Perhaps sitting in the car for a few hours at a time, and driving some of it, was not the physical accomplishment it felt like at the time, given where I had been just weeks before. In my head I was 90-95% better. In reality, I must have been closer to 60-70%, with few reserves. In addition, I was not used to working that hard on that little sleep. If Heather and I have three days in a row like that on the boat, we just stop wherever we are.
I think I first noticed getting sick with a little cough on Wednesday night at dinner at the Red Iguana. That night back at my hotel I got the call I had been dreading. My grandmother had not been doing well, and the day after the meeting I was going to stop in Prescott on my way back to Phoenix. I didn't make it. She passed while I was at dinner.
Her public life is being celebrated, and rightly so. She did many great things in historic preservation, libraries, and a hundred other Prescott, Arizona state, and even national efforts, some just weeks before she passed. She lived so long that some of the buildings and such she had help expand or to be restored needed some more of the same again decades later. But what I remember her for most is she and my grandfather taking in an angry, scared junior high kid, back when they were roughly my age now. I lived with them through graduating high school, and to their thinly veiled distress, the rest of the year after graduation. I worked at the golden arches during the week, so I could drive up to Flagstaff on weekends to be with my girlfriend, who at least had the sense to sign up for college after high school.
They gave me several critical nudges in the right direction, or at least better directions, and more than once a little bit of support just when I needed it most to pursue a better life. They taught me that there were different ways to proceed in life, to be honest not always better ones, but just knowing that different ones were an option, and that I had some level of control over that was enough most of the time.
Back in my hotel room I cried for a while, then turned out the lights to go to sleep, determined to make it through the meetings the next day. I made it, but just barely.
sv-hiatus.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment