Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Housebound



No, I haven't fallen again, but this wonderful Bizarro cartoon feels about right.  If I fall and get up, I just have the news to get up to...  Next time I fall into the dog bed, maybe I'll just stay there.
I'm getting tired of this "sick-ish" period Walt and I are going through.  The longer he deals with his condition the more depressed I see him become.  I can't put my finger on how long I've been dealing with this whatever-it-is, but long enough that it's starting to get real old.

It's being more or less housebound.  I can't remember the last time I was in a supermarket, but remember that I got weak and dizzy and could only handle half the store before leaving, so I'm not eager to go back.  This does save us tons of money on impulse purchases, of course.  I've also decided that Home Chef is becoming too much, so I've put it on hiatus indefinitely and we will go back to eating "something with chicken in it" for awhile.

Since I still can't drive, I can't just hop in the car and go somewhere.  Walt or Ned will take me wherever I want to go, but I'm not eager to spend lots of time at Atria and I haven't had lunch, one on one, with a friend in months.  (My friend Kathy and I missed discussion of the whole immigration crisis and separation of parents and kids.)  And watching Walt moving gingerly around the house, I feel bad asking him to drive me somewhere.

We saw one show on Friday and will see one on Saturday, but both of those are local and I have no plans to see a Sacramento show in the foreseeable future.  We decided not to go to the first film of the new IOOF film series because it just seemed too inconvenient for us to get there.



Our memories of this day have always been a bit different from most people's.

We were checking into the obby of a hotel in London, when a woman rushed in and asked if anybody had seen anything the news about "something" happening at the World Trade Center in New York

This hotel got CNN and when we got in our room, I turned the tv on to see what was happening and saw the second tower collapse.

We spent the day glued to the TV until dinner time, when we went out to meet friends (from the US). I wandered the streets of London and the tube and listened vainly for an American accent.  I desperately needed to hear an American accent. At that time it was early enough that there weren't even any headlines in the tabloids.

We met Ellen and her husband at the restaurant and shared information we each had.  A nice couple of British ladies, hearing our accents, came over to our table and offered their condolences.

The next day we changed hotels and only had the BBC, so we didn't have any of the coverage from home and by this time newscasters were concentrating on the Brits who had been killed.  One newscaster said to another that now the Americans would "find out how we've been living for so long."

The cyber cafes were filled with Americans trying to make contact with people at home.
When we moved to Orkney at the end of the week, the news in the small town where we were staying did not make the front page, but was on the back page.

We returned to a country we didn't recognize, with flags flying everywhere and everyone suffering various stages of grief.

It wasn't until we went to New York a few years later and saw the notes saved on a hospital billboard and memorials stuck on a chain link fence that I got a full dose of the emotions that everyone had been feeling for so long.

The country came together in a very special way in the days after 9/11.  It's too bad we forgot that.

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