HAP

Dear friends, The sabbatical is over. I'm not sure it solved anything or resolved any of the issues that brought it on. I do feel much better than I did eight days ago, in part because it gave me the time to do a serious examination of the roots of some of the problems I've been dealing with. At one point I made a list of all the projects I have in hand. It is an enormous list. It is no wonder I have felt overwhelmed at times. I've done some pruning, prioritized what was left, and begun asking others to help with the things I can most easily outsource that still need doing. The work is still pretty substantial but feels more manageable. More importantly, I did some deep diving into my soul to look at the emotional issues I am facing and their roots. My dreams pitched in on that project--and there are a number of painful things I need to deal with more constructively than I have. The heaviest reality is dealing with the fact Jane is gone and is not coming back. I may dream of her--I did many times this week--I may visit and decorate her grave--but the dream Jane is not her and the granite stone that marks the place her body resides now is only a marker--her body an empty and unanimated husk. She is not here and will not be here again. Our life together changed me. The good changes, I can keep. The bad changes--and there were some--I can discard--and need to discard. There were compromises we both made in our lives for the needs of the other. Some of those compromises still make sense. Others do not. I need to sort those things out, keeping the ones that still work and eliminating those that don't. None of that is going to be easy. Each undoing will remove a part of her from me. But I cannot make my mind and soul a shrine to her any more than I can make this house a shrine to her and still live in it. Living is about growth. When we stop growing, we die--not merely in the body, but in the soul as well. Jane would say it is about the need to keep moving forward. The past may influence the ways in which we move forward, but we cannot move forward while trapped in the past. Yet if we lose track of the past the results can be just as devastating. The truth is my relationship with Jane is the only fully successful male-female relationship I have ever had. I have lots of female friends, just as I have lots of male friends. But our souls do not touch--do not integrate with each other. I spent the first 33 years of my life looking for that relationship. Every time I had an inkling that such a relationship could happen between me and another, something happened that destroyed that relationship and left it as a friendship. And now, Jane is gone and I am left with considerably less than a friendship. I have nothing but memories--and the memories do not nourish me--only leave me hungrier than when I started. It makes me angry--pound-faces-into-mush angry. But I cannot let myself fully experience that anger--I know what happens when I let my emotions fully off the leash. Three times I have let that happen--and three times nearly killed someone as a result. And this anger--just feeling the edges of it--is far more powerful than any of those three times. So I tamp it down--control the rage and bank the fires--I walk, pushing myself faster and harder, seeking creative outlets that will help to burn the hatred and the hurt from my soul. People think they know what anger is: "I was so angry..." I hear people say. Wrath has no words, barely has an inarticulate sound. If you can explain how angry you are you are not really angry. Some people talk about literally seeing red, of having no memory of their actions once the rage passes. They have experienced real anger. But wrath...wrath is so cold, so logical, that to know it, to feel it, is to know and feel the very personification of evil in your heart and in your soul. And I have known it and felt it and relished it. I have seen the devil in my life, to quote John Proctor, and it is my face... I know the cure for that wrath-filled hatred is love. I work daily to build it into my life--to rebuild it into my life, really. I lost so much when Jane died that the well nearly emptied. I know, if I am patient, that well will be replenished. And I know how to be patient--I just don't want to be any longer. I am a week short of 39 months since Jane's death--43 months since she was diagnosed--and the flow is still barely a trickle. It's frustrating. But I know how important patience is. And I do know how to wait. So I will. Peace, Harry

Be well, both of you. Harry

Dear friends, Thank you. I have begun to tell people that I am vanishing for a week starting tomorrow night. We'll see if I need more than that. I won't know for certain until i get under the hood and poke about a bit. I will take what I need, in the end. My plan is that I have no concrete plan other than to put cancer and all the other projects I am at work on on the shelf: "Let the world turn without me" for a bit. I think I may spend at least a couple of days in deep meditation--or at least try to get there. Jane and I both lived in meditative states most of the time. The end of her life shattered mine. I have been slowly getting back there, but part of what is missing for me is that clarity of mind and living in the moment that I had grown so used to. Part of my frustration is that I seem only partly living too much of the time. I know I can't rush the process--it took two decades to get there to begin with--but I will get back there eventually. I'd just like it to happen more quickly. Just call me the farmer who pulled all of his crops out of the ground by pulling on them to get them to grow faster. That will be the start of poking around under the hood. I may go find a counselor--that's a good thought Fae. My experience there has been decidedly mixed in the past, however. I may go for a long drive--though the weather that is coming in makes that unlikely. I'd like to go for a long walk in the mountains in NH or Vermont--but, again, the weather seems to have vetoed that idea. Maybe come summer. That is one thing I have decided: I need to take at least a week every two or three months and just walk away from things for a bit. I need to put my mind in neutral periodically, I think. Part of my problem is being too long in contact with cancer and death. I realized earlier that I have not really had a non-stressful moment since Jane came down with the H1N1 in late October of 2009--that's more than four years of worry and grief. No wonder I feel like I am losing my mind sometimes. Jan, I know a forty hour week sounds like a lot, but after teaching for 34 years, it feels like heaven. To not start my day until nine in the morning and be done by five in the evening--to be able to sit down after dinner and read a book, or write a letter, or watch TV or a movie or even--shudder--go out on a week night--and to have the entire weekend to play--all of it guilt-free--is an indescribable pleasure whose only bad point is that Jane is not here to share it with me. That is a huge hole, don't get me wrong--and I would go back to teaching full-time if I could have Jane back. I also give myself an hour for lunch every day, so I'm actually only working 35 hours. Talk about feeling decadent after all those years of rushing through so many meals to get back to work. Woof. Mostly, though, I want to do nothing my soul does not need me to do. I want to rest and recharge and think about nothing more complicated than what to have for lunch. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Had a good long walk indoors today--after nearly killing myself outdoors yesterday. Only my trekking poles saved me from multiple falls. Nice salad for lunch. Nice comments from friends on yesterday's anything-but-positive post and some good music out tonight on the agenda. Peace, Harry

Dear Anne, Thank you for your kind words. You've gone and made me cry again. Peace, Harry

Dear Marsha and Mary, First, Marsha, you may be right. I am early in year four, but thinking back to late November, I did seem to be low on energy at that point--and the trip out West did not rebuild things as much as it might have because I got sick when I got back. That my friend Katherine was clearly in her last weeks--and getting very little help in Northern Virginia--clearly did not help. Mary, I looked at these two pieces--and a couple others. Burn out was something we did lots of training on when I was teaching, but I had never heard of compassion fatigue before and the idea intrigued me. I found a self assessment on it online, since I did see some of what I am feeling in that article in particular. Unfortunately, my scores there don't seem to indicate the level of emotion I have felt the last few days. Some of the somatic burn out symptoms are there, but again, not at a level to explain the last two days. I think, though, that you are both right about my needing to step back a bit. I have a commitment Saturday at a health fair, so I will have to do some prep work for that tomorrow. But I think I will try to take all of next week off--maybe even go away somewhere for a couple of days. And a band I like is playing Saturday night and, depending on how beat I am after the health fair, I may go listen to them for a bit. I have already cut back on a number of things--feeling guilty about that isn't helping much--since January, but I may need to think about what else can get side-tracked a bit as well. After some meditation and some thinking, I think Katherine's death about a month ago probably plays into this as well. I've mentioned that a couple of times elsewhere here. Frankly, her death has hit me pretty hard--certainly much harder than I expected. As is the case with Jane, my inability to do more than ease her suffering has left me feeling impotent and incompetent. Intellectually, I think that is stupid, but emotionally, I understand it. It is simple to recite, "Cure the sick, heal the wound, but let the dying go;" it is, however much more difficult to do. And it goes back, as well, to the way my life is lived: I pick up a hand and I don't put it down until life ends--but there is an emotional cost to that ethic that I don't think about very much. Something needs doing: if I stopped to count the cost--but I don't. Katherine worried, correctly as it turns out, that my reaching out to her would reopen old wounds when she died. I assured her it would not, but knew that statement was a lie. I could not let her go through those months alone--even knowing what it might do to me in the end. But you're right, Mary: I do need to take care of me and what I need. For me, all that work on the disease and with other people has been part of the grief work. But there are times when I need to be by myself; there are times I need to be out with other people in an environment where I am not thinking about anything more than whether I like a particular piece of music. I need to be more conscious of making sure those things happen more regularly. I resolved back in October that I was going to work an eight hour day and a five day week on the cancer projects--and I have largely stuck to that pledge. But I need to work more on not thinking about that work outside those hours--a thing that is really hard to do after a career in teaching that demanded thinking about teaching even when we were not in the classroom. Nature of that particular beast, I'm afraid. I feel a bit better than I did when I wrote the original post. A good cry--which I had while I was writing it--always helps. Thank you both for your kind words and thoughts. Peace, Harry

Sometimes, Joey, it's one second at a time. Peace, Harry

I'm broken. There. I've said it. I haven't been right for a month or more. I feel like I am walking up hill through frozen molasses. My brain is frozen. My soul is frozen. And part of me will be just as happy if they never thaw out. I spent yesterday in bed. I was not sick. I was not tired. I just didn't have the desire to get out of bed. Instead, I lay there staring at the ceiling--thinking about what might have been--trying to imagine a retirement with Jane in it--trying to imagine a life in which I had made different choices--a world in which I could have saved her life from that damned cancer--where I went into medicine instead of teaching--where wars did not take precedence over everything and funding would not have been a problem. Jane said to me I had made her life better. But I could not stop her death, could not take away her pain--and God knows, I tried. I spent the day thinking about all my dead cancer patients--all the people I have lost: two kids before I graduated from high school, George--my neighbor who fought the pain of his lung cancer by gouging quarter inch deep scratches in the maple arms of his chair--my two best friends' fathers, the woman across the street from us, George's wife, my research partner in graduate school, a favorite uncle, my neighbor across the street, multiple people I went to high school with, people I taught with... David, Ashley, Katherine--and always, Jane. I spent the day thinking about all the people I am likely to lose--the daughter of a former student who is fighting leukemia--my neighbors with bladder and kidney cancer, Jane's cousin--who has cancer everywhere--a high school friend fighting leukemia--and a grad school friend who waits for hers to come back--my friend Pam, who has the same cancer Jane had... A friend once warned me not to get involved with someone because once I picked up their hand I would not be able to put it down without hurting them. The truth is, once I pick up a hand I never put it down until that hand is cold and dead. People can walk away from me--for decades--do it in the cruelest way possible--and it doesn't matter. They reach out, they call--and my hand is still there. And I have taken up so many hands: old hands, young hands, adult hands and child hands, healthy hands and sick hands. To quote Tennyson's Ulysses, "I have been a part of all that I have met." I have been part of their lives, as they have been a part of mine. i have rejoiced in their success and joy, wept at their failures and their pain. And I have been a part of each and every death--felt each of them as though they were a member of my family, because, of course they were--and are. How did I come to this? Why do I care for so many when so many do not care for anyone--or any thing--at all? Why do I bother with any of it? Why do I feel so guilty about missing a meeting or not doing this piece of reading or that bit of research or writing this article or that response? Why can't I just sit here in my chair and do nothing, think nothing, feel nothing? What monster sent me into the world this way? What monster keeps me here when all I want to do is go home? Why do I have this addictive personality issue that prevents me from even thinking about drugs, prescription or otherwise--that prevents me from even getting drunk--because I know so well what is down that particular rabbit hole? I'm tired. I have work to do. People have expectations of me. I have expectations of me. And there are never enough workers in this vineyard--never enough workers in this vineyard. I'm broken. I don't want to be fixed. I want to stay broken--non-functional. I want to scream, "Screw it all" at the top of my lungs and make it stick. But I won't. I have a tool kit around here somewhere--and some bailing wire and sealing wax. It may take me some time to work out how to take these odd broken pieces and put them back together into something workable--but I'll figure it out. It's what I do. It's who I am. Peace, Harry

Tell her she is in my mind and in my heart. May she be well--and truly blessed. Harry

Dear friends, I made some significant progress today on several fronts, but I am still miles behind where I wanted to be at this stage of February. Katherine's death has had a greater impact on me than I expected it to. We never saw each other after 1973. It makes no sense to me, but there we are. We had 4-6 inches of snow today when we were supposed to get a dusting to an inch. The weather is supposed to break later this week, at last. I will finally be able to walk outside rather than having to drive to a mall to walk on concrete and tile. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Here is the poem I wrote for Jane for Valentine's day this year. Peace, Harry For Jane, on Valentine’s Day 2014 Winter comes— And I shovel. The drifts grow And shrink like time. A cat drinks The melt-water— Sings loudly By the closed door But flees warmth. Spring arrives— I clean, I prune, I plant seeds— The groundhog eats More than I— While the earth sinks— Flees itself And still-born dreams Lost in death. Summer comes— I weed, I sweat— Building beds And outdoor rooms— Feed hummers That look for rest. The lawn waits For a sharp blade To kill loss. Fall arrives— The night grows frost That slays all— Leaf, branch, and root— But leaves me And leaves my love Still beating As I stand here— At your grave. All my love, always and all ways Hubby the Baboo(n)

Dear Anne, Consider yourself hugged with all the intensity I can muster. Peace, Harry

Dear Karen, I don't know what I can say that has not already been said. I have a friend whose wife is facing surgery for what your daughter is now facing. They don't know what caused it in her case. They are both trying to tough it out as near as I can tell. That means they are being as upbeat as possible with each other and the outside world no matter their private thoughts. Ultimately, I know you will be as positive as you can with your daughter, no matter how worried you are. It is what we all do when our loved ones are in trouble and we know it. They most often return the favor--trying to be positive with us no matter how they really feel. Certainly, I think Jane and I were that way with each other. That positive attitude gives the best chance of recovery from any injury or disease. But the price of maintaining it can also be great--especially for the caregiver. The thing I didn't have when Jane was in the hospital was a place to vent--somewhere I could share my deepest worries, fears, and pain. I think, sometimes, that my slow coming to terms with her death was caused in part by not being able to deal with the emotions of the moment in any way beyond silent screams at whatever power seemed responsible. It all got pent up inside me where it could well and truly fester. I felt well and truly alone during those months--especially those weeks in the hospital. My description of it in my mind was that I was out on the extreme point of the spear: there was plenty of heft behind me, but no one with whom I could truly share any of that burden. So please, be free to vent all that frustration here. It will make you much more able to give your daughter what she needs. She needs all the positive energy she can get, unalloyed with anger and doubt. Leave those negatives here--let them explode out of you here. We know very well the reason you need to do so. We have all of us been there--and doubtless wished for somewhere we could put that burden down if only for a few minutes. Put your burden down with us so that you can carry the real burden you need to carry most. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, If anyone has any extra real wolves, we'll take them. Plenty of groundhogs here for hungry, industrial-size canines. I survived the snow, though the drift at the end of the driveway is up to the base of my mailbox. Three more inches predicted for Monday into Tuesday. Then it is supposed to warm up--and rain. Can you say, "Flooding?" We got 8-10 inches locally from the looks of it. Lots of drifting, so it's hard to get a precise measurement here at the top of the hill. But it was mostly light and fluffy, so the snowblower made short work of it--and the stairs went quickly with the shovel. The wind, however, is something else. Peace, Harry

Yes, we have been getting clocked regularly. I am trying not to think about the snow forecast for Monday. Enough is enough. I might just as well be living in NH or Vermont. At least there I would have better scenery to enjoy. Harry

Dear Mary, Given the weather, I may soon be snowshoeing everywhere. I find being able to visit her grave helps me anchor my grief so that I can be more focussed on what I am doing here, if that makes any sense. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, The snow has begun here. It was supposed to start after 2 p.m. as rain. It started at 1 p.m. as snow. I'm afraid this likely means more snow than is in the forecast. I am certainly glad most of what we got two days ago was rain. At least there will be somewhere to put what arrives today. An electrician came today to check out a water leak around the electrical box in the garage. Apparently the sealant on the meter outside had dried out. He replaced that--and I am hoping that solves the issue, finally. I did what little shopping I needed to do this morning--and got in my Saturday cemetery visit as well, so i can clean house and watch the snow fall the rest of the day. I don't know about the rest of you, but I am ready to shoot that dratted groundhog in Punxatawney. Peace, Harry

Dear Nats, Be well. There is nothing else I can say that others have not already said. Be well. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Every year on Valentine's Day I wrote a poem for Jane. I still do. I'll post the one I wrote for her here later--I'm on the wrong computer to do that now. I take copy of that poem and a card to her grave and leave them there with the flowers. This year, I went with silk flowers as it is too cold for the carnations she liked so much. I read the poem and the card aloud while I am there. Usually, I spend half an hour there, but the cold wind drove me off the hilltop pretty quickly this year. I avoid restaurants or other places lovers congregate on Valentine's Day. I don't want to deal with the stress of it. Everything will be under a foot of snow here by morning. I can't wait for spring. Peace, Harry

Mary, I know this feeling so well. You have said it more eloquently than I could. It feels awful. I kept busy today with this and that and made my trip to the cemetery. Today seems worse to me than the previous three. I can't figure out why. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Thank you all for your kind words. My good news I have posted on the positive thread. I had to go out for a bit this morning--I had shopping to do. At the first store, the clerk at the register wished me "Happy Valentine's Day." I said it back to her, but thought, "If you only knew." Then I got to the grocery. The place was mobbed: We have the storm that blasted the Southeast arriving overnight and the bread and milk crazies were out in force. It is supposed to be mostly rain here, but that made no difference. I try to shop Tuesday or Wednesday because usually the stores are empty and they have had time to restock from the weekend. And the place was flooded with Valentine displays: cards, flowers, candy--you name it--even heart shaped cakes. Then I got to the check-out. The woman bagging the groceries was bubbly. "You should take your Valentine to dinner at--she named a restaurant in New Bedford, but the name escapes me--The fish I had this weekend was the best salmon I've had anywhere." I couldn't control my mouth. "I'd love to do that," I said. "But my wife died 38 months ago." I immediately felt bad about saying that--she had no way of knowing--I still wear my wedding band--and I apologized and she apologized--and she suggested I go there sometime by myself. I told her I would, but that it would not be on Valentine's Day. I could not believe how angry it made me. I still can't get my mind around it. Jane and I always hated those letters people sent to the newspapers complaining about how intrusive the day is for those without partners--and here I am feeling that anger I so disliked in others. It is stupid to feel like that. They are happy and in love and in my heart I want them all to stay that way. My anger makes no sense to me. But there it is. Emotions never make logical sense--even when they do. This is a strange land we live in. We are all wounded ducks. And maybe, she, too, was a wounded duck. One never knows. I try to live by the credo, "Be kind to everyone you meet for you do not know the burdens they are carrying." I failed to live up to that credo today. I know why--but it doesn't excuse my doing so. I need to work harder on that. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, It's been a busy day here between walking and trying to get caught up with the things I let slide last week--and the little matter of the biopsy report this morning. The one I was most concerned about--because it did not look like any of the others in the past--was precancerous and not something that needs any further bother. The one on my nose was an early stage basal cell carcinoma. I've had these before and, while bothersome, are about like having a wart removed and present no danger to life or limb. If you have to deal with cancer, this is the type to have. Even if i did nothing with it, it is not really a threat of any kind. I have to go back in March to have the wound checked again. If it comes back, it's a simple outpatient procedure under another local anesthetic to dig out the roots. I've had one of those before as well. No big deal either way. I wrote my first fundraising letter of the year and sent it off to someone who does these for a living for comments. I hope to get that in the mail by next week. I am posting it later on the Walking with Jane website for comments. i also got a note from the Marathon Walk people congratulating me for being the first Pacesetter of the year. I will likely be the first to two stars, as well, since i have enough in the kitty that all i have to do is put the check in the mail. I will, of course, finish well behind the real aces of the trade--as i did last year, but i am happy to play rabbit for the heavy hitters through the spring. Dinner is calling. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, People tell lots of stories about what grief looks like and how it works. They write books. They write articles. They talk about the stages of grief and about what recovery looks like. But it is a very different story from the inside. The things we are told about how it all works seem largely myths at best to me. Thirty-eight months after my wife Jane’s death I have seen nothing that even resembles what the scholars and experts describe. They talk about the first year of grief as “The Year of Firsts” and imply that when that year is over everything is better and you can get on with your life. Maybe that is true for some people. It was not the case for me. My second Christmas without Jane was, if anything, worse than the first. Maybe it was that my expectations were too high. Maybe I was still so much in shock at the first one—Jane had died just 15 days before—that I should have counted the second as the first. It was late in January before I felt anything but numb. But every “second” experience was just as bad. Each one taught me the emptiness that had descended on me within seconds of Jane’s death was not something mere time would wipe away. Even 38 months later I am aware of the dense silence that surrounds me in every environment, no matter how noisy or crowded it is. Coming to grips with the reality that nothing I did or tried to do could fill that void was the work of the second year of grief—and of much of the third. At one point in that third year, I described myself as a toddler in my dealings with grief. I had learned to cope with the emptiness at times, but like a toddler, fell on my butt periodically for no better reason than it happened. We often refer to such events as “grief tsunamis:” They come washing in and drown whatever progress you think you have made without any warning. They can be triggered by the smallest seeming event but leave you swimming in tears and exquisite agony. Two weeks ago, I was at a dinner to kick off the season our local Relay for Life. I was talking with an old friend Jane and I had worked with. Suddenly, the DJ spun the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” It was our favorite song. I fled the room, knowing what was going to happen if I stayed. But I might as well have stayed. The words were in my head and the tsunami had been launched. It was a week before I felt ready to deal with anything again. Without the need to get the Jimmy Fund Marathon Walk pages together the end of last week, I might still be paralyzed. The truth is that even with that pulling me back to the surface I am still struggling as I write this. The house is too quiet, too empty, too filled with memory. To the people around me, I look to have recovered from Jane’s death. I can carry on a conversation, talk intelligently about a piece of art or some new piece of scientific theory; I make the bed, clean the house, go for a walk every day; I laugh at the appropriate times and seem to avoid being cruel most of the time—though I still have my moments. But each day I realize the truth of my neighbor’s words shortly after Jane’s death. She had lost her husband a dozen or more years before. She said people told her all the time now how she seemed to have gotten beyond her loss. She said she sometimes told the ones who could handle it that the truth was she had just learned to cope—that the grief and emptiness were still there—that she still sometimes cried when her children were not home or when she knew they could not hear her. Three years and two months into this journey, I can give a good counterfeit of normalcy most of the time. I’ve always been good at hiding how I really feel from everyone but my very closest friends. Sometimes, like at that dinner, I have to struggle to control what others see. But, for the most part, people think I am doing fine. They don’t see me screaming at the top of my lungs like a three-year-old when something frustrates me. They do not see the blinding anger that I still feel about the unfairness of Jane’s death. They do not see me struggling to go to sleep at night, struggling to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. They do not see the fear that stalks me—or the loneliness that plagues me. I cope with the life I live. I cope with the losses life has dealt me. I cope with the well-meaning ignorance I encounter every day. I cook and I clean and I write letters and articles and I work on this project and that event. I look normal and well adjusted and like I am moving on with my life. I went to the cemetery yesterday. I placed a decoration I had built for the 38-month anniversary of Jane’s death on her grave. I will write a poem for her, and a card, and buy some flowers to put up there Friday for Valentine’s Day. But there will be no reciprocal gift or card here that day. I will wake up alone and go to bed alone and feel just as empty and alone as I did on Christmas Day—or any of the other holidays I have faced without her these 38 months. The day after Jane died, I looked at myself in the mirror and said, “I’m too young to be a widower. I am too old to be a bachelor. What the hell do I do now?” For 38 months, the answer has been grief—and working to prevent others from experiencing what I have experienced by fighting Carcinoid/NET cancer with everything I have left. Where others see success, I am too aware of my failures—too aware of how much more I could have accomplished if I could bring my full focus and energy to bear. Loss has weakened me. I have endless ideas, but lack the energy and focus to make them work as well as they could. But I keep trying. The tsunamis keep knocking me down. But I keep getting up. The silence and the hurt cripple me. But I keep moving forward. It’s who I am. Peace, Harry (This is largely similar to a piece I posted on Walking with Jane earlier today.)

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Marty, happy birthday to you. OK, I'm a day late, but I didn't get here at all yesterday. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I baked bread and English muffins this afternoon, after doing some light housekeeping this morning. I have not been sleeping well lately and don't know why. Spooky dreams, I suspect. Tomorrow is 38 months. I wonder if I will ever stop counting this in months. I wonder if I will ever get to the point the tenth of the month is not some kind of ordeal. I got angry with myself this morning. I have all these things that need doing--and I just don't get to them. It's frustrating. But baking bread always mellows my mood. It becomes a kind of powerful meditation. Now if I can just keep myself from eating the whole day's production before bed... I think this will be an early night. I did get an hour's nap yesterday. I could have used one today--but would rather sleep tonight. I'm skipping out on the Beatles thing tonight as too commercial. And with John and George gone... Babbling again like a brook. Stay warm. Snow coming in tonight, but not the amounts we were supposed to get when this was first forecast. Peace, Harry