Category Archives: Blog

When A Month Will Never Be The Same

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

    November is “my month.” It was actually the family month. We would hang the Happy Birthday sign across the wall-unit and there it would stay from beginning to end, reminding us of another year. The 5th…the 11th…the 30th. It’s different now.     My birthday, on the 5th marks another year for which I am grateful. But it is a bit scary and daunting as the numbers go up. As a child, it would fall on election day every few years and that was special. A day off from school. A meat ball and spaghetti birthday party with … Continue reading →

The Puzzler: The New York Times: Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

    About and this puzzle: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/crosswords/daily-puzzle-2024-11-05.htm   Unrolling the spirals reveals SAN DIEGO, CUPERTINO, LONG BEACH, and PASADENA. That makes 34 squares that are part of three answer words each.    

Continue reading →

Part 36: Blogging for Breast Cancer: It’s Complicated

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

It has been twenty years since my first bout with breast cancer. At the nineteen year mark, thinking I had a lifetime pass for paying my dues, I was shocked and freaked out by cancer’s recurrence, in the remaining breast. This time it wasn’t DCIS, where a bunch of microcalcifications were seen on a mammogram. In 2004, the oncologist spoke to his cronies at Memorial Sloan Kettering who told him that because I had had a mastectomy I didn’t need chemo or radiation. Philosophies change over the years. Had I had that “ductal carcinoma in situ,” now, I might have … Continue reading →

Part 301: →Husband Journey: Love Letters

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

    This post has taken me months to form. Let’s start here, it’s as good a place as any. Picture my closet as a small room, a walk-in. (It didn’t look like this, but it was close). A room with 3 1/2 walls. A room with two upper shelves which were packed with boxes: Robert put them there. Over the years he crammed in more and more and I wasn’t sure what was happening: he was impinging on my shoe territory. I gave up asking him to move the stuff to the basement. He feared the possibility that these … Continue reading →

Part 300: →Husband Journey: Finally, A Review of the Nursing Home

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

I decided to review my husband’s nursing home here so it remains live and can be found. This has been on my mind for months and I couldn’t get it together. It is on YELP and GOOGLE; I am going to indicate there that the review will remain on my blog. The more I think about the experience of observing a declining person morph into a stranger, the more agitated I get. Corporate, for profit nursing homes just want a person in the bed generating money and considering they got my husband’s entire social security and pension they got plenty. … Continue reading →

The Puzzler: Will Shortz: NPR Sunday Puzzle: 6/30/2024

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

  Evan had a puzzle on NPR with Will Shortz, “The Puzzle Master” Weekend Edition, on Sunday, June 30, 2024. You can get to it via this link. Scroll down mid page, read/listen: This week’s challenge: This week’s challenge comes from listener Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Name a state capital. Remove its first two letters, and you can rearrange the rest to name something in two words that you might find while beachcombing in that state. What is it? The following week, July7, 2024, the answer is here.  

Continue reading →

Part 299: →Husband Journey: Ici Bas. The Marvel of Electronics: Life’s Virtual Reality

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

  A blog in two sections. First the weirdness of electronic misadventures in my house. Let’s blame it on sunstorm activity. Then a strange but exhilarating travel via V-R, virtual reality.     Not to sound like Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown, but hello again, dear reader, it has been a while and taken me a long time to cook another blog. I have to rewind to a strange series of electrical-type events and misplacements of objects which began happening in my house in May and eventually led me to an adventure: I misplaced two books of checks and drove myself nuts … Continue reading →

Part 298: →Husband Journey: Hey! Where You Goin’ With That Suitcase?

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

  This post takes us back about a few weeks when I called Robert’s former nursing home to make an appointment to pick up his personal effects. It was months since he left but no one had the energy or courage to pursue the task. I was told by the receptionist who is one of the only  people I respect there, that I would have to notify her of the day I wished to come in, and, in about a day I would get a call to make the pick-up as the effects of those who pass are destined to … Continue reading →

Part 297: →Husband Journey: Don’t Know Why

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

© Susan Kalish I walked in the first heat of Spring on an April Sunday afternoon, in circles, knowing where I was going, but not, fearing I would trip and fall on small rocks, trekking up and down grade. “Find me, steer me,” I said, knowing that when alive he had GPS in his head as he was proud of saying. My inner compass was tattered and muddled by emotion: make a right, no, make a left, go up there on that rise. Lost. I hadn’t come here before this, I couldn’t go before, easy as that. I don’t know … Continue reading →

Part 296: →Husband Journey: Tower of Power Meets Pablo Neruda

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

Robert’s grandparents, father on the left and uncles on the right     The picking through the piles has begun. Piles and mountains the size of Everest. Photos, so many photos. Sorting, so much sorting. Recreating albums, ditching hundreds of duplicates and realizing that everyone in every photo from previous generations is gone. And, then realizing that the previous generation has been usurped by the present generation and we’re going.   I sit on the floor surrounded by paper and archive someone else’s life; I haven’t had the time to archive my own. I have been given ownership and the … Continue reading →

Part 295: →Husband Journey: These Days

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

    Today is March 2, 2024, the one year anniversary of the (second) mastectomy and (complicated) reconstruction which created months of visits by visiting nurses, and live-in aides and long, drawn-out healing which has left me, still uncomfortable and with compromised flexibility. Then there are the medical records. M is for mastectomy. Again. Now when dealing with medical records I am asked to fill-in another date. It was 2004. Now I have to add 20023. March 2, is also the birthday of my first husband, Steve, who passed at the age of twenty-eight. I was twenty-six. It’s a long … Continue reading →

Part 294:→Husband Journey: Somebody That I Used to Know

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

Well, dear friends we’ve been on some journey. A journey of years with surprises and twists and convolutions and paradoxes and disbelief. And let’s not forget the sprinkling of Covid for good luck, just to kick things up a notch. I left you before Christmas and continued to slog on into a world of darkened, short days, hoping for Spring, and while we’re at it, hoping for miracles, for, after all, ’tis the season. Hope. Miracles. Them’s fighting words. Strong stuff. Magical stuff, control stuff. So, let’s move into January and all that hoopla of a new year. More hope. … Continue reading →

Part 293: →Husband Journey: And Then He Kissed Me

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

  Here we are, back at the nursing home: I begin the ascent to the third floor with a pit-stop at the rehab department. I am looking for someone from the speech department and share my alarm at the recent observation that Robert’s frequency and quality of responses are waning. I share my view with a combination of realization and didactic condescension as this is “my field” of expertise and what could these young people know? I approach with sadness, I approach with urgency and I approach with questions. I am told I will get a call-back. As usual I … Continue reading →

Part 292: →Husband Journey: The Great Pretender

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

The bonsai was a gift from my sister in November 2022. It was doing well: the instructions said to keep it moist, to provide a tray of wet pebbles underneath for humidity, to feed it. It produced two small, fragrant gardenias in the spring and then carried on looking green and gorgeous until this past November when it spontaneously, mid-month, began to droop; its leaves sagging, eventually drying, then dropping. I frantically did research and have been stuck between grief and hope. I removed it from the pot that it was wired into. No, it wasn’t potbound, no the roots … Continue reading →

The Incredible Lightness of Being With Confluences

Cerebral Jukebox Magazine Posted on by

  Three years ago, my mother was 102 years old and about to pass. Her body had survived a terrible case of Covid but her mind did not. What she left behind was my mother in a different form, unrecognizable in spirit. When she left, it was a blessing. It was enough. I told her on November 4: “Do not die on my birthday!” She waited a day and then checked out: It was finally time to go home. At my recent, wonderful birthday dinner in a favorite restaurant, I invited my mother to come; I toasted her “wherever she … Continue reading →