Cancer is stealing my friends

Now another friend is in grave danger in the ICU unit up in Halifax Nova Scotia. I dread every email from his partner. Dan is unconscious and the doctors don’t seem able to get a handle on his condition. I only met Dan a few years ago, but we became close quickly, surprising for me at my age when it’s hard to make new friends. We shared our poetry with each other and we had similar sensibilities. Evenings with Dan and his partner Paul were always raunchy and funny and sweet. I don’t believe in prayer or a personal deity who fiddles with things in everyday life, yet I have said the Hebrew prayer for the ill every day. Leave no stone unturned. We do not find that many friends to love on our journeying. The garden is belching forth too many zucchini, too many pattypans and yellow squash, too many cucumbers, the first beets and beans and red cabbages. Many nights we have two veggies for supper instead of a protein and a starch and a veggie. Now it's common to have protein and two veggies, as we have done this week several times. We give away, I dehydrate, I freeze. This weekend we have to make pickles of some of them. It’s almost too hot to work in the garden except if we can get done with household chores early enough. It’s been a dry heat this week but it’s still hot. Next week is supposed to be much hotter and humid. I am not looking forward to that. I’ll coop up in the airconditioned room and get a lot of my own work done. I’ve been writing poems all week. My assistant is off this week but will be back Monday. We need to figure out this weekend exactly what we’ll be doing for the memoir workshop at the Cape Cod Writers Conference. We’ve done memoir workshops in so many different formats and places, it’s just a matter of some fine tuning. Willow is totally a part of the cat family now. She still likes to sleep with Sugar Ray, her benevolent pacifist uncle. She plays with Mingus much of the day until he retreats and takes a nap. She does not yet sleep as much as the other cats. She purrs loudly whenever we touch her or whenever she can sit on one of us, not just when we pet her. I have been reading Margaret Atwood’s short story collection, THE STONE MATTRESS. I have gotten much more interested in the short story form in my old age. Most of hers work well – as she says, more tales than conventional short stories – but I am still figuring out why a few of them didn’t, at least for me. I am about to read a newish Chabon novel Companions of the Road I hadn’t gotten until yesterday. Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Lois. I don’t go out to lunch much except when I’m traveling, but sometimes it’s the only way to see women friends alone, always a different experience than seeing them with a spouse or in a group. I made a wonderful Turkish recipes [with my own modifications as usual] of chicken and bulghur Wednesday, enough for an encore last night with a cucumber dish while we did our Shabbat. Tonight Dale and Stephen are coming over. I’m going to make a chicken-chorizo-shrimp paella. I still figuring out dessert.