2018 November 7

I meet my parents at ten tomorrow morning then help my father try and get my mother to the doctors.

I typed that without stopping, I write to perform first, not write to report, though spoken and written of my parents this way since I was a teen.

My mother, says my father, won’t get out of bed, complains of hurting back, barely eats.

He took her to a walk-in clinic and quack there fart.

He asked her to go to a doctor since and she refused.

He had not tried to make an appointment, their doctor of decades just retiring, he didn’t know where to go to not see quack.

I called yesterday, called again today, said, I will go with you, and I am meeting my parents tomorrow morning at ten to help my father try and get my mother to the doctors.

My mother knows she should know me when she sees me but doesn’t know who I am.

She really knows she should know me when I talk to her, not what I’m saying but the peculiar cadence I have when talking (people can vouch), the one I hear when writing poetry speaking it aloud simultaneously.

My handwriting now illegible to me, my cursive now awkward in my hand like taught cursive, I can only read aloud while fingers type.

I can only edit typed pages aloud while fingers edit.

My father doesn’t have a will.

Tomorrow morning will be the first time I have been in the house I grew up in in months.

We meet once a week for an hour at a restaurant, try not to watch my mother try to remember how to eat.

She always said she was allergic to shrimp, eats shrimp now, never ate mammals or birds for sixty years, eats them now.

My father speculates my mother has kidney stones, my daughter speculates my mother has a urinary tract infection.

Doctor, I hope to ask tomorrow, how exactly do you propose we make her take her medicine?

I will be worse than my mother earlier than she was worse if no medicine saves me.

Being metaphor for end of world, downs as well as ups, me.

Baby-boomers last great class, if only I hadn’t discovered my glass ceiling before crash and flame and abdication of responsibility for planet.