Finally Relaxing... Until...

The Fall Festival is over. Sales were just a tad behind last year, not bad considering inflation's kick on spending this year versus folks coming out of the woodwork after finally feeling covid-free last year and finally able to spend money. But everything went just fine, things are back in their places inside the club, checks are written (not my job) to those who sold items (like me), and we can take a deep breath. Unless we're one of those sick right now from covid, RSV, pneumonia, etc., like we're hearing about from several of our members.The new tablecloth/banner looked great except for the people hanging it over a pair of tables instead of one, not understanding it was extra-wide because the sides were supposed to drape to the floor off the ends of the table for privacy of whatever/whoever was under there.

 Thanksgiving cooking is finished, and as I do every year while making my stuffing muffins, the three days of work cooking drive home yet again my determination not to actually cook anything again till next year. Sure, I'll make sandwiches, nuke water for instant coffee/mocha or prepared food in the microwave, even including scrambling eggs in a paper bowl lined with margarine or stored bacon fat. While that may seem like cooking, I don't define it that way, mostly since there are no pots and pans to clean up afterwards.

Glass drilling has progressed far enough that I can proceed to make wind chimes needed to go our for X-mas presents, possibly even in time to arrive for the actual holiday for those who didn't get them ahead last summer to save shipping. (OK, so I'm cheap! Get over it!) Last night as I hung the latest one, I took a look at it and instantly decided I have a better way to use the wires to connect the glass pieces of they can swing freely. I think I'll redo that one... later. (If you need a re-do on yours from last summer, let me know and I'll bring enough wire and tools. Just give me a couple hours.)

The Christmas Tree Challenge still has a few days before it needs to show up in the club, and I think a few revisions in concept and a couple new skills will actually give me the concept I want to execute. The insomnia has retreated once I came up with the latest how-to, so now it's just the long haul of actually implementing all the minutia of wire work - in time.The basic form has been filled in with more framework giving proper shape to the final product, and should be completely covered rather than open to some kind of internal webbing of wire and hung beads like the first two samples to show up back in the club have been showing. Then after that, the basic tree will have jingle bells, candy canes and a tinsel drape added to the outside, with a tree topper in a variation of my wire poinsettias, and underneath on a green felt "floor" will sit a fancy box with a red wire bow on one side and a sleeping cat on the other. I have all I needed already prepared. It's just a matter of wiring things in place now. Or gluing in the case of the floor. It will take till Sunday night, most likely, but it doesn't have to show up till Monday morning. In fact, it won't, as I don't want to give anybody else any ideas.  

Steve looked at the form, listened to my concept, and watched me start putting things together, and commented, "You're a bit competitive, aren't you."  Ya think? It caught my imagination, and anything giving me insomnia needs resolution. It grew from there. My most recent idea sprung up last night on my way to bed, and is easy enough to avert more insomnia. I just need good glue....

Steve announced he found that glass table/chair patio set we've been talking about since we moved in here. We came down with a wicker set originally but it's not doing all that well in Arizona sun. After my Monday club duties we hit the thrift store that set was selling for me to check it out before he bought it for me. I had one question for him: once you sit in one of these chairs, can you get out again by yourself? I knew it would be an issue because it was a  swivel rocker style. After my knee surgery years ago, we spent time at the neighbor's patio and I sat in one of those. Anything that rocks has the front drop as you lean forward to stand. Any bad knees need steady high support under the knees for standing to occur. Two helpers barely managed to get me out of that chair back then, and only after several tries, some rethinking, and a lot of pain. But I let Steve check it out for himself. It took two other people to get him up from the chair that went with that set. However...

There was another glass table next to it, even prettier, sold alone, and some steel patio chairs sold separately a few feet in the other direction. We had him try one of the steel chairs, and normal effort was all it took. Even better, they were having a half-off day, bringing the total down lower than his original planned budget even including delivery. Rich had the area cleared and the new set plus cushions laid out where it catches the morning sun and afternoon shade, and we gave it a tryout last night. Other than a temperature of 48, it was a very successful excursion.

The wicker set, minus one very nice piece as a side table holding Steve's pipe set, is curbside with a "FREE" sign with it. If nobody wants a painting project, it'll be chopped up and fed into the landfill via regular trash pickups.

The living room X-mas tree is up. It's what is now our usual, a 4' artificial white one with white lights already in the branches, small enough to sit on Steve's roll-top desk, sturdy enough to hold a string of bubbler lights. We have two strings plus spare bulbs, but figure one string in use means all the other bulbs stay available for replacements regardless of what the market chooses to provide in the future. After the club Christmas party I'll being my challenge tree home and it will become an annual decoration as well, no matter how it scores in the competition. The jingle bell wreath went on the outside of the security door like every other year, once the new door was installed. (It spends the rest of the years on my closet doorknob. No particular reason beyond sticking it there once until a better location came along.)

So with all that holiday stuff taken care of, or under control at least, what disrupted my peace of mind? Sunday night, I happened to look at the calendar. There is a Board meting this Friday! I totally spaced it, somehow thinking (OK, not thinking, alright?) that I still had an extra week to prepare for it. It's every 1st Friday, because it comes before the Membership meeting, this time being our party, but falling on the 2nd Monday of each month through the "winter" season down here. I have to set the agenda and I hadn't given it a single thought since the last one. Been kinda busy, you know? I started obsessing about whether our secretary had gotten me a copy of minutes from the last Board meeting, as that's my starting place for each next agenda, before adding whatever has come up during the month. It finally dawned on me that of course she hadn't. She was sick last month. So I, as former secretary, did double duty last month, running the meeting and recording it as well. I am the one with the copy of the minutes on my computer, dutifully sent out to the rest of the board the day after the meeting. I'll resend it along with the new agenda by Thursday, aka tomorrow. But right now I gotta go wind the ten foot multicolor wire thing around the wire form to make the body of my challenge tree while I listen to the TV.

The New Front Door!

 It's in!

 No more air leaking around missing gaskets, no blowing open with a whisper of wind, no cold surface on the inside because of lack of insulation in this fiberglass beauty. No stacking up every portable heavy object inside the house against the door before going to bed so we don't wake up to the the door wide open while the furnace runs. No warping if a little rain blows that far under the front overhang because this isn't a hollow core interior door installed against building codes way back when. No doorbell that nobody can reach because it would have been behind the dead bolted security door that one can knock loudly on anyway, like that young man early this morning who pretended to see roof damage and offered to go up for free and take a look. No need for a second set of keys because it matches the deadbolt on the security door. No more dark corner because this one has an actual window, just low enough that Steve's eyes can see over the bottom of the window to see who's out there. My eyes are a half inch too close to the floor to see out of it, of course. And that's with wearing shoes, even. We can paint the frame in two more days if temperatures decide to cooperate when somebody (ahem!) is awake. We can also step on the threshold instead of past it then as well. Something about putty and insulation needing to set first.

Did I mention no more spare in the budget now? Good thing some of you who read this already got your X-mas present last summer when I didn't have to mail them.

Oh, and I accidentally figured out how to drag a photo onto my blog so it doesn't jump back to my desktop the instant I release a finger.

Wonder if I can do that again someday. We'll find out together, eh?

Eulogy For Joan: Four Decades Of Memories

She grew up on a Minnesota farm with 4 siblings, all but one of them sisters. She divorced an alcoholic, not necessarily because of the alcohol but because it enabled a long history of abusive behavior. They had one daughter, well grown and gone by the time I met Joan. In the first few years I knew her she lost her mother, a particularly difficult time for her, and had to watch a sister succumb to the ravages of ALS. She worked at the University of Minnesota Hospitals in an office position. Besides venting about the frustrations of office politics, she found the irony in their putting up braille signs in the parking ramps on campus in places where presumably only the drivers would need the information on the signs. She also had invested in a duplex in Minneapolis and rented the top part, kept a garden in her back yard while growing beautiful lilacs and many other flowers around the house and yard edges, along with a patch of huge raspberries from which she shared starter plants with me when I finally had my own yard with space for them. Inside she had a large south window full of thriving houseplants, and lived with a pair of very affectionate cats.

When I spoke with her  recently she had forgotten much of that beautifully tended yard. By then she had forgotten much that I remembered from our early years together, but I can share (some of) those memories for her.  We met at a support group for resingled people - separation, divorce, widowed -  where she was a facilitator. It happened to also be where I met Steve, and her future husband Bob. We all became facilitators, and each of us at various times wound up on the management board for the parent organization. She first became important to me and our actual friendship started at one of the workshops put on by that organization. At the time I was an attendee and she was facilitating the group I had been assigned to. Something she disclosed about her own life made it finally safe for me to disclose something about my own life, and move forward from there in dealing with it. I remain grateful.

We became the kind of friends who could call each other up, after half an hour start making our excuses for needing to hang up, but still finding things to talk about for the next half hour or more. One memory that just popped into my head this evening was of one the annual Halloween parties the support groups put on. Most of us went in costume, though they weren't mandatory. (I once showed up as a courier, still in the uniform I'd worked in all day.) I had worked hard at designing and sewing mine as a red crayon. She went as a can of beer with a foaming top, shown by a very silly and very curly pale wig  for the foam. She won a prize for hers. That might be the same year Steve won one, coming as a... well, nobody quite knew, but some guessed a kind of space alien, wrapped in layers and layers of mylar wound around and around him. I'm not sure he knew just what it was either, but as long as we were intrigued by it, he didn't care how it was defined.

Joan and Bob began dating after several years in the support group, and it became serious. Work transferred him south, and it became a commuting relationship. They finally decided Joan would relocate to Arizona to live with him. I overheard her worrying about whether her stepfather would be a safe driver for her moving truck, so I volunteered to drive it instead. I'd had experience with one ton trucks, and this was upgraded to an automatic transmission, so even easier. Plus I knew the route, since my then snowbird parents brought me down there a couple times a year to help them out, including driving their car back and forth while they flew.  

Joan had another friend, Carol, share driving duties for her car, and meals and motels were paid. Mostly that trip went smoothly. The glaring exception was after a supper stop where it was full dark when we emerged from the restaurant. Note this was before cell phones. As we were getting on the freeway ramp, a semi had parked on the ramp and I had to wait for a couple minutes for it to move enough that I could get past it in the truck. Of course Joan and Carol were first, having no problem getting around the parked truck in their car. It never occurred to them I would be delayed. I worried about finding them for about ten minutes until I finally passed a car on the shoulder of the freeway which blinked its lights at me, pulled out and swung in just ahead of me. It took that long in the dark for them to realize there was no moving truck behind them!

Before hitting Phoenix, Joan led us off the freeway to Montezuma's Well, which we all enjoyed exploring. We even all saw our first roadrunner along the road in. We had plenty of time to kill for that excursion as Bob's unloading helpers weren't scheduled until the afternoon and we were making good time.

When Joan and Bob got married, it was a Las Vegas wedding, and I flew down with another mutual woman friend from the same support group, shared a motel room with her, plus a trip to Hoover Dam on the bus, and a stroll down the strip to see the variety of casinos. I believe we spent a total of five minutes inside one, each putting a quarter in a slot machine promising somebody would win an enormous amount. It wasn't us. But the wedding was lovely, the reception delicious, and the red-eye flight back exhausting.

Until she retired she worked in Arizona for ADOT. I'm not sure in what order each retired, or when they moved to Sun City West. I know they lived there before my parents quit snowbirding, since I easily memorized the short distance between the two homes while I was visiting, and we had plenty of time to visit and for them to show me different parts of the state, including an introduction for me to Thai food, a favorite of Joan's. At one visit I expressed an interest in relocating down there myself, so they spent a Saturday taking me to see several versions of more affordable housing in the area, most having open houses that day, but one being lived in by a friend of Joan's and open to a visit from a stranger.

There were years when our friendship slowed to occasional long distance phone calls. My parents no longer traveled, and I couldn't afford to. Eventually Steve and I changed our long term friendship into what it is today, and we made our own retirement plans for Arizona. Still, we were busy, they were busy, life moved on. When I got an invitation to join a small group of demonstrators, a local branch of Grandmothers For Peace, it meant a time to both sit at a busy corner in our folding chairs, hold signs, and chat with Joan in the small breaks between traffic noise. The first year or so I was in my scooter, and Bob needed some exercise, so we would travel the square of the walking lanes of the major intersection with our signs until Bob had gotten enough exercise. Once he wasn't up to that, mostly we sat, Joan and I, amongst the others, and talked to each other. We'd go as a group to a local restaurant for brunch afterwards, and talk about the day and our lives, getting to know each of the protesters, occasionally changing restaurants, trying new menus.

Then Bob died. A while after that, covid killed our get-togethers. Joan's larger car held all the signs we set out or held, and some were heavy. Joan recently had been diagnosed with some rare form of leukemia, but stubbornly insisted on being strong enough to show up early and put all the signs up. After covid quarantining pretty much ended, the job became too big and we were out of the habit of protesting, still not sure we were safe in a group. Some of us connected via email, but none as the group we'd been, and no more brunches. During that time she kept me and others apprised of her brother's epic motorcycle journeys, connecting us to his photo blog. We also saw pictures of a grand niece, and photos of new pets in her daughter's and her husband's lives.

Covid did bring Joan to our house once, when she came as a witness (and camera person) for Steve's and my wedding.  The legal one, not the commitment ceremony we'd had in Minnesota years earlier before heading to Arizona to buy a house on our honeymoon. That one had all the bells and whistles, but she and Bob couldn't make it up. This one was out in the carport, 5 humans total present, socially distanced, casually dressed, everybody seated, sealed water bottles and cookies for a "reception". She came with us into the back yard for a couple photos in front of a bush in full bloom at the time before leaving, nobody that day letting covid fears stop us from exchanging those long supportive hugs from back in support group days.

When Joan began to get worse, she and I instituted a daily afternoon phone call wellness check. Suddenly we were back in the hour long phone calls, often ending because light was fading and she needed to get out to feed the birds while they were still up. The calls got shorter after several months, and suddenly I heard from her daughter that Joan was in the hospital. Once she was able to be home Pam would be taking care of her mom's needs until she was better. The care included making sure Joan got her sleep in the afternoons, and between having a full time on site wellness checker and more naps, the calls pretty much stopped  again for a while. I managed to visit Joan a few times after her daughter went home, but by then she was needing a walker most of the time. We'd gotten used to her needing a cane to get around during the last of our demonstrations, but now it took a long time to get to the phone, to even schedule a visit, and might even require a call back later if she had been in the process of taking food to her chair in front of the TV to watch her favorite political news shows. 

 Joan and I had a spring visit this year where I saw her X-mas tree was still up and decorated. She tried to apologize for being too tired to take it down and I assured her it was all about her own personal pleasure and all the wonderful memories from previous years with Bob the tree held, and not about some arbitrary calendar. It was still up last time I stopped by the house this fall to see Pam. That particular visit Pam had located a few things I had given Joan over the years, after asking if I wanted them back. I did, now treasured as memories of our long friendship. One went way back to when I had come down to visit/help my parents, a photo I'd taken on a trip with them. That location was open desert then, a very rare rain puddle along the road under a saguaro reflecting it and the sky, the area now long since developed. I had forgotten it over the years until seeing it again.

I began to hear that her computer was broken, and she couldn't get my emails. All summer I'd been sending out shots of flowers from the Minnesota garden, or a nature preserve, or whatever. She'd had her IT guy, the son of a mutual friend Rosemary whom she loved referring to as "Rosemary's Baby", out to fix it but it still didn't work. Neither did her phone quite often. We heard later that they worked just fine, but her brain wasn't able to comprehend them anymore. It happened with the TV remote later, and that became hopeless for her once she was in hospice. It turned out she had something called "white matter disease". 

The  difficulties that added to her life and self care regimen put her in the hospital once more and brought her daughter back down to stay for a while. It was that which pushed her decision to stop taking her chemotherapy meds and to go into hospice. She lost some of the side effects of the chemo, which actually made her final months more comfortable for her in a few ways. She also decided to ignore her celiac disease and spend her last weeks enjoying as many of the foods she used to love as she could tolerate, so she and her daughter would plan on which treat Pam would bring her the next day to eat. The list included spaghetti, pizza, various sandwiches, sweet rolls and breads. She merely had to think of something and Pam would spend the time needed to locate and buy what Mom wanted, making sure any leftovers went into the refrigerator at the hospice home and not into the mouths of any hungry staff or other residents still mobile enough to get to it, once Pam had a chat with the management.

Joan nearly always had one or more cats in her life for as long as I knew her. This time was no exception, but once in hospice a decision had to be made. The aging cat had its own health problems, and was considered unadoptable. Before a vet was called to the house for a gentle euthanasia, Joan came home on a final visit to her own bed. A photo exists of the cat on the bed with her one final time.

I did manage to get a few visits in while Joan was in hospice. The first time Penny, another friend from peace demonstrations, was there, who later brought Joan her ballot so she could vote in this final election. She's also been my go-to person for information on judges and other lesser known candidates who can be hard to find information on. Another visit one of her sisters from out of state was there along with Pam and a big pizza which they shared. I did manage to coordinate with Pam a day to visit when I could have private time with Joan. Groups can be exhausting, visits needed to be short, and Pam welcomed some time off. By now I'd spent a couple of hours with Pam over several brief occasions, and each one gave me more respect for her and appreciation of all she was doing for her mother. I mentioned as much to Joan on that visit.

The fourth visit was much shorter, as by now Joan was tiring easily. She couldn't manage to stand up for a good-bye hug, so I leaned down to her for what turned out to be a very brief one. The fifth visit didn't happen. Pam got hold of me before I was to leave and let me know her mom wasn't up to a visit, also adding her opinion that there wasn't much time left. As a retired nurse, Pam's seen her share of patients dying and I respect her educated opinion. Still, it was a shock to open her email last evening and find out that Joan had died just over an hour before I read it. She had told Pam when she left her house for hospice not to pay the hospice place for more than a two month stay. She lived two months and one day there.

Joan wasn't religious. Somewhere between agnostic and atheistic covers it, according to our conversations.  Bob was a devout Catholic, and she commented to me once that one of the reasons they got married was that she got tired of being something Bob had to confess on a regular basis until they were. I don't know if she believed in some kind of afterlife where she would reunite with Bob. Only she can know that now. If it's possible, I'm sure they are, with the strong connection they had. I'm not much of a believer either, but it's one of the things I kept telling Daddy in his last days, even his last night, that Gladys would be there waiting for him. He believed. At the very least it brought him comfort. Joan deserved that kind of comfort too.

Rest in peace, my friend. I will miss you. You will always be treasured in my memories.

November 20, 2022.

The Christmas Tree Challenge

I have another new project. Our club has a party/potluck every December. We dress up for this one. There is lots and lots of food of course, plus music, a present exchange ($10 limit) via whatever game they dream up this year. A very brief business meeting installs the next year's slate of 5 officers. A committee volunteers to do the work of planning, decorating, and even cleaning up though we all are expected to clear our table space and take leftovers home. The BYOB policy (we can't serve) means there are always a few people having an extra good time, and last year the dance floor space was filled for a bit with some who found "YMCA" especially entertaining. In my times there, alcohol has never been a problem. Many of us have spouses or partners with physical or memory issues, and people remain thoughtful.

Our volunteer committee chair this year is a talented and energetic woman named Jeanne - pronounced with two syllables. After consultation with another couple of people she came up with and made the actual frames for the tree challenge. A small wood square supports 4 pieces of sturdy copper wire - I'm thinking 14 gauge - which spread out at the bottom and rise about a foot to connect at the top with a flourish. We can sign  one out, individually or as a group, take it home, decorate it however we wish using our club skills, and return it by a deadline. Then the club members get 5 days to vote for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for the best. Top three places get prizes and recognition. All trees become table centerpieces for the party, and we take ours home afterwards. The penalty for not returning a tree is your table gets decorated with one of our old, ratty, never-tossed, artificial poinsettias from bygone years. Very bygone years.

Of course I signed one out. I knew before I even saw the final form that was devised what my tree topper would be, how I'd hang decorations, and - what I hope is my piece-de-resistance - how to devise and hang "tinsel." I have all the needed bits now, some taking up room in the house for years. I made one trip to a craft store for the tinsel-to-be, and luckily they had something even better than I envisioned. 

All I need to do now is the actual work. Some supplies have been made already and have just been sitting around waiting for a home - like a pair of ear wires, for example. Only now they've been diverted, since I have way too many earrings in the club already looking for customers. Other things have been shaped and need to be connected, some items have been long abandoned because people just don't wear them - ever! But they sparkle, or have color, or just will look great on a miniature tree. I hope.

Of course I'll still be slightly over-busy. The fall festival is coming up and that takes both administrative duties and actual service time on site. I have my third November workshop to teach later this week, and it will involve typing out instructions and assembling  supplies as well as the actual class. Thanksgiving cooking is always labor intensive. My Christmas gift projects (some of you already got yours this summer to save postage) are finally proceeding after giving up and buying the really expensive, American-made diamond drill bits which last about 8 times as long as the cheap versions, which lose their diamonds after their second hole. But hey, I'm not bored!

Am I overworked? Finding myself once again delaying sleep after head meets pillow several nights in a row while my formerly sleepy, suddenly busy brain starts going over the mechanics and how-tos and what-withs of the tree challenge tells me it just has to get done and I'll make it work! All of it. The deadline is soon enough that if I like it when completed there will even be time enough to make it THE X-mas card picture this year, even though I was planning on that one special Bear Lake  sunrise shot where colors from clouds and bouncing down the mountain to the lake turned everything a unique shade of red. Of course there is no reason I can't do both, I suppose. You'll find out if you're on my list.

The Eyes Have It

I found something new to worry about over the summer. So far the experts have no explanation.

It started when I was watching the dog out in the back yard on her bedtime duty call. It's pretty dark out there at night, in a small MN town where every yard has tall trees blocking neighbors' lights and street lights (as well as satellite TV signals) since they've grown so tall. It didn't help that the dog is mostly black. I could see her most of the way, but when she got small enough she disappeared! If I looked a bit to the side of her, I could make out where she was and what she was doing. There are some white hairs on her after all. Switching back to looking straight at her... gone!

I wouldn't have made anything of it but an interesting (to me) footnote, except for the fact there is a history of macular degeneration in the family. I started to wonder, since this was limited to my very central vision and only when it's very dark, does it start by affecting the rods in the eyes? Could it be possible that we live in such a light polluted world nowdays that people just haven't had an actual chance to notice? It never gets that dark here in my well lit Arizona suburb, unlike the Minnesota back yard where at night all color is erased and nothing exists except black and grey, with stars actually sprinkling the sky again. It takes that deep a dark for that tiny bit of central vision to go completely black.

I had an eye doctor appointment coming up in October, so made a mental note to discuss it with him. While I waited, I tried to "make" it happen again in AZ, but it never did. There was always still color, even inside with doors and windows as blocked as they get. I couldn't reproduce the effect. While musing over it back in Minnesota, in the bedroom it got dark enough that I could stare at the wall at night after having had my eyes closed for several minutes, and for ten or fifteen seconds that black spot would come back. I'd do it one eye at a time, and the left eye made it slightly more distinct than the right eye. With slightly lighter walls than the depths of the back yard, I could determine the black spot was the shape of a fat football, just a hair off of being aligned to my head's horizontal axis, angled just a bit higher on the left. Curiouser and curiouser. That was true for both eyes. With my pillow being about seven or eight feet from the wall, the spot was about the size of a fat football as well as its shape.

Come appointment time, my regular eye doc had no answers. They did the eyedrops to expand my pupils, shined lights, took pictures, had me look at graphs with lots of tiny squares in a grid to see if any of the lines wiggled. Nothing. My eyes are fine except for a small nevis, although he's suggesting my right eye could qualify for cataract surgery any time now. (Since I see fine by my standards with glasses, no thanks. Not yet.) 

Just to be sure, he sent me to a retina specialist. "See them within a week." When I questioned the speed, I was reassured that a real emergency like a detached retina would have me over there that same day! That exam was last week, and much like the other one except with one additional machine and more lights to follow plus brighter flashing lights for their pictures.

The conversation with this doc was... reassuring, I guess. At least as far as anything they can see, my eyes are perfect. But he had no explanation, had never herd such a thing described, and (therefore) found it nothing to be concerned about. So I walked out of there... reassured, I guess. But I promise you, with or without the dog to take out at night, next year back in that dark bedroom, I'll be doing the black football hunt again. Are they still there? Bigger? Blacker? Or gone, just a figment of an aging memory, a mystery never to be solved?

What's For Dinner?

Visits to my friend Joan in hospice care have developed a definite pattern. Her best time for being alert is late afternoon. Once my schedule and energy levels open enough to plan a visit, I call her daughter, currently down from Minnesota, living in Joan's house for months now,  and putting everything in order ahead of her mother's death, as much as possible. My reason to call is first to find out if she knows of anybody else who plans to visit this day. A crowd is very tiring for Joan, and I like one-on-one conversations in the brief time that works for her. Pam knows who's got plans, and today is a day when she was the only one planning to go. I'm informed she relishes some time when she can plan her own supper at usual supper time, not at 3 before she goes visit her mom, or 8 after she returns. She also respects others' wishes for private conversations.

But could I stop by the house on my way? Joan still had my house key from several years ago when they could come over a couple times in the summer and check on the house, maybe water something in the yard. I've come to like Pam the more I see her, and it's easily inserted into my plans. Once there, she hands me a couple other things that either she or her mom (I can't be sure these days) believe I would appreciate. She's absolutely right. I depart not only with those but a note from Pam to her mom that Joan can read over and over in her leisure to help her remember the various pieces of information contained in it.

Pam also gives me the shortcut directions from Joan's house to the hospice home, which I really like, not just because it shortens my route but takes me on the 303, through a few miles of undeveloped Sonoran Desert. I see it won't be that undeveloped for much longer, more reason to appreciate the drive now.

Our visit lasts less than an hour but longer than expected. She's disappointed that I can't figure out the TV remote any more than she can, but there are no tutorials and only one staff person on site who seems to be taking her own break for a bit. So we switch from family news to talking politics, a favorite topic of both of us, particularly so close to the election.

On my way home, part of my attention is on the spectacular colors in a sunset covering just a sliver of the western sky. The rest of my mind not needed for traffic is planning where to stop and pick up something I should actually enjoy. Every possible carry-out food franchise in the state has a location somewhere along the way home. Do I want egg rolls? A burger? Mexican food? Chicken? My mind settles on Arby's for a French Dip sandwich, and I take that exit. It also covers in a small area a burger & chicken place, Mexican food, Subway, all on my way to my goal. Just as I'm ready to make the next turn, traffic is stopped while four fire engines with lights and sirens rush past in the direction I want to go. 

Could I be that unlucky?

While sitting waiting, I glance through an opening between buildings to where my goal sits. Yes, I can be that unlucky. As it turns out, I missed the first engine heading in that direction, as five wind up there. Dang!

OK, burger it is tonight. Good enough, just not the choice. But I drive past my original goal on my way out of the area because it's where there is a light I can safely use to get back on busy roadways in heavy traffic, which suppertime certainly provides. All 5 engines are scattered around their parking lot, none close to the building, no sign of fire, nor water being used, nor any kind of urgency whatsoever. In fact the fire personnel are standing around in small clumps and appear - are you kidding me? - to be eating their suppers there.

I don't expect to ever hear the rest of that story. I guess that leaves me free to make up my own version.