Hiatus

Today is Friday. For most of you, it's in the morning and for me, it's the evening. Which means I'm way ahead of you. Luckily, you won't have too much trouble keeping up. This time.

G has continued to recover as well as any of us could have hoped and is now waiting to come home. She'll have to wait until next week, though, because over here the good people who fill out the papers that say "go home now" don't typically work on the weekends.

Like everyone else in Italy, they probably don't work between the hours of noon and one-thirty or two, either. And they probably have wine with lunch before their nap. There are some things about this place I really do like.

Everything has turned out well. Through all of this, we've had a niece and a nephew who will start school a week late this year because their mom was here helping with this whole hospital fuss. D has continued to work at full capacity, which means she spends most of her not-at-the-hospital time on the phone or in meetings conducted through some internet portal thing unless she's staying up late or getting up early to be ready for those meetings-through-the-portal. So, for example, that means our Friday evening is spent here at home until nine, when the meeting they're holding on the West Coast of the US will come to a close.

Sometime after nine is the perfect time to go out for dinner, though we'll have missed the best time for an aperitif. Aperitifs are really fun - all the bars compete for your business by including food with your drink purchase. Buy a beer for a few Euros, and they include a basket of chips, little bites of pizza, bread sticks and prosciutto, a dish of olives and some pickled veggies. All of these items accompany your single beer. You could easily go to two bars, have one drink at each, and scarf down enough food to keep you from being hungry for the rest of the night. Especially good if you're loading up on the carbs.

I don't know how they make any money selling drinks. The drinks are expensive, but not that much.

Tomorrow will be the last day I'll get to visit G before I go home. So I won't be here when she comes home and sees the Amphora sitting on the dining room table. I think that's a good thing, given that we didn't ask permission to glue it back together. If she's not happy about it, I'll be a long way away; and I won't see her again until after she's cooled down. If she is happy about it, I think it best that she and D can share that moment. D was the one who had the misfortune of tipping it over, so it seems fitting that she be the one to present it once again.

On Sunday, D will take her sister, the niece and nephew, and the brother in law to the airport. I can't go along, because the cars here in Italy are too small to hold that many people along with all their luggage.

And then on Monday, I will return to Portland. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I want to stay so that I can do whatever I can to be helpful - I can't converse all that much, but I can carry things up the stairs and help with the dishes. Truth is, though, that kind of help isn't really needed at this point and there isn't much reason for me to stay. D can handle anything that comes up, and G is closer to autonomy than we probably realize.

This has been quite a trip. Our week in London coincided with riots and looting. Some of the violence was just a couple blocks from our hotel (though I may not have made this clear before now - hi Mom, hi Dad). We didn't have any trouble, but it was certainly an interesting twist.

When we left London bound for Edinburgh, we took a detour through Oxford and had a short visit with one of my roommates from college. I don't feel qualified to have friends who have moved to Oxford to do post doc research on MRI stuff but it turns out that I have friends of a pretty high caliber. Braniac quotient. Who'da thunk.

In keeping with odd coincidences, our week in Edinburgh happened to be during the Festival of the Fringe. This is the largest arts festival in the world, and pretty much ensures that all of the hotels will be booked, everywhere you go will be crowded, and that the level of activity everywhere will bring you to a near overwhelm state of being. The population of the city doubles during the Fringe.

From there, we headed for Italy to surprise G for her 75th birthday, which was a terrific fun thing despite finding that her health wasn't so good and - as you already know - our plan to stay for a week was replaced by another plan that would see me remain for a couple more weeks, and D for three more after that.

These weeks have seen us - all of us - engaged in activity we hadn't foreseen. Everyone has been busy taking care of logistics that don't usually exist while taking care of themselves and one another in an arena largely unfamiliar and fraught with challenges none of us could predict. Add to this our collective concern pre-and-post surgery, and I'm afraid you'll find us a weary, though grateful bunch.

Times like these are usually taxing for everyone involved; times like these without being able to participate in conversations; or run an errand in a car; or succesfully order a plate of food; or ask directions to the bathroom without waving your arms and shouting a very desperate and panicky "Dough vay TOILET??!!" in a room full of people (actually, this is pretty cool now that I think about it); or to really do much more than smile and try to be useful... times like those are uniquely so. Taxing, I mean. Throughout these days, my hope has been that whatever utility I might offer has outweighed the burden I place on the household's resource base. The most frustrating part is that my 'usefulness barometer' doesn't work over here. At home, I can pretty much tell whether or not my efforts in any given direction are worthy. I can assess this based on my own criteria and usually that of others (though my own judgement typically serves me better than theirs). Over here, not so much.

While I set out to be the solid rock upon which everyone could rely and to remain commited to our mission without being encumbered by emotional stress, I now find that I am not the superhuman I intended.

Fortunately, I'm not alone. Each of us has had our moments. And even more fortunately, we're now closer to one another than we've ever been before. What there is to accept, we've accepted; what there is to forgive, we've forgiven.

We've each contributed a great deal to making this whole thing work and we've managed to do so with a shared objective. And everything - every last single thing - has turned out remarkably well.

We're family. Like never before.

And we're dog tired.

Have a great weekend -

Cameron