Three Beautiful Things 08/26/16: Mom's Week, The Small Things, Enjoy Every Sandwich

1.  I have called Mom each day this week and have kept in touch with my sisters -- today, talking to Mom and texting with Christy, it made me very happy to learn that she's had a great week:  Rosie Rinaldi brought her lunch and they visited; Jane made her a dinner; the new cleaning woman impressed Mom; Kellee explained some knotty medical billing practices to Mom; Roger and Trudi paid Mom a visit -- she hadn't seen them for many, many years. All of these things happened in addition to the daily help Carol and Christy provide.  I was especially happy that Mom had visitors. I think all the time how difficult and isolating it is for her to be confined to her house unless someone helps her leave.  I hope she'll have other visitors as time goes by -- but, one of the difficulties of growing old is being preceded in death my friends, and Mom is outliving a lot of them.

2.  It really is the small things that get to me. When I drove Jack to New Jersey on Thursday evening, as I pulled out of my parking spot at Bob Evans restaurant, the Sube's "Check Engine" light came on. In the Sube's twelve year life, this light has come on twice and both times it was because the gas tank cap needed to be on tighter. I got gas in New Jersey and I heard the crunch crunch sound of the gas cap going on after the attendant filled the tank, but the light stayed on all the way to Silver Spring. When I arrived at the Diazes Thursday night, I cranked hard on the gas tank cap, crunch, crunch, crunch.  In the morning, I ran errands. The light persisted, but, after I got out of the car, took care of some business, and returned to the Sube and fired it up, the light was off.  At the end of a week filled with many demands and points of stress, I was profoundly relieved.

3.  Today, after listening to an hour or so of Warren Zevon songs, I went to YouTube and watched, for the first time, Zevon's last appearance on The David Letterman Show. It aired about a year before he died. Zevon talked about his cancer diagnosis and his impending death. Letterman asked him if, now that he was close to death, he had learned anything about life and death the rest of us should know. Zevon replied, "You're supposed to enjoy every sandwich."