A Conversaton with Elizabeth
1998
Midnight Musings

From:          Elizabeth
To:            Larry.m.mixson@bvs.com
Date:          3/4/98 12:29pm
Subject:       midnight musings
 
Usually if I have napped and then have re-awakened later at night I read until I become sleepy. I'm not sure I engage in deliberate reflections. My mind goes to my Mother quite a bit. At times I grieve over what seems the present meaninglessness of her life. What bothers me the most is she literally will not do or does nothing, with very few exceptions. She won't look at t.v. She won't do puzzles or games--simple ones are recommended for AZ patients. She just sits for the most part and looks or watches. It's not out of incapacity. She's alert and can talk and do things. She just doesn't. Sometimes she will do things and that is often amusing. She got in her head that she was in her own house (that is one of her major confusions) and she started "cleaning out" all the cabinets, which of course were the floor supplies and nursing supplies etc. There is some humor in AZ behavior if you can go with it and not let the tragedy of it effect you.
 
Otherwise, my mind goes to mortality more and more. I worked with a woman counselor here for a while who was in her early 60's and it was quite a shock to me to see how oriented to mortality a person in their 60's can be. That put my own life in perspective. How would I like to utilize the remaining years left to me.
 
Sometimes I ponder things which I felt went wrong, and sometimes I ponder those things which seemed to have turned out well. Sometimes I ponder that nothing goes either wrong or right, but rather that it is all somehow part of my individual journey. If I repeat or go in circles, I still have lessons to acquire and things to understand. Since I've been writing you, I think about you. I think about the friends I have here, although most of my contacts center around law school. I have one friend who is going in extreme circles trying to fix her bad job, and I think about her.
 
I wonder if I am living the life I really want to live and if not, how might I change it. I make plans for small re-structurings to improve my daily existence, or even my immediate future.
 
Sometimes when I am in my car on a country road I have a fantasy of just keeping on driving and leaving Montgomery behind. The thing that most amazed me about Into the Wild by Krakhaur was that the main character literally hitchhiked or canoed or walked all over the country. He got into a canoe and canoed down through Mexico. He did this at times deliberately without money or supplies. His last trip was to Alaska, hitchhiking into the woods, where he camped in a survival camp, but unfortunately died of starvation. He was summa cum laude Emory so he was no flake, and he spent his time reading Tolstoy I believe it was. What I found meaningful out of the book was a citation from another book stating that persons who for some reason or another cannot or do not find the meaning of existence in another person, or in family relationships, etc., often seek through quests of one sort of another to find meaning through other avenues--adventure, discovery, challenging their survival, exploration, etc.
Anyway, when you are sans wife and sans daughter and alone, what do you think about?
 
I wondered about the BMD, but I really didn't read anything on the page, just scanned for an e-mail address. Many hospitals have their entire staff directory available from the web page, but I didn't find theirs if they do. I bet he pulls in megabucks.
 
I started a book by Connie Fowler last night, about a woman growing up in the early days of south Florida. That is why I stayed up too late.
 
That's interesting about your family re-union in Clearwater. Have you been to the Salvador Dali Museum there. Also, there is this enormous used book store called Haslams. Interestingly, although Alabama from some perspectives is the pits, you will not believe how beautiful the state is, esp. the northern parts. It is actually part of the southernmost Appalachians and is totally gorgeous. It is such a shame that the mentality of many of the citizens is Third Woridish in that they don't mind cutting and selling all the beautiful trees. Chip mills axe in overabundance, and it makes me sick. The roads are full of logging trucks. Have you head of the Alabama Cahaba Lilies--I wonder if there is web site. They grow no where else in the world. They are incredible. They are tall lilies which grow in the middle of the Cahaba river with roots clinging to the rocks of the shoals, They bloom once a year. People in the area for years never paid any attention to them, but now there are yearly journeys to view them, usually I think in April.
 
I am totally burnt out from doing an inane project which I knew was inane when asked to do it. I won't go into the details, but imagine if someone asked you to search for "united states" on Yahoo. I was asked to do the medical equivalent. I had so many pages to print my buffer kept filling up and locking up, etc. I finally got through it and it is ready to mail. Enough for now. A long note. Take care.

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