OK, I’ve fed Mom her breakfast, and as and after she ate, we chatted and I sang with her. Her in-home physical therapist came, and I rooted for Mom during her once-weekly workout session. Now she’s napping, which gave me a chance to set up my laptop, bring out my notebook, settle into Mom’s wheelchair (the most comfortable seat in the house, and she doesn’t use it much), and write about her while she’s snoring.

♦ ♦ ♦

In her mid-90s, Mom was in generally good health until March, when she underwent two heart surgeries. The anesthesia left her mind muddied for months, memories missing, and she was suddenly unable to walk.

After a long hospitalization and rehab, she’s now been home for a month or so, improving. She’s 90% Mom again, but still weak and occasionally confused. I bus over and spend three or four hours daily with her, but my sister Katrina, who lives with Mom, is out of town, so I’m on extended Mom duty. I’m staying for three days, two nights.

To pass the time and help reconstruct her memories, I ask Mom lots of questions about whatever — her childhood and teenage years, meeting Dad, meeting me when I popped out from between her legs, etc.

Her answers are interesting, because Mom’s lived a life. The farm she was raised on had no electricity until she was 8, when an uncle wired the house. Which burst into flames a few years later, so maybe amateur electric wiring wasn’t the best idea. They had no plumbing until Mom was 12, when flush toilets and hot running water were added, also amateur but nothing caught fire. The outhouse Mom and her family had used pre-plumbing was still there when I was a kid in the 1960s, visiting Grandma at the farm. I peed and pooped in the outhouse, of course, cuz it was more fun than a boring old flush toilet.

Now, Grandma’s long gone. So’s the farm. So’s the outhouse, but we still have Mom, and I’m glad about that.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mom’s main hobbies are watching TV, reading the newspaper (on paper, delivered daily), and singing hymns. I sing along, and enjoy it despite being devoutly the opposite of religious. Raised on “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Everlasting Arms” and all the other hymns, I still remember the tunes and most of the words.

She has a few non-church songs in her repertoire, too — “Bill Grogan’s Goat,” “I Knew an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” etc. It was a big surprise, though, when Mom started singing “Barnacle Bill”…

Same tune, same opening lines as one of the most joyously vulgar songs ever! The next lyrics answer the young maiden’s question with, “It’s me and my crew and we all wanna screw, said Barnacle Balls the sailor.” The song goes on from there, always X-rated and not at all the kind of song my mom would sing, but she was singing it.

Mom’s version is different, though. The song I sang with beer buddies in my 20s is apparently a satire of the song Mom knows. In Mom’s song, the fair maiden’s boyfriend is Barnacle Bill, not Barnacle Balls, and he’s returned from a long voyage at sea to ask her to marry him. It’s sweet, and Mom still doesn’t understand why I chuckle whenever she starts singing it.

♦ ♦ ♦

In the midst of good times with Mom, there are occasional moments not so good. Like, she woke screaming from a bad dream, and I tried to reassure her. “It was only a dream,” etc.

“No,” she said, “I dreamed about abortion, and it’s still legal. It’s murder, and it’s everywhere!”

Mom hates abortion so much, she has nightmares about it. I think abortion should be celebrated with parties, and ought to be universally available, free of charge, as easy to obtain as water from a fountain or a toothpick from a restaurant. We’ve discussed this before, so I asked no further questions about Mom’s awful, awful dream.

♦ ♦ ♦

For many years, we didn’t get along. Mom loves asking pointedly personal questions, critiquing my weight, appearance, dental health, dating choices, etc, and reminding me that I’d gone missing for 13 to 22 years (the number varies, in Mom’s scoldings). “Your brother thought you were dead!” “I opened a missing persons report with the FBI!” “How could you vanish so long without any word to your loving mother?” Et cetera, for decades.

Mom was actually about 1/3 of the reason I moved away and left no forwarding address. It was a shitty thing to do, sure, but that was 35 years ago and I’ve said “Sorry” and don’t like repeating myself.

I’m back now, and over the past few years Mom has mellowed, so have I, and we’ve been getting along. But on Monday, as I was helping her up from a chair, she said to me, “You look retarded. Why do you always run your tongue over your lips?”

Why, hello — it’s pre-mellow, pre-surgery Mom — blunt, rude, casually insulting. It gets me riled and it’s easy to say the wrong thing, so I didn’t reply, but I realized, yup, I do have a habit of running my tongue under my bottom lip. Even figured out why.

Ever since I’ve been old enough to grow a beard, I always had one, but circa 2024, looking for work and finding nothing, I shaved it off. Thought being beardless might make me a more desirable hire. It didn’t help, though. Never found a job, and retired instead, but I enjoyed the novelty of a smooth face, so I’ve continued shaving.

The whiskers grow back quickest under my lower lip, and every few hours I catch myself running my tongue along the underside of my lower lip, enjoying the feel of the stubble. Mom’s helpful line, “You look retarded,” was my first awareness of this odd habit.

My second awareness of it came Tuesday morning, as I was again helping Mom from a chair and into her walker. She looked me in the eye, stuck out her tongue like I do, and rolled it under her lip, making a mocking face. This was an insult without words, and not subtle. Mom doesn’t do subtle. Again, I didn’t respond.

That afternoon, we sang a few hymns, talked about Mom’s childhood, and she told me how difficult I’d been in mine, as she was removing her her dentures. They’re a little uncomfortable, not a perfect fit, so when she’s not eating she sometimes removes her teeth.

You don’t think about it, but teeth (or dentures) help shape a person’s face. Without the fake teeth to support her jaw and cheeks, Mom’s expression droops, transforming her face from “nice old lady” to an almost comical frown. Even in a good mood, Mom without dentures looks like a caricature of the Wicked Witch of the West. And she knows it. She’s embarrassed when she sees photos of her toothless look.

After she’d removed her teeth, Mom asked me to bring a blanket, cuz she gets chills. I draped the blanket over her shoulders, saw she was looking at my face, and instantly knew that my tongue was out, licking my whiskers — and Mom was about to say something mean about it.

So I made Mom’s face back at her, exaggerating her toothless frown into the biggest, meanest, ugliest scowling grimace I could force onto my ugly mug. It was absolutely an insult without words. Not subtle.

Mom laughed. “OK,” she said, “I deserved that.” And then we sang “Barnacle Bill” again.

♦ ♦ ♦

Over my Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday with Mom, I prepped her meals and helped her up from chairs a few times, but she’s grown strong enough that she usually stands without assistance. I changed the sheets once after she’d wet her bed, and coached her through answering text messages, because she’d forgotten how that tech works.

The first night, Mom asked if I was there to take care of her, but I said no. “You take care of yourself. I’m just here to help with little things, if you need help.” And more and more, that’s the truth.

Really, I didn’t do much. We sang twenty hymns twenty times, talked about how we both despise Trump, and she talked about her sisters and her childhood, her dad who was dead before I was born, her mom who lasted past 100, and she told some funny stories about my brothers and sisters and me. She read her newspapers every morning, and I wrote a few pages for my blog, including this one.

Mostly I just hung out with Mom for three days, and mostly had a good time. Hope she did, too.

6/11/2026

itsdougholland.com
← PREVIOUS          NEXT →

And there goes the ‘weekend’, my two days off on Tuesday and Wednesday. Didn’t do a damned thing, didn’t work much on the zine, didn’t answer more than a few of the letters that now fill an entire milk crate. All I did was sleep, read, and hawk loogies out the window.

Today I’m supposed to wash dishes at Judith’s house, and Friday and Saturday and Sunday sell fish, and then Monday at Black Sheets — a whole ‘nother work week before I get any days for me?Well, that sucks, so no.

Instead I called Judith and told her the dishes would have to wait until tomorrow, then called Jay and told her the Friday fish would have to ‘go fish’ until Saturday. Neither boss gave me any push-back or anything more than, “OK.”

Can’t afford to turn my two days off into a three-day mid-week weekend, but I am not a responsible adult, and what I can afford must yield to what I need.

♦ ♦ ♦  

With a third day for doing nothing, that’s exactly what I did, and it was a lovely nothing day.

It’s cooler than it’s been — weather for June, not August, finally — but I barely left the building. My exercise was walking a block to check my voicemail.

Mr Urgent had left only one urgent message — I feel so neglected — and I’ll call him back, sure, but only if he ever leaves a message that isn’t urgent.

Back at the hotel, I didn’t do a damned thing, except sleep, read, and hawk more loogies out the window.

At mid-morning I made the arduous trek to the fire escape, to see what the city looked like today. Not much different from yesterday.

It wasn’t obvious, but in the distance I was able to spot a small chunk of black where that house burned down yesterday. If I hadn’t seen the fire and didn’t know where to look, I’d never have noticed.

It kinda reminded me of the jagged gaps between some of my teeth, where chunks or entire teeth have crumbled or been yanked.

Looking a ways beyond the steeple of Mission Dolores, there’s a hill of dirt and trees more than of houses, which I’d never noticed before. When I put my glasses on, it came into a sharper focus — sun-baked grass and trails that didn’t seem too steep. A glance at my map told me it’s Corona Heights, a park.

There’s a little boy inside me who wants to climb those trails up that hill, but the man I am says don’t be ridonkulous. You don’t have the shoes for a hike, Doug, or the right pants. You don’t even have a water bottle, plus you’d probably croak of a heart attack halfway up.

The kid in me won the argument, though. He usually does. It’s decided: I am going to climb that hill. Just, not today.

♦ ♦ ♦  

After a dump in the late afternoon, I went to the fire escape again. A layer of smog had settled over everything between here and there, and even with glasses on, I could no longer make out the trails up that hill. As the afternoon went on, the smog grew thicker, so (if and) when I take that hike some time soon, it’ll need to be in the morning. Want to reach the summit while there’s still a view.

Katrina will be out of town for a few days, and I’ll be Mom-sitting at their house, beginning tomorrow. They don’t have the internet, which means this site won’t be updated until Wednesday.

Sorry about the next three days of silence, but being freed of the daily five-hour, three-bus round-trip, riding to Mom’s house and then riding back, might leave me time and energy enough to write. I’m going to bring my laptop, park it on Mom & Katrina’s dining room table, and hope to have a few pages ready to post when I return home and to the internet.

♦ ♦ ♦

Katrina has a smart TV, which Mom is unable to turn on, not because of her health issues, but because it’s so damned complicated. Turning it on requires pressing eleven buttons on two remotes, each button pressed in exactly the right order, traversing a maze of “smart” ads and “smart” options for services my mom and sister have never subscribed to.

A couple of years back, Katrina showed me how to turn the TV on, but I’ve never successfully done it solo. It’s too baffling, plus there’s a conflict of interest: I prefer it off.

Mom, though, likes to watch TV, and I want her to be happy while I’m taking care of her, so I asked Katrina to re-brief me on the 11-button process. This time I took notes, and may have it down. At least, I know the final button I’m looking for — HDMI 3. If I can navigate past all the “smart” ads and find HDMI 3, Mom can watch TV.

♦ ♦ ♦

While Katrina was teaching me this, the smart TV smartly interrupted, placing this message over the screen:

“Oh, this,” Katrina said with a sigh. “I hate it when it does this.” Then we waited five minutes for all of Katrina & Mom’s “TV boxes” to update.

“What the hell is a TV box?” I asked Katrina. She doesn’t know. She also doesn’t know what’s being updating once daily, or how these updates bring her “the best experience possible.”

My guess is that once daily, their TV sends all the latest info on what shows Katrina and Mom have watched to some database, where the info is sold, to better target them with more ads.

I’m so old, I remember when TVs had a physical ON/OFF button, which immediately turned the TV on or off. Ads weren’t targeted. There was no database. Nothing interrupted viewing for five minutes daily.

♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of the hell of technology, take my phone, please. All I want from it is the ability to send and receive text messages. If that function was available without a phone, I would own a text-messaging machine instead.

I rarely use the phone to make or receive calls, and strive for never. My ringer is off 24/365, unless someone I love a lot has told me, in advance, that they need to get hold of me.

Over my 20 or so years carrying cell phones, I’ve purchased a new one three times, always because the service provider was discontinuing support for my antique device. Each time, after unwrapping the new phone, the first thing to do is un-install whatever apps are pre-installed, mute all functions that make noise, turn off internet access and tracking, etc. The name’s Ludd. Ned Ludd.

The number of times I’ve used, needed, or even wished for a flashlight on my phone is zero, but somehow in sending a text and then slipping the phone into my backpack, I accidentally pushed whatever button lights the flashlight. It’s very bright. How the fuck do I turn it off?

6/7/2026

itsdougholland.com
← PREVIOUS          NEXT →