>

|Categories: Fiction | Tags: , | Permalink

You Don’t Call, You Don’t Write

This afternoon, I sat down to write. I mean, of course I was already sitting down, but I can’t help think of it as an action I still perform when I am committed to writing. Except that I wasn’t very committed. I ordered sweaters for myself and school clothes for Scarlett. I answered a couple of messages, but not all of them. I thought about the many thank yous I owe to our super generous #whatwouldyougive donors, but thinking about that was as far as I could get.

I’m tired. And I’m frustrated, because everything is hard. Because the dog keeps banging at the blinds in Scarlett’s room, and because my dictation thinks I said hanging instead of banging and banking instead of hanging.

I actually think I should be laughing. Otto is only going crazy because Scarlett put a life-sized skeleton in the front yard, and he clearly thinks it is here to kill us all. I should laugh because I can sit here ordering clothing online, which can only be considered a privilege. I should laugh because the other night when my niece was here for dinner, she toddled all over the dining room and then slid purposely and dramatically to the floor like a buttered noodle, face down on the walnut veneer.
Read More>

|Categories: Life | Tags: , | Permalink