new stuff

It's the weekend, which is not to say that I am any less busy than during the week since I save things to do for supposedly free time, like everyone else. Yesterday my friend Marly sent me an email to tell me about a poem of hers that has been published on a favorite online journal of ours, Qarrsiluni. I had a poem there last month in an issue called "Insecta"--things about insects, one of my obsessions. This month is hidden things. Go have a look at it at www.qarrsiluni.com.
My poem, "Public Transport," will also appear in this issue, which is about hidden messages.
I am excited about this, being a relative newcomer to all the writing and other odd things going on online. I have long been an emailer, but never ventured far beyond that. Instant messenging gave my computer viruses, so I steer clear of that, but I might as well not, since my 17 year old son uses this computer, and he does it all the time.
Marly also introduced me to Facebook, where I have a box, and got me interested in the virtual battles one can engage in there. Yesterday I threw a rat at her and at several of my cousins. Won't they be surprised? I was thinking about Chinese New Year, since I love to eat and cook Asian food. It's the year of the rat, in case you have been packed in cottonwool for the past week and didn't notice.
One of the things I try to squeeze into the weekend is caring for my elderly parents, Morris and Lydia, who are 91. I am an only child, so there are many many things I must do to help them. I generally take them out shopping, to the beach, to the movies, or such things on weekend. Last week it was an expedition to the shoestore with my mother, who has dementia.
Mom is small, like me, and her feet are too. They also hurt, probably from wearing shoes that are too big. Stores don't seem to acknowledge the existence of people as small as we are, even in this region full of small people from Asia, Mexico and Central/South America, and the Middle East. So looking for shoes is akin to searching for the grail, and when one finds a pair, there are likely to be a slew of like-minded women with murder in their eyes looking to whack you one with an overloaded purse. Since we are not blessed with an overabundance of cash, we shop at discount stores. In this case it was Nordstrom Rack. There happened to be many suitable shoes there on this visit (about 12 pair), though we had to fight through parking lots and crowds of shoppers to find them and then stand in line to get the mates to the shoes we had for what seemed an hour in which my mother had to go to the bathroom at least twice, forcing us to leave the line and start over again.
Getting her foot into the shoes was rather like stuffing a Galapagos tortoise into a pair of Speedos. I don't recommend that you try it. Then once we got the shoes on, with the help of a shoehorn the size of Delaware that poked me in the eye at least once, she really wasn't able to tell me how the shoes felt. I had to take a guess. This has not worked so well in the past (there are nearly as many discarded shoes littering the bottom of her closet as hairs on my head, though there are fewer of those since experiences like this make me want to pull some out), but what choice do we have? So we went home with two pair. From what I hear, she has forgotten they are there and hesitates to put them on when they are put in front of her, but eventually we will wean her from the old pair, probably by disposing of them before her big toe starts hanging out.
Memory loss is an odd thing. My mom has no trouble recognizing us, thank goodness. And she remembers every obscure cousin in the back closet of the family, and people's children too, who I have forgotten long ago, if I ever knew them at all. But she washes the same spot over and over, wears the same clothes, forgets she has eaten as soon as the plate has been whisked away and claims to be starving. It's a mystery, and one that saddens me.