When I am seriously taken aback, shaken to my roots, I make mindless errors. Just now, when I  went to type in my user name, I typed “a special friend” because she (JE) was very much on my mind. I was thinking of when we went to Shadowlands at Kenwood Mall and there is this speech by C.S. Lewis, (Anthony Hopkins) :

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.

She was sitting on my right and after that last sentence, she turned to me, smiling, and softy commented on the truth of it.

I have often returned to that moment and how she looked and what she said . . . and I have found comfort.

Today Mother is 83 years old and we started the morning off with a CAT scan with IV contrast, after drinking a lot of  the pre-test Crystal Lite mixture just before the scan and 16 ounces of water before that. Did I say we? Oh, I did . . . well . . . Mother did the drinking and since her stomach has not been feeling at all well, it was a bit of a long process, with her lying in an examination room with a vomit pan beside her.

Oh, before we left, while I was upstairs changing clothes,  I heard Sydney barking plaintively and thought he was in the back vestibule, although he sounded closer than that. He was; he had followed Alison two floors below into the bunker (where the cat is) and didn’t make it out before she left and put the gate up. He was trapped with Tiffany, the cat from, well, Mother’s. When I got down there, his little nose was up against the gate like a doomed prisoner.

Mother is sleeping on the porch now, after having watched Angela’s Ashes and I am on the other sofa with traumatized Sydney. We have the electric firestove on and a Macintosh and Peach Yankee Candle burning. And I am drinking a cure: you know, Diet Coke mixed with Coke and sipped after two aspirin.