Got dressed in my "missing Paul" uniform this
morning.
Lots of us have FTS shirts, which Paul's best
friend Kag designed and gave to everyone on Christmas in 1999. It
stands for "f*ck this sh*t" which was what Paul once told his wife he'd like
to be his epitaph. We knew we couldn't print that anywhere, but
my friend Olivia suggested "FTS" and it has been a useful abbreviation for
19 years now. I hope somewhere Paul knows that.
You probably can't see the earring, so I took a close up.
Paul and I had a joke going about happy
faces, giving each other gifts with smiley faces on them. I think it
started with a dumb necklace he gave me as a joke one gift-giving occasion
and has included things like a HUGE candle (basketball size) and the famous
"Happy," who went with us to meet Gasper last weekend. I'm so happy I
remembered to find the earrings this year! I bought them several years
ago and think of them usually a week or so after Paul's anniversary.
I went to Atria for lunch. Nothings
works better than a lunch at the funny farm to cheer one up. She woke
up a little more clear-headed than last time, but wandered around wearing
only her pajama tops for about half an hour, trying to straighten out a
necklace n her dresser for literally 30 minutes, butt flapping in the
breeze. I finally got her dressed and then to the dining room.
If dementia has ever been something she could hide, it no longer is. I
don't know if the woman who eventually joined us, Betty (someone I had not
met before), has dementia or not, but I suspect she does. My mother
asked many times if this were lunch and just lots of stuff like that.
I did a lot of explaining what we were doing today (flowers to the
cemetery), who Paul was, etc. Nothing new. Just the new normal,
with a bit more nudity involved this time.
When I got home, I tried to set up Skype on
my iPad, but Davis Community Network has two addresses, the original one
@dcn.davis.ca.us and a shortened version adopted several years later
@dcn.org. They are essentially the same address, but for some reason I
am on iTunes with the short address and Apple with the long address and
Apple won't recognize my password and there is no way I have figured out how
to change it. When I have time I'll try to get Apple customer service
(bwahahahah...such an optimist) and see.
But because I could not get Skype installed,
I was not able to have a Skype conversation with Caroline and Jane, though
we were able to facetime, which is nearly as well. Caroline
entertained me with tales of her week castrating an obstreperous horse and
trying to feed frozen rats to a snake, Jane talked about once babysitting
for a snake, to the horror of her dinner guests, and I shared the story of
our orphaned rats whom I had bottle-fed and eventually donated to the local
pet store fooling myself that they would be sold as pets, while pretty
certain they would end up a someone's lunch.
In
the afternoon we went to the cemetery and discovered that Jessica had gotten
there first. She always brings mayonnaise to the cemetery on 4/20
because Paul hated mayonnaise so much and she's still angry with him for
dying.
We left flowers and then Walt went wandering
around "the neighborhood" while I sat on a new bench engraved "the gang's
all here" and looked for familiar names. It seems that each time we
come to lay flowers on the grave, we find new familiar names joining the
neighborhood.
Walt and I have a plot somewhat close to this
one for Paul and David, so one of these days we will be members of the
neighborhood too.
At night more sushi and then home to catch up
on the shows that were recorded while we were out at dinner. Now a
break for a month when it's time to commemorate Dave's 21st anniversary.
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