Wednesday. November 14, 2001

a favorite cousin with a prized fish, camping somewhere as an extended family

"The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life."

Carl Jung

I'm dreaming of a bunch of stuff and I keep going back to sleep. Well aware that I'm on vacation and can be a little lazy about my start. In my dream there is a two-story high pinball machine. I'm showing someone how to use it. I try to urge the ball in a direction by shaking the railing which is like on a catwalk above the playing field. But it tilts. Two stories below, near the giant flippers are lights that say 'TILT.' Until I do it again, then they say say 'AIDS.' I'm not sure who the other person was. It might have been my sister. I'm apologizing for tilting her game.

Chores. I struggle to get the stuff in my guest room stuffed away somewhere. Also a bunch of archive stuff that's been in the 'bonus' room for a couple of months since we cleaned out the closet in there and FFP cleaned out some drawers in there. If you responded, in a prior entry, that you'd be glad to clean the place out when I'm dead, then you will be glad that I move it all around occasionally, stirring up the dust and that, yes, occasionally I discard things. (I didn't receive any actual volunteers to manage my estate, of course. I'm going to outlive all my readers, anyway. Except FFP. So he's the one that needs a volunteer really.)

I have a little project to make place cards for my Thanksgiving Dinner. I find some old slides in the guest room closet that seem perfect for this. So, of course, I start piddling with scanning slides and editing and printing them. FFP's machine quits working with Adobe Acrobat files and he boots and it core dumps and then he boots and it can't see another machine on the network (where he backs up) and that is locked up and we boot that. (The core dump said something like 'contact your system administrator.' Yeah, right. That would be me, I guess. "Boot it again," I say.)

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My sister comes today. So I scanned a slide of us from about forty years ago. I haven't changed much since age 13 or so, have I? Didn't think so. This slide is sort of sad. The baby in the picture is, I believe, my cousin who died last year of breast cancer that had returned in her lungs and bones. She succumbed at forty. Hence my guess that this picture is about forty years old. That and the fact that I look about 13 and my sister about 17 or 18. My sister loved kids then and still does.

I think this is my sister's first time to go on an airplane by herself since December 1998 when an aneurysm in her brain ruptured. I prowl around, looking at the displays, baggage claim, asking after the plane (since the displays never admitted it landed and it just rolled off the screen) Mom and Dad sit and wait where I think she will come out. She's asked for a wheelchair and I miss it when she comes out there and I find them at the baggage claim getting all kinds of help getting her luggage and stuff. So we get her loaded up.

Of course, she was up early and ate at home but has had nothing else to eat. (I think the goal is to starve potential hi-jackers and weaken them. Anyway, never count on the airline to feed you.) So we go to Chili's and she splits a burger with Mom and Dad and I have beer and a plate of nachos.

My sister and I have always been interested in very different things. Her medical crisis of the last almost three years hasn't really changed that. We are both crazy about her grandson, of course. But she is interested in going to a store while here that sells miniatures and she wants me to get the family calendar and address book up to date and has brought updates. This is the stuff that matters most to her and I'll see that she gets to do it. Even if I get a bit bored sometimes.

Mom and Dad take Sarah home with them and are going to take her to their Wednesday night social event at church. (More food.) The great thing about the house we got them is that it is perfect for a visiting sister who is a bit disabled. Raised toilet, walk-in shower, no steps. Sarah hasn't regained complete use of her right side although she walks with a tripod cane or even without for a bit. She seems to have recently regained a lot of confidence and drive. (Which means she will be ordering me around for the next week! Yep, she's back. That's cool.)

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I tell them that I'll come over and visit when they are home from church. Meanwhile, I will get some things done. I attack the paper pile. (Yeah, well, and then new ones show up every day.) I stop briefly to find some books for my dad to read. Getting rid of the old papers is sometimes a chore. Like when I find interesting WEB sites and have to go add them to my bookmarks. Time-consuming. Yeah, today we read to find information and WEB sites.

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I do go over there and I play a game with my mom and sister called Sequence. Someone invented this with some poker chips and four decks of cards. Then they printed a game board with images of two decks of cards minus Jacks. It is sort of fun and I win all but one game and who doesn't like to win. I have to shuffle for everyone. Mom and Sarah both say they have never been able to shuffle. Shuffling two decks is certainly hard and I'm not surprised that with Sarah's limits on the right hand and with Mom's aging arthritis and a little shakiness that they can't do it now. But never? I think I will walk up a few flights of stairs and shuffle a deck of cards everyday from now on, just to prove that I can. Geez.

My sister is leaning on me to take her shopping tomorrow. I really don't mind. I just hope I can get everything done for the big turkey day fest and not feel too stretched. It's a vacation, right?

Must find a way to achieve balance.

My sister also says that she 'never finds anything new on my page.' So she hasn't figured out that I have a journal there and that I update it every day and that I tell the world she could never shuffle cards. (Or spell. I pointed out last night that when she started writing to me again, hard because she is/was right-handed, she misspelled words but, then, she always did. My sister's talents were with things she did with her hands. Not with academic stuff.)

So, yeah, what if she becomes a fan of reading the page? (Assuming she figures it out. I couldn't bring myself to tell her.) I know of one cousin who reads now and then at least because he occasionally comments. But I don't feel constrained by his reading. We are different in our feelings and values but I think we appreciate and accept each other. I've always felt close to him, he's near to me in age and we were great playmates when we got together as kids. (I was a tomboy incarnate and getting some boys to play with was a godsend. My sister loved dolls. I refused. I would play with the dollhouse people and stuff. I made up elaborate fictions, little screenplays for those people. Even more fun was clipping people and things from the Sears catalog and making up lives. I ignored the missing legs and arms (cropped out of photos) and the not-to-scale sizes Hmmm...how did I get off on that???)

JUJUST TYPING
Sisters.
Have history.
No matter how different.
Something the same.