The First 20 or so Things That I Love as They Occur to Me in the Moment

A blog-friend I recently rediscovered after my 10-year absence from posting gave me the idea for this post. I'd say he's about my age, and his occasional posts on this same theme always begin: "Peggy, my wife of 51-years" - or whatever the current tally of years might be.

 

I wish I could do likewise, and then my list would begin: "Allen, my partner-then-husband of 45 years". Alas, it will soon be 10 years since Allen died, so our partnership only made it to 35 years. Even so, he deserves a mention here, because no list of Things I Love is complete without at least a glance back at Things I Have Loved.

But as they occur to me in the moment, the First 20 Things That I Love (now):

1. Living in Australia, not the USA, and feeling in my bones that I'm more Australian than not.
2. Being free to live each day as I please and being able to do (or not do) whatever I feel like doing on most days.
3. Having my daughter and her family near enough to visit regularly and feeling I'm always welcome when I do visit.
4. Daily texts or phone calls with my sister who's on the same wavelength about so many things and knowing we can share our woes as well as joys without being judged.
5. 
   The blousy white hydrangea that's flowering right now in my garden, reminding me that Spring has arrived and there'll be weeks of blue hydrangeas to follow.
   
6. The little brown honeyeaters and double-barred finches I can see from my desk, as they take turns to bathe in the bird bath.
7. Rays of afternoon sunshine lighting up the top of the hedge along one side of my yard.
8. Being fit enough to maintain my house and garden to a satisfactory standard and, when necessary, being able to afford the services and products I need to keep things ticking over.
9. Cooking interesting food - and then eating it - sometimes with friends to share it with.
10. Reading good books - especially newly published ones - and sharing this pleasure with....
11. ...the lovely people in my book club - their kindness, generosity, intelligence and the fact that none of them are right-wingers or nutbags!
12. 
    A nicely cleaned house after I've finished a really good round of housework.
13. The wonderful opportunities I've had to do interesting development work in several countries.
14. Writing a few good sentences now and then - and sometimes sharing a piece of writing here or elsewhere.
15. Visits by family members and old friends - though I only wish more of them were closer and could visit more often.
16. 
    All my gardening activities - turning over the vegie patch, planting, composting, pruning, harvesting, repotting, pulling on my Redback boots and just getting dirty and sweaty.
    
17. Knowing I don't have to worry about possible future medical bills or access to medical care because I have access to government-subsidised medical and pharmaceutical services as well as affordable private insurance for extras.
18. Being cancer-free 23 years after breast cancer. 
19. Having nice neighbours who agree we will look out for each other but without being too nosy.
20. Having a green outlook over the back fence, with beautiful trees, bushes and an adjacent wetland that I don't have to maintain.

Postscript: I can't end this list without mentioning my dearest A.B-M. (You know who you are!)

Me and The New York Review of Books

For a month or so, I have been debating whether or not to renew our annual subscription to The New York Review of Books. Allen used to be devoted to this publication, and would read most issues from cover to cover. I tended to browse through each copy (dilettante that I am), picking out for closer reading just one or two articles that appealed. Sometimes, I confess, whole issues would go onto the shelf without my having even done that. At least many of the articles remain just as relevant months, even years, later. So we do have quite a collection of old editions on hand, and could probably spend a year or two revisiting these before we noticed an absence of new ones.

Charlotte reads aloud

During grand-daughter Charlotte's recent weekend with us, I observed her practising what we used to call 'pre-reading' activities. (God knows what this is called now, given the speed with which educational jargon comes and goes.)

Charlotte loves to put things into containers, then get them out again. And she will happily do this for long periods. On this visit I gave her a set of my discarded plant labels, and put them into a little straw handbag. At first she simply loaded and unloaded the labels from bag to table, doing this over and over. And she walked around with the handbag on her arm, in a distinctively queenly manner.

 

Reality bites

The fifth annual Reality Bites festival of nonfiction literature was held last weekend here at our beautiful Cooroy Library on the Sunshine Coast. In past years I was a member of the Sunshine Hinterland Writers Centre committee that organises the festival each year, and an enthusiastic volunteer helping out at festival events. This year, however, the progression of Allen's condition made it too difficult for me to attend committee meetings, usually held in the evenings. And then when Allen was hospitalised with pneumonia in January, I had to give up any involvement in festival preparations. But as festival time rolled around, one of the women who has been a key organiser of each year's festival and who knew I'd have liked to remain involved asked if I might be able to do some of the catering for events on three successive days of the weekend festival.

Reading and writing hurdles

Allen is working on one of the A4 sheets that the speech therapist gave him last week. This is a particularly tricky exercise for him. Sample item:

Something you can cut that is not grass:_______________________

He holds up a pair of scissors and asks me "What's this called again?" I point out that the question is not asking for something you can cut 'with', but rather, somethat that can be cut. (And how grateful I am that we don't have to get through the spelling of 'scissors'!) We settle on 'paper' as a suitable answer.

This type of question is very difficult for Allen. His aphasia is now at the point where it's not only speaking and writing that he's having trouble with. Grammar and syntax are also harder and harder for him to process. The negative twist (e.g. 'not') in this series of questions requires him to make a grammatical leap that is especially challenging. In both oral or written language, Allen now does best with simple sentences in which the parts appear in a standard order (subject – verb – object). Complex and compound sentences, or sentences like the ones in this exercise which take a strange turn, are problematic for him.

Spelling, too, is proving more and more difficult – as well as writing, which has been a problem for a long time. Combine those two difficulties, and writing out a word like 'laundry' can take a long time, and several mistakes. By the time he is forming the 'd', he has forgotten what word he started out to spell – or that's how it seems. Once an excellent speller, Allen now regularly leaves out letters and makes other spelling mistakes – things he would never have done a few years ago.

Name something you drink that isn't milk:_______________________

I have no idea why Allen answered 'yogurt' to this question! Perhaps he was thinking of the smoothies I occasionally make with yoghurt. He managed to write answers to 16 of the 20 questions of this sort, but a few stumped him (e.g. "What is something hot that is not fire?" "Tell me something wood that isn't a table.") I don't know why. And the whole exercise took him well over an hour.

I'm not convinced that Allen enjoys these language exercises any more, even though he spends hours on things like this every day. And this has been going on, now, for almost three years. If there were other things he could do – such as woodwork or gardening - I think I'd suggest we throw away the pens and papers and books and just do other things that give him pleasure. But the fact is there is very little left that Allen can do to keep himself occupied. Once a first-class putterer and amateur carpenter, now he can't even bang in a nail or use a screwdriver even to just unscrew something. And he never really cared for gardening - though he was an able and willing gardener's assistant. But anything requiring strength, coordination or a steady hand is now beyond him. So working with pen and paper is about all that's left from his former life. It also happens to be that by which, I think, he has always defined himself – along with reading, and that, too, is proving a major challenge.

Large-print books reduce the amount of text Allen has to process in each line. But as with spelling, short-term memory loss is proving a real hindrance to his getting much pleasure from reading. Quite simply, he has to read so slowly that he forgets the main elements of a story by the time he goes on to the next page. Those texts that he can process are mainly the kinds of things given to primary school children. And even though he is willing to read such texts when working in the comprehension workbooks I buy from the educational supply warehouse, he doesn't really want to read about clowns, circuses and other childish topics when reading for pleasure.

Recently I stumbled upon a series of nonfiction texts by Anthony Horowitz, intended for upper primary students. Each of four books in this Legends series (Heroes and Villains, Battles and Quests, Beasts and Monsters, Death and the Underworld) features seven stories taken from mythology or fiction that are interesting enough to appeal to an adult reader. But the little books have just the right mix of type size, grammatical construction and amount of text per story to make them manageable for someone with A's problems. I found the first book in the local children's library, and promptly ordered the next three titles from Booktopia. Until now, we've relied on library books but Allen now wants to annotate his texts and underline various things. It seems to help him digest the content, so we're trying out his new method with these little books. So far they are holding his interest.

Allen's obviously determined to continue reading and writing, even as everything gets harder and harder for him, and more and more frustrating for us both. Can anyone suggest any titles that might appeal to a serious, mature adult whose technical reading age is probably no higher than 10 years?

PS re palm nuts (and Robert Frost)

I am reading a biography of Robert Frost at the moment (Robert Frost: A life, by Jay Parini. William Heinemann, London, 1998. ISBN 043400166X), in which the author reassesses the life and work of "the only truly 'national poet' America has yet produced". It's a big read, at 500 pages, but really splendid and with as much detail about most of the important poems – no fewer than 161 poems reviewed and/or quoted from, sometimes at length, with information about where and when they were written, what the catalyst was (if known) etc. – as about the people.

Opening the book this morning, after writing last night's piece about my troublesome palm nuts, I couldn't help but ponder how in one of RF's notebooks the little annoyance of nature I blogged about would have morphed into a sonnet or some other poetic form, with one of those quietly, sometimes deadly, aphorisms in the last line or two: e.g. "And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."(Out, Out – ); or "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference"(The Road Not Taken); or "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep" (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening). Or maybe something as rueful as the closing lines of Reluctance, where, as Parini writes, "frustrated hopes are mirrored in a dying landscape":

     Ah, when to the heart of man

          Was it ever less than treason

     To go with the drift of things,

          To yield with a grace to reason,

     And bow and accept the end

          Of a love or a season?