Ann left me a blank check on her dining room table with a note: “Michael, tell me if the remainder of the bill is over a thousand dollars and I’ll transfer money to cover it.†When she asked if I would work for her mother in Cambridge I said, “Sure.†Teresa is short, dark, with […]
Florence slipped in the bathroom Friday night and now has a non-displaced stress fracture of her greater trochanter. Call it a hip fracture that won’t require surgery. Flo sat (laid, squirmed, shifted) in the emergency room from 11 AM until 8 PM when a room finally became available. That kind of torture would break a […]
Kitchen Duty My brother Brian and Diane. My apologies to anyone whose comments I accidentally erased. The blog receives an eviland vicious amount of spam from online poker sites, body part enhancers and viagra makers, and in my hurry to delete the three hundred or so posts to the comment sections I obliterated a few […]
Bonnie Downing, Bill Connet, Beth and Ed (aka rakkity) Diane, Dan Downing and me. View larger image
Our return flight, in spite of Matrix-depriving sleep, felt flawless. Brian and I sat together across from Matt and Diane, and while I wasn’t reading The Big Bad Wolf (on loan from Matt) or napping, we talked about partitioning, scsi drives,Intelligent design (described in a Globe column this morning as “Creationism in sheep’s clothing.â€), the […]
“Have you ever had an MRI?’ I asked. “Yes.’ “That’s what this plane reminds me of.’ “Without the clanging.’ John was born in Queens, lives north of Boston, attended college in Virginia and married a girl from Jackson, Mississippi, which is where he was headed. He’d been to Mississippi many times, once to Oxford. I […]
We leave the house in twenty minutes at 4:20 AM with one stop to pick up my brother, Brian, in Cambridge, to catch a 6:30 flight to Evansville, Indiana. I hope to update the blog from afar, but who knows. In the meantime, here is a photo that will surely raise questions such as: why […]
This is a summary of a conversation we had last Saturday at our local coffee connection. It is long, it ës probably boring ñ it is what it is. I sent the nearly finished draft to busy Adam for edits. He helped with punctuation, dialogue, and he added an ending. He was reluctant to spend […]
Open Wide
Chris tells me she thought of both Diane and me when she read Love Song: I And Thou (below). I believe it mostly reminded her of me. Last night after reading the poem, I dreamed I built a second story addition onto my friend Rob’s ranch-style house. He lives in a three story Colonial, so […]
Days after Diane’s hawk sighting she fell ill (is that better than she got sick?). Real ill/sick. Two eye infections and bronchitis that raised her core to about 103. She continued working until long after raspy whispers replaced her voice. I accompanied her to her doctor’s appointment at Acton Medical, which was the day before […]
At 1 p.m. a woman called the police to report a disagreement she had had in the parking lot of Roche Bros. Supermarket. The caller reported that after she accidentally hit a parked car with the door of her car, the owner of the car yelled at her and accused her of being a poor […]