Revisiting An Old Hotel and Other Relationships in Everyday Ramblings

Okay. I just haven’t had time to set things up on Easy Diary. I admit it. What with work and teaching and getting ready to go to Seattle next weekend to both see and hang out with my older sister and to watch Miss E. in a very important dance recital and taking care of Sam and catching up on what didn’t get done last weekend and…

Oldest sister’s surgery is scheduled for 2 ½ weeks from now. It is a big major deal. She is still getting the IV total nutrition everyday, which basically means she doesn’t eat much at all. They want her to eat so that her system remembers how to function but it gets all complicated. The difficult news is that she, like millions of folks these days will have a colostomy bag for the rest of her life after the surgery. Sigh.

But things will get better. She will have a quality of life that is pretty unimaginable now in the dark days of recovery from the chemo and radiation. She also has lung disease that needs to be addressed but these are chronic issues, and once through the surgery not life threatening ones.

It has been so challenging up in Seattle that Miss E. has been staying with friends and hanging out at Starbucks and spending time at their community garden and rehearsing madly for this big performance with the group that did the absolutely magical dance performance outside at Gas Works park a few years back. These last few years they have been doing these across the lake in Microsoft land.

So I am taking the train up by myself and staying in a hotel a few blocks from their place that we stayed in as kids. This remarkable time we had as kids, I was five, had the measles and couldn’t fly so stayed in the house we were leaving with my mother while everyone else flew to Seattle on one of the first ever Boeing 727s from L.A. The stories everybody tells of their stay in this gracious enchanted old hotel…

Sammy is sitting on my lap while I type this. We are just coming out of record- breaking heat into a more normal rainy period. I admit it was nice to wear sandals again but I am ready for the rain. It will nourish all the beautiful new leaves.

My relationship, such as it is, with Mr. Fine China had digressed to the point where I put a post on Facebook and he “likes” it. I need something, umm, a little more robust than that. I did walk by a poet I used to have a crush on today on the Eastbank Esplanade.

He didn’t recognize me. I just smiled. He was talking to himself.