Ten-Finger Exercises

last Friday revisited, and a patient revisited too

No wonder no one commented on Seamus in his shawl! I set last Friday's blog to Private access. I'll post it again at the bottom here so you can see.

The crusty old bartender lady I met a couple of weeks ago as a new patient has grown on me. She has a tender heart in there after all, and a lot of determination. She is legally blind, and last week she had me helping her with recipes she'd written large with magic marker. She wanted to get them separated out to give different people. As I identified each recipe for her, she'd rave about it, swearing that I'd never tasted anything as good as her oxtail soup, or her rhubarb cake, or her zucchini bread.

This week she wanted the social worker to help her get a will made, and he passed on to me her request for a priest to hear her confession. I was about to make the call when I heard she'd fallen and would be taken to a nursing home where she would probably die soon. I couldn't find a priest anywhere, so I took my prayerbook out and read through the confession with her while I waited for the ambulance. She slept through it all.

Since she has no family, I'm really sorry she didn't get the will made. She has a very old house, which looks dilapidated from the outside but is quite charming inside and neat as the proverbial pin.

Along with her recipes was a stack of "funnies"-- visual jokes she'd tack up behind the bar that were always a little raunchy but usually funny. One was titled, "You're at a baseball game. What's happening?" Beneath the words were pictures of a clock with the big hand on the eleven and the short hand on the four; a whiskey bottle upturned with the last drop coming out into a glass; a woman with one strap of her dress off the shoulder, revealing a breast; and a toilet.

Can you figure out the message?

Here's Seamus in drag, wearing his granny shawl to keep him warm. He seemed to like it, but finally let Bill take it off him today. Bill thought he was hot underneath, but I know he'll be shivering again tonight if I don't put it back on.

I misquoted the pastor's comment to my blog about truth. Here's what he really said, truly: "I will limit my comment to the observation that facts and truth are two different things, and that facts are often very unreliable indicators of truth."