I love looking at my calendar for this week. There is nothing
on it (except my weekly Logos work afternoon). No shows to review. Nothing
other than taking my mother to have her TB test read last Monday. And other than
lunch with a friend on next Thursday, there is nothing on next week's calendar either.
Be still my heart.
With nothing on the calendar, I was able to drop in on Ellen and
Shelly. I'm looking for a new Kaiser doctor for my mother, when she moves to Davis
and the two of them had been talking about switching from their present doctor (who is
also my doctor) to another one. I was looking for recommendations. We
hadn't visited in awhile, so they invited me to come to their house and they would give me
the results of their investigations.
I wasn't there five minutes before the phone rang. It was a
reporter for the Sacramento Bee, who wanted to interview them for an article on
same sex couples who have raised (or are raising) children together for a Mother's Day
special (Ellen and Shelly raised 4 children together, who are all now grown with children
of their own). I forgot I was visiting with "the famous Ellen and Shelly,"
who get called whenever a statement on gay issues is needed!
It was fun listening to the interview (Ellen put it on speaker phone
so both Shelly and I could hear). She rememberd what it was like when they first got
together nearly 40 years ago, when their lawyer told them they could never admit they were
a couple, when they couldn't touch each other in public, when they had to pretend to have
separate bedrooms and doors were always to remain closed. In those days
they didn't know a single other same sex couple who were raising children. When one
of their children was in an auto accident (Shelly's biological child), Ellen had to say
she was Shelly's sister so she could go into the emergency room with Shelly and so she
could visit the child she had been helping to raise.
Ellen said that they could not even have imagined that things would
be the way they are today, with Rhode Island just becoming the eleventh state in
the country to approve same sex marriage. They have lots of gay friends who are
raising children and even having their own biological children. It's definitely a
whole new world.
We talked about their feelings regarding the current doctors at
Kaiser and I found out that doctors who are taking new patients changes daily, sometimes
twice a day, when you check the web site. That was encouraging. Maybe my
mother would do better with a good looking male doctor that she can flirt with instead of
a young woman doctor.
Interestingly, we also got to talking about strengths and weaknesses
and I confessed my complete (and growing) inability to deal with math. I confessed
that I can't add and subtract a couple of 2-digit numbers without a calculator. I
always felt really stupid about that until I worked for a psychologist who did assessments
for learning difficulties and typed so many reports on people whose math difficulties
matched mine perfectly. These days, you get extra time on tests or other helps if
you are diagnosed with a mental impairment in one area of learning.
To my surprise Shelly confessed that she has always been a wiz at
math, but her weak point is grammar and spelling. Ellen and I are strong in that
area and she and I talked about diagramming sentences.
It's odd how if you have a weakness in one area of learning you see
yourself negatively and dismiss your strengths as not important--because they are
strengths and don't really take any effort on your part. I found our discussion very
affirming, to tell you the truth.
I got home shortly before time to have Walt drive me to Logos to work
my afternoon. It was a very quiet afternoon, with very few customers. I had
time to finish reading "A Little Princess," which I started reading after I saw
the show last weekend. I was reading it to find out what the musical was
missing...and I found it. You need to either completely rewrite the story and star
Shirley Temple in it, or you need to find a way to put the magic that is in Hodgson's
narration into it. In this new musical, we don't get a chance to fall in love with
little Sara Crewe or find out why she is a "little princess."
It was kind of fun that three different people I knew came into the
book store during the afternoon, including a guy I worked with about 20 years ago, whom I
see every day on Facebook, but have not seen face to face in all that time. He was
with his son, who, I think, was a toddler when I last saw him and is now a grown man.
Another guy came in with a dog, who reminded me a lot of Jeri &
Phil's Lester. The guy told me that the dog was part dingo. Very sweet dog.
After work, the evening stretched out before me, with Bob Newhart
guest starring on The Big Bang Theory, in one of the funnier episodes, an
absolutely perfect role for Newhart.
I had an e-mail from the woman I work with at the Enterprise,
pointing out how many errors I made in my review for A Little Princess. I
was appalled, but I realized that I saw the show after my 6 trips to San Rafael, my
emotional involvement in getting my mother in the right places, and the fact that I wrote
the review at night, after coming home from the show because I had to leave again the next
morning. I told Kim that I knew it was no excuse, but I did want to explain how I
screwed up so badly.
Her reponse: all is forgiven, no worries; i hope for you
peace and rest.
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