My mind keeps going back to highlights of the past year. Lowlights. Were there any happy times? The first half of September was okay. I thought the Mini Cuisinart was dead, so ordered a new one, quite different, and by the time it came I found Moki’s old one was perfectly good and a hard-to-find workhorse to the cognoscenti. The new little one was good for making butter, though you had to hold down a button all the time. Easier to clean. And then, following hard on the new Cuisinart I received a big box full of LED lightbulbs. 64 of them. A shipping mistake. But this is like $150 worth of bulbs. The company up in Vermont decided I should just keep them. But I don’t need them. So the box still sits in the corner, next to the white Morton Williams bags with the empty vodka bottles.
And the mice were gone. I trapped 11 of them in the second half of August. Moki was impressed. But when September rolled in we got an infestation of fruit flies. Much worse. I’d never seen anything like it. Moki was still eating a little, sometimes getting out of bed. In August I cleaned the kitchen floor (hadn’t been done in a year) and invited him to come out and see. Yes, he could still walk then, still go to his bathroom.
And I got the certified mail from Tenaglia & Hunt saying they would need a further adjournment, past the trial date of Oct. 2. What a relief, what a pleasure. I didn’t know that it would turn out to be a ruse. In the middle of September I finally got my WF debit card with my married name on it. And then checks. A few week later I sent in the ACH form so Meg B can be direct-deposited (haven’t used that one yet!). I found a really good chili recipe, Montana Spicy Chili, made it on the 22nd.
September got edgy towards the end. On the 25th I had a mild flamewar with an asshole in New Zealand. On the 26th Moki, getting up to go to the bathroom, or coming back, fell down, couldn’t get up. I put a pillow under his head. I took photos with the iPhone. The day before, I caught him pissing into the wastebasket. I remade the bed, as well as I could, with the new mattress pad from Amazon. He’d soon wreck that one too. Scent of urine everywhere. Eventually we got him back in bed. I’d ordered urine bottles for him, they came on the 27th. It was around this time I realized he might well be dead in a month or two.
I had a horrible pain flareup in the UR molar. An abscess just above. I’d use dry ice wrapped in a towel to bring the swelling and pain down a little. On the 27th I went up to Petqua again to get erythromycin. I’d been there once before, Dec. 2022, same thing, same condition. After about two days of the antibiotic, it starts getting better. Also I noticed a week or two later that my plaque psoriasis (face) had cleared up, and the plaques on my butt and thighs had diminished. I’d been puting fluocinonide on them with little result. Sept. 28th, we lay in bed, probably watching The Fugitive (TV show, not movie) and worked our way through the copies of the lease renewal forms. Moki got weary of it after doing one, so I did the other, signing his name and mine. There was a third copy, but I couldn’t find it. It turned up on the floor by Moki’s side, yellowed from urine. Patricia Warren ended up sending us a clean version of the missing copy.
Through all of this I was writing little Substack pieces, often posting old blog stories to make it look as though I were productive. Tom, the guy Jim Russell and I went to the Met with on August 11, ponied up $80 for annual donation. Later Kristin Anderson did. Sept., Oct., Nov. I published nothing in CC, VDare, Amren, Chronicles, SDR. I regularly used Moki’s debit card to buy the vodka we drank every day.
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Right now I’m terribly bothered by the tooth/gum pain on the upper left. This probably relates to the sharp pain I started feeling a couple of weeks ago, on the day I went out with Pat E to J. G. Melon. And maybe to the deep cleaning on Wednesday. I’m sitting here, lying here, with the fake Moki hump next to me (Moki Mouse and the other puppet), thinking I’ll make some erythro capsules, then maybe head up to Whole Foods around the time they open (8 am), and get the makings of the other chili recipe (very similar to Montana, but uses a homemade premixed chili powder seasoning). I’m drinking cranberry juice, having finished the pint of vodka between 3pm and midnight. I’m not really much of a lush, but I’m still over my old half-pint limit. I remember how Moki would get the 1.75s and the liters, and together we’d go through them in a day. By July or August we had vodka bottles everywhere. In the hall, the pantry, rolling on the floor in the foyer. In September I set about bagging them up and dropping them in the streetcorner bins, one or two bags a day. First the liters and 1.75s, then a mix of pints and liters, finally just pints.
Moki somewhat resented my pints. He’d sometimes order me to get two pints. And when we were both awake at 8 or 9 in the morning, lying abed, he’d constantly asked for a timecheck, so that at 10 he could get me out the door to the Chinawoman’s. Sometimes I felt sick, couldn’t get out, or told him to wait, practice self-control. On a Sunday, perhaps a week or two before he died, when he could barely sip anything, he was grousing at me to go out to the Chinawoman’s. She wouldn’t open till noon. He didn’t realize what day of the week it was. His last week he didn’t really speak at all, but I still got him his vodka and mixer. And tea or coffee. One of the last things he ever said, perhaps a week before he went, was “Why tea? Why did we start drinking tea?”
“Because one day we were out of coffee, but I had plenty of tea, so I made strong tea with honey, and you liked it very much. And we used the tea kettle, and I gave you instructions on making a cup in the microwave.”
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Lots of emails back and forth with Laura. I resent not being able to share any of the foregoing with her. She keeps asking me if I miss my sister (ha!) and if I feel bad that she died. She says this knowing full well that my husband died a few weeks ago and I’m a complete mess about it.
Today I took most of Moki’s outstanding library books to the 53rd St library. A couple of them I kept around for ages because I was doing a year-end wrapup review for CC. One book that hasn’t gone back is a book of essays by Elizabeth Hardwick. Very typical of Moki to decide that it’s high time he learn who and why Elizabeth Hardwick is.
On my way to the library I dropped the big white envelope from the Marc J. Bern law firm in the mailbox on the corner. Mailing back questionnaires pertaining to the 9-11 Victims Fund class-action settlement. I didn’t start going to MSK until 2003 and I definitely had a biopsy sometime in the previous year, so there’s an outside chance the environment may have affected the lymphoma. These mailboxes do not have doors you pull down anymore. You have to slide your letters through a narrow slot. I thought they were all locked up for security reasons, and did all my mailing at the post office.
