JUST STUFF

I have so much to write about.  My son, daughter in law and four of my grandchildren have been her and during their visit, I managed to get three of my other children together and we all went to the Atlanta Aquarium, the Civil War museum and cyclorama, and generally had a wonderful time in Atlanta.  The grandson’s mowed lawn, and helped with a lot physical things around the house (actually the grand-daughters did a lot of that too.) and they have only been gone for a day and a half and I miss them terribly. 

Actually their father came late  and stayed over and is still here and he made a wonderful contribution to the completion of my sculpture and puppet studio that has been half built since my oldest son (who did the initial construction ) fell ill, gravely ill, and was not able to complete it.  Today is my seventy fifth birthday (now you know how much more than three score and ten I am) and I am a happy man.  Being seventy five is a pain in the neck, and the back, and the hands, and it is so irritating to be unable to remember or do so many of the things that were almost second nature to me as a playwright, play director, scene designer and occasional house remodeler (When we moved into our present house, one of the primary criteria my wife demanded was that there couldn’t be any walls that could logically torn out—that from the lady who demanded the wall removal in our last two houses.)  When your children take up the slack, remind you how to do things and generally make one able to accomplish things, it is a little distracting but enormously joyful in the end.  My studio is progressing to the stage that I will be able to add some pictures soon.  (If I added all the pictures that I would like to add from the last six months, I would have a long photo essay and not much else.  I lost my camera (and four or five gigabytes of pictures of our trip to Alaska) but other cameras took up some of the slack.

On another note, I watched President Obama’s news conference, analyzed the reasoning and the data therein and am really very frightened of the potential effect on Janet and myself as we grow older an more frail (and single income pensioners).  On the other hand, I watch my  oldest son, who is virtually penniless because he can’t work, struggle through a serious liver ailment, going to doctors he can’t pay (though he has some hope of disability) losing over a hundred pounds and becoming a shadow of himself, and part of me would like to have some form of socialized medicine.  I think we are in a very frightening period for our nation.  (I, at least, wish a real stimulus package had been passed and our economy would get on a stable foundation before we found so many ways to create new deficits.   (It occurred to me that if a billion dollars of the “stimulus package” had been invested in standard commercial health plans for the “forty six million” who don’t have health insurance, the main incentive for this whole thing would have been eliminated and the money would be doing some good—for a change) 

Oh well, what will be, will be, I’m afraid.   I still had a wonderful birthday and the days leading up to it.