Bloggin' On: Mother's Day 2020, and Things I Miss

-

Today is Sunday, May 10, 2020. As I start this blog post, it's almost 3:30 PM in my corner of Florida. It's a warm afternoon ﹘ 81℉ (27℃) under partly sunny skies ﹘ and it looks like it might rain. Of course, this is immaterial; ever since I left Miami and moved here I rarely ever go for walks or do anything outdoorsy, so the weather only affects me if there are thunderstorms or severe cold snaps. Right now, according to the forecast, we are experiencing the high for the day; at night the temperature is expected to drop to 65℉ (18℃). In a few weeks, if Florida weather sticks to its normal patterns, the days will be increasingly hotter, stickier, and less pleasant.

Today is also Mother's Day, the 10th occurrence of the occasion since Mom got sick in 2009/2010 and the fifth since she died. My older half-sister Victoria and I managed to "celebrate" the day with our Mom for the last time in 2015 ﹘ she died a little over two months later, on July 19, 2015 ﹘ and even that occasion was a dreary one. Vicky was unbearably irritating on that day, trying to make herself the "star" of the show with ostentatious gifts such as a helium balloon with Mother's Day motifs and gifts that Mom, who was far gone with dementia, couldn't really appreciate.



I gave Mom one last Mother's Day present: the Blu-ray of Evita, the 1996 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice's 1979 musical about Argentina's Eva Duarte de Peron. I wish now that I'd given it to her a few years earlier, because when we watched it that last Mother's Day night Mom was terribly confused. She insisted that she had seen it before (she had not) and grew irritated and even bored with it. If I recall correctly, I only screened it for her twice before she died; I don't think she enjoyed it much due to her poor mental and physical condition.

I feel out-of-sorts today. Mother's Day is a day that brings out the darkest emotions in me; I feel sad and angry about Mom's final illness, the way that it revealed how selfish and thoughtless my half-sister is, how much our mother suffered during her last five years on Earth, and many of the changes that occurred after she died. I feel lost, frustrated, and despondent.

Maybe I feel this way in part because the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has had such a nasty effect on the world as a whole. So many lives lost, so many jobs gone, and so many things that Westerners who live in the First World take for granted put "on hold" or in "lockdown mode" have made 2020 one of the weirdest and most filled with uncertainty in living memory.

So, on this somber Mother's Day not only do I miss my mom but also:


  • Living on my own
  • My old townhouse
  • My home town
  • My neighbors (except for those who befriended my half-sister)
  • Choosing and preparing my own meals
  • Watching TV series that are not "reality shows"or "DIY renovation shows" like those on HGTV
  • My friends
  • Being able to walk to the supermarket, drug store, bank, etc. 
Well, I don't have much to add to this post, so I'll close for now. I think I'll go read for a while. At least I can still do that. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more