Ages Old Draft Clean Up

• It was bound to happen sooner or later: a while back my 15 year old passed a pair of shoes he had outgrown down to me, wait would that be up?


• I love watches and if I had the means confidence is quite high I would own hundreds (at least).


• I gave my childrens great grandfather a nice-ish but, inexpensive pocket watch as a stocking stuffer one year. Twelve plus years later I saw it with his other pocket items on his night stand with evidence of wear (he even reported wearing the chain out and having to replace it).


• Nice feeling. I really didn't know he had appreciated it enough to use it that much and honestly, after I gave it to him don't know that it ever even crossed my mind after that.


• I miss him and my mother like no others in this world.
  

Priceless Doesn't

even begin to touch the objects in this picture. The pop gun belonged to my childrens Pop- their great grandfather. He got it for his fifth birthday. It was in a window display at a downtown  Bridgeport TX hardware store for months while he coveted it and his sainted mother saved pennies and nickels to buy it. The antlers belonged to the last deer he killed about 5 years before his own death at the age of 83.

Some people were supposed to live forever weren't they? I miss him like few who others who have departed this mortal coil.

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?