Phoebe Kate

In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare compared his lady love to a summer day.  Ahhh, very romantic indeed.  But off hand, I can’t think of a single female poet who wrote about her special guy and likened him to anything   So what can we compare the male of the species to?  

Well, let’s think a minute.  Men are like:

Coffee — the best ones are rich, warm, full-bodied and can keep you up all night.

Chocolate bars — they’re sweet, smooth and usually head directly for your hips.

Blenders — you need one, but you’re not quite sure why.

Mascara — they usually run at the first sign of emotion.

Horoscopes — they always tell you what to do and are invariably wrong.

Bike helmets — they’re handy in an emergency, but otherwise they just look silly.

Laxatives — they irritate the crap out of you.

Plungers — they spend most of their time in the hardware store or the bathroom.

Government bonds — they take so long to mature.

And finally, men are like the weather – you can’t do a damn thing to change either of them.

–phoebe kate

I recount my experiences with my 92-year-old mother-in-law so often that I just betcha you feel like you’re living with her. 

If you’ve already got your own Golden Oldie, you can sympathize.  If you’re too young to be dealing with this particular issue, then heads up, kids.  One day, this is going to come out of nowhere and bite you when you least expect it.  Barring an early exit to the Eternal, your parents or in-laws, no matter how much they try to stay Forever Young, are going to get old and it will become your problem, too.  Mark my words.

Anyhow, the last we left the Old Girl, she’d been to the doctor and then the hospital to cure her “not feeling 100%,” which translated out into the diagnosis: CONSTIPATION. (Over the course of three weeks of complaint, she’d never bothered to mention to her family that she hadn’t pooped since who knows when.  And we didn’t know that’s what she meant by “not feeling 100%” because she declined to elaborate further.)

Oh well.

Now, over those several weeks of vague medical complaints, she’d also once mentioned something about her ear.  She said she could hear her voice “inside her head.”  Well, doesn’t everybody?  She said she thought she had a “cold in her ear.”  I asked if she had an earache and/or a fever.  She said no, it just “felt funny,” a story she stuck to no matter how many questions I asked.  

“I put some cotton in my ear,” she told me.  “To keep it warm.  That’s what they always did back in my day when your ear was feeling funny.”   

Ooooo-kay.  I don’t have home remedies for “feeling funny” other than take a couple of aspirin, a stiff drink or two of Jack Daniels and a nap.  Works for me every time.

Anyway, last week, she told my husband and me that her phone (a landline cordless push-button dealie) wasn’t working.  ”I can’t hear anybody!” she wailed.   

We’ve been through this with her before: she’s rough with her electronic stuff.  They don’t last very long in her keeping.  She rips the dials off radios turning them, yanks handles off refrigerators, breaks TV sets by switching channels, destroys toasters simply by looking at them too long.  Don’t ask me how.  She’s a frail 92-year-old lady. 

So we got her a new phone.  Second day she has it, she calls us to say it’s defective.  ”I can’t hear anything through it!” she bemoans.  Then she says, “Oh!  Wait a minute!  Let me change ears!”  And then she says, “Oh!  I was listening through my BAD EAR.  I can hear you just fine now!”  I say to her, “If you have a bad ear, why were you trying to listen through it?!?!?!  And by the way, since when do you have a bad ear?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  It’s not bad.  It’s just been feeling funny.”

Back to the funny feelings explanation again.  Only now, for the first time, we have deafness as a symptom.

Today, she visited her doctor to find out why she’s going deaf.  The good news is it’s not old age and it’s curable. 

Guess what?  It’s those cotton balls she stuffed in her ear to cure the “funny feeling.” With the same powerful hand that breaks all the electronics, gizmos and gadgets she owns, she wedged that fluff deep, deep into her ear canal.  It’ll be removed at the hospital next week by an ENT specialist who’s coming from the Raleigh area specially to do the procedure.

And now the humor stops.  My mother-in-law’s antics and mannerisms and archaic euphemisms for common ailments like constipation are amusing, that’s for sure.  But now she’s hurting herself by being evasive about her health and trying to treat her own conditions. 

And that’s not funny.  It’s worrisome. 

My sisterwoman, Val MacEwan — my best friend who has become the sister I always wanted – has just been down this sad, sorry, heartbreaking, tearful and hopeless road with her own mother.   

Tonight, thinking about today’s events, I can see the road ahead of my husband and me with Dorothy. 

–phoebe kate

My 92-year-old mother-in-law writes poetry — or more accurately, she writes political commentary in verse form.  She is admittedly a 24-hour-a-day news junkie.  I draw nigh her front door and can hear CNN or Fox or MSNBC opining away on any and every subject that you can have an opinion on.  I have to say that it takes a strong and resilient person to listen nonstop to that stuff – five minutes of any newscaster on any channel and I’m tearing my hair out and spouting bad words like I’ve got Tourette’s Syndrome.

Anyway, this poem of hers really amused me.  It almost seems like she wrote it with me (and my media news aversion) in mind.  Maybe she did.

TV NEWS

by Dorothy

 

In this era of communication

Are we truly an informed nation?

TV anchors like to say

They’re “fair and balanced” all the way.

“No bias, no bull,” “The spin stops here” –

They’re on the defensive, it is clear.

Is “we report, you decide:

Not just a meaningless bromide?

TV news relies on fear,

As listeners feel a disaster’s near.

Is a warming planet shifting its axis?

Or is this just a “plot to raise your taxes”?

–phoebe kate

The big news today from the world of the glitterati is actress Brooke Shields regrets losing her virginity at 22 — or so she says in the June issue of Health magazine.

Yes, I know it must be a slow news day in the entertainment industry.  A very slow day.  I can hear the yawns out there.  I nearly dislocated my jaw a moment ago with one.

(And yes again, I also heard some of you go, “Brooke?  Brooke who?”  And honestly, I don’t blame you.)

Ahh, but hold on here.  There’s a twist in this tiresome scenario.  Our former child-model-and-teenage-starlet doesn’t lament having meaningless sex with somebody she’d didn’t care about and who wasn’t all that into her anyway. 

She’s sorry she didn’t have sex a lot younger.  

Now there’s a real pearl of wisdom from a forty-something mother of two young daughters.  Which just proves what we already know: that getting older is no guarantee that you’re going to get any smarter.  In fact, in some cases, it seems quite the opposite.  And her complaint sounds just like something sensational that a semi-has-been actress would say as she uncomfortably sails into middle age. 

The irony is that less four years ago, Shields was the cover girl and feature story for the Moral Majority squeaky-clean magazine, Guideposts.  I’m sure the saved-and-sanctified are cringing behind their Bibles right now — and the editors are planning to confiscate and destroy all copies of the issue so they can pretend the whole thing never happened.

Meanwhile, Brooke should look on the bright side.  She may have missed out on being a teenage sex kitten, but she is now the perfect age to become an official cougar and go on the prowl.  Just ask all the other Hollywood midlife femmes fatales who are making a new career for themselves carving notches on their bedpost — there’s no lack of opportunities for meaningless sex for folks of any age.           

–phoebe kate
             

When we last left Jesus and His mother, Jesus was appearing in a stain on a car dealership’s door in Dade City, Florida and Mary was reprising her Our Lady of Guadalupe role in a Calexico, California restaurant griddle.

I have no update on the Mother of God’s latest venue.  However, I’ve just learned that this month, Jesus has made an appearance in southern Sweden and another divine sighting reportedly occurred in a family’s home in Germany. 

The owner of Soderslatt Golf Club told reporters that a potato being fried a pan “hopped out and set itself apart from others.”  Rather than tossing the rogue spud back in the fryer, the chef examined it and declared that it bore the face of the baby Jesus.  The restaurant owner displayed it in a little plastic crib for the pious and the curiosity-seekers who came to see it.

A middle-aged Muslim hausfrau in Berlin suburb had quite a surprise recently when she cut into an ostensibly normal potato.  Within the cavity of the tuber were two perfect crosses.  News quickly spread and the housewife welcomed a multi-faith stream of pilgims who came to her home to view what a local newspaper is hailing “the miracle of Berlin-Charlottenburg.” 

Reaction to this last divine manifestation has varied.  A biologist at the Berlin Botanical Garden stated the hole in the potato could have been caused by fungus or bacteria and didn’t resemble a cross to her.  However, a Catholic theologian with the Free University of Berlin affirmed the possibility of a miracle.  “There are continuous phenomena like this.  In principle the Catholic Church is open to miracles like this.”

Ahh, the same old conflict again – between the eyes of faith and the eyes of science.  Some things never change, do they? 

–phoebe kate