The Good Rev. Dr's 2009 bi-coastal "Adios, Adieu and Godspeed" final farewell tour

I've decided to post-date a few of these entries from my journal, which has also suffered in terms of timeliness because of my travel travails, but it seems like the most logical thing to do. So looking back now to the "thirteenth" hour, I ended up giving my Pink Martini tickets to the woman and her son who had been driving me around Portland for most of the past two months, and then was able to rent a Ford Explorer at one of the local agencies, and with the help of two self-appointed "handmaidens," arrived in Carlisle on June 16th just in time for the "Milk & Cookies" meet-up they had been promoting through their church bulletin. Still, a very touch and go thing, with a lot of folks going the extra mile just to make it happen at all. Makes me wonder whether I should change my policy of only rarely mentioning people by name here, but they know who they are...and, of course, Jackie was first among them.

After the cookies, I met up with another old friend of mine from the Carlisle church, and we had dinner together at the Concord Grill. One of the waiters there just so happened to be one of the guys I used to play basketball with regularly at Concord Parks and Rec, so we also exchanged e-mail addresses which may lead to some renewed contacts there as well. Like all of these events, the missing faces were just as prominent as the familiar ones; and yet that just seems to be the way it is these days in our high-speed, highly mobile 21st century society. I try to celebrate the people I see, mourn (on some level, at least), the people I miss, and hope that somehow the technology will also allow us renew these contacts and enjoy them even at a distance.

I'd planned on having Wednesday morning just to hang around the hotel spa and try to recover a little from the previous day's travel, but instead I received a phone call from another "favourite" family, which resulted in morning coffee with mom and eldest plus youngest, then lunch (at the Bamboo!) with dad and middle child. Nothing TOO strenuous at the time, but when my good friend PB arrived later that afternoon (recently home herself from five weeks in Turkey, Romania, and Paris) I knew I was going to feel a little pressed to keep up. We hadn't really communicated that clearly about the exactly extent and limitations of my abilities and "disability" (which would have been hard to do anyway since I really wasn't sure what they were going to be in the first place) or how much I was counting on her to help me navigate Nantucket (another essential unknown), but that first night at her house was a little challenging for me: upstairs bedroom, too-tall bed, trouble getting in to and out of the bathroom...that sort of thing. We wisely decided to pack lightly for the island, even more wisely deciding simply to leave the wheelchair in the car rather than unpacking it in the first place, caught our afternoon boat with little trouble, and soon were happily ensconced at the home of our host and seemed "home free" - a convivial atmosphere, lots of help if I needed it.... Mission Accomplished, and nothing more to worry about until it came to Sunday morning....

Wrong. Trouble really started a little after 2 am that morning, when I struggled out of bed to answer a call of nature and discovered that my walker could not navigate around a wooden hamper just inside the door. Hurt my back figuring that out though, which left me collapsed in bed with an excruciating back pain radiating down my right leg and (my apologies to the squimesh) an urgent, nearly bursting bladder to accompany it. Finally broke down and called PB on her cell phone (she had decided to sleep in the other house in order to avoid my snoring), who arrived just a little before 3 am appearing exactly as you might expect someone to appear in such a moment: tousled hair and spectacles, as angry as a drowned cat, and not a bit of artifice or inauthenticity to her -- in other words, to-die-for, drop-dead gorgeous...although I suspect she would have taken those sentiments in a slightly more LITERAL sense than I did. Not exactly Florence Nightingale or Clara Barton, but a close approximation. I was sure happy and relieved to see her, in any event.

Friday morning, after several phone calls and face-to-face conversations with my hosts and the current minister, the previous minister, and (of course) PB herself, I agreed to take a ride in a firetruck up the the Emergency Room of the Nantucket Cottage Hospital, to see whether there was anything they could do for me there. But I'll tell that part of the story in the next installment....