How does a woman, raised in the south by a father who was a new deal democrat, slowly become a conservative? I always believed that my father, an early neo-conservative, was a major influence on my mother, but as I spend more time with mom since my father’s passing, I think the answer is more complex.
Continue reading
What’s the best way to deal with a parent or relative as they age. My aunt, my mother’s sister, raged through her decline with anger, denial and increasing hallucinations. My mother has taken a different approach, always the optimist, she tries to see the positive. But like my aunt, my mother is strong willed. Often when mom says yes it really a secret no.
Continue reading
I will have been with my partner for five years this coming January. We have lived together for a year and a half. It has been a wonderful journey but our recent talk of marriage has me all stirred up. Continue reading
My two brothers and I, with our children, have all descended on the Florida town where my parents are renting an apartment for the winter. My mother’s desire to take my father, who at 90 years of age, is wheelchair-bound, out of the apartment for meals, movies, and tonight for s’mores, knows no bounds. Continue reading
Whose life is this anyway? I went from living my new gay life with a sense of freedom, joy, and fun to caring for my wife who was dying of cancer, caring for my father who is dying of old age, caring for my college-age son who found himself accused of hazing and working with my siblings to clean up my father’s estate, which is a mess. Continue reading
There has to be a better way to grow old. Continue reading
My grandfather was, what they used to call, a natty dresser. Natty is an old fashioned term for someone who is smart and fashionably dressed. Continue reading
In my work, I have often prided myself at being able to look at a project and know from the onset if it would be a success or a failure. This same ability to project into the future and imagining what will be has always been a part of my life. I can often look at a situation and see the essential outlines or framework of what it will be in the future, even if I can not see the details. Continue reading
Today is the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. She died on March 4th, 2004, at the age of 100. Tomorrow I will visit her grave, a ritual I do whenever I am in South Florida. She is buried next to my grandfather, whom I never knew. My grandfather died five years before I was born of a massive heart attack. Continue reading
Sunset at Provincetown, MA – November 23, 2016
Somehow the tradition of thanksgiving, with the abundance of food, plates heaped full of food, a myriad of desserts, and that stuffed slick feeling later has always seemed to be a very strange tradition. Continue reading
