Saturday, December 13, 2014

Brand New Toy

I was off yesterday for some medical tests in the wake of my visit two weeks ago to the Emergency Room. I started lurching when walking and slurring my speech, or was it vice versa?- and Sigrid insisted that we go to the hospital literally around the corner and down the street from the house and that's how we spent a Friday evening.

I'm smiling as I typed that because when I was looking for someplace for us to live when I headed over here first from Germany I was really concerned that the house be near a school. I found such a place and the kids attended the William Buckingham School, though they went by bus because everyone in America goes to school in a bus unless they can afford a limo.

Years after they graduated, decades more like it, the Board of Education closed the school (lack of kids) and tore it down. Now the same house, with our children no longer children, is close to the hospital which was there all along but that we didn't when the children were growing up. Go figure.

I've had these episodes before and the situation is always the same. I have a little harder time finding a word, spelling it correctly or remembering a sequence or even placing a name and a face together, especially when I tire. A lot of it, I suspect, is a product of getting old and a lot more of it (I fear) is the product of really bad choices made while in the process of trying to get old.

What can I say? Don't do as I have done. Except a lot of it was fun as near as I can remember and what's the point of the exercise if you don't get to enjoy yourself along the way. Speaking of which, I did enjoy an otherwise brisk afternoon later in Norwich watching the clouds thicken overhead as the meteorological stew required to generate cascades of snow as winter officially approaches bubbled and boiled.


Sigrid got me a toy for the cell phone camera and it provided me with hours of challenges in getting it to work and seconds of pleasure admiring the fruits of that labor. And it got me out of her hair for an afternoon as she continues to Christmas the house. Es Weinachtet sehr.
-bill kenny

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