222) Memories of Michigan

February 26, 2008
Tuesday

El Milagro: I arrive here on time again, driving directly from renting a car at Enterprise for a quick trip to Victoria tomorrow to do a workshop on Ethical Conversations with Youth. Another Pontiac... this time it’s a new G-6. I might note here that one of the perks of traveling around the state doing workshops is renting new cars to cruise in.

I weigh in today at 78.9… a little high, but makes sense after going 4 days without dialysis… wow… you know, I have never in the last 22 months gone for four days without getting dialyzed! Noting that in my brain of brains throughout the day today, I note that I don’t really feel any different, so 4 days is not enough, I guess, to begin to feel bad. It is enough to pull the weight up a bit… and I am glad that I don’t actually feel the four days…

I walk into the big room and wander around looking for my chair… and realize that it isn’t ready yet… Carol the Tech points over at a chair filled with a body that is holding their punctures, waiting to get taped up… and I realize I have some time to wait… but then Kim the Nurse calls out to one of the tech trainees to set me up in an empty chair across the way… and voilá, I have a chair. So, they set me up and that takes about 15 minutes for the machine to get to know the dialyzer [time for the machine to run its components tests and then rinse the dialyzer before they hook me up. This is still a better deal than waiting for the other chair.

So, I am sitting here pondering the trip to Michigan while waiting to get hooked up. This trip introduced my new family to my old family… and I am always surprised at the immediate feelings of closeness I feel to relatives like my cousins, Susan and Elaine. I hadn’t seen them since my mom’s memorial service in Lawrence about 16 years ago. Susan, especially, and I were close as young children and that familiarity, I hallucinate, is still there and when I first saw her in the community room of the Congregational Church in Bangor, it was like no time had passed since the last time. The memorial service was an opportunity for Shayna to observe the rituals and hear the liturgy of a Christian service. Also, Shayna commented on how many relatives I have in Michigan and I laughed and explained to her that most of these people were friends of my Aunt Marilyn, not relatives… and I pointed out the actual relatives I could pick out of the group. Shayna was still impressed with the amount of people. She was also impressed with all the snow, since she has never been in snow… so, of course, we had to find a field for her and Liz to run and play in. Finally, we went out to my mom’s family’s (now my Cousin Susan’s) cottage which had been the center of my summers as a child, and was featured in the memorial service as a favorite memory of each generation of the family. It was fitting that the whole scene was covered with the whiteness of snow and cold… it somehow leant a sense of purity to the experience. I was very glad I decided to make the trip, and now sit back in the comfort of that choice and the memories it gives me.

Onward through the snow.

Notes: In at 78.9 and out at 74.9 Kgs.
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