happy birthday....

 TO ME!!!

and HAPPY NEW YEAR, SUGARPLUMS! xoxoxoxoxox

the fairytale of new york

Hat tip to our pal, macy for reminding me of the best christmas song this little pagan baby ever heard!



cheers, sugarplums!!

The Eulogy by the MITM for his Mother, read by his Brother on that rainy day in Los Angeles

Henry David Thoreau wrote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  Sadly, for many, this remains true and desperation keeps them from fully experiencing life.  This was never the case with Carmel.  The 7th ward could not contain her young spirit.  She had an infectious personality that whirled around South Central Los Angeles like a gossamer dervish.  She howled down Wilshire Boulevard and laughed at any hint of restrictions.  She elegantly whispered through the Spanish moss of stately Savannah oaks.  She was always, and at all times of her life, a woman of substance and someone to be reckoned with.

She could simultaneously madden and entertain us with her impishness and vanity.  According to Carmel, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Dorothy Danridge, and even Lena Horne, copied her style.  She could humble us with her deep understanding of all that is beautiful in this life.  She was a lover.  She was loved.  She had the warmth of family and lifelong friends.  She was blessed and privileged in much of her life, and struggled without a husband to maintain a blessed life for her family.  Exceptional is a word that comes to mind when I try to define her life.

Her affable spirit fought to stay ahead of the game as the ravishes of dementia and Alzheimer’s took her slowly from us.  She would sometimes recite her favorite poem, a poem she told me she committed to memory while in high school.  It is by William Ernest Henley.  I think it bears reading because it is so much of what became Carmel’s raison d’être:

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Out of the clear blue she would spout out the numbers of my father’s WWII dog tag, each digit absolutely correct.  I thought it was because she had written so many letters to him when he was posted in Korea that it was burned in her memory.  I asked her, “Mom, why are you remembering Dad’s ID tag number?”   She looked at me with clarity, as if the dementia had left the room, and said, “Because he consumed me.”  I knew I was witness to a love that was continuing and everlasting.

Many of you in this room visited Carmel over the last few years during this insidious illness.  She would say to me, “Pull up a chair for so and so”, or “don’t you hear what so and so is saying?”  She would laugh out loud.  “Mom?  What ya laughing at?”  “So and so just told me the funniest joke.”  Her memories of all of you did more to ease her pain than all the pharmaceutical cocktails fed into her veins.

As she lay in the hospice, watching the inevitable sunset of her life, she asked me for three things:

1.    To listen to the music of Duke Ellington (Come Sunday was her favorite) and Mozart.  We did and it was beautiful and serene.

2.    To make her laugh.  Well, that was never hard for me to do.

3.    And finally, to bring her a, “very cold” mind you, Stella Artois beer.  She even sat up a bit to drink it.

I can say about her something that is not oft said in our day and age – What a Woman!

I can tell you this – she loved us all deeply.

Je ne t’oublierai jamais.  Je t’aimerai toujours.

I will never forget you. I will always love you.

It rained today in Los Angeles. . .

Today was the memorial for Carmel, our Miss Daisy.

wednesday

the goal was to get back to blogging on a regular basis.


didn't happen.

i'm going to keep trying, but maybe, just maybe, i should try and respond to the comments y'all have left. *sigh*

the pressure is getting to me!!!




I'm kidding. 
about the pressure, i mean.