Listening to Eric Burdon's heavenly, riff-thick 9:32 rerecording of the 1960's hit, We Gotta Get Out of the Place. My college buddy, Bob Kingsland, used to play this song obsessively whenever he grew restless. Which was often. He spent his summers scuba-diving at archaeological sites in Central America or tuna-spotting from an airplane off the New England coast. Last I heard, he had welded himself together a steel sailboat and was cruising the Caribbean.
The day so far. We spent the morning shuffling Jane's medical files between the hand surgeon's office and the back specialist's office. Jane is Simone's 80-plus mom. A feisty, unsentimental, complex woman and mother of six. That's nine words, and Jane's a couple of good volumes' worth. She's exercised every day since the mid-1960s. She has the bones of T-Rex, thanks a milf-fed youth. But she's falling apart. She's a Honda with a million miles on it. She's been in unrelenting pain for a week, needs an intervention, but can't take any drug stronger than Tylenol because tomorrow she's due for carpal tunnel surgery. She has another problem we heard over breakfast: she can't have a hard bowel movement without extruding her intestines, so she's on a laxative that turns it all to pond scum. "God, I hate my body," she groused.
I'm about to decamp for an Internet cafe, where I can write, eat, email. I need to leave because Jane's house cleaner is due soon. Apparently, the woman is terrified of men. It's better if I'm gone when she arrives. No complaints here: one of my life goals is to scare as few people as possible. And, as it happens, this Internet cafe is the area's best pie company, too. On the seasonal pie clock, the hour hand now points toward strawberry rhubarb, probably my favorite after dutch apple with crumb crust.
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