Culinary baptism by fire…

Marshal Dillon kept the peace.

We picked up one more straggler for the trek into the Bridger: Ellen.  Her ticket is already in hand and there’s no disguising how much I look forward to her joining our little band of hikers.   She’ll be a good addition although she’s already reminded me yet again that she doesn’t eat red meat (like we were going to tote steaks around) and she’s about to get a culinary baptism by fire with camp cooking.  She also professes to not like fish, but if she’s hungry enough, she’ll warm up to roasted trout sprinkled with lemon pepper soon enough.  Assuming we catch any.

————–

June 27, 2011

Ellen/Reid: What is worth looking forward to this week is a short Friday.  My boys Tom, Mike and Todd are planning a grudge match at some local course on Friday afternoon.  They all have high pressure 24/7 jobs at the bank and they are really looking forward to getting the three day weekend off with a bang.  Of course, it will be at my expense since those thieves demand strokes.  Not that your inheritance is at risk but I’ll need to keep my hands on my wallet at all times.  It is near criminal.

Got a pretty clean bill of health from my four month checkup on Wednesday.  The doctor is on one hand a no-nonsense guy in that it is all about data/results, but he shows his softer side, too from time to time.  I go back in September and that will be the real litmus test.  He took me off guard by saying that everything has yet to heal fully and by September it should be all buttoned up, so to speak.   His assistant paints something of another picture.  There’s this troublesome diverticulum (kind of a large balloon or bulge) on the bladder which creates what is essentially an unintended reservoir.  That’s why things don’t empty as they should.  The thinking of the assistant is that this creates a long-term set of problems (infections, etc.) if not corrected.  It doesn’t have to be right now but it’s a strong point of consideration.  Not real invasive surgery, but they go in and cut out this protrusion and sew the hole in the bladder shut.  It would put me down for up to two weeks with another 30 with “no lifting or straining.”  Literally, we were talking a January timeframe (so as to miss the least amount of golf and riding) when the doctor came in.  He immediately nixed those plans.  His reasoning is since I feel good and all the numbers point to things being mostly okay, he doesn’t want to operate in the absence of symptoms.  He reserved the right to change his mind when the September results are in.  I’m not opposed to the knife although he cautioned that every surgery has its risks.  So we’ll see.  But I feel good as of this writing.

Felicia came through her melanoma surgery in fine shape.  Basically, they carved out a chunk of her left calf and sewed it up nice and snug.  The assumption is they send the tissue to pathology to check it out, and no word so far on the results.  She was hobbling around like Festus on Gunsmoke and I had to ride her about just taking things easy for a while.  If it were me, I would’ve milked her nursing for everything I could get.  But she’s headstrong and she was doing it her way.  There are no stitches per se.  They glued the wound (can you really glue human skin?) and then did some other kind of non-stitch thingies and kept it together.  It will be interesting to see how it all looks once the bandage is removed and the non-stitch thingies go away.  It’s good they moved up the surgery a week or so because that gives her more time to heal before we head to the Bridger.

Enough health morbidity.  Apparently they no longer manufacture the tent pegs I want.  That, or people simply buy them out.  I’ve been to REI and another couple of stores more than once and everyone is flat out of good tent pegs.  This weekend we resolve to fire up the MSR stove and fumble our way around erecting the Mountain Hardware tent so we’ll know what we’re doing when the time comes.  I’ve put up a tent in heavy, wet snowfall before and it’s no fun and that’s no time to figure out how to erect a tent for the first time.  The menu is beginning to take shape although I am all ears when it comes to innovative breakfasts as long as it does not involve freeze dried food.  No doubt it will be the traditional instant oatmeal and whatever additives come to mind.  I just hope the weather is decent and we can have fires.  People are relatively outraged that there will be no smores or other fresh foods available.  What keeps coming to mind for me is: bears.

Well, off to the races (as in rat races).  Be good, stay cool and have fun.

A compendium of small things…

Some weeks its just hard to find something to pontificate on in the fatherly sense.  It could be accurately chalked up to a lack of strong coffee or that nothing reveals itself at the moment of creative conception.  I am ramping up on red-red-red North Carolina politics that set our state back, our shunning of environmental issues and the like but nothing has jelled as of yet.  So I fall back on my PB days (the Pre-Betsy admonition to write something of depth so as to be of interest to her that in tandem would show my personality to the kids) and thus a letter becomes a compendium of the small things that went on the week before.

Last weeks letter was a definite throwback to the PB days.

———-

June 6, 2011

Ellen/Reid: Well, if you like heat and humidity this is the place for you.  Blast furnace hot but damp at the same time.  Go figure.

Here’s the update on Felicia.  Her surgery is set for the end of this month.  That nearly 30 day delay would absolutely drive me more bonkers than I already am.  Why in the world they wait that long on such a terrible disease is totally unfathomable to me.  I lectured her this weekend, more than once, to call her physician’s office this morning to see if she can light a fire under the operating doctor so we’ll see if that does any good.  There was a related article this morning in the paper about some new drugs specific to melanoma.  Advances, yes, but not a cure.  This comes at a time when she’s wrestling with other issues in her life, notably her son who has veered onto another path she’d rather he not take.  I don’t know.  I’m glad you guys are who you are, but it is very hard to see her have to endure another bout of the same situation she has already endured for years.  I’d rather that she take the time to tend to herself but the mother’s instinct to nurture, or at least care for, her offspring is awfully strong.  She needs to worry about herself for a change.  I plan to be with her at the surgery and be available for whatever else she needs between now and then.

Ellen, I’ll need to tap into your teaching expertise in the next couple of weeks.  My class on freelance writing is filling up at the local community college (it will probably top out at about a dozen or 16 students) and I’m starting to get nervous about it.  It’s not the content that is vexing but the presentation of things.  The class will be in a high-tech lab setting loaded with capabilities for PowerPoints and other sort of splashy gizmos.  My class outline is done but that’s all it is; an outline.  I’ll head over to the college later this week to familiarize myself with the ins and outs of the learning laboratory.  They say to teach is to learn twice so maybe that’s good.  All in all, this probably is something of an odd time for freelancers.  The pay scale has dropped like a stone (at least in the newspaper biz) but the availability of work is probably pretty good in that in this economy firms may not keep full time staff but instead farm the work out depending on their situational needs.

Your uncle lifted his cell phone to your grandmother’s ear this weekend but I couldn’t understand much of what she said beyond “I love you, too.”  I just don’t know what to make of it.  I wish I could be there a lot more often.  Her health seems to have stabilized for the time being.  I’m dependent on your uncle’s reportage of what’s going on and he’s around her often enough he sees the ebb and flow to her situation but he’s not sounding any alarms as of late.  It looks as if Joe is going to buy your grandparent’s house.  I have some mixed feelings about it, largely because he’s being influenced by your aunt and uncle (the house design is a bit staid by young person’s standards, I would think).  He’ll get a sweetheart deal on the house but I suppose when you do the math in terms of what it might sell for minus the real estate agent’s commission it’s probably not that bad an overly bad thing.  Joe and Ally will have their baby at the end of this month.  Ralph and Gayle are pretty excited about it.  Their third grandchild.  Guys, I’m in no rush.

That’s about it for this installment.  Working out for Wyoming (there’s a long way to go physically) and just trying to keep cool in this oppressive heat.  Reid, the offer of a ticket to CLT still stands, and Ellen, watch for news about a trip up to see your swanky new kitchen.  The pix of the gutted interior are cool, but for your sake I hope the contractors get a move on so you don’t have to live in a pile of dust and debris all summer.  An end-of-June timetable seems nice.  I hope they can live up to those terms.

“No letter?”…

The string of letters was broken last week for the first time in I don’t know how long.  A long, long time.  It was chalked up to equipment malfunction but it was probably closer to ‘operator error’ in that I moved my office to the house and I couldn’t quite figure out the new printer.  But that’s been cleared up and the presses are rolling again.  Ellen was first to pick up on the lull in mailbox activity with a quick text “No letter?” so I guess there is some assurance that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

The lapse gave me some time to think about the unfolding details of a new development for Felicia.  The kids have both known about her melanoma for a week or so, but the details and scope of the issue weren’t yet fully known.  They are now and we’re ready to move ahead.

—————–

June 1, 2011

Ellen/Reid: I’m up on the third floor of the townhome this morning, typing away in my new home office.  Although it is in theory an ‘office’, your grandmother’s old twin bed is nearby and I have to fight the urge to lie down for a moment to rest my eyes.  I’m officially a MyWorker.  That’s bank parlance for someone who works from home or a satellite office.  I’ll work from home three days a week and make the reasonable drive to one of the outlying offices the other two days.  There’s only one other person in town who is on my ‘team’ and I’ll see her often enough.  There was no earthly reason for me to drive the half hour each way, plus the parking space and other expenses.  As it turns out, I actually start the day much earlier – about 6:30 – than I might otherwise.  A guy could get used to working in shorts and a t-shirt.  I wasn’t able to write last week because the printer was on the fritz.  The string of letters was broken by a technical malfunction, to quote Janet Jackson.  You probably didn’t miss much.

Today Felicia goes to her surgeon to find out what must be done to eradicate the melanoma which is on her left calf.  It was discovered a few weeks ago during a routine examination, and it was determined to not be very deep (which is how they measure those things) and that is a good thing.  She’s an outdoors person but had also frequented tanning booths (which she stopped going to last year) but the damage was done.  She’s shown the patience of Job in not riding her doctors to get her taken care of sooner.  That the disease had not shown signs of progression probably influenced their decision to make her wait for a few weeks, but it would’ve driven me totally nuts.  We’re not sure when the surgery is scheduled – we will find out today – and they will likely carve out a chunk of her leg to make sure the beast is eliminated.  I’ll be with her when she goes through that, just as she was with me in February.  She’s been a trouper through all of this.  It reminds me of your uncle’s situation, which is going on 10 years now in terms of a clean bill of health.  He had a significant melanoma taken off of his left arm, and even now he goes through an examination every three months just to keep on top of things.  I can’t recall if he underwent any chemo or radiation but the lesson here is that you guys ought to make sure a regular dermatology exam is on your medical radar screens.  I say that at the very moment my face is peeling from broiling in the sun this past weekend on the golf course and the bike even though sunscreen was applied and re-applied.  There’s probably more to protection than wearing hats and lotions.  Since this runs in the family, please make sure you get checked out at least once a year.  That’s why you have insurance.

Had a brief scare last week on my situation that had me hustle back into the doctor’s office for a few hours but all is well.  Just part of the healing process, so there’s not much else to report on that score.

Not much new on your grandmother’s situation.  Still in Wood River, still getting by.  Her health seems to have evened out as of late although it appears she will make the move to a Veteran’s Administration facility because it’s simply less expensive.

My workouts to get ready for the Bridger have started.  After a couple of minutes on the elliptical machine, it became very clear that whatever was gained over the years has been completely lost.  It means essentially starting over from scratch, but there are about 7 weeks for me to try to regain some level of fitness.  We arrive in Jackson Hole on Thursday, July 21 and head back to Charlotte on July 28^th, if memory serves me correctly.  Lots of planning to get down before the trip goes down.

Okay, guys, have a good start to your summers, stay in touch (that means you, Reid) and wear your sunscreen.  Hope to see you sooner than later.  Keep your Thanksgiving plans open.

Some good and some bad…

Felicia. She stood by me through thick and thin when she could have bolted just as quickly for the door.

All along the kids have seen virtually everything that has gone on in my new life in North Carolina.  As they’ve seen and been told, and in many cases you, too, my nearly five years here have had roughly equal shares of some good and some bad, although I think the good has nosed ahead of the bad as of late by a comfortable margin.

Last week’s letter is a recent example of how the good has extended its lead.  It is all part of simply picking up the pieces and moving on.  It is as we all do.  We all have a past but hopefully a future, too.  Ellen and Reid have had bits and pieces of the new situation sent their way but this is their first inside look at the larger picture.  As I have fumbled my way down this road, it’s been quite a path of trial and much error to reach this juncture, but here I am.

——————–

April 4, 2011

Ellen/Reid: By the time you have opened this letter, we will know of Butler’s Monday night fate.  I’ve wondered, aloud sometimes, how they’ve managed to get this far, but they have slain their share of Goliaths along the way, and what’s one more in UConn?  I may be AWOL on the telecast because I’m just too nervous to watch.

Well, it’s about time you guys got to know a little more about Felicia.  You’ve been on the periphery about this for some time – an allusion here, another allusion there.

She’s a North Carolina girl, from Shelby, which is about 50 miles west of Charlotte just north of I-85.  About the size of Ames, I would guess.  But she’s lived in CLT for quite some time, and has two kids just about your ages (Suefan, 26) and Kenneth (23).  Felicia is a nurse by training (RN) and she works in the specialized psych unit of the big local hospital system.  I don’t see how she does it, working with people who just stepped out of an alien spacecraft or see themselves as Napoleon incarnate.  And those are just the easy-to-handle cases.  In some ways it’s fitting that she works with nut cases because that makes it a little easier for her to deal with the likes of me.

We’ve been together on and off for almost three years, and virtually all of the past 20 months.  I’ve got 10 years on her, and whenever she mentions how hard it is to grow old, she gets the evil eye.  She’s very fit and health conscious, none of which has rubbed off on me, and we spend a lot of time together, at least on the weekends.  To her credit, she’s not a golfer, yet, and the thing that she really enjoys is just sitting on the back of the bike.  I wouldn’t be riding nearly as much if she wasn’t taking up the back seat.  We’ve been all over the place on jaunts of 150 – 500 miles at a crack.  Last year I’d guess we put 7,500 miles on the rig.

I have to hand it to her in that she’s quite low maintenance (knock on wood), and although she’s been known to have a short fuse, she rarely exercises her right to complain about my bone headedness or other guy faults.  Thank goodness she doesn’t pay per text message because if she did, she’d be bankrupt.  I’ve never seen anyway who texts more than she does.  If she could text me during dinner, she would.  She’s very attractive, and I am amazed at her staying power when it comes to sticking around.  In the past nine months, she’s had every reason to jump ship but has been with me every step of your grandfather’s situation, my job hurdles last summer, and most recently this bladder thing.  She could’ve bolted for greener male pastures but didn’t, and for that I am very grateful.

Even more amazing is how she has done all that in the face of what she has going on in her own life.  Her daughter lives in Baltimore with her boyfriend and that’s all well and good, but it is her son, Kenneth, who is in Asheville fighting his own set of demons which have afflicted him since he was a teenager.  It causes Felicia no end of worry and heartache, and keeps her on high alert almost every day.  Since I’ve known her, it’s almost like clockwork for him: four good months then wham, some period of time when he’s fallen off the ledge.  He’s been hospitalized and has frequented institutions, and she still has the motherly support for him.  Neither of us is certain how it ultimately will play out, but it absorbs a lot of her waking time and mental stores.  I worry for her, and for him, but it is just how life continues to unfold.

But I wanted you to know at least some of the details because it would be accurate to call her my significant other.  She’s stuck with me through thick and thin, and the least I can do is return the favor.  You’ll have your chance to meet her soon enough.

Invincibility takes a hit…

This has nothing to do with today's post, but I'll keep reminding Ellen and Reid they need to take an interest in the natural world. My new blue bird house - unoccupied as of yet - is one such reminder.

There must come a point in everyone’s life when the notion of invincibility takes a hit, when mortality takes on personal meaning.  For me, that point is right now.  Not to be morbid about it, but it does give one pause.

Someone suggested if now was the time to let Ellen and Reid in on the the reality of being a post-middle age dad.  It is a fair assumption that kids tend to see their parents as forever beings.  I did, but as we all know the outcome is not a matter of if, but when.

So today’s letter you will see next week might be something of an intro to a larger conversation between the three of us.  We can’t run from the future but only toward it, and we might as well recognize there are indisputable facts of life in motion for all of us.  I don’t see this, however, as some omnipresent dark cloud over the letters; in fact it will be far from it.  It is just simple recognition that it is just the way things are.

—————–

February 14, 2011

Ellen/Reid: They say every day above ground is a good one and I am now a true believer.  What a hell of a birthday.  One moment I’m working out in the gym and feeling good and three hours later I’m in a hospital gown with a catheter shoved up my you-know-what.

I’m not sore at all but am really just out of gas. Haven’t dipped into the pain meds they gave me. Tried to work at the kitchen table but ran out of steam.  I’ll get back to it in pretty short order.

All things considered, I’m really lucky.  By sheer luck, I was the only patient in the normally packed urologist’s office because he was doing surgery.  So I got instantly into a room, and again by sheer luck, he was just returning to the office.  Once he saw my urine sample, he and his staff pulled out all the stops.  They quickly put in the catheter and in an incredible sign of how urgent this was, he personally drove me the few blocks to the hospital.  He described the possibilities for the source(s) of the bleeding, and the outcomes if it went unchecked, in terms that just stunned me.  I wasn’t so much scared as just wondering ‘what the hell is going on here?’  His staff had already admitted me on an emergency basis and I went straight to the urology floor where they started to irrigate my bladder with what’s called a Murphy drip.  They were trying to flush the blood or clots out, and that was what they did for the next 54 hours or so.  It was sheer torture.  If the path of exit was impeded by clots, which it was frequently, the saline solution would accumulate in my bladder and make my stomach puff up.  The nurses couldn’t respond quick enough to my pleas for relief, so it was up to me to relieve myself as best I could.  You’ll be spared those details but it was awful.  It was really good to have Felicia there because she understood the medical lingo (she’s a nurse) and was able to goad the nurses into action.  She was there almost every minute.  I was really glad to get your persistent text messages.

The surgery depended on the doctor’s schedule.  That was the worst part, waiting for him to go inside to explore the source of the bleeding, given his blunt predictions of the source.  There was one good bit of news in that the CT scan didn’t show any overt tumors or cancers.  In a nutshell, my bladder had worked overtime for some time to unsuccessfully, and fully, drain itself, in part impeded by an uncooperative prostate.  This in turn put pressure on the bladder walls and adjoining kidneys.  But it was the bleeding that had to be stopped and since the bladder was filled with blood it obstructed the view of the source which could have been anything.

The surgery was supposed to be Thursday mid-morning but it didn’t go down until the afternoon.  He went into the bladder, removed the clots, and then he proceeded to “roto root,” or resection, my prostate to create an easier path for the urethra to drain the bladder.  He said he talked to me in recovery but I don’t remember a thing after telling the anesthesiologist “I can feel it working…”  In the space of his 120 second visit Friday morning, he said he reserved the right to go back in to the bladder if things didn’t clear up to the degree he liked.

But I’m home now and still feeling okay.  Felicia played nursemaid the entire weekend.  I’m up and around a little bit, checking in on e-mails at work, trying to be marginally productive.  It’s weird in that I can go from a workout to being told no exertion for six to eight weeks.  No golf (no biggie) and no bike riding (biggie).  But I’m damned lucky in a lot of ways, and like they say about soldiers in the midst of war, even atheists find God in a foxhole.  He and I had our share of short conversations.  No doubt there will be a few more to come.

Falling upward…

 

My friend Bob sent this photo of my letter to him, plus the $1 I grudgingly owed him for a lost bet.

 

It has been some time – a few months anyway – since I’ve written a letter to only one of the kids.

Now is the time for another.

Reid has done a better than admirable job at his gigantic ad agency in Chicago.  The advertising game is a harsh what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business.  He has persevered after his primary account was lost to a competitor.  He made himself valuable with his attitude and his intellect.  The account went down but he fell upward.  And that is a great thing.  This week he got a raise and a shift to other big accounts.  Maybe he didn’t get all he was after, but I am very proud of his stick-to-itiveness.  This is a kid who, early in his agency career, got axed along with a slew of line staff at another shop.  At a tender age he became a graduate, with honors, of the school of hard knocks.

I’m not sure when the letter to him will ultimately surface on this page.  I will ask but that will be his call.  Yet that is the prerogative of dads and moms: tell their children when they have done something that is good and, secondarily, pleases their parents.  That is the gist of the note to Reid.

—————-

Bridger Wilderness update: Hey, I’m up to one companion for the July, 2011 trip.  My cousin Tom Andersen from Oregon, is on board.  Bring it on, Tom.  Hey, there’s room for plenty more wanderers.

—————–

But it’s Wednesday, and we’ll reach a bit further into my bag of tricks for an older letter to the twosome.

July 9, 2007

Reid/Ellen: As weekends go on the old 1-10 scale, I’d have to give this one a 3.  This is Murphy’s Law as relates to weekends: whatever could go wrong did go wrong.  And once it goes wrong, it really never gets right.

It started when I took the hog in for its 30,000 service — 30,000 miles, can you believe it? – and since the Harley dealership (i.e. crooks) didn’t have loaner bikes, I rented a Dyna Wide Glide for the day at an alleged steep discount.  Anyway, the bike didn’t have a windshield, so it was nice to feel the wind, and bugs, in my face for a change.  I went home and laid around then thought ‘what the heck, I might as well get out and ride’.  So I went northeast of town to Lowe’s Motor Speedway, an absolutely enormous venue that can sit 200,000 for stockcar (i.e. NASCAR) races.

On the way back, it clouded up, and before I knew what hit me, the rain was coming down sideways.  If you’ve never been on a bike in the rain without a windshield, the best way to explain it is that raindrops feel like needles.  In the space of :30, my face was utterly exfoliated.  It was raining unbelievably hard, and by the time I got to shelter under the first Interstate bridge, I was completely soaked.  But it was very hot, in the mid-90s, although the shower cooled it down a fair amount.  Seems we had a microburst which shoved down trees and powerlines all over the city, and by the time I got back to the Harley dealership (i.e. crooks) I’d navigated through standing water and was mud from head to toe because of all the traffic ahead of my kicking up dirt and debris.  And if it’s not enough to catch raindrops, try some sand and stones at 70 mph.  That gets your attention.  Now I’ve been in rain before and really don’t mind it, but this was incredible.

And that was the high point of entire two days.  Against my better judgment, played golf yesterday, and it was more of the same you’ve heard me whine so often about: bad, bad, bad.  Shank, shank, shank.  It’s sickening.  Reid, I may give you my clubs when you and Rachel are down here.  I stink.

Am supposed — supposed — to go in today for a skin treatment called Levalan.  It’s where the dermatologist slathers your face in some gunk and, as he says, you sit in the lobby for an hour or so to “let the marinade work” (his words), then you sit under some blue light for 90 minutes.  It turns your skin bright red — they say absolutely no post-treatment sunlight for 48-72 hours — and in theory it’s supposed to rid your skin of pre-cancerous cells.  I’ve had what they call squamas cell carcinomas taken off in recent weeks and this is supposed to do the trick.  But when he uses words like marinade and sort of laughs off the treatment, it makes you wonder.  So, I’m getting a second opinion in the very near future.

Did bake some round Italian loaves Friday night and dropped them off to some folks around the office on Saturday morning before the deluge.  I dunno, Reid, these loaves are good but my gosh, it’s a three-riser and takes roughly 5 hours from start to finish and didn’t take things out of the oven until 11:30.  Hardly worth it.  But damn, it makes good toast.

Okay, here’s the skinny on Grandma’s birthday.  Uncle Ralph has made arrangements for photos on Friday at 2:00.  I don’t know why he didn’t get this figured out for Saturday, but that’s the way things are.  Can you guys make that?  If you need plane tickets, go ahead and make ‘em.   FYI…with Joe’s wedding in January, it seems plane tickets may be $1,100 according to Ralphie.  That may change our plans a bit.  Let’s reconsider making that trip.

Be good, be safe, have fun.

The stuff of letters…

Dad and his MGD.

——————————–

The kiss

—————————–

This week in Omaha has been close to an out-of-body experience.  Is this really happening?

I’m afraid it is.  The old boy deserves one more tip of the hat because in his readiness, he has prepared the rest of us.

To the degree he can tolerate the discussion – sandwiched around plenty of nap breaks – my dad and I have talked candidly and at length about family, his life-shaping WW II experience as a 20-year-old bombardier, my mother’s health predicament, and, of course, the conclusion to his own health situation.  We have mapped out the fine points to his service, he’s chosen pallbearers and opined on key points for his obituary.  He gave a gentle nod to a tasteful display of his war photo and a few medals, some of which were discovered buried in a drawer in my mother’s bureau – as we moved her this week to a memory unit.

All of this is the stuff of letters.  Reid, bless his heart, is particularly taken aback by the goings on.  He is near-insistent that what I have gleaned become at some point an official part of the Bradley lore.  I aim to do just that.  Much of the precious information will be transferred via letters for some time to come.

I know of no better way to give the kids an honest representation of their grandfather’s life and times.  Some of it is already known to me; yet a new trove of family history – some of it somewhat troubling – has bubbled to the surface.  We had some dear, dear relatives travel great distances to pay their respects and much of the bedside talk turned on still more family points worth saving – and sharing.  Really, we do it now or it is lost.  It won’t be lost if I have anything to say about it.

———————

I wrote to my father early this morning, the result of which was mailed to him today at his new address.  My hope is he reads it to mom when he visits her in the memory-assistance wing.

June 11, 2010

Mom and dad: Of all the ways anyone can spend all their weeks, this week was the way I would spend it.  This was everything I’d hope the time with you would be.  Short of a different outcome, I would not have changed a thing.

It seems to me the one thing that is coming out of all of this is that we are remaining a family to the very end.  Reid pointed out to me that lots of families have fractious relationships that, for one reason or another, are beyond repair and that we at least have the good sense to tell each other we love each other – and we can actually mean it.

Unbeknownst to either of you, I snuck in a few camera phone shots of you two lovebirds smooching and sent them ASAP to all the grandkids.  So in an instant they had the latest and greatest images from L________.

Dad, I told Ellen and Reid and Joe of your attitude (and I’ll do the same when I talk to Andy), and it really struck home with those three.  They all love both of you dearly.  You probably are not aware of this, but as they’ve gotten older, they seem to hold you in that much more esteem.  Ellen said that her generation would wear their pain on the sleeve much more than you let on.  We were trying to figure out why that was, and the only thing we could attribute it to was you guys simply came from a tough generation that saw a Depression and a Great War.  The rest of us are way too soft.  If only we could exhibit the strength both of you are showing right now.

Dad, you have been the best of dads.  Without exaggeration, if your other son and I could be half the man, and father, you turned out to be, well, it would be a pinnacle.  That hill is a little steep for us to climb so we’ll each have to get by on a small percentage of the lessons you pass on to us.  It bothers me that only now do I think of all those times I didn’t pay attention to what you did and how you did it and why you did it.  The same goes for your other son.  Why the hell didn’t we have the brains to realize what was there before us in front of our eyes?

But that’s what made this week so great.  We simply had the chance to talk and be.  Your stories about the Bradleys and the Andersens and the Allingtons and the Ramseys and the Yanceys are what none of us knew.  (Honestly, Reid hung on every word when I relayed what was archived in pages of notes.  He’s becoming something of a family history buff.)

What goes on from here is anyone’s guess.  We’ll leave it in the trusting hands of a higher power.  That is pretty comforting to know.  We’ve had our share of good times for a long time now, but what went on this week surpasses what has gone on before.  It may sound a little odd at this juncture, but in some ways this week was the best of times.  Like you said, what else are we going to do about it?  You both have paved a road that my brother and I will be only too glad to follow, even if we can’t fill your footprints, if you know what I mean.