Back to town

OK so the current choice seems to be Florida v. Missouri.  Not to say that Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York (city and state, under separate analytical approaches), New Jersey, DC, and California (north and south, also quite separate) aren't also in the running, or at least in the memory bank, and maybe Illinois and Texas too.  Hey, it's been a trip, these 63 years, and I'm not even planning to go back abroad to live, as I used to think I would, or to places I haven't been to yet. Say, Alaska.

The real point is whether, wherever I am, I'm living the balance of my time in a way that doesn't waste a day.  Or at least to think about how to do it, as a coming play - since I'm currently in a spot where the results are not in, I'm just told to cool it for another couple of weeks, then we can decide what's next, the 12-month version of stuff they will next apply and then say, basically, OK that's our best.  A total of six weeks of waiting for my brain to get back to whatever constitutes my normality, and then how to take it ahead.  Coming attraction.

Well, I have to say that right now, if not yet going forward, that this working with something less than 100 percent of the previous capacity is OK part of the day, and damn strange in other parts.  An example, right now right here, is the typing of this talk.  Every third or fourth word is typed wrong and I see it immediately and I fix it.  Includes spellings that are not even close to what I mean.  It's a very active version of composition correction, which even in smart days I used to make once in a while.

But the good news is it isn't today like trying to skip through a badly wrecked piece of landscape, as it was right after the head was first grilled and carved in December.  Just a practice that is somewhat slower than before, and probably not with vocabulary at the the same level.

And so-what to that?  I think I've moved to simpler patterns of thought and friendship.  Simpler language as well?

Oh OK.  Part of me wishes it were French.

Eastern coast of Florida

We're in Florida for a few days to stay with a great newish friend, in an oldish house in a part of Vero Beach, one of those long islands running off the east coast.  A relatively reasonable cost way to leave the Midwest for a few days, go someplace worthy, and, as it turns out, stumble into some of your greatest friends almost by accident. I guess Florida is now where most of our post-60 bunch goes, at least in winter, maybe more so than ever. Hmm.  A lifeplace I never thought I'd sign up for but man, now, dealing with medical stuff that is way off any previous-understood set of charts, maybe now I will, as least more than before, hang out in Florida.

Or not.  Who really knows where all this goes?  Me, least of all.

The trip here brings back strongly some old memory, of Fort Lauderdale and the lives my grandmother and uncle led there, with homes, water and boats, and the idea that  - 60-70 years ago - there could be a life there that differed from life in, say, Cleveland.  My grandmother, after brilliance in the Cleveland society of 1910's and '20's and loss and rescue in the '30's, lived her final years in a house on the water in Fort Lauderdale. Where I learned a lot in Spring visits, and in particular how to look out to the water that lead out to the ocean, and how that could mean future, not just that day.  Then my uncle, a fine-looking man with beautiful cars and boats, who went out of his way to live a fine-looking life which, as far as I could tell, he pretty well did.  Miss you, Uncle Greg, and the world, old Lauderdale, you lived in with residual class.

No. Six weeks since the last one?

One of the odd aspects of this brain surgery world is that days, then weeks, can drift by and you don't really even notice that you aren't doing what you should.  Used to be, over the past few years or so, that I felt bad about backing off from Strays and my other ways of tossing out mostly non-legal ideas.  But after the serious crap shoot in December, and especially over the recent six weeks of brain zap, I didn't really feel bad about quiet and non-reply.  I just saw the days and nights go by, and let notes from dear people go unanswered, and just thought, oh.  Did my life really consistent mostly, and without regret, of getting zaps and conversation at a hospital and otherwise watching the tube?

Well, I'd better return to more that that or pretty soon I will wish that December 23 had been the finale (as, for a few weeks, I wasn't sure it wasn't - an interesting time - wondering if this was post-surgery or post-everything, a sort of dream).  But naa, I'm still alive and it's all been just one life, bouncing from Cleveland to Concord to Princeton to Boston, back to Cleveland, to St. Louis, to Washington DC, back to St. Louis, to London, back to St. Louis, to Hong Kong, back to St. Louis.  More or less, and so far.

Many places still to go to, if not to inhabit.  Maybe not a lot of time to get there, though, and flying from continent to continent would undermine an option I have thought about so often, my version of Travels with Charley - a work that was as important to me, decades ago, as any, but which did not involve world air travel.  At least as to the far-off stuff, maybe it will be better to follow Stevens, do it mostly by thought.  We'll see, no decisions right away, but I can't and don't want to wait for long.