Trying to have a good relationship with mom

We tried two times to have a good relationship with my mother by moving back to Florida where she had lived for decades.

Mom and my wife, Lori, at the time share she had in Bradenton Beach. 

She had an active career as a ballroom dancer with her husband, Dale, in the Pocono Mountains. I was in high school in Wooster, Ohio with Nonnie and I would see mom for a few weeks each summer.

Lori and I returned to Florida in 2005 and tried to get along. Mom had been living alone since Dale divorced her to marry a younger woman with whom he could have children.

My mother had taken over the Theater Grapevine that I created and had published for local community theaters from 1983 to 1998. We had a falling out when I wanted to move it to the Internet, and she refused to. Shortly after that, she changed the name of "The Lary's" awards given each fall. We could not get along and things were worse since mom had become the grande dame of community theater in the Tampa Bay area. 

Lori and I had both acted in the theatre for a decade before we met so we appeared together in one last play, Night Watch, in 2006. The ingeniously devised thriller builds steadily in menace and suspense until the final, breath-stopping moment of its unexpected twist ending.

When I was fired from my job at a Tampa think tank in 2008, Lori and I returned to California.

After two years (2009-2010) of acting in TV and movies and student films in Los Angeles, we decided to try one more time. 

We moved to Dunedin, Florida, five miles from mom's home in Clearwater. This time, Lori was working as a nanny for wealthy families in Dunedin and Tarpon Springs.

I started another novel, but I felt odd on Veteran's Day night in 2010. Lori called 911 at once.

I call it my "lucky stroke" because I was left with no physical problems, just short-term memory things, like forgetting words like a canopy, establish, and detritus.

Finally, we gave up Florida and headed for the west again in February 2013. We stayed for a month with Lori's cousin Victoria, a Buddhist living in Walnut Creek twenty-five miles northeast of San Francisco. We visited the city once in 2013 and then decided to land in Reno a month later.  We are still here.