We got home a day late because of an unexpected detour from Seattle to Philadelphia. My 96-year-old mother had had a stroke in Nazareth and been taken to St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem (a Biblical journey in reverse). This was her second stroke; the first she had had while visiting us here in 2005; though this new one was followed by a heart attack. Yesterday, after eight days in the hospital, she was discharged. She was coherent (her speech had returned, with occasional lapses) and perhaps not all that happy about her recovery – she gave the impression of being woefully weary of everything – but this did nothing to detract from her strength and her remarkable ability to overcome setbacks.
May is the opposite of March: Up north it was one of my favorite months while in Florida it's one of my most disliked, for it brings the heat and humidity I'd almost forgotten about and leaves them here for the next five months. This year I'm taking a new strategy to May: I'm going someplace cool - the Pacific Northwest - for the first two weeks in hopes that I'll welcome the sticky embrace when I return.
See you back here on the 16th.
She's so nice she goes on Facebook and likes any post with five likes or fewer.
I’ve been setting up book readings, for the paperback edition of The Joys of Travel, and in doing so I’m always asked if I’ll need any audio-visual equipment. I always say no, feeling inevitably like a Luddite. But then I remember that standup comedy – one of my favorite art forms – is similarly free of new technology. While entertainment devices have gotten increasingly sophisticated, the comedian still stands, unaided and unencumbered, in front of an audience, just as in ancient times. It is one of the reasons I’m so fond of standup.
Reading Mark Adrams' Turn Right at Machu Picchu I learned, among other things, that Alexander Graham Bell founded the National Geographic Society.
I'm meeting someone for breakfast, her "favorite meal." I like breakfast out too, but I rarely have it because it often means that your gustatory highlight of the day is over at the beginning.