Month: June 2018
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Mamá Prays for My Mind
My wife Michelle and I became my mother’s caretaker last year. It’s gone relatively well. Mamá’s going on 91, her mind is sharp, she eats like a horse. She scoots through the house with her walker. She’s a fairly pleasant elderly who helps out where she can, washing clothes, picking up dishes, threatening the cat…
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Find Your Homeland
The Spanish word terruño has captured my imagination as of late. It means “homeland,” which, in both languages, has a loving tone to it: one’s native land, the first soil, the place where we began. Of course, if your first soil was pock-marked with cruelty, abuse, neglect, drunkenness, violent parents and predatory uncles, the word…
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Art and Madness
There are studies on the connection between the artistic impulse and mental illness. The best are books written by Kay Redfield Jamison, especially her “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” In that book, she charts hundreds of writers, from George Gordon Lord Byron to Virginia Woolf, and reveals how the mental illness…