Bring flowers, Rusty said. Plants. Daffodils are .99c at Trader Joe’s. Anything. Let’s make the chapel celebrate our risen Lord!

And so we did. And stood and sang the Hallellujah chorus. To life! 

There is someone I seldom see and whom I’d like to be better friends with, but where my hearing has gotten in the way as much as anything and we just haven’t made much of a connection.

She is a woman of faith but not of our particular flavor of it, although her husband is.

So I was surprised and delighted to find she’d been asked to give a Palm Sunday reading from scripture of the passion of the Christ to us. And she’d said yes.

She found herself stopping mid-verse a moment to wipe a tear quickly out of the way, and I think I did, too.

After the meeting she happened to be just on the other side of a door I was walking through. I stopped when I saw her, unable to find the right words to convey the power of what she’d offered us all, and simply said, Thank you, as we held each other’s eyes in our own.

Everything felt transformed right then and there for the better. She had no words, just joy, and finally gave a pat on my arm, nodding.

Love. It is all there truly is.

I checked their patient portal again and the radiologist still hasn’t entered anything.

On the other hand, neither did the phone ring today with anyone wanting to tell me bad news personally, so that’s good. See how patient I’m being?

And on a lighter note, Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post noted that Fox News had prayers for sale.

(Now, in my church, poems are wonderful but a prayer is a heartfelt conversation between you and God, not something you might recite out of a book, and the work of being an actual Christian is in putting oneself aside and trying to hear/feel/fathom/choose/enter verb of your choice/ the guidance of the actual Divine for the good that it leads to. But I digress.)

So with capitalism sponsoring religion, Petri offered up a few of her own, and I’ll borrow a few of her lines here because she is just so good at this:

Our Father Who –sponsored by 23&Me

Art in Heaven–sponsored by Etsy

(and then eventually you get to)

On earth as it is in heaven –sponsored by Boeing

and

Forgive us our debts –sponsored by, I don’t even have to tell you because you’re already laughing and E. Jean Carroll gets first dibs.

Yeah…

I always figure if a doctor is running late it’s because someone really needed their time and got it and I’m all for that.

Still, I teased her: I finished my knitting project. I’ve never done that before. I had to read my phone like normal people!

She chuckled.

You were out on maternity leave. Your little one must be–kindergarten?

She loved that I remembered: He’s in first grade.

So is one of my grandsons!

Okay, so with that bit of reconnecting after that long gap we sat down and talked bone densities.

I had been wondering why I needed to wait months for a new-patient visit when I hardly considered myself such, but in fact she spent an hour being very thorough, checking every possible med for possible interactions with my new meds since the last time I saw her, every trajectory on this osteoporosis history.

Turns out that what they’ve learned since I had Prolia infusions eleven years ago is that if you stop taking it the bones regress to where you were before you started. Oh. There was good reason to stop it at the time, but now it’s time to try something new, so we are.

I fell Sunday (fairly spectacularly, with multiple people running for me and half the crowded room suddenly frozen–I was not trying to be that good at it) and twice more last night. She was wondering if I remembered her saying to always try to catch yourself in a fall because hand bones heal much faster than hips and I told her, I remembered that and I was really good, I did exactly that! I broke my finger in two places the next day!

I didn’t need to be quite that compliant, like, this was not an encouragement to go throwing myself around.

I know…

Sudden side note to myself: now, while I’m thinking about it, I need to quick go figure out a new carry-around project and put it in my purse because it is out of knitting and there’s that mammogram in the morning.

Anybody else play Hellowordl to warm up for Wordl? Y’know, where there’s no once-a-day limit? Great word retrieval brain exercise.

I also find it a pun incubator. As in:

Equip: to send a joke to a comedian online.

But then you get to the real Wordl, and today’s bot helpfully suggested I could have chosen its word for my next guess.

It stumped me. That is the last place I expect to see a word I’ve never heard of. My heavy Merriam Webster on the floor was raising its hand excitedly, going, *I* know, *I* know!

Talus. (Flipflipflip.) Refers to where the slope of a hill suggests gold underneath. (What the hey, Wordl?) Current usage is more, the rock debris at the bottom of a cliff and especially a slope caused by such, and definition two, the bone that bears the weight of the body and with the other leg bone forms the ankle joint. Or just call it the entire ankle.

Wait. Seems to me if you’re talking anatomy, which seems a pretty specific and medical category, you don’t want to be throwing meanings at the wall to see where they stick or go splat.

(Equip. That one’s for you, Dad, I can hear you laughing up there from here.)

Well that was fast. Mammogram Thursday morning first thing. All I had to do was ask–and then show up then, of course.

One of the women in the carpool last night said something and I did a double take and went, Wait–did YOU have breast cancer, too?!

Yes, last year.

She told me how her doctor had told her she was officially old enough not to have to have mammograms anymore and her response had been, Why don’t we have one last one for old time’s sake. Which made me kind of laugh, because that isn’t a test one associates with fondness nor nostalgia.

But that is why they caught it quite early.

I thought she’d just been watching church by Zoom. I thought she’d just gotten a shorter haircut than usual. I had had no idea.

I’m going, I’m going!

My cellphone rang. I was in my knitting group Zoom and ignored it, noticing though that it went on and on. I finally silenced it–noticing a tenth of a second too late whose name was showing. The landline immediately rang. I picked it up and said, Hi, Phyl!

She was heading out to watch a women’s broadcast at the church the next town over and suddenly had the thought that she should offer me a ride since I don’t drive at night. I did a quick goodbye to my fellow Zoomies, who were almost done anyway, and waited for her car.

I realized only after the meeting had started that the less-local people had not thought to enable the captions on the video part of the meeting because why would they ever need to, nor was there a Zoom link for it. But they did have the sound turned way high.

Booming, echoing, painfully loud radio static in that room. It made me wonder how anybody with normal ears could make any sense out of that.

The evening was rescued by the two friends who had carpooled with me. It was the generosity, the conversations in the car, the time spent in person that made me glad after all that I’d gone.

The one thing that if only, if only I could have changed, was the news they gave me that a mutual friend went to the doctor a few weeks ago about the increasingly bad back pain she was having for no reason that she knew of–but it turned to be widely metastasized breast cancer. She is now in palliative care. She’s younger than I am. I just cannot imagine the him without the her in that couple, but it’s coming.

I will schedule my overdue mammogram first thing in the morning.

Last night was, at long last, the final dose of antibiotics.

It had been two months since this whole eyebrow/the tumor is benign/raging infection thing started; all this time I’ve been avoiding the potential exposure of–who knows what, since it’s not like they’re cutting eyebrows, but don’t ask about logic.

I ran for the haircut I’d been waiting for for so long.

I’m a child of the ’60s and ’70s, I like long hair. But I lost a chunk of mine to skin cancer years ago and it gets awfully thin on the right past a certain point, while what’s left tends to get caught in things when it gets too long. Like the car door when you shut it. I fear the KitchenAid mixer after a relative described her teacher’s long hair getting caught and ripped out by the beaters on hers, and when your hands are gooped in batter is a lousy time to go oh right and try to put it back in a braid.

An old friend who hadn’t seen me in awhile marveled last week, “Your hair is so long!”

And now (sorry/not sorry) it’s not. Just below the shoulders and we’re good. And it is.

Today:

1. Enjoy the sunflower sprouts.

2. Be glad the twice-a-month gardener day turned out to be the day after the neighbors’ guy pruned their stuff and saved labor by dumping it all on my baby peach tree on our side of the fence and leaving it. Debate telling the neighbor, who would surely never know otherwise. She’s about 90. I offered my guy a bonus for the extra time spent and he just waved me away with a chuckle: it happens. The peach tree only lost a branch or two, thankfully. (Not that it had very many in the first place.) It will have extra sunlight for a couple of months, so that’s good.

3. Get a visit from Richard’s sister who flew in this afternoon to see the California relatives, take her out to dinner, have a fine time, take pictures (not posting her picture). Wish for better lighting, resolve to finally fix that entryway one that blew in the power failure.

4. Find slightly more sympathy for the neighbor’s gardener. But not a whole lot. (Honey, you got the entryway, the edge of the living room and family room, the kitchen, and the top of the dining room table.)

5. Be glad it fell after he stepped far enough away from it that none of it hit him.

When you try to transition to the new time by getting up the moment you start to wake up the five days beforehand and then tire yourself out enough that you accidentally oversleep by 45 minutes the Saturday morning before the Daylight Savings Time change so now you’re almost two hours behind…

Yeah. Maybe next year I won’t try so hard.

And to think I considered not going to that dinner.

I had biopsies–“just one more?” the doctor said apologetically this afternoon–to rule out uterine or endometrial cancer. Probably just autoimmune related but worth making sure.

I was bleeding, I was tired, all my body wanted to do was rest, or barf, and what on earth that had to do with anything from that procedure I do not know.

But there was to be a get-together of half a dozen women friends this evening that I’d baked a chocolate torte for. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks and I knew that it would be energizing to go. I had a ride.

Man. We had such a good time. I feel so great. Laughter really is the best medicine.

And everybody took a piece of leftover torte home to their husbands so they wouldn’t feel too left out.

The power of suggestion while eating lunch and looking up.

Below was a line of dark, dark cloud with its upper edge gone wavy on the wind current, above it, another dark dark cloud with its lower edge likewise as wobbly as a Romaine leaf edge. And in between so much brightness bursting out of the bun!

A sun sandwich.

If you take a bite does it rain tomato seeds? (Looking at that waiting Burpee’s packet calling out to me.)

I once saw a very old cookbook in a used bookstore with the exciting news printed across its upper cover that, Yes! It had recipes! For this rare tropical fruit. Are we excited?!

Bananas.

I remember that every time I think–or used to think–how glad I am that rambutan is so rare. Not so sure about that now; dragonfruit (is that a transliteration? Marketing?) is showing up in the local Safeway these days. I haven’t started carrying an epipen to restaurants but the day could come. The memory of my mouth and throat being on fire and my airway closing so close to entirely shut like that–yeah, you don’t risk that again.

I have family with allergies to foods they have to actively avoid on a daily basis, far more than I ever have to deal with, so I read this with great interest.

The FDA has approved a new med that interrupts the inflammatory cascade, stopping it from becoming fatal. That doesn’t mean go eat a peanut butter sandwich, but.

Being able to eat out without fear on the menu. That’s huge.

Man, am I glad my taxes help pay for medical research and oversight and, as a dusty old page for Democracy declares in Article 1, “provide for…the general welfare.”

He asked us, and nobody knew.

He asked them, and they knew who.

He grew up where I did and went to the same Cabin John Regional Park that we knew well.

They changed the subject (I remember that discussion and thinking, but that’s not what he’s asking, folks) and talked about climbing in the fighter jet or riding the train. I silently remembered being able to watch a beehive at work from inside the train building and being reassured the bees could only exit to outside.

Everybody remembered the Porky the Litter Eater‘s trash-mouthing: you push a button and you get to hear the recording of Porky telling you that he likes to eat trash. You put paper in his mouth and it whooshes away. I remember us kids standing in line to get a chance to feed him and listen to his loud Oink oink oink!

And there was a totem pole.

As a kid I wasn’t sure what to make of all those faces looking woodenly over us: did they approve? The grownups said it was carved by hand, and that was cool, so, okay.

So here’s this guy who paid more attention to it than I ever did, who now lives in Alaska and credits some of his interest in the place to that totem pole, and who had always wondered what the story was behind how a children’s park just outside Washington, DC got one installed. A genuine Native totem pole. What it had meant to–somebody, enough to get it there.

Fifty-eight years later the history of it seemed lost to time.

So he posted to a group in Alaska, and right away got, My father-in-law helped carve that! They had not only not forgotten there, they still had the program from the ceremony.

Alaska Public Media has the story. And a photo of the guy at Cabin John Park, and man does that take me back.

So then I found this description of why totem poles were built and what they represent. The art of creating them started making a comeback after it finally became illegal to loot them and sell them to museums out from under the communities.

The Cabin John one was commissioned and paid for and that father-in-law got to work on it as an 18-year-old apprentice. I hope he made many more. I just love that he was right there when his daughter-in-law got to tell him, Hey, Dad, people in Maryland want to know about that one you made them!

Form signed, face normal, days’ worth of intermittent fever over, and back to the Social Security office at long last.

This time, a mom with two kids came in and the younger one was getting antsy. My specialty. A pink panda and a hippo and the mom and I made friends on the spot.

After weeks and weeks of carrying it around I finally got that purple cowl to the point where I just need to finish the repeat it’s on, bind it off and call it done.

They seemed better staffed this time and they had the thirteen people ahead of me out in less than an hour.

The woman who handed me that form to fill out last time was dour and efficient. The guy who took care of me this time was young, cheerful, helpful, and efficient.

I walked out of there so giddy at having the thing done done done! that it surprised me. I hadn’t realized it had been bugging me that much. One letter in the mail from them and the classic Medicare+supplement plan will officially be a go.

As my friend Donna marveled out loud to me yesterday, How did *we* get to be the older ones?

And then, just before getting in my car, I told the middle-aged guy who was struggling with a walker and trying to get his dad out that the door to the building was a long way down on the other side and the parking over there was open now, including handicapped spaces. He might want to drive over there instead.

He thanked me very much and was putting the walker back in the trunk with his dad’s door closed again as I turned my wheel and out onto the street.