Cold Comfort

In which your humble narrator is grateful for a little well-timed aridity, celebrates improbably weddings, the color orange and remembers his paternal grandmother who couldn't remember anything.

It finally stopped raining. June has been unpleasant. It's either been beastly hot or raining or both (mostly both). If I wanted to live in a climate unfit for human habitation I would have decamped for Dixie years ago, thank you very much. The garden was waterlogged and there were mushrooms all over the lawn. Child #1 who assiduously scrapes any single particles of green vegetable matter off of his carrots has shown a surprising interest in eating the damn yard mushrooms. "No, no we only eat grocery store mushrooms!" And it's not like he would eat grocery store mushrooms either, but for some reason, potentially poisonous things growing in the yard look tasty. My sister suggested that I use this to my advantage and sprinkle foods he refuses to eat in the grass to gin up some interest. "Look! The yard grew us some meatloaf! Isn't nature's bounty wonderful?"

Wife-a-roo and I went to a wedding on Saturday. A friend of mine from my days working in the used bookstore got hitched to a perfectly lovely woman much to the surprise of everyone who knows this guy. A former unwashed, anarchistic, dread-locked, hippie-jock hybrid, this guy managed to find a charming woman who actually seems to, you know, love him. The wedding, for me, was a delightful combination of heartfelt goodwill mixed with with a noticeable undercurrent of surrealism, a bride dressed in a bitchin' orange wedding dress and free dinner. Just my kind of shindig.

The wedding was a nice way to end up what had been a lousy week which kicked off on Monday with news from West Virginia that my grandmother had died. She had suffered from Alzheimers for a number of years. The last time I saw her at my grandfather's funeral almost two years ago, I had to introduce myself to her. She was a good woman. She took care of my sister and I often when we were kids. She taught us a number of useful skills and took crap from no one. Her personality was big. She loved cheap beer, her unloveable fat cat, making things and delivering well-deserved smacks to various smart-alecky members of her family. She was an excellent cook and made everyone feel welcome in her home. She fumed loudly about sexism. She registered as a Republican to please her parents and became a liberal because of the civil rights movement. She sewed, knitted and crocheted. My daughter is sleeping tonight wearing a pajama shirt that Grandma made for me thirty years ago.

Her memory, language and abilities were all degraded by her disease to a point that the woman that I knew has been gone for a long time. Unlike some Alzheimer's patients, she seemed to, at least intermittently, be aware of her diminishing faculties. I suppose an easy death should seem like a relief for a woman who had lost so much of herself. But it's cold comfort.