The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving Read Online Free

importance in my life, that I could be so absent? And the answer is: I don’t remember.
    Th e car is still idling. I see that a light has come on in the foyer, and now a face peers out the window at me. I pull away from the curb slowly, resisting the urge to look back.

adventures in cartography

    O n Fridays, Trev and I work on the map for ninety minutes. Th e map was my idea. It was inspired by one of those “America’s back roads” type of travel channel shows where the host goes to some rotting seaside burg and learns how saltwater taffy is made, or he travels to some dark hollow in Appalachia where the hoecake was invented. Except in this particular show, they went to places like the Two Story Outhouse, in Gays, Illinois (alternatively known as “the Double Dumper”), or the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, or the Wonder Tower in Genoa, Colorado. Th e host, with his overactive eyebrows and tall hair, was impossibly irritating, but the unique destinations made the show worth watching. You wouldn’t believe what’s out there. Th ey’ve got an actual stuffed jackalope in Wyoming. Th ere’s a Virgin Mary in a stump in Salt Lake City. Liberace’s ghost is haunting an overpriced Italian restaurant in Vegas. Th e town of Bedrock actually exists. Yabba-dabba-doo!
    We started the map early in the spring, as a sort of survey of North American roadside attractions, from double dumpers (of which we’ve cataloged no less than sixteen) to Hitler’s stamp collection, which purportedly resides in Redmond, Oregon. I suspect the ongoing project appeals to Trev for the same reason that the Weather Channel appeals to him; it’s an opportunity to note conditions he will never experience himself. We’ve devoted the better part of a living room wall to our AAA road map, which Rick down at Kitsap Reprographics was kind enough to enlarge by 400 percent for us in spite of certain copyright infringements—and at a nifty price, too. People will do most anything for a guy in a wheelchair as long as he doesn’t have food in his beard. Working on the map means a lot of Googling and pushpins. Of course, I, being of fine digital health, do all the Googling and pinning. Trev delegates like a field general from his wheelchair. Lately, we’ve been focusing our survey on Muffler Men. We’ve cataloged over four hundred of these giant fiberglass humanoid relics coast to coast. Th ey are a diverse lot from Loggers, to Vikings, to Cowboys, to Indians, to a former Big Boy in Malibu who’s been made over into a Mexican, complete with serape and burrito platter.
    To keep track of everything, we use a color-coding system. Muffler Men are red. Museums are blue. Mystery houses, vortexes, crop circles, and other unexplained phenomenon are green. Dead celebrity parts (Einstein’s brain, Napoleon’s johnson, etc.) are black. Everything else is yellow—this would include anything from ghost towns to two-headed farm animals, to Th omas Edison’s last breath, which, technically speaking, should probably be cataloged as a dead celebrity part. Somewhere behind all of this pinning and mapping, there lingers the vaguest of notions that we will someday visit some of these places. Needless to say, it’ll never happen and we both know it. Th e map is just another exercise in hope. Next comes the slow, steady deferral of that hope over the coming months.
    After we conclude our mapping for the day, Trev whirs to the bathroom, urinates into his plastic vessel for what seems like an inordinate period of time, whereupon I dump his pee (which is invariably too yellow by my estimation), flush the toilet, rinse the jug out, and replace it on the counter. Th is I do efficiently and respectfully, like a waitress, in strict adherence to my sensitivity training. I do not stand by tapping my foot as he struggles to liberate his dingus after I’ve unzipped his fly. I do not say things like