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.
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