Rose's Cantina

    Vern, Ivan, Lloyd and Vera: My mother's family  When I was a little farm kid, I had a playmate who stood about five foot tall and ran me around the yard in my little red wagon which he had hooked up to our Golden Retriever Penny. His name Vern and he was my best friend, a guy my mother could always count on to watch me, pick me up when I fell and scraped a knee, or put a cold compress on my leg when I got stung by one of Gramp's bees, which was pretty often. Vern loved to sit on the step of the house. He'd play an horrific version of one country song or another on his guitar or his fiddle. Sometimes, he accompanied himself on the harmonica or the Jew's harp. Twang-a-lang, Twang-a-lang . If I close my eyes, I can still hear him catterwalling. Vern liked to wail or yodel which is why Granny always made him sit outside. He was a terrible picker and a worse singer, but oh, my, how he loved his music. Vern wasn't one of the neighbor ki...

I saw a concerning post from Jenny Lawson, better known as The Bloggess, this morning. "After a long night of ambulances and hospitals, it wasn't a heart attack," she wrote. "They don't know what it was." Her story is similar to that of Shyla's mom who has been a frequent flyer these days at one of the local hospitals. She, too, was convinced she was having a heart attack. Jenny famously suffers from anxiety. Ditto Angie. While Jenny is young, Angie is not-that-young. Both got the same answer from medical professionals. Dunno. Secretly, the medpros are calling it as they see it, "whack job," "middle age crazy", "hypochondriac", "hysteric". That's because what medical professionals know about wimmen could fit in a box of Tic Tacs. What's interesting is that, as suddenly as the symptoms appear, they vanish, at say around 55. I know. I suffered for ten years with debilitating panic, heart palpi...

My friend Doris called me on Monday. She was in tears because her eighty-six-year-old dad was going into the hospital for emergency surgery to repair an aneurysm in his heart. The doctor told him his chances of survival were about twenty-five percent. Twenty-five percent. Wow, I thought, those are some pretty terrible odds. Those odds didn't include the possibility he would wake up with brain damage or paralysis or something equally awful. I wondered what was the point? When you're eighty-six, is it worth getting the procedure at all? Then I thought, snap out of it you selfish little elder-bigot . Just because a person is old doesn't mean they can't be as resilient as the rest of us. Of course, Ted's going through with it. He's as strong as men half his age. Or at least he was until recently. As it stands now, he can barely do anything without become completely fatigued. If this doesn't work, well, I guess from his standpoint, he thinks h...