23 bronchitis, fenway park/Red Sox, grandma, OCD, healing, LOTR exhibit,

09-13-04 Mayatime: 12.19.11.10.19 12 Cauac 2 Chen (next to last day of Tzolkin!)

My bronchitis continues to kick my butt. Yesterday I coughed until I threw up—big gobs of clear mucous, obviously stuff from my lungs. Yuck. I’m done with the medicine, so now what?
When I saw my doctor, who is also my father’s doctor, he asked about my dad. I told him that honestly I didn’t think he was doing well. My mother thinks he’s fine, but she sees him everyday. I don’t. And I think she knows he’s not fine, because her actions betray her. She wasn’t able to go to grandma’s last night, which she told me on Wednesday. She wanted me to take my dad, because she didn’t think he’d go otherwise. But she said she wasn’t going to tell him until Sunday because he would forget.

So we went over at 4:30 to pick him up. My mom was going to a concert or something, I forgot what. Some country music guy. She came outside to give me the coupon flyers for my grandmother & some other stuff, including the Sunday comics so we could read Opus. My father tried to shut and lock the front door behind her. She had to tell him repeatedly to leave the door open. Then while she was talking to me, he stood there at the bottom of the steps and kept looking at the door. It was obvious that he wanted to shut it.

We told him about how we’d eaten supper on Saturday night across the street from Fenway Park. He is a major Red Sox fan so we thought it would interest him. (More about the trip to Boston in a moment.) We asked if there was a game at 7:00 since when we left at 5:00 there was a huge line of traffic coming down toward the park. It took a lot of effort for him to tell us the Red Sox are on the West Coast. He could not remember the names of any of the teams they’d played, but was sure they had won. (Is that true? I don’t know.) He thought they were in California but then he said Seattle (which was right, there was a Red Sox-Seattle Mariners game on last night). I am making this seem like a regular conversation, but it wasn’t. It’s punctuated with long silences, lots of “um” and “you know” and “I don’t know” “damn it.” I think Will and I might make it worse, because we keep asking questions, trying to keep the conversation going, and Dad just gets confused.

Since he was watching the game while we ate (which I hate, it makes the whole dinner conversation revolve around baseball, surely one of the slowest and most boring sports besides golf), he did speak, but only about the game. Such gems as “that’s that guy.” And of course his patented napkin balling & throwing when the Red Sox lose a run or something. Why do people invest so much of themselves into sports? It’s not like my father bets on the game, but he gets himself all agitated and always has. I can’t see Stephen King, who is also a major Red Sox fan, balling up a paper napkin and flinging it when Seattle makes a home run.

My grandmother’s always fun. Her last big thing was eating lots of garlic for her eyes. That gave her hives. So she stopped taking her eye medicine. (don’t ask) Now she’s on this “no sugar no flour” diet. And she is a riot. She only eats sugar and flour on Sunday. Except during the week, when she has ½ a sandwich (with bun) for lunch most days. She says the sugar in store-bought sauce “doesn’t count” as refined sugar, and neither does the sugar which is the first ingredient in her daily bowl of frosted flakes. (What are they flakes of? Wheat, I bet.) Supposedly she has lost 2 lbs.

On the way home, my dad sat in the back seat (I had sat there on the way, watching the pizzas). Of course he gets all agitated because he can’t put on the seatbelt because the latch is down under the seat. (It has to be manually moved every time the seats are put down and frankly it’s not that important to us, since we rarely have passengers and of them only my father freaks out about the seat belt). It’s one of his obsessive-compulsive things, having to have that back seat belt on.

My mom said he came home from somewhere a back way and took a wrong turn and got lost, but found his way home. Does that make me uneasy? You bet. But am I supposed to say he can’t drive anymore? Then he’ll just sit home all day and vegetate and get worse. Is it the lesser of two evils? I don’t know.

I saw, on Friday, a Native American healer. He said I should not eat dairy and should eat lots of brown rice. He also said I don’t cry enough, and being fat is only a symptom. And as a healer myself, I know that treating the symptom is useless. He said I have “entitlement” issues and that I should get a punching bag. It was a very interesting session.

Saturday we went to Boston—we being my friend Joyce, Will & I. We went to the Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Museum of Science. My friend from Boston and a bunch of her kids (she’s got 8) met us there. The exhibit was awesome. The amount of details put into the props was amazing. Some of them, up close, were a little cheesey—Will said some of the forged weapons had air bubbles in them, for instance. The most amazing thing was probably the display of the full size Samwise pack next to the hobbit-sized one. They even wove the cloth at a different scale! Just amazing.

Speaking of Samwise, there was no section for him (other than his pack). The other hobbits, Merry & Pippin, were mentioned in the Treebeard section, but not otherwise. But they had huge displays on Arwen and Elrond, who are more minor characters. Galadriel had a section and so did her husband, who I believe says ONE line. Each member of the fellowship should have had a section.

The “One Ring” room was totally lame. It was a round room with doors on 2 sides. All around the wall was pictures of lava with flickering lights behind it. In the middle was a clear tube of water with a ring suspended in it. Two spotlights threw the Elvish script around, and it was engraved on the base of the tube. That’s it. Total waste of space. I’d rather have seen more original drawings. They had all sorts of framed pencil drawings & oil paintings from the three different artists, and also some original digital artwork which was pretty cool to see up close—looking at it on the DVDs just doesn’t do it justice.

If you’re into the Lord of the Rings movies, and you live anywhere near Boston, it’s worth the trip. It’s only $19 to get in, and that includes admission to the museum, which is a cool museum. All hands-on stuff to play with. (1235)