Back from a week at the Cape - beaches, Oysterfest and a memorial for a schooltime friend. Something for everyone there. I spoke a few words at Jackie's memorial, about our long time friendship. After the speakers, there was food, snack food and a small boat decoration filled with raw oysters. Her younger sister Sandy told me how she was so angry when Jackie died too early, Sandy thought they would have so many more years to be together. A few days before I had been to a funeral for a friend in Tivoli, who died at 69. The pastor there also kept saying, too young, she died too young. Made me think of Maria at 45 but then I guess they always say too young. Not my Uncle Ed Murphy, he was 96. There they said, "Doesn't he look good?" and he did. I went to Oma's 100 birthday, but was away for her funeral, but they probably didn't say she died too young either.

Anyway, something happened to me at the Cape, something broke free and I can once again do embrodery. I haven't been able to do that since Maria died. Instead I replaced it with Sudoku, the numbers game, placing numbers 1 through 9 in blocks, filling books and books of Sudoku. I even did the ones in the newspaper each day and the one in the AARP magazine, any Sudoku I could get my hands on. I realized in Cape Cod that was because when I embroider, I think. When I do Sudoku, I have to concentrate on the numbers, nothing else, no thinking. I had my bag of assorted projects to embroider and I picked up an apron I had started before Christmas. The needle went in and out and the brain started to wander. But my thoughts weren't scarey thoughts, they weren't awful thoughts, they were just thoughts and the needle kept going until I ran out of thread and then I picked another color and it was like I had never stopped for seven months. One small step.....

I've changed in many ways, I know it. Not long ago Caleb Potter's mother wrote in her blog that Caleb had asked her, "Where's my real Mom?" She was upset and hurt, but Laura wrote to her blog, saying something like "since my sister died, I lost my real mother, the one I had before" and I know what she meant. Tragedy changes you. I told Timmy the above, and he simply said, "I lost my old girlfriend too". I know I am less tolerant, less patient. At the Cape we were in line outside waiting to eat at Moby Dick's the last night of the season it was to be open. A big van drove up and parked next to the line of waiting customers with a bumper sticker NOBAMA. "Where did you get that sticker?" asked the man in front of us."I want to get one". The people behind us piped in, "We want to get one to," That's it, I told Timmy. Let's go. I'm not eating with people that think like that and we left, with the hostess saying, "Won't you reconsider?" I wanted to yell, "You assholes want McCain. Stand in line then, like sheep, waiting to go into a restaurant" , but Timmy (who is never the conservative) said to me, "I wouldn't say anything to that group if I were you" and I didn't. But that's just an example. No patience. I can't even wait for the next two weeks to go by so we don't have to see and hear all the politicians pointing fingers and telling us how much money they are going to save us. Well, I may be impatient now, but I can once again do my embordery.