How I Spend My Time

My father is recovering from the major surgery he underwent for the abdominal aneurysm.
The staples have been removed. He's up and moving about well.

I had some crazed notion that he was going to look at all this as a gift of life from God, a second chance, and change his life and do things that really made some difference to the world, even if it were only planning and planting a real garden. His gardens recently have born more resemblance to the Sahara than to those lush pleasure palaces of old where Alph the sacred river ran.
So far, there has been no sign of it.

The garden is being planned, but it is in that chaotic way, a pepper here, some tomatoes there, the water flows uphill, the cat has his plant...

It is not catnip as one might think. It is some odd little blemish that my mother took a fancy to, and thus one day in her moment of joy for the day she called it Moochie's plant. As far as I can tell, the cat, Mooch,  has no use for the bloom. He would like catnip. That would augment his day of wandering from feeding bowl to feeding bowl just right.
He has two feeding bowls: one on the main floor, the other in the basement. When everyone is on the main floor, he feeds there. After his morning meal, my father gives him a hearty "Well done!" and fishes out a hand full of treats to celebrate the feeding. When they go into the basement, the food bowl there must be filled, lest Moochie need to haul his large tummy up the stairs.
Treats abound. Normal "treats" have become so commonplace that my mother has begun searching for some sort of "super" treat, although the exact nature of this hyperreality remains obscure, even to her. She told me about it the other day. I was riding with her. She was driving. I was tired. Even though my wife says that letting my mother drive is enough to turn my grey hair brown, I was too tired to drive.

So she drove. When she came to a stoplight, she talked to it, something like "Why is there a stoplight here?" and "Why does this light takes so long?" Well, she must have been talking to the light. She could not have talking to me. I do not live in Port Desespoir. Even in the hamlet I do inhabit, I know very little about stoplights.
Where I live, the DOT has managed to increase the number of possible permutations of red, yellow, and green lights as well as red, yellow, and green arrows, combined with variations in the settings, such as is the advance green before the red at street x and is it after the red at street y ( who can tell? you just have to drive up to it and find out.) and various signs which instead of helping are rendered ambiguous or downright pernicious by faulty writing, being slightly turned so that the lane of traffic to which their message is directed is unclear and flummoxing.

It is an art, not a science.
Cat treats. Or cat treat-treats. Hyper treats. Like some insane hierarchy of obese felinity.
"Just use the same treats and speak of them in the meta-language." I said. "Chessie will understand."

Now you might possibly wonder why we have different names for the cat. Why, indeed, do my parents call him one thing, Mooch, whereas I call him another, Chessie?
Wonder on. So last Sunday I called my brother, the sheepish fellow with a black hue. I had been monitoring him for a few days. He had suddenly found it hard to breathe. He could no walk the 60 feet from the restaurant to his front stoop. The 24 stairs could not be climbed without 3 stops for rest. And it was getting worse.

My wife and I had gone to see Blades of Glory Saturday night. It was wonderful 8th grade humor and plenty of it. It was so good that I thought it had been an unusually short film, for I had the feeling that time went by very fast. We went out with friends afterwards. A friend ordered a beer, a Stella Artois, pronouncing it something like "Stella Artis..uh."
I immediately said one should not drink beers one could not pronounce.
My wife observed later that I was insulting and a difficult fellow.
I objected. I knew the guy, and he was indulging in his parochial disdain for foreign languages, as do all American men.

I called my brother when we returned home. Did not sound good. So I said I'd call in the morning.
You may wonder that, since I am not a licensed practitioner, why I was monitoring his health. He refused to go to the ER. So I was stalking him, ready to intervene when he collapsed.

In the morning, he asked how long I would be getting there. Since he knew our goal was the ER, I sensed the urgency. I flew to Port Desespoir as fast as my little 1991 Mercury Marquis would take me.
The Marquis is quite the car. It makes an eggbeater noise at start-up, but only briefly. It roars with all the outrage of an aged bull elephant as I wait for it to warm up, which is no mean feat ever since Achmed the Egyptian mechanic turned the thermostat setting down and I never corrected it.

The Marquis relays a sense of quondam gentility. The Marquis! Not some menial, distasteful thing like a Probe! Not reeking of hormones and horn butting contests, like a Dodge Ram. Not some jeune daydream like Navigator (" the boy stood on the burning deck..."). Marquis is a real House of Lords cognomen.

I must admit I feel a bit like a Tennessee Williams play driving it. A touch of the Blanche Dubois. I often imagine myself breaking down and freezing by the side of the road, but no such luck. I always survive to live another day. And the corrosion-on-wheels keeps on running.

Is there anything more poignant and painful than a onetime regal car fallen on bad times? A queen of the road living on the wrong side of the tracks? Our lives are filled with allegories, aren't they?
We shall end here and continue the story of the thrilling trip to the Port Desespoir Hospital tomorrow. Not many people in Port Desespoir read other languages. That is good. One of the major benefactors of the Hospital was a Dante buff, and over the entry way to the ER is a cut stone stele emblazoned with "Lasciate ogni speranza..."