In other words, is this blog a dialogue, or am I just talking to myself, and if I am, does it really matter? So what if this ends up being yet another navel-gazing piece of crap, something that should have remained safely ensconced in a Moleskine journal or a Mead three-holer, rather than committed to cyberspace for generations to ridicule, neglect, or misrepresent?
(Of course, I bring up three conditions most would construe to be negative. I strive for optimism, but I am the daughter of a man who says, when asked whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, “What fucking glass?”)
I guess I won’t know until I write a bit more. And I can’t expect my anticipated audience to visit or become involved unless I provide something with which to interact.
My brother has a successful blog that was recently picked up by the Los Angeles Times called Dodger Thoughts. He gets hundreds of comments daily, and I am incredibly proud of him.
Here is his third post, from July 23, 2002 (yes, he started his blog years before people were discussing SEO and keywords and even added value, at least in a blog context):
Having now written that unsolicited ramble, I now confront the question of: Why? Why am I doing this, and who am I doing this for?
My best answers are, for no good reason, and for no one in particular.
Whatever I write here will be with the assumption that the audience might only be one person – me. Admittedly, writing for one’s self on the Web is not unlike talking to yourself in a public place – but though I try to avoid doing that, it’s not like I haven’t done that. There are probably worse things.
And I figure, occasionally, someone else might read this. My brother or sister. An indulgent friend. I don’t know – someone. I’m not sure it matters.
And I guess I enjoy the idea of writing about baseball enough that I’m going to try not to worry about the audience thing too much.
But if there’s one thing I do want to make sure you all know, it’s that I’m not so delusional that I’m thinking big about this site. I’m thinking small. Very small. Just something to have fun with for the time being.
I’m trying to keep his thoughts in mind. The royal “We” will see whether I can ever get comfortable with this, whether it matters even to me, and whether this is not a case of deja vu, which for me has mostly translated to, “Why bother?”
The medicine cabinet was partially open, and two old Ban roll-on deodorants were on different shelves. Each looked to be at least 20 years old, both from their labels and from that hard-to-define gunk that collects on stuff in a bathroom — dust, baby powder, dried deodorant or toothpaste.
In the bathroom’s florescent light I saw my first gray hair. It’s funny what lingers in your mind months later.
Tags: Depends, gray hair, lucille hassen, medicine cabinet
-aside-
Of course, Los Angeles isn’t supposed to be humid. I can think of my one thunderstorm growing up. I was ten, riding my bike up the hill toward my house, and the clouds arrived, went black, it rained and thundered really hard for maybe five or ten minutes while I stood there with my bike, marveling at how drenched I was getting, and then it stopped, the clouds moved on, and the sky went orange before fading to that almost white summer sky, etc.
Meanwhile, it was really humid here yesterday, and humidity is fairly common now. It must be the additional million people who now populate the city (vs. 1975), the concomitant water consumption, global warming, fumes from the earth’s crust — theories abound.
-end aside-
Anyway, it did rain that day, and had we left the nursing home even an hour later than we did, we would have found ourselves stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. An 18-wheeler overturned on the Pomona Freeway because of a tornado. I’ve spent a lot of time in Memphis the last several years, and the clouds in the distance looked like tornado clouds, but again, I thought, No way there’s going to be a tornado. We don’t have tornadoes in the Southland…
-aside #2-
I was being a little disingenuous because I remember Mike Davis in his book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,
writes about tornadoes being a occasional occurrence. He wrote something about a big one in Long Beach in the early 1930s, I think…
(I keep getting e-mails from Amazon Associates noting that I haven’t made any money with its program; hence, these links, what the hell…)
-end aside #2-
At one point, while we were wrapping up my grandmother’s Meissen figurines and other breakables, it started pouring rain. Mom didn’t give me too much shit over it (one of her many qualities that make her so lovable), but she hates getting wet. So I suggested she get a coat out of Lucille’s closet. Lucille may have willed most of her things to that woman in Orange County, but according to Lucille’s executor, the woman was mostly concerned with getting my grandmother’s fur coats, which neither Mom nor my aunt wanted anyway. Mom chose a fleece jacket, and the executor, a healthy looking 75-year-old man with a full head of gray hair and clear blue eyes, freed an umbrella from this weird hook thing at the end of the clothing rod.
Here is a photo of some of the breakables that I took on my Motorola RAZR. My mom was adamant about getting these items because they were in her mother’s bedroom. And the executor, seeing that Mom and my aunt only wanted either photos or things that reminded them of their mother (stuff Lucille kept after my grandfather died, stuff she promised to will back to them, but probably forgot about as her mind started to go), signed off on it without consulting this other benefactor.
I don’t know why it’s taken me over two months to write this entry, but I think it has to do with my ambivalence with blogs in general, which (I hope) will be the topic of a future post.
Lucille’s last home was a place called The Village. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a Heritage floor plan:
The building itself looked like so many apartment complexes built in the 1980s with its sandstone-colored stucco facade and drive-through portico. The apartments also had that era’s feel, with off-white carpeting, white walls, built-in drawers with oak veneers, balconies with painted steel railing (in this case, forest green), vertical blinds, etc.
The common areas, meanwhile, were decorated in the complementary scheme of a private hospital. The common areas had pink walls, wide hallways with brass railings, forest green carpeting with a repeating bland floral pattern, and watercolors of horses and seagulls. You entered through the automatic doors into a huge multiple-sided lobby with overstuffed side chairs upholstered in polyester pink and green vertical stripes and pots of dusty silk flowers with dull pink blossoms and faded green leaves.
The front desk was white like the floor tiles, tall enough that employees had to stand to be easily seen, and went from the wall to the right of the first hallway, angling somewhere in the middle and ending perhaps a foot and a half from the middle hallway (Lucille lived down the right hallway, FWIW). At the midpoint, a nameplate coupled to an 8 1/2 X 11″ dry erase board read: “Manager of First Impressions.”
I can’t remember what was written on the dry erase board, but it was green like the balcony railings and the hallway carpet. A woman in her 40s or maybe early 50s (she looked older than me, but it could have been the perm and the ultramarine blue suit) stood behind the sign, joking with two elderly male residents.
“I feel like I know you!” said the Manager of First Impressions to one or maybe both of them. I was sitting too far away to tell, the people sitting to the left of my mom, my aunt Judy, and me were discussing potassium and self-defense, the TV was on FOX News, and it had started to rain.
Tags: convalescent home, lucille hassen, manager of first impressions, memory, memory token, Robyn Weisman