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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