The Iliad

  "Thus held they funeral for Hector tamer of horses."

The last sentence in my 1922 edition of  The Iliad of Homer.
Kind of makes you want to read the whole thing, right?

Drowning in Downsizing

     I'm trying, I really am, to restore some order in my life. The first step is to organize.  In the past, even when I would decide to finally get rid of an accumulation of utility bills or old bank statements, I would first put them all in chronological order before disposing of them. I figured that was the least I could do for them after all the time we'd spent together.
    I knew it wouldn't be easy to sort through more significant items, for  example the ton or so of books that have been in my house throughout the various life stages.  We weren't provided the luxury of book-owning when we were children beyond a tattered old Bible, a Webster's dictionary, and an old  World War 1 book that had been my father's.
   The first books accumulated enmasse were my college texts, and then a number of books from my teaching days. At the time, teachers were gifted with free offerings for their personal collections from book companies hoping to convince the teachers to order their texts.  That was the procedure then: each teacher submitted  preferred selections of classroom textbooks. A teacher in my department retired to move to Arizona, and offered me free choice of books from her personal library, even handing me the key to her summer camp where her books were stored.  I remember carrying out only a dozen or so, because books are heavy and I didn't want to seem greedy, though her hundreds of books were to be donated or discarded anyway.
   Naturally, you can't organize books without leafing through them, as I am presently doing with "Recognition of Robert Frost." It was edited by Richard Thornton in honor of Frost's 25th Anniversary, copyright 1937.  It has slowed my would-be organizing down to less than a crawl.
   In the book is a torn in half sheet of paper with the following poem written in longhand, placed in the book some years later.  Discarded, but evidently saved as an afterthought:

                  The Obverse:  Waiting

     If reality exists, if all is a sum of parts,
     You spend hours, days, months
     Waiting for someone to come home,
     Endless hours spent thinking, knowing
     That your child is gone,
     And one brief moment of realizing that he is here.
     Years from now, when all the comings and goings
     Are in the past, history, deeds and days gone by,
     Yes, you have the memory of the joy of his presence,
     But also the truth  of anxious, empty moments
     Of dread, of fear, and the certainty
     That separation is forever.
     
     At the end, all is but memories anyway.
      "Remember the good times," is the cry,
     But how to select one memory over all the others?
     And, finally, did not what was dreaded come to be?
     Did you not lose first the body and then the spirit
     Of what was most precious?
    
    

The Web

This morning a spider was building a web across the handlebars of my exercise bike even as I was sitting on it.  I brewed a mixture of Borax and sugar.  That seems to work on ants, but spiders--I don't know.

Watch Out for the Eyes

  He called across the midway from one booth to a woman across from him and a distance down working another concession,  "Yes," he said, "I am one of those people whose eyes change color.  They're green, but turn brown like when I'm angry." His voice rising across the midway, he added, "And when I'm really angry, they turn red, blood red."  I hope the carnival is long out of town  before that happens.

Sorry, Brian,...

....but I think you're being a little bit of a wimp and more than a little self-indulgent.  In your interview, you're asked what was the first thing you remember when you woke up after your TKR.  You answer that it was the surgeon standing over you telling you all went well, and he's going to go tell your wife.  Some of us peons have yet to have a follow-up visit with our surgeon, and won't until 5 months have passed since surgery.  And you remark upon your constant, ongoing physical rehabilitation, innocent of the fact that some are strictly limited by financial guidelines. Your doctor, you state, wouldn't let you leave the hospital until you had 90 degrees of bend in your knee.  Really?  Your surgeon actually tracks that?   You say you're able to fight through the pain by reading of the tremendous suffering of true American heroes, and are buoyed up by the knowledge you don't have cancer, or MS or other debilitating disease.  You announce that recovery takes strong motivation and that you are very strongly motivated.  Does that sound a little like bragging to you?  But then, your interview is watched by millions of people who are interested in the experience of and the outcome of your surgery, and who of us can even come close to that milestone?
  ( And he still uses a cane.) Or, as he most likely calls it, "a stick."

Lost

 I like to say that, unlike others I know,  I always put things back after I use them.  However, I know this can't be completely true because I fed the cat this morning and now I can't find the catfood.  It's a bitch when you don't have anyone else to blame. 

Bugs ( and arachnids)

  I'm sitting on the chair in front of my house recuperating from  a rigorous and vigorous 15 minutes on my exercise bike.  A spider is building a web on the grill of my car.  I haven't driven it yet today, but I drove it yesterday.  The  spider is intent on making it his own.  No wonder they say that bugs will inherit the earth.   (Or is it the meek)
  Sometimes in the morning when I go  out to get the newspaper, I open the front door and walk face first right into a spiderweb laced from the shrub to the outside light.  They just can't wait to take over.  (I suppose that's why some people choose cremation.)