Pressing on

We had another book team check-in this morning. Zoom meetings are now completely normalized and even seemingly preferred. No one considers assembling in person anymore, and we are the poorer for it, I think. Don't get me wrong. I still appreciate rolling out of bed and getting decent from the waist up in order to meet. And I continue to be in love with every single person who is a part of this team. Book writing is hard, especially in the first rounds, but I don't think I've ever enjoyed a collaborative experience more, or felt quite as purposeful. May we all go from strength to strength on this project, and in every other corner of our lives. This is a prayer.

There's a lot going on, including my cousin who lives in Boston staying with us for the past week. She is the primary caregiver for her 96-year-old dad, my uncle Quintin, the very last of our parents' generation. When I started writing here fifteen years ago this summer, all but two of my mom's nine siblings were still alive, and all their spouses, too. Now they are all gone, but Uncle Quintin speaks with them regularly in the course of his days. He hallucinates, a feature of the particular kind of dementia with which he has been diagnosed, and my cousin just rolls with it, whatever he's seeing, wherever he happens to be in his mind, whoever is visiting from the other realm that afternoon.

My uncle is a lucky one, the second of his three daughters lovingly caring from him as bit by bit, he prepares to take his leave. "Why am I still here?" he sometimes asks her. She tells him he is allowing her to be of service to him, and that is reason enough. But she desperately needed a break, so her sister flew from San Francisco to relieve her for the week, and she came to stay here. She knew I had to work, but all she really wanted was a place to be where there was no one to take care of but herself. She goes for walks, visits with friends from her college years who live in the city, and some days she doesn't get out of her pajamas. It turns out her energy is easy, I can focus completely on the writing while she is across the dining table from me, meditatively working on a jigsaw puzzle. 

Once I grasped what her days and nights have been like, I just wanted to pamper her, help her unplug and get restored. We've be watching Younger together (rewatching for me), which a lovely, cotton candy rom com series in which a divorced mom named Liza Miller pretends to be 26 to get a job in publishing. There is the young hot tattoo artist in love with her, and the older hot publisher who's aghast that he's falling for a 26 year old assistant, and wonderful and hilarious characters around the central love triangle, including Debi Mazar as Liza's lesbian best friend who she moves in with in Brooklyn after her marriage crumbles, and who has the bright idea for Liza to just pretend she's younger when she can't get a job as a 40 year old. 

The binge watch experience with my cousin has been delightful, with lots of belly laughs. And because I have already seen the series (a few times in you want to know the truth), I can even keep working while it runs in the background.

I thought I might try to catch up here on everything that's happened in the past couple of weeks, but I wont, after all. It's too much. I'll just move forward from here.