My daughter asks, “If you were going to knit socks for God, what would they look like?”
Archive for June, 2007
Welcome To Texas
Howdy, fellow Knitters Virtual Vacationers, and welcome to the Lonestar State. I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.
I brought my kids down in 1996 to visit my sister who had lived here since 1981. We stopped for gas just inside the Texas state line. I went in to pay for it, and my kids had to come and drag me out 20 minutes later, because I was having such a good time jawing with the Good Ol’ Boys. I got back in the car, looked at myself in the rear view mirror, and said, “I’ve been living in the wrong state for 40 years.”
Didn’t take much convincing to get my dh to agree to the move, either. All we had to do was get him down here, and stick a cowboy hat on his head. You see, his grandparents were Texans, and although his mother was mostly raised in Chicago, and denied her Texas roots to her dying day, he has Texas in his blood.
I love Texans. Native born Texans, although they are getting rapidly becoming outnumbered by transplanted Yankees, are the kindest, friendliest people you could ever hope to meet. They will talk to anyone about anything. And, they are always willing to lend a hand if you need one.
What I DON’T like about them is their driving. They aren’t rude, as some people think. (It is more the transplants who are rude.) Some of them just tend to be careless. I think it is because they don’t have long icy, snowy winters to keep them on their toes. That being said, the men are gentlemanly even on the road. If I need to do a quick lane change, all I need to do is signal, look back for a guy in a pickup, and smile at him. Guaranteed he will let me in every time!
I love the cities in Texas. Each one has their own personality, of course. I am fortunate enough to live close enough to get to either Dallas or Fort Worth easily. Dallas is upscale, with great shopping. For clubbing, which we don’t do, Deep Ellum is top of the line. You can see many of the greatest Indy bands in the country there.
Fort Worth is a little slice of what you think of when you think Texas. Sundance Square has some great restaurants, Bass Hall, an accousical gem is nearby for classical concerts. Their zoo is top notch (Better than the Dallas one, I think.) Dh and I like to spend a romantic weekend at a B&B inn on the Square called Etta’s Place, after Jesse James’s girlfriend.
Although we live in the burbs, and could be almost anywhere, sometimes something happens that makes me chuckle and think, “Only in Texas.” For instance, people actually keep longhorns on their front lawns as “decorations”, if they have enough land. Plus, it does get hot. Yes, it does. But, we knew that coming in.
If you have any questions about my state while you are visiting, just put them in a comment, a I will answer them in another post.
Church Widows, Mohawks and Gray Redheads
The widows at church seem to have adopted me as one of their own. They were all clustering around me yesterday, hugging me, telling me how brave I was. It was touching, in an eerie sort of way. I wanted to point across the room at Philip and say, “Hey, he’s not dead, yet!”
His zigzag mohawk was a big hit. Too bad he is going to get it cut. He has decided he likes the buzz cut, though. I kind of like it too. It feels sexy when I run my hands across it, but we won’t go there. That’s private. 
And, of course, unspoken, but still thought by both of us, if chemo becomes necessary, it won’t be such a shock when the hair falls out, if there isn’t much to begin with.
I have been neglecting mine. I have a one inch gray skunk stripe at my part-line. I have been gray since my early 30’s. In my family, you gray early, or very late. I drew the short straw there, and Philip doesn’t want me to stop coloring my hair yet. Redheads don’t gray gracefully, anyway, or I would just go ahead and let it go. At 51, I am not fooling anyone.
Well, Sh*t
I took my dh, Philip for his two week surgical followup yesterday. The first question he asked the woman who directed us to the exam room was, “What were the results of the biopsy?”
She looked at the chart, and said, “This is all gobbledygook to me. I am going to have to let his nurse explain it.”
Oh, oh. The first little tendrils of worry begin to creep in.
In comes the nurse. Same question. She looks at the chart. “Dr. Weiner is the one who explains the results. He’ll be in after I remove your staples.”
That really doesn’t sound good.
Dr. Weiner comes in. He explains that the slides were sent off to two different labs besides their own, one at Washington University, and I honestly can’t remember where the other one was. The unamimous consensus was……….inconclusive. Ambiguous. Who knows?Could have been a tumor. Could have been AVM (Arterial Venal Malformation). And if it was a tumor, they can’t tell what kind, but probably low grade….maybe. But probably astrocytoma rather than glioblastoma multiforme, which is the scary kind. You know, the one John Travolta had in “Phenomenon”. We hope, anyway.
On the plus side, he said he has seen this once before in his career, and the patient is still alive and kicking, 15 years later, with no sign of anything regrowing.
Philip has to return in 4 weeks for another MRI to see if there is any sign of regrowth. If there is, they will start chemo and radiation. If not, they will wait and see, checking his head every so often for the rest of his life.
In other words, my husband is a medical mystery, and a possible time bomb. Maybe. Maybe not.
I suppose we will get used to the uncertainty, and it will become just part of the background hum of our lives.
The way life works, we will probably be watching him carefully, and some other disease will sneak up and take me, instead in 5 or 10 years. So, worrying about it all the time does nothing but gives me a stomach ache.
Time to knit!
Secret Pal Package!!!
Hooray! I got a package from my Secret Pal! Thanks Secret Pal, You ROCK!
The pictures are over in the Flickr column to the right! I can’t seem to get them to post over here yet, but I CAN get pictures to post to Flickr, which is an improvement. They won’t move from Flickr to here, though. I keep getting a dumb error messages.
Take a look, anyway.
www.flickr.com/photos/cookieknits
Or, better still, check out all the Secret Pals who have posted pics of their packages at:
