A quarter to three in the morning

It is quarter to three in the morning. I can't sleep. I have not seen this hour since my son was a baby. He is now 18. Just the other day I bragged that sleep was one of my best things. And I guess God heard, because here I am writing a blog that no one will read, that I haven't touched in a three months because my nonfiction was usurped by a novel that grabbed me by my collar and did not let go until I finished.

It might also have to do with the fact that fiction seems far more appealing than reality these days, especially since my mother's reality morphs further into fiction each day. She has Alzheimer's. She is a writer whose stories have become jumbled as if the words loosened and fell from the pages. She sweeps them up and dutifully pastes them back in place but now the chairs that my daughter bought at a junk shop last summer are the chairs that sat in Grandma's living room on Maynard Drive. The rose-covered bathrobe she puts on in the morning is the same one that her brother-in-law Rosie wore who died in 1995.

Alzheimer's is a selfish disease. She seldom asks about me anymore. How am I doing? What am I writing? And she does not remember the book we wrote together, the one about how to write nonfiction.

So I guess this blog is not so off topic as I thought. Someday I hope to be able to tell you more about that book, when the editor gets around to putting it on the production schedule. It has my mom's best advice, her spark of wit and best of all her love for writing and passion for helping other writers, which she has done for years.

If you are up late too and read this, and have had the good fortune of meeting Margery Facklam, please let me know. I'd like to tell her you said, "Hi."