One reason I work in medical: seeing someone pull back from the brink of death is priceless.

Seeing a patient come in for a checkup gripping the pill box I gave her at the last visit, seeing the lettering worn off the little flip-doors because she has been using it and it's working and her viral load is way down and she is smiling. She feels better.

And I feel better.

We take for granted our ability to keep ourselves relatively stable and healthy. Some folks need a little extra help.

Oatmeal

Oatmeal is a good food. It is warm and soothing in the belly. I am sitting in the kitchen floor with a bowl of the maple and brown sugar kind, feeding it to my grandson. He has the cabinet open. The mixing bowls have been pulled out and he is nesting and un-nesting them. After each rotation of movements, he turns toward me and opens his mouth so that I may spoon in another bite. He is busily content with the monotony of this moment, as am I. He is a beautful child. Eyes that seem to be staying hazel and golden hair which is smooth in the morning, but as the day goes on springs into tiny curls. Some days I cannot stop staring at him, at his preciousness and his relationship to me.

Now he has found the skillets, three stacked together, and the process continues. Stack. Bite. Unstack. Bite. Then the bowl is empty and the spell is broken. He stands up and totters over to his favorite window, the one he can see out of in the kitchen. He shrieks greetings to the tree and the birds. He knows this place, this house his mother never lived in.

I'm taking a little break from the public eye. From the Audience Mentality, so to speak. The internet and social media causes us to think and act as though we are continually on stage in fromt of our peers, as really we are, and I am thinking about whether that is a healthy thing. I like to write truth, and sometimes the truth hurts people. Sometimes people just don't want to be included in my public truths. So I am at an impasse with my writing and I feel that the only way I can break through that and make some preogress is to close the door and write alone.

I will be writing privtaely for a little while. I also hope to get  a few real live letters out before the postal service goes under. You should do the same.

I do have an email address and I check it daily. mfschuppeATgmailDOTcom.  I would be most grateful to receive even an electronic letter from any of you.

Of course, I may pop on here at some random time and wax poetic about asparagus or something. One just never knows.