back to reality

Well, we’ve been back from Charleston since Sunday night, but I’ve been having an unreal few days, all full of feveryness and involving sleeping like 15 hours a day (with apologies to poor Tae who hasn’t slept 15 hours total in the last three weeks). Baker B was feeling cold-ish last week before we left but got over it and never was more than a little sniffly. Sunday evening I started feeling all sniffly and achy and fevery and weird, and of course came down with the full-blown… whatever it was. In retrospect, I think I got it from my student worker, who has been coughing and hacking and feeling ill for weeks, but whatever, it’s not been fun. I called in sick Monday, went to work yesterday feeling like hell (and looking like it too, according to my coworkers who were a little overly eager to let me know just how ghastly I did look) so today I stayed home again. And now I’m happy to report that I feel MUCH better.

I’d planned to take off today anyhow and go to Asheville – my sister-in-law and I had decided several weeks ago to take my mother to see an old friend of hers who is in a nursing home in Waynesville. They’ve been friends nearly as long as I can remember – Ms. R went to the same Weird Church as us, and for quite a few years rented a trailer from my parents, so was our next door neighbor for ages. And she used to come visit my parents and stay a week or so, but in the last few years her health has deteriorated. Now she’s in a nursing home, although she sounds like she’s doing very well. She writes my mother, and not long ago I wrote her back to let her know about Daddy having the bypass operation, and also to let her know Mama’s memory is seriously deteriorating, so she wouldn’t be hurt at not hearing from her. And she wrote me back a nice long chatty letter, sounding just like she always did. So I’ve wanted to go visit her too. She’s got to be in her mid-eighties.

ANYHOW, my point was that we were going to go out there, and I’d planned to drive down to Asheville last night, but I felt so awful that I finally decided I’d better cancel. I didn’t want to make any of these elderly people sick, either. Of course, since I belong to the Scatterbrain Family, apparently nobody remembered this big plan but me anyway. I’d talked to Mama, who I thought remembered it, but she apparently never mentioned it to anyone else, and when I called yesterday and talked to Daddy first, he didn’t even know we were going out there. He said the SIL was taking Mama to get her Cumiden (the blood thinner – my spellcheck thinks I’m trying to say her comedian) checked in the morning, but hadn’t heard of a visit to Ms. R. I’d emailed the SIL the day before just to make sure we were still on and never heard back from her – but then found out later to day that HER mother is in the hospital, so that was her excuse. She hadn’t checked her email. After talking to my father I called the SILs cell and left her a message just to be sure she wouldn’t be waiting on me to arrive, expecting that everyone else would have forgotten to tell her I was sick.

My family grapevine is full of short-circuits, obviously. I’m realizing how hard it’s going to be to communicate now, since my poor mother can’t remember anything. She was always the message-passer-on person. And I wasn’t counting on her to do any organizing of this visit, of course – I kind of thought the SIL would be telling my father what we were doing. He might actually like to go too. Oh, well. Next time I’ll write it on the calender myself. That’s the only way they remember anything, I think.

Well, anyhow. Charleston was great fun, at least. It was hot as hell – it had to be in the 90s. It was almost too hot. It was verging on being too hot to walk all over town. We both got unusually exhausted from the blazing heat. We just stopped a lot for beer and water. We went to the Coolest Cemetery Ever first thing, the one I found last time I was there – turned out it WAS Magnolia, contrary to what the gatekeeper told me while she was kicking me out last time (“Don’t go to Magnolia – I’m closing the gates there too!”) It’s HUGE, and there are several other old cemeteries around it. I of course have photos on the way.

The other unusual fun thing we did was walk across the new bridge that links Mt. Pleasant with downtown. Well, I did – and I didn’t walk all the way across (I think it’s about four miles round trip) but I walked far enough to take pictures of the old bridges that they’re tearing down. The new bridge goes over top of the old ones. Baker B started out walking across with me, but Baker B is afraid of heights and as soon as we got over the water, he was like, “I CAN’T DO THIS I HAVE TO GO BACK RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!” So he went back and I forged ahead, not being afraid of heights myself. It’s REALLY high – I’d been surprised that he was willing to go with me. Then, even more surprising, he met me on the way back, having figured out that if he stayed in the center of the pedestrian lane he was okay. They made a very wide lane for pedestrians and bikes – actually two lanes, one for bikes and one for walkers.

It was a spectacular view, and next time I’ll go all the way across. We didn’t do it until the morning we were leaving, so I didn’t have time to do the whole thing. I have to say I approve of the new bridge, though. I HATED that they were building it, because I loved the old scary ones. There were two very old parallel bridges, one that was two-lane and built in, I think, the 1920s, and the other was three lanes and built in the fifties or sixties. The two lane one was very narrow, and was one-way, while the three lane one had two lanes going the opposite direction and the extra lane was for large vehicles and people afraid of the two-lane one. Baker B was terrified of them both and would never drive across them. I always had to drive. The new one is four VERY wide lanes going each way – eight total lanes – plus the walker and bike lane. Yet you can still see off it, and it’s designed so it’s very open and airy, yet not at all scary. Baker B even drove across it and was perfectly fine. So, much as I’ll miss the terrifying old ones, I do approve.

Pictures soon. I had HOPED to post a few camera-phone-pictures, but Pix Place is being all screwy and irritating and won’t let me in. I keep having trouble from my home computer, and can’t figure out why – I seem to get in just fine at work. When I don’t have time to mess around with it. But I’ve got the old fashioned film ones being developed now, so if I ever get around to scanning them I’ll post some.