Unearthing a life.....

Yes, I am surprised to be sitting upright today and with (apparently) a good 75% of my brain working. I had chemo treatment number six yesterday and was expecting to get the full seven hour procedure, but LO!, the doctor decided to skip the last allowable Sisplaten dose because a) of my allergic reaction to it last time and b) he thought I'd achieved all the benefits to be expected of it. So I just got the dose of 'the other thing' .... and it was over in maybe thirty minutes of needlework. In a month I go back, get a chest x-ray, one more dose of the other thing, and then [doc's words] "we'll take a little time off and see where we stand." The Sisplaten is what knocked me down for a week afterwards, so I'm expecting to be in much better shape these next ten days .... can't really tell just now as I'm still on a drug that hypes me up considerable -- and wards off a rash from 'that other thing'.
All very simple, yet convoluted into compexity.

Last week my boyhood friend, Dick Gilbert, and his wife dropped by for a pleasant afternoon on our deck. One of my earliest memories, in the late 1930's, is of Dick's dad coming by our Othello home with his peddler's truck and someone holding me up so I could see the big silver fish packed in ice in a box that ran along an exterior side of the truck. In 1948 the Gilberts moved onto a farm they owned three miles east of Smyrna. I left for high school in Leavenworth that year, but Dick was a fairly constant companion to brother Neil and I for the 1948 through 1951 summers. We had many adventures.

And we spent the afternoon relating these adventures to each other .... telling variant versions of identical events. Strange how memory can wander slightly off like that. We hadn't seen each other for 56 years and it was just like these things had happened a few weeks back. A testament to the power of 'story'.

Mrs. H (granddaughter Rachel) has become Allie's second mother of sorts. She takes him to the bus stop, she makes rules, she enforces Angela's rules, etc.,. This morning his bus stop behavior had a bit of a melt down and she marched him back home, made him sit for fifteen minutes and then drove him to school. She doesn't use question marks much when she addresses Allie (now known as 'Alex') .... she tells him how it is, he appears to mostly listen and mostly obey. Besides which, she exercises considerable power over his video game playing technology. All's well that ends well.