My dad was taken to the hospital by ambulance today from their apartment at the retirement home. He was having trouble breathing and hadn’t felt well for a while.

So far, it’s looking like dehydration and possible pneumonia, and they’re going to have a scan tomorrow to make sure there’s no intestinal blockage.

Our family would appreciate your good thoughts.

Anthropomorphization is defined as the act of attributing human characteristics to non-human objects.  It is the essence of my relationship with Hazel, the cat who has lived with us for eight years and complains in a voice that is a cross between Ethel Merman and a police siren.

But just look at that face.  She has expressions.  Granted, all of them are aggrieved, mean or vindictive, but still.

Here she is talking to me through the storm door.  I was in the car port the other night, taking pictures and she was yowling at me the entire time.  If I talk to her, she answers.  And if I don’t talk to her, she answers anyway. 

Good old Hazel.  We went through hell and back with her – just over two years ago, she became ill with fatty liver disease and almost starved to death.  She had a feeding tube in her neck for 6 weeks and we fed her with a syringe.  For a while, it was a scary thing to look at her.  During her slow recovery, she bonded to us even more than she had been in the past and follows me all over the house now.   

I’m not one of those cat ladies.  I just think we’ve been remarkably fortunate in our history with cats to have felines that are imbued with distinctive personalities and affectionate natures.  How much of it is nature?  How much is nurture?  Friends and family probably wonder how much of it is anthropomorphization.

Today in the car, Rabbit and I had a long and rambling conversation about food.

“Mommy, I know how to cook,” she announced in a confident voice.

“Oh really?”

“Yes.  I can make supper tonight because I know how to make a smiley face supper.”

“Okay….” I said, pulling up at a stop light.  “What’s a smiley face supper.”

“It’s easy,” she said breezily.  “Want me to tell you how to do it?”

“Of course!”

She took a deep breath.  “Well, all it is is you need a banana and three Ritz crackers.  You put the banana on the plate after you peel it and it looks like a smiley mouth.  Then you put two crackers at the top of the plate like eyes, and then one Ritz cracker in the middle like a nose.”

“Really?!” I exclaimed.

“Yep.  That’s all you do.”

So guess what we had for dinner tonight?  Yep.  Smiley face supper.  But we were out of Ritz crackers, so Rabbit substituted two halves of a peanut butter sandwich for the eyes, and a Triscuit for the nose. 

She’s quite a cook.

Waxing rhapsodic is impossible to avoid when you drive through our city with your windows down on a cool spring afternoon and the air is redolent with the sweet and heavy scent of lilac blossoms.  Streets are lined with billowing Bradford pear trees, ornamental plum, flowering crab apple, lilacs, forsythia, tulip magnolia and redbud trees. 

It’s magical because this winter was so awful.  So snowy, bitterly cold, overcast, foggy and downright depressing.  To look out the window at the thousand shades of green and see pink, lavendar, purple, white and yellow blossoms everywhere is like being in a Disney movie.

Just take a look at a few images from my back yard, just from this evening.

I could just cry.  But I won’t.  I think I’ll go outside and get dizzy smelling the lilacs again instead.

It’s late and I’m just mulling over the past several days, when I’ve felt happier than I’ve been in a very long time, and have started wondering why.

It’s kind of like this:  when you fight the current, you become exhausted and resentful.  When you let it take you where it takes you, and you don’t resist?  Well, either you drown, or you’re in for a nice float that takes you where you’re meant to go.

I’ve not given up.  I’ve just let some things go.  And doing what I used to fight against, I find those things to be not so dreadful.  When I fought the current, things got ugly.  I fought for what I wanted, what I thought was best for ME. 

Not to be cryptic, but to be general:  you can be in this for yourself, or you can help others along the way and cut loose some of the stuff that drags you down.  Usually, the stuff dragging me down is ME. 

What works for me isn’t for everyone.  I don’t expect everyone to understand, especially when I’m so vague.  But just put it this way:  when it feels like everyone is against me, it’s usually because I’m making that way.  Once in a while, I’ve got to say “okay” so that I can be okay.

And I’m okay with that.

If you are new to the blog, or if you haven’t been reading very long, you almost certainly have missed some of my better stuff. 

What’s fun for me is that after nearly a thousand posts, I find that I forget what it is I wrote about at different phases in the blog, at different times over the past four years.  Typing in random words on the blog’s main page search engine, I come across postings that stop me dead.  Did I really write that? 

This one grabbed me today, about the need for escape and “me time.”  My Tent helps remind me that the feelings I have about writing and identity today are not new, but rather symptoms of the cyclical nature of adult life.

And then this post, reviewing what was arguably the worst 36 consecutive hours of my parenting career.  I need to go back and read this whenever I think I’ve had a bad day, or on days when I think my husband isn’t pulling his weight, and revisit the slaughterhouse that is single parenthood. 

And then there are the rants.  If I were to chart the rants on a calendar, well….let’s just say they occur at roughly 28-day intervals.  Here are some of my favorites:

Raggy describes what started out as an innocuous family trip to the grocery store.

After being bitten during a listing appointment, I wrote “Rules Concerning Big Dogs.”

When you entitle a post “I Would Like to Lodge a Complaint” it’s pretty self-explanatory.

“Peeves”, a post wherein I enumerate things I hate, including clowns, Aaron Neville, dogs dressed as people, and much more.

The “Beeyotch Lifeboat” so described in this post is now in a place of honor in my upstairs home office. 

I haven’t updated my Wheat From Chaff page in so long, and there are other posts I should feature there.  For tonight, though, please pardon this walk down memory lane.  Sometimes it’s not about what I’m writing but what I’ve already written.

A girl child not yet squeamish about bugs talking to a roly poly on a nice spring day. 

We spent the evening in the school gym, where they were sponsoring family movie night.  Children brought blankets to spread out on the floor, while parents sat in folding chairs in the rows behind the children. 

The movie was chosen by the kids, by popular vote.  A sequel to Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Thankfully, my niece has texting and I spent a great deal of the movie texting her back and forth with snarky comments about the movie.

Rabbit, from our vantage point, appeared to be supremely happy:  sitting next to her friend on their mat, sharing popcorn and dancing to the music. 

It was a dreadful movie, but the kids seemed to like it.  I would despair of the future of humanity, but then I recall that I voluntarily watched the movie “Rhinestone” at the theater when I was a sophomore in high school.  Twice.  So we all have shame in our youth.  Hopefully, Rabbit will develop better taste in movies as she gets older.

Also, today while showing a house, there was a room in a basement full of odds and ends of old furniture, a portable wheeled oxygen tank, and a creepy doll sitting in a chair. 

And really, that’s about all for today.