I've got a letter from his mom - to him - don't know why it is in my possession. I should send all of these letters back to him - not the ones from me - but the ones from his aunt and mother. She encloses $10 for "the overcoat." No, the ten bucks isn't in here. Back in the day, that might have been about half the cost of a good overcoat. Maybe less, but not insignificant. Today, of course, a pittance.

I just got a call this morning from another good friend who told me straight out that she has cancer of the cervix - or was it ovarian cancer - in the whirlwind of conversation after that announcement, I seem to have forgotten the details - and is going in for surgery on Tuesday. It's getting hard to take. I have another friend who is terminal - but she is still having her Seafair Blue Angels party in August. I put my yearly party off for a week so I can attend hers. I will also be at the hospital on Tuesday with the other women in the waiting room while we await results. In the meantime, I have sciatica, and I am beginning to imagine some kind of tumor there, wrapped around the sciatic nerve and squishing it. So I'm shopping for an MRI.

But what am I worried about? My friend the palm reader was here the other day, and she tells me I will be a very old lady with just a tuft of hair growing out of the top of my head. And that my hands are full of healing energy. So if anyone spots me walking around patting my own ass, don't think weird thoughts. That's where the sciatic nerve begins its journey to the base of my ankle. That's where the pain is. A real pain in the ass.

Ommmmmmmm...........

Finally, a letter that sounds familiar. It sounds like me. I'm not depressed and needy (although that is sometimes me). I'm not promising things I can't deliver (something I tried and have mostly succeeded in giving up over the years). There is no desperation or preaching or pleading. There is just me, telling a story about how I missed a zoology mid-term. One whole page of various all-nighters (no party, this is exam time in the early 60's). I am listening to Ramsey Lewis playing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," which I say "gives me chills." As I recall, it did give me chills, and I am filled with a wish to hear it once again. It is on an album (Down to Earth) borrowed from my old friend Merrilie Johnson, who came to my first wedding (not to Larry, who I didn't marry, of course, but to this other, very nice but not quite right guy who, when he asked me to marry him, I said "let's do it quick before I change my mind"). Merrilie gave me a funereal condolences card as a wedding gift. There may have been a toaster or somethiing similar involved, but the card is the only gift I remember. From anybody.