Forever and Inexorably by Liz Flaherty

It's Friday morning and it was three degrees when I got up. After whining a bit about this being winter at its worst, I remembered a few blizzards from days gone by and refined my whining to It's so dang cold! and stopped.

Please don't expect me to make sense today. Joe DeRozier can make a day of memories interesting. I can make it sound like just another day. I might resent him for this, but I don't. He's too much fun to read and way too nice of a guy.

The bare branches of the trees are beautiful against the sky, aren't they? I am an admitted tree-lover, and that's one of my favorite things about them. Regardless of the season or the weather, the sky is the perfect backdrop for whatever stage of leafery or greenness that the trees are in.

As I say more often than not, it's been a week. On Tuesday, we went to Fort Wayne to get Duane a new hip. We were home four hours after he got out of surgery, and we live an hour and 20 minutes away from Parkview. I was--and remain--shocked by that. Although he's doing okay and we are grateful for the care we always get there, a part of me wishes we could go back a little, to where major surgery called for at least a night in the hospital.

I haven't written this week, for the first time in a very long time. I haven't even been in my office since Monday. I have learned that the sky won't fall if I don't write, but I don't think it would take long for me to lose sight of who I am. I am a product of nearly three quarters of a century of learning things, of finding peace with that learning, and of standing up even when I fear falling. I don't want to lose that place. While aging has a really big downside, it has a long and joyous good path, too, and I want to stay on it.

Speaking of writing (as opposed to actually doing it) AI has forced its large and ugly head into it. "Writers" are using it as an editor, as a cleaner-upper, as a means of refining their voices to the point of them sounding like a digital voice at the other end of a phone call. Media is using it because it's cheaper than actual writers. (What a concept--why didn't every corporation in the world think of trying to avoid using real people?) Book covers are "created" by AI. The news is being manipulated by it. As a real person and a real writer, I will use my very best words to describe AI's attempted takeover of the arts.

It sucks.

We have three cats. They are all tortoiseshell. Susie came to us starved. We had to start feeding in separate dishes because she ate in the middle of the dish. Literally. She stood in it. She has a long, pretty coat. Baby was given to us by my friend Shawn. She has short hair and bright eyes and no matter how hard I tried to name her something else, Baby's the one that stuck. Sprite showed up meowing her tiny head off behind the back tire of my car. We tried to find her owner and then (not very hard) to find a new owner. The one we found is us.

They remind me of our kids and kids-in-law and grandkids. They are all ours, and they are all so different from each other and us that I'm not sure you could pick us as a family out of a crowd, but we are forever and inexorably linked.

The cats don't get along all that well yet. Susie liked being Only Cat after we lost her friend Gabe, although we could see her looking for him. But at mealtime, they gather round the plate of cat-food, their same-but-different fur blending so that they look like a very wide, fat cat. When it's cold, they'll share space, but they slap each other around a bit in the process.

Like our family members, they have each other's backs. A friend said yesterday that "I just want America restored to what it once was." While I understand her wish, I also know it was only what it once was for some of us. The degrading and hateful isms were always around, but if you didn't talk about them, you could pretend they didn't exist.

I want for America to be what a lot of cats and a lot of families are. We have differences, but we can eat from the same bowl and the differences flow together and make a pretty picture. We can keep each other warm even if there is some grumping and figurative slapping around involved in it. We are all our own kind of beautiful against the sky. We are, indeed, forever and inexorably linked. Let us want what is best for each other--even when we don't get along.

Have a great week. Be nice to somebody.