I leave home hours before dawn each day, and even though I say goodbye to Diane, there never is a response. This morning there was. She wanted an icepack for her neck.
By the time I returned upstairs, she needed to use the bathroom, a major undertaking these days, even though I can touch the doorway from my side of the bed.
Lately she has forsaken climbing from the bed on her side, walking around the end while touching the surface of it with her fingertips for balance.
In the midst of a bumpy night, she slowly crawled to my side, slipped on her clogs, the better for traction, and gripped me as she leaned into the bathroom, promptly reaching for the sink’s edge to keep her upright.
Looking Back
While taking my daily constitutional this morning, I was thinking back on some good times we have enjoyed.
Ten and twelve years ago we would attend two or three nursing/medical conferences every spring and summer for the education of my wife, the nurse practitioner.
We went to San Diego for a weekend ten years ago. Leaving home on a Thursday evening, we had dinner at a favorite restaurant just off the 405, barely into Orange County.
The Holiday Inn on the edge of San Diego was our destination, and we arrived at 10:30 on a spring evening. Next day while Diane was engaged in the conference, I cleared ample time for my favorite pastime, reading, this time the best biography of the brilliant Baltimore journalist/critic H.L. Mencken and his wife, by a woman who knew them both.
We pledged to return on another weekend for a Dodger-San Diego series. We never did. Now we cannot.
We came home early Sunday afternoon to the music of John Legend’s first hit and to play-by-play of a Dodger game against Atlanta.
This Is What Endures
Soothing, sentimental, pleasant – these are the sweet memories I study and cradle in the mornings when the sun has not yet risen, streets are soundless and no one will distract me from what is most precious in waning days.
