It's recycled but I like it.

I won't say which friend described me very gently as "pouty" (but her initials are Dede!). Scared is what I was. I don't like to think of myself has helpless. Thinking that way makes for long nights. So what about this makes me different from anyone else?

So Robyn convinced me that trying to go cold turkey off pain meds wasn't sane and a nurse in Madison explained that both the antibiotics I am on make a person prone to nausea (which is you see also an indicator of increased infection) and the gently blunt Dede has offered her magic skills (and it must mean something that I'm going to take her up on this. I'm still uptight but I've been handled by so many strangers lately this'll be a pleasure, I know). A friend from work came by and caught me up. Brought me the chip I'll use to work from home next week. And so it starts to fit together.

If you page back a few weeks there'll be some doggerel about how I'm going to learn somehting meaningful from all this. True and low hanging fruit, that. You don't get to choose what you learn. That's the deal.

Walker's home!

My Inner Diana

A friend of ours is dying and it is almost not imaginable. It looks as though Diana ("well, what did you think I was gonna die of!") Paulina may succumb soon to cancer of the inevitable. It's enough to make a person ache.

It almost didn't seem inevitable. Diana is a tough, passionate, brilliant bundle of Ukrainian orneriness. I really thought for a very long time that she might beat this. She still might have something up her sleeve. I never bet against dp. But it just kept coming, this cancer.

There are people in our lives who have been part of raising us. I would not be in my profession or know how to work a computer or ever have been beaten at Scrabble if it weren't for Kevin and Diana. Okay, I would have been beaten at Scrabble. I have been my best and my worst with them, and they with me (I suppose . . . maybe they were holding back). Who they are is woven into my sense of myself.

I was driving around today, thinking about this and having vaguely agnostic thoughts about all this and it occurred to me that death will not eradicate that part of Diana that is woven into me. As long as I draw breath, whenever I tell an oblique joke, or solve a puzzle, make a pun, or charge off to tilt I windmill, I will summon my Inner Diana. I will fight and argue, push and advocate, I will cook and cheat at poker (just kidding), and try to live my life with the vigor, intelligence and whimsy that has characterized my good friend.

As long as I possibly can,

I will summon my Inner Diana.

s.

Scenery

I found an alternative route back from Des Moines yesterday, up 65 to 330 from Altoona, then over on 30 through the rolling mostly harvested hills to Tama and home. It was good to look at something different and get away from the parade of semis and SUVs all in a hurry. Actually, the semis don't seem to be in a hurry, but the other traffic on 80 is often very rude and seem to view tailgating as mandatory. When one is driving a hockey puck sized sedan (albeit zippy) one begins to appreciate a little space between one and those laws-of-physics-defying maniacs.

I took this picture when Mom and the kids and I made our epic journey to Southern Illinois. The good thing about rivers is that they always change scenery and you just have to sit still. I used to love watching barges go by, seeing the men working through lighted doorways, or walking along the long decks purposefully. Once in a while a guy would take a leak over the rail into the river, as though we on the bank were just scenery, after all. No harm done. It's a wide river.

We pass, most of us, without giving much thought to the other. The pickup in front of me is mostly an impediment to me reaching my preferred speed. The farmer harvesting is a diversion to me, and I'm irrelevant to him, preoccupied as he is in quantifying his year's work in bushels. The trucker is thinking about his wife, the couple in the SUV are preoccupied with ignoring global warming.

Today I'll drive back and forth, to and from Iowa City. Maybe I'll take 218. Maybe I'll stop at a rest stop and have a meaniful conversation with someone. On the other hand, I could get busted for making an ill advised foot tap in the potty. Better mind my own business and hurry along.