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Getting well takes baby steps

So I’ve had what you could call a case of the pneumonia. It was not pleasant. And to top it off it happened in San Antonio, Texas. Like I wasn’t sweating before the fever.

I was there to see my niece Michelle, who by the way kept asking me, “Are you going to write about this?” which is funny because she’s a writer too. I naturally said, “Oh no, of course not.” And here we are.

Thinking back, the best part of that trip teeters between meeting my two great-nephews, Oliver and Isaac, and having a couple of beers with their Yaya, my sister, who I haven’t had beers with in decades. Like I said, it’s a toss-up. There’s also the fact that I got to spend time with my niece’s husband Alex. He’s a hardcore military guy. He teaches other military guys how to be military policemen. I’m not going to gamble on writing anything about him. He’s from Wisconsin though, which I like. And he likes to cook, which I also like.

I thought to myself before I ever left my nice cocoon of Martha’s Vineyard to travel to Texas that it would be hard to…get a ride to the ferry, take the ferry to the Woods Hole terminal, take a bus to the airport in Boston, take a plane to Texas via a couple of airport connections along the way. It wasn’t as simple as most people might experience, but I also wasn’t crossing the Atlantic in a refugee skiff.

I had the very best time just squeezing those babies. Having someone, even though they’re quite small, look at me with nothing but pure happiness made the whole trip. When does that happen if not with humans under the age of two?

Then I came home and went to the doctor who pronounced pneumonia. Then I went to my other doctor a week later who said my lungs were clear but that I have a sinus infection. Then she proceeded to prescribe more meds and said, “We’re gonna kick its butt.” I like her a lot. She also said airplanes are a petri dish.

Now after 12 days of blowing my nose, coughing my guts out, and also sitting in a chair with an ottoman and numerous afghans on top of me trying to sleep in the middle of the day, I’m starting to feel normal.

I took Dan on a ride to Morning Glory Farm today to pick up basil, cilantro, and that nice mozzarella cheese, sundried tomato, and basil mix they loosely call ‘salad.’ God it felt good to even be in a car, not to mention being out with the rest of the Mother’s Day shoppers whose only goal was to buy a nice plant for the kitchen.


Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, which makes me think of my own mother and all the other mothers I know. My mother was something else. She wasn’t a hugger or a squeezer or a kiss-your-cheek kind of mom. But she was very much a show-you-how-to-live-your-life kind of mom. When you’re a kid you want some attention, you want some kind of physical contact and when you have parents who don’t have such things in their wheelhouse you want to just have a fit and blame your own inability to concentrate on their shortcomings. I’m of the school of thought that says forgiveness is a gift and everybody does the best they can at the time with what they have. I know that’s what I did.

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