July 25, 2019
Two weeks ago, my mother was hospitalized for the first time in the past 12 months. She is back at her residence again, having put on four much needed pounds. I had an honest and slightly humorous conversation with her doctor at the hospital, which I have shared with a few friends on e-mail, who all seem to appreciate his forthrightness. I certainly did. I feel fortunate to have him as one of my mother’s doctors.
“Your mother’s not in the check-out line, or if she is, she’s way back,” he said to me in the hallway. That’s a very reasonable assessment of her situation, at the age of 97 years and seven months. I don’t know if she’ll make it to her 98th birthday. Hey, for that matter, I don’t know if I’ll make it to my 72nd birthday. “Life is a rental agreement without any lease” is one of my favorite aphorisms from my reading of the past couple years. That sums it up pretty well, eh?
In the meantime, I am working on a poem about “the predicate” and sorting through recent photographs.
It should be noted that the waterfall depicted at the beginning of this post is usually two separate flows of water. The night before, however, a storm that was the culmination of five straight days of rain dropped so much moisture that the two streams united in a single flow.
About Bill Mohr