Sunday, January 20, 2002

Dad, WWII

"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

Anne Bradstreet, Meditations Divine and Moral

I'm awake at 5:30 for a trip to the bathroom, but I am sound asleep at 8:30 when Ru calls. I get up and dress. FFP makes coffee. Ru wants to do the hood because rain threatens. I walk over to her house and return her comuter cup which has been sitting at our house for a while. We walk one block north of her house and rain drops fall. We head back to her house but it's stopped. We start across the foot bridge, but decide to walk up Crestmont. We mean to walk the blocks just beyond hers but forget because we are talking and it's stopped raining. We go up cat street, back down to the apartment gate dead end, once around the cul de sac. Still not raining so we walk up Shoalwood to 45th, reverse, end up walking up Ramsey by Scary House, back over to Top Drawer and back to SuRu's house for a bathroom stop. She walks us home. We have been walking for an hour or something, without going north of Hancock or South of 45th or east of Burnet. In circles. But it wasn't really boring. We entertain ourselves. The sky has turned kind of blue. I actually shot a couple of pictures, finishing up a roll of 35mm.

I go back home. FFP's at Westwood. I settle in, determined to get some scanning done and get this box of stuff I've strewn around the floor in an effort to clean it up back in the closet. I throw out a bunch of old Christmas cards (saving photos, personal notes, those family letters for some). I find a souvenir replica of a sabre-toothed cat fang from the La Brea tar pits. It amuses me. When the sifting is finished, there is room in the box for a few more souvenirs. There are some old notebooks stuck behind the box. I pull them out. These are school things that I've never been able to throw away. I remind myself that once I've done so with stuff like this, I never really regreted it. I think these came out of the closet in the 'bonus room' and never got disposed of, just got stuck somewhere else. These are math notebooks. I start reading them and long to study math again. Silly. I know.

I go over to Mom's to work on the photo project. I look over her medicine and see what she is taking for the urinary track infection. There is a problem with the photo project aside from the fact that Mom doesn't really feel like working on it. She can't find the album. Maybe my sister took it home. I pick another one that needs work and tell her I'll take it home, scan some pix and put the photos in archival holders at least.

Everyone should plan to die. Someday. Or be disabled. Or both. We have redone wills, powers of attorney, medical powers a few years ago. We are now working on 'instructions' and locators of important documents. So FFP and I spend some time on this. It is not depressing because it's abstract. You still don't believe it will happen to you. That's the way we are wired, I guess.

I eat some leftovers and get the wild hair to clean out the every day silverware and gadget drawers. From the look of it, it's been a very, very long time. I find seven or eight cork screws. I find some silver pieces that have gotten in there and corroded mightily. This takes longer than anticipated as is usual with such tasks. This is one I'd intended to do with all my time off over the holidays.

We watch a show about the Statue of Liberty and I read newspapers and a copy of Too Much Coffee Man magazine FFP bought me when he visited Whole Foods and Book People earlier in the day.

I stay up too late, flipping channels, looking for a movie I care to watch.

JUST TYPING
If the world is an illusion.
It's an elaborate ruse.
Without lots of artifacts.
And documentation.
Fading photos and hand-written notes.