Jul. 11, 2007 - 22:13 MDT

SORTING THINGS OUT

Life seems to go on nowadays in its own hum-drumming way. Chores and errands and the like, visits to the clinic to see doctor and pick up prescriptions. Interspersed with get togethers with our Denver family.

Here now is a bit of history to more or less give an idea of where I am coming from.

I was an only child, who was alone at home after school from about second grade on. Mom and Dad both worked, and had to in order to keep things going for us. I had two cousins near my age who lived way across town. Seeing them was an occasional thing. Much enjoyed but for much too short a time. I was not allowed to have friends in after school, in fact Mom and Dad wanted it to be a secret that I was home alone �til they got off work. I can see their reasoning, but it was hard to live with as a kid. I begged for a brother or sister, hopefully both. I was never told why, but it was not to be. Then I met Heather, began to go with her. Met her family and was immediately drawn to her young brother. He was in high school and was the ideal of what I had wanted to be at that age. Don and I became friends, whacking golf balls off across the vacant lots and having deep conversations. He was a good mechanic, took very good care of the car he bought from his brother who went into the navy just before I met Heather.

Don�s Dad built a room in the basement to use as a study place. Often I would sit with him, reading one or another of his textbooks, or perusing one of the papers he was writing. Little conversation, but I think both of us were happy.

Heather and I married and visited her Mom and Dad quite often, a goodly part of the time I would be downstairs with Don while Heather would visit with her Mom upstairs. When we married the whole family took me in as one of them, which was glorious for me, being a member of a big family like I always wanted to be.

It went like that, while he attended college, then he went to work for a steel company in Utah, met a girl there and they married and started a family much as Heather and I ourselves did. Visits from them came when they could visit and we got to see their kids grow as they saw ours. Heather and our family lived in Florida for ten years and did not get to see them then.

In recent times he would visit us on his way to see one or another of his kids, one in Tampa, Florida, one in Sequim, Washington, his stops in later years were with Heather and I, because we were the only ones left. Then they became more frequent, he would come to funerals of our loved family members, and recently to the funerals of his schoolmates.

Heather, our son, and I had a wonderful time at his property near Duchesne, Utah last summer out in the boonies where one could look out the window at night, count the stars and hear wild animals going about their nightly business.

That will give an idea of the brother I never had �til I met him.

This morning one of his daughters called Heather and said that Don was in hospital with a mass on his brain and they would let us know more as they found out more. This evening the other daughter called and said he was lucid, but was drifting in and out and would have surgery tomorrow and they would let us know how things were going then.

Today both of us did little but trying to keep each others courage up, fiddling with stuff trying to do something to little avail. Neither one of us is near over our younger son�s death from cancer three years ago. It seem as insult of fate for loved ones younger than us to be taken. We have seniority and wish to leave this earth with happy and healthy younger loved ones, but it doesn�t work that way for any of us I guess.

If I knew what to fight, I would fight tooth and nail to keep him with us for yet a while longer. We do hope the surgery will be a success and he returns to health.

This entry if probably the most I have accomplished today, this lugubrious process of SORTING THINGS OUT . . . . . . . . . . . .

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