I miss Sherri by the way

I’ll have to contribute for sure.

As I wrote once on my blog, my mother died of Alzheimer’s in December of 2006. One of my sisters, P, is a fundamentalist Christian, and one of the most irritating people I have ever known. (Not because she is a Christian, though how she expresses her Christianity does not win my affection.) P sort of kidnapped my mother away from my other sister, D, who was going to place her in a home. P got the state of California to pay her to be a caretaker of my mother. My mother got better care than she would have otherwise. However, I rather cynically think my sister got herself a job (when she might have trouble getting one otherwise) and rather enjoyed being in a role where she sort of mothered out mother. I don’t think there is anything wrong with any of this, but I don’t think that I want to write this up for the proposed book.

It gets more complicated. My father’s oldest sister, Diana, is now in an institution with Alzeimer’s on the East coast. I asked my father’s sisters how my parents met in Chicago in the 30s. They told me that in the Bohemian society of the time, my uncle George (my mother’s brother) was a promising young composer of modern atonal classical music who somehow met Diana. They had a brief but torried affair, causing the two families to interact, and somehow my father and my mother met and eventually married. I know that my maternal granmother (whom I only remember by her Ukainian name “Baba Manya”) detested my father, as did my mother’s sister, Rose. Rose thought that he had ruined my mother’s life, and was working on ruining mine when I was a child. Rose somehow persuaded my parents to let me live with her for a year in Monterrey, California. I suspect my year with Rose may have saved my sanity (such as it is).

As far as the cookbook aspect, I can’t help but think of my paternal grandfather, who started out as a dentist but then became enraptured with Kellog (of the cereal family). Kellog was notable for 1) believing that all ills could be prevented or cured by “colonics” (enemas). My grandfather was apparently the chief naturpathic enema purveyor of Chicago in his time. My other aunts (Naomi, the ballet dancer, and Henriette the would be opera singer, and my father) took the enemas they got as children in stride (so to speak), but Diana felt grandpa was a child abuser of his children so left home and didn’t speak to her siblings for sixty years, when they made up at a family re-union.

The other cookbook item I think of is my parents (who gave me a few enemas as a child, but mostly focused on “health food” and avoiding vaccinations for such ailments as polio and smallpox) but had us eat organ meats(more as Jewish and Eastern European tradition) such as beef tongue (which I liked), brain (indifferent) and liver (indifferent to me but which my wife, from different traditions hated passionately as a child).

I just don’t know that I feel like putting this in the book. I might just make a donation. As I am 64, I give the odds of dying from a heart attack (as my father did in his forties) or of Alzeimer’s (as my mother and some day aunt Diana) about equal.