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Just keep swimming…

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 Just a little note this morning while I sip my coffee. As I appended the last entry to say, after a rather exciting, for many reasons, swim practice I spent an hour crafting a rather beautifully written blog about rolling with the changes and challenges life offers me. Just as I had finished a bit of copy-editing, there was a "blip" in Live Journal and I found myself back on my CHROME page. That didn’t worry me because LiveJournal has automatic draft capability. Except when I re-opened LiveJournal, it was gone. All of it disappeared into that place cyber stuff blips apparate. 

I looked squarely into the face of the laughing universe and said "Yes, I did mean it!" and went to bed, only momentarily flumoxed.

I work again today, although that is not usual, so will be going to swim again tonite and will blog again tomorrow. Continuing to eat,over all, my usual organic vegetarian, wheat-light clean diet of vegetables, rice, etc and find the more I expend my angst in exercise, the less food I crave. Although fatigue still requested some empty calories last night and I indulged it with one of the single serving Ben and Jerry American Dream single servings in the fridge and 1 cup of sesame/flax pita puffs.

 
Off to be a nurse again. Oh, have I mentioned again recently how grateful I am to be living all my childhood dreams finally? I love my job. And I promise tomorrow to attempt to recreate the two stories, one from recent experience and one from fourth grade but I can’t promise what philosophical direction they will turn now.
 
Namaste.

Postscript I did train tonight.
2 laps with the kickboard
5 pushoffs to half pool and swim back
3 full laps (one lap is 2 lengths and the pool is 25 meters long so 150 meters)
5 pushoffs (see above)
3laps
5 pushoffs
3 laps………….I am now not crabby at all but fully a jellyfish. Goodnight.

PPS: Close to four decades have passed, but June 13th is still one of the harder days in my year. It is the anniversary of my mother’s death. It was early morning. The clock radio had gone off and "Wildfire" was playing. My mom had been in the hospital for months. The day before I had cut out of school early and rode around in Wendy Bicknell’s car with her and Leslie Harmon smoking Virginia Slim menthols before getting dropped at the New London Hospital to visit my mom. My mother had spoken her last words to me weeks before and now I would just sit quiet and hold her bony hand, only that Thursday she moaned when I touched her and the nurse who came in said she couldn’t have anymore pain medicine, so after that I didn’t even touch her, I just sat, so she wouldn’t be alone. 

 
My father had quit coming. The cancer had taken all of my Mom but these last few shreds of tissue and bone. Her husband had left her in all but name, just before the cancer took the last of her memory. I was actually glad he stopped coming. See, my father had begun dating other women again months before my mom was even hospitalized. The last time before she died that my father visited her at the hospital he brought along the woman he meant to marry once he was free and forced me to come along as a chaperone so "no one", meaning my mothers nurses, would think badly of him.
 
Anyway, it was a Friday morning. Friday June 13th and Wildfire was playing on the radio and the phone rang, and I knew. I just knew. My father came into our room a few minutes later and said "Your mother is dead, Marlene is dead." And then he started to cry.
 
My mother was as thorough a mix of good and bad as any human can be. From her I learned how to knit, how to sew, how  to cook, how to clean and how to hide. Her last words to me were, "I’m so sorry. Someday my dear, you will understand, some people are just harder to love than others." In that, as well as so many other things I am like her. "Yes,mother, I do understand, I too have had harder time loving myself than just about anyone else."

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