Note: For a fleeting moment today, sunlight shone through the glass squares on upper half of our front door, casting a shadow on the hardwood floor. The smoke was not quite as heavy today.
1. This morning, I watched a National Kidney Foundation webinar on kidney transplantation, eager to further assess my decision to decline the offer of a kidney last month. I'd say the program did what it should have: it cast doubt on my decision. The program, at times, emphasized the value of a preemptive transplant, that is, a transplant completed before the patient ever goes on dialysis. That's what my transplant would have been. But the webinar never brought up my specific situation. I feel great. I'm not experiencing the symptoms of kidney failure. Yes, I have moments of doubt -- which I'm fine with -- but most of the time, I think I made the right decision. I'm curious what Dr. Beiber will say. Today is the 15th -- I see him tomorrow.
Later in the day I enjoyed the Billy Collins poetry broadcast more than I enjoyed the kidney webcast! I now know that the two poets I'd never heard of that Billy Collins read on Monday were Teresa McLamb and Maureen Oehler DuRant. I'm especially interested in buying Maureen Oehler DuRant's book, Skirmishes on the Okie-Irish Border, and finding out if other of her poems are as morbidly funny and deeply touching as the one Billy Collins read on Monday, "Made Up". The poem is about the speaker of the poem and her sisters not approving of how the mortician made up her mother after she died and tells how they go about correcting the mortician's work at the funeral home.
2. When he flew off to New York with Debbie, Gibbs left behind much of a 30 lb bag of dry food and a few cans of wet food. Today I packed the dry food into several gallon sized zip lock bags and packed them, along with the cans of wet food, into two boxes to send to Lucky Paws Rescue in Springfield, OR where this non-profit group is housing animals (dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, etc.) displaced by the fires up the McKenzie River, along with the other rescue animals they care for normally. Lucky Paws Rescue also posted requests for animal vitamins and other items and I fulfilled those requests with two Amazon and two Chewy orders and had them shipped to Springfield.
3 I thought Bill Davie gave a rip-roaring Tree House Concert tonight. He divided his selections tonight between some of my longtime favorite songs of his ("Sacred Ground", "Narrow Gate", Learn to Say Goodbye") and songs that don't reach back to the days when he performed a couple of concerts in my living room about twenty-five/seven years ago ("Summer Island", "The Blue Spruce Motel"). Bill reached back into the earlier days of the USA's folk revival and brilliantly and touchingly covered songs by Tom Paxton, Malvina Reynolds, and Pete Seeger. When he took his poetry break, Bill read more of the poems that comprise his Pandemic Suite and he read a handful of very short poems, sparks of verse, written by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, from their book, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry.
A limerick by Stu:
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