Missives

• When people have been in the US long enough to have lost most of their accent it comes back if you get them laughing and and on a roll conversationally. I talked to a lady the other day from Ireland who has been here for nearly 40 years but, you would never know when you first meet her she hadn't lived here all her life. By the time we parted ways she sounded like a Leprechaun.



• As a hospice nurse I've been the only person present at the time of too many peoples deaths. No family, no friends.



• My last patient had only a velour pantsuit, a paperback Bible and a picture of a long forgotten family to her name at the time of her death. Seemed sad but, really it wouldn't have made a difference if the closet to that dingy inner city nursing home she died in was full of gold bars. She's dead.


• I had French Onion soup for breakfast. It's funny to me how it has become associated with tony, high class foods. Nothing I think would scream peasant to people a couple of hundred years ago like eating onion soup.


• It's a boiled onion.


• Freedom soup?


• My 17 month old said,"Thanks" when I handed him a breakfast bar this morning.


• Had dinner at a place last night for probably the 100th time. It was the first time though I realized the name translates into Two Big Peppers in English.


• My childrens great grandfather had a stroke recently. God, it was sad to see him that way. He was a Navy Diver during WWII and just always the epitome of tough and vibrant throughout his life. At age 75 I remember him cutting his thumb severely when installing a window while remodeling his house. His wife fussed at him to go to the hospital and get it sewed up- it was pretty bad. His response? "If I go to the hospital and let them put stitches in this thing it will be sore for a week and I'll never get finished with this project!" He wrapped it in electrical tape and drove on.


• Does it matter at all how people remember us?


• Is that the only thing that matters?