Monday, October 6, 2008

Fall

Saul thought I should use this title when I told him I was going into my office to write my blog. I decided that I liked the ambiguity of it. On the pleasant side, it is another word for autumn and the weather has been crisply cool in the mornings and at night, and perfectly temperate in the afternoons. After my initial hopeful efforts gardening in May and June, everything has been neglected all summer as we went on a two-week vacation, Mom's health deteriorated, and now she can no longer be left alone even for a few minutes. In previous years, I used to go out early in the morning to water and pull weeds. That has not been possible for at least six weeks now, plenty of time for the weeds to become giant and grass to put down its impossibly strong roots in places where it doesn't belong. Saul is on a five-day fall break from teaching this weekend, so yesterday, he went out to patch up those carpenter bee holes (see blog of Wednesday, May 7) and do some repair work on the deck before winter. Most of the holes are right outside Mom's bedroom. Unable to resist the beautiful day, I ventured out at the same time to begin weeding my trays of herbs that ring the gazebo. I left the sliding door in the kitchen open with the screen in place. As Saul was walking by carrying a large ladder, Mom began to call him urgently from the kitchen. I had just stepped down from the deck and in my hurry to rush in, I tripped, having not lifted my foot high enough, and hit the deck hard bruising my leg and cutting my hand. Seeing my distress and establishing that nothing was broken, Saul dropped the ladder and ran in to see what Mom wanted. It turned out that she wanted him to turn on the television in her bedroom. When he saw my cut hand, he returned to me with antiseptic and liquid band-aid. I just sat and cried for a while out of sheer frustration. Then, he went in and I went back to weeding. He came outside a little later when Mom had eaten lunch and gone to sleep and together, we finished weeding, removed and dumped planters that had mostly gone to grass and removed dirty and unsightly piles of leaves with a mulching leaf vacuum. Enough herbs and flowers had survived the neglect that I spent the last hour before darkness gazing out the window at our spectacular handiwork.

Today, when the aide came to bathe Mom, we took the opportunity to get some more work done outside. Unfortunately, she did not let us know when she left. Saul's cell phone rang and Adele and Larry were freaked out because Mom had fallen in her bedroom and couldn't get up. Adele had been talking to her on the house phone and she couldn't find her cell phone, so Adele had called the cell phone. In her hurry to find the cell phone Mom had gotten out of bed and slipped. She was unhurt, but insisted that Saul help her up. We each grabbed her under her arms and lifted her onto her feet. Her cell phone was exactly where it was supposed to be, in a bag that is attached to her walker. She is badly shaken, not so much by the fall, but by her dependence on someone else to help her up. We are feeling bad that we seem not to be able to leave her alone even for fifteen minutes.

I have not had a whole lot to say about the candidates in this upcoming election because Ari has always been extremely interested, informed and articulate about politics and I have always sought out and, most of the time, deferred to his judgment. As soon as he was old enough to read, he would be making assessments of local candidates and advising me when I took him into the voting booth with me as a child. He was a very unusual child! This evening, before I began blogging, I checked my email and there was a transmission from the Obama campaign with a link to a specially-prepared 13-minute You Tube video about the connection of John McCain to the Keating Five. I was not very knowledgeable at the time it was happening about the details of the case. The financial aspects were very complicated and the events had little or no effect on me personally. I half-watched a documentary about the Keating Five a few months ago, long enough to learn that John McCain had been acquitted. I decided to watch the video this evening. When I was finished, I Googled Charles Keating and decided to see what Wikipedia had to say on the subject. I finally began to understand that the details of the situation in our economy right now are just a hugely magnified repeat of what happened with the failure of savings and loans in 1989. Everything I have learned about the current economic situation points to the fact that government deregulation in our capitalist society leads to corruption in business. If we do have regulation and our legislators are in bed with our regulators, that also leads to corruption. I don't understand how anyone of intelligence could vote for another Republican knowing that the party has always been for government deregulation. In view of the current circumstances, and particularly because John McCain has been personally and publicly involved in this very thing before and continued to push for deregulation up until the shit hit the fan, I don't understand why anyone would want to see all this chaos pushed under the carpet in the next administration while American taxpayers are again bailing out the very institutions that defrauded them in the first place. I fear that if McCain is elected, the status of the United States in the world will fall because of failure to punish those who engage in bad business practices that bleed the American taxpayer and weaken our allies' financial status throughout the world.

2 comments:

Ari said...

Does this mean we're allowed to curse on the blog now? :)

baenigma said...

Hell yes!