Hi, everybody! This being my first official post, I thought I’d start us off with some music. As you can see in the video, I haven’t yet perfectly mastered the art of playing harmonica with a neck holder. Honestly, I don’t know how Bob Dylan makes it seem so easy!
In case you find yourself distracted by the haunting mellifluousness of my voice, here are my timeless lyrics to the “But Not Enough About Me” theme song:
There’s a song about war and what is it good for
There’s a tune about why someone swallowed a fly
And then later a cow — and there’s songs about how
It’s a man’s man’s man’s world and the fun wants of girlsBut not enough about me — no!
Not enough about me.There’s a poem to inspire ’bout a widening gyre
Wallace Stevens wrote some — boy, they make me feel dumb!
There are lim’ricks on hand ’bout a Nantucket man
Hey, from what I can tell, they don’t often end wellBut there’s not enough about me — no!
Not enough about me.It may seem I abide on the self-focused side
But hey, you know: YOLO
I should introspect some, but then oh no here comes
The harmonica solo!I’m not meanin’ to boast, but I had Joyce Carol Oates
As my teacher one time — and her writing’s sublime
But she writes so damn much that I cannot keep up:
I just lifted my pen and she published again!And it’s not a book about me — Joyce!
It’s not a book about me.Oh, there’s lots of stuff about lots of other things
But not enough about me!
Boiids! (yes, with two i’s)
Check out this beauty that Sara photographed near Hoffman Marsh in Richmond (Calif.) yesterday:
Weight weight … don’t tell me!
Let me just put this out there: I always weigh 212 pounds. Feed me lard sandwiches for 30 days and I will weigh 212 pounds. Put me on a months-long fast so I can be a last-minute replacement for Matthew McConaughey in The Tommy Tune Story … and I’ll end up tipping the scales at exactly 212 pounds. If McDonald’s offered me as a burger, I’d be a 212 Pounder.
So imagine my shock when I casually checked my weight a couple of weeks ago … and found out I’d somehow made it into the high 220s! Okay, this wasn’t a total surprise: Over the holidays I’d gone from buckling my belt at the second hole from the end, to the first hole, to … I just stopped wearing the belt. I honestly don’t know what made me put on so many pounds.
It may possibly have had something to do with the Chocolate Covered Lebkuchen Cookies that Trader Joe’s had on offer during the holiday season. Now, I have to say, these are called cookies, but their essential quality, both in terms of taste and mouthfeel, is more like packing material. And yet. There’s something luxuriously indulgent about them: you — or, I should say, I — just want to keep eating more and more. It’s kind of like, How can eating something this awful be bad for me? Or, as Sara puts it: “They make you question what you mean by ‘food.’”
In any event, thanks to the Lebkuchen (and maybe a few other holiday treats), I ended up packing (see what I did here?) on the pounds. So my New Year’s resolution was to — *sigh* — go back on WeightWatchers. And on my first weigh-in day of 2023, Monday, Jan. 2, after only one day of dieting, I was down to 223.5 pounds — a loss of 3.5 pounds! Yowza! And then on my next weigh-in day, Monday, Jan. 9, I weighed … a mere 216.2 pounds! Yes, I’d lost over seven pounds in a single week! Inspired by this unbelievable dieting success, I spent last week sticking assiduously to WeightWatchers: Oh, the carrot sticks I ate! Oh, the sugarless tea I tried to pretend to enjoy! And then, yesterday morning, Monday, Jan. 16, the big moment arrived. After performing my usual bathroom rituals (what Sara calls my “morning Kornblutions”), I stripped down and stepped on the scale: back up to 222.6 friggin’ pounds!!!
What gives? Why the almost total rebound from 14 days earlier? It’s as if I’d spent the prior week eating carton after carton of Lebkuchen cookies (which would be kind of a confusing thing to do, as the cookies would taste pretty much the same as the cartons). Some might just give up at this point. But we Kornbluths are made of sterner stuff. I will soldier on with my diet. And remain, for a time, belt-less.
String theory
It’s Almondina Almond Cookies that are my mom’s confection of choice. She’ll reach for one of the biscotti-like biscuits fairly continuously throughout the day. I send them to her at the Selfhelp Home in Chicago, and the nurses make sure she always has a package on her tray.
Mom lapsed into Alzheimer’s sometime during the Covid lockdown. She’d been living alone at Selfhelp ever since her second husband, Frank Rosen, himself died of complications from Alzheimer’s. Bunny and Frank had met and fallen for each other when she was in her late 70s and he in his mid-80s — a Communist love story. As I relate in my most recent solo show, Citizen Brain, after Frank’s first wife, Lois Anne (both of them had been organizers with the great United Electrical Workers Union), died of cancer, Frank (after a suitable period of mourning) set about searching for a new Communist wife. At the suggestion of his children, he placed a Personals ad in the New York Review of Books — and my mom was one of a surprisingly large number of respondents. (In those days, apparently, if you were a Communist widower, it was a seller’s market.) Bunny was so smitten that, to move to Chicago to be with Frank, she made the ultimate sacrifice: she gave up her rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Now, that’s love!)
For several years, Frank and Bunny had a beautiful life together — living near the top of a modern high-rise on Chicago’s South Side, with picture windows overlooking Lake Michigan. But then Frank started showing signs of cognitive loss, leading to a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s — and eventually it got to the point where my mom could no longer care for him on her own. So they moved to Selfhelp, a legendary institution that had originally been founded for elderly Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe. Because my mom still had it all together and Frank was still mobile, they were able to share an apartment on one of the “assisted living” floors. But then Frank declined to the point that he needed 24-hour assistance, so he was moved upstairs to a nursing-care floor. And my mom, to save some money, moved down her hallway to a smaller apartment, going up to the eighth floor regularly to visit with her husband.
(A lighter moment: During a visit to Chicago to help my mom move to that smaller apartment, I took on the responsibility of calling AT&T to put her name on the phone bill, which had been in Frank’s name. The woman on the phone at AT&T was insistent that she could not make the change until I answered the security question. I explained that the only person who could have answered the security question, my stepfather Frank Rosen, now had Alzheimer’s — and I asked if AT&T could possibly make an exception in this case. But the AT&T woman remained firm: nothing could happen until the security question got answered. So — figuring, Why not? — I asked her for the security question. Which was: Who is your favorite actor? So I’m sitting there thinking, Who would be Frank’s favorite actor? And I just took a stab at it. I said: “Spencer Tracy.” And the AT&T woman said, “So what do you want to do?”)1
After Frank died, my mom did pretty well by herself in that smaller apartment — until sometime in 2021, quite a ways into the pandemic. In November of that year I got a call from Selfhelp, telling me my mom had had a fall while trying to get out of bed. After a brief hospital stay, she returned to Selfhelp — this time not to her apartment, but to the rehab floor. I had flown in from the Bay Area, and they explained to me that she was exhibiting a steep decline in pretty much every area. In physical terms, she no longer could walk, even with her walker. And it was easy to tell that her mental state had deteriorated as well: for one thing, it no longer was the case that you couldn’t so much as breathe a word to her during her beloved Rachel Maddow Show.
For a week, I was told, Medicaid would fund her rehab. But if she weren’t able to regain the ability to walk by the end of that week, then she’d have to give up her apartment on the assisted-living floor and move up to nursing care. Desperate to motivate her, I had the thought of us singing folk songs together. We used to sing together all the time when I was a kid — but as far as I knew, she hadn’t picked up her guitar in ages. My suspicions were soon confirmed when I opened her guitar case and found it to be four strings shy of its full complement of six. So I made a quick trip to a musical-instrument store a few stops away on the “L” and bought a new set of nylon strings. Then, when my mom seemed fairly alert (she’d taken to spending most of the day napping), I picked up her restrung guitar and began singing. “Solidarity Forever.” “Banks of Marble.” “Union Maid.” And, yes, “The Internationale,” the international workers’ anthem. And on and on. After just staring at me for a while, smiling, she actually started singing along with me. A little bit. She’d run out of the energy to sing pretty quickly. But whenever I’d stop and say that I couldn’t remember the words to the next verse of, say, “The Peat Bog Soldiers,” she’d recite it verbatim from memory. After two or three songs, she’d get tired — so we’d take a break, and then, when she seemed up to it, I’d start singing and playing guitar again.
My success at getting her to join in with me on the folksinging made me hopeful that, with the daily rehab they were trying with her, she’d be able to recover to the point that she could return to her apartment — and to a relatively independent lifestyle. But she just couldn’t do it — couldn’t walk, I mean. They said that it turned out there was nothing wrong with her physically that was keeping her from being ambulatory; it was something mental. On the last day before they had to make the call on whether she’d have to go up to nursing care, I was sitting with her in her room on the rehab floor. We had just been singing — or rather, I had been singing and she had been smiling at me. Her physical and occupational therapies had been going terribly: she wouldn’t even stand, much less walk — no matter how much assistance was offered. I said, “Mom, could you do me a favor? Could you just try standing right now?” I put her walker in front of her. “Just try, for me,” I said. She nodded. I put her hands on the handles of the walker. “Okay,” I said. “One … two … three!” I could see her trying to concentrate, but nothing happened. I said, “Let me help you a little.” I put my hands on her forearms. “Okay,” I said, “again: one … two … three.” I gently tugged on her arms, to try to give her a bit of momentum — but again, nothing. She gave me a slightly different smile then, an acknowledgment that — whatever her physical condition — the idea of standing was one that she could no longer engage with. She would not be going back to her apartment, with all her manuscripts and books and photos and files and records and paintings and snacks. After a few minutes I asked her, “How do you feel right now. What’s it like for you?” She thought about it. “It’s like being in a fog,” she said.
When I visit her in Chicago — and it’s been way too long! — she still knows who I am. She still asks after my wife and her grandson. And she still remembers all the songs. I’ve left out from this account most of the complexity — the difficulty — of my relationship with my mom. (That will have to wait for future posts!) But one thing I’ve discovered in this twilight period: none of those complicated emotions are in evidence when I’m with her now. I walk into her room and she lights up — her expression is one of pure joy. I am her son, and she loves me. And I love her. And life, despite everything that has been lost, goes on.
Listening …
I’m currently on Chapter 5 of an amazing podcast, “Mother Country Radicals.” Host Zayd Dohrn tells the endlessly fascinating story of his parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, as they led the militant Weather Underground (not the weather-forecasting app, which is telling its own hair-raising stories these days) in the ’60s and ’70s. … And I thought my upbringing was radical!
See ya soon!
Thanks for checking out this installment of “But Not Enough About Me”! My heartfelt gratitude goes out to everyone who has already subscribed! I’m just starting out, but this has already become quite the labor of love.
After all that, I later asked Frank if he had a favorite actor. He considered this a bit, before replying: “I guess I’d have to say Spencer Tracy.” So I could have asked him! A lesson to me about making assumptions. (By the way, I just watched this clip of Spencer Tracy’s speech at the end of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and it made me cry — both because of its beauty but also because of the horrifying fact that, given our current political and judicial situation, it seems far from inconceivable that the Supreme Court may actually try to overturn Loving v. Virginia.)
A Theme Song (& Read On for Some Stories)!