Healthcanc

We've talked about it before, ritualized grief. It is healing, if executed well. And at the end of an official year (especially if you do it the Jewish way) one feels different, as if a millennium has passed. We're returning from Ruby Falls, a tourist trap in Tennessee. I had the front seat of the van on the way out, but am in the back now, hosting three very little, dirty and exhausted children. They are engrossed in movies. I can stretch out my legs. Not a bad way to travel. Gazing out the window, road trip lyrics come to mind: Let us be lovers, We'll marry our fortunes together. I've got some real estate here in my bag. So we bought a pack of cigarets. And Mrs. Wagner pies, And we walked off to look for America . America, the Bookends Album Hard to get the  Bookends song out of my head. Now you've got it. That's what we do in my family, pass off songs. My son asked if we could take a short vacation, come for a visit this summer. So just before the year of mou...

This post is dedicated to Bev, who always saw and always heard my mom. Zeek and Camille    I've been watching way too much TV, and feel guilty because I remember telling my kids how it is so numbing, how it can get away from you, the hours. And it's the truth, more than likely, why we love it. That and looking at people who are good-looking and talented enough to make it onto television.  Our own people zoo. Does the job. And yet, it has to stop. An hour a night is all I get, then it's back to books. Who needs friends? One big happy family You do learn things from TV. After hearing about it from a critical mass, I found • Parenthood on Amazon Video, all of those old episodes about aging and not so aging hippies and hipsters, one big happy family in Berkeley, circling the hub, the deteriorating old family homestead, complete with a barn. The teenager, even the young children, are the ones who think outside the box. There's an especially adorable child with Asperger...

Only weeks ago, maybe between my mom's lapse into coma and her last breath, not sure, I found a book in my mailbox:   Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters , by  Susan Forward, PhD .  I tossed it into the Get To This One Day pile. Found it yesterday, buzzed right through. Thank you Harper Collins.    I'm talking to FD about someone we both know, and he asks, "Why is he this way." I suggest a particular parent-child dynamic, only confuse him more. "How do you know this?" "Because this is what we do in my profession, look backward to parents, how they treated now grown/adult children as children. We look for clues. In your profession history helps, but the lab results and the vitals tell more. For us, history is everything. It didn't hurt, I confessed, that the subject of scrutiny, at someone else's visitation, talked about his father. From this it isn't hard to extrapolate, suggest broad strokes about personality and beha...