These past few days have been pretty eventful. I guess you could say the eventfulness started on Friday. We were going down to Northampton to Tamar's school for grandparents day, and as we were arriving, I got a call from my son John who said he was calling from the emergency room at the Brattleboro hospital! He had been driving home from work in Keene, not feeling very well, and then suddenly started having pretty severe chest pain. So he decided a trip to the ER was in order. By the time he called me he had already had an EKG which was negative, so it was looking like he probably was not having a heart attack, but there were further tests that he was having so I left and came back up to Brattleboro. I spent the next three or so hours with him - Cynthia was there also - and the news was good re his heart and the explanation for his pain seemed to be, according to the doctor, pleurisy. So he was sent home and told to take ibuprofen.
So I said my goodbyes to John and Cynthia, much relieved, and headed back to join up with Ellen and Tamar. But that turned out to be not so simple. Suddenly, my cell phone simply would not go on. I even took it back into the hospital with the charge cord to see if it would go on there. But no luck. I knew that by then, Ellen had joined up with Ray and Doris Feinland, who were also at grandparents day, at a hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts. They were planning to take Tamar with them to the hotel to swim. We were all supposed to gather for dinner at the hotel. The problem was that I knew they had been trying to reach me to find out about John and had been unable to because my cell phone was dead, and I didn't know exactly where the hotel was. But there was nothing better to do than try to find them. I sort of remembered the word "garden" in the name of the hotel, and that it was near the basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. That turned out to be good enough. I found the Hilton Garden Hotel just past the Hall of Fame. And they were all in the restaurant ! But then when we came out to the car to come back to Northampton with Tamar, I plugged the cell phone into the charger cord in the car, and it went on! So I don't know what was going on there, but was glad to have my phone back. Amazing how we have come to depend on these phones!
So that was all Friday. We stayed overnight in Northampton Friday night, and on Saturday we hung out there at the house for a while. Ellen took Tamar to the movies in Hadley - The Pokémon movie - and I stayed at the house with Theo. I had a date a little before six to meet John and Cynthia for supper and then take them to a play in Dummerston. In one scenario, Ellen and Tamar were going to join us for supper at Panda North, and then Ellen and Tamar would go home and I would go to the play with John and Cynthia. But we got a late start heading back to Brattleboro, and the logistics just got too complicated. So Ellen dropped me at the restaurant and they went home. John and Cynthia and I had a nice supper there at Panda and then we went to the Dummerston Grange to a production of Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton, a play written in 1938. It was a psychological thriller about a man trying to drive his wife crazy intentionally by accusing her of losing things that he himself had hidden. She did indeed think she was going crazy, and became quite distraught, and all of that was painful to watch, though very well acted. I think this play was ahead of its time, because the wife is freed from this abuse and the play ends with her redeemed and the husband in jail. You can watch a 1944 movie based on the play on YouTube. That is in fact what I did while Ellen and Tamar were at the movies earlier in the afternoon. I watched the entire movie, Gaslight, and I have to say that in some ways I think the movie was superior to the play. (Note: I just realized that the movie I watched on YouTube was not the 1944 version of Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman, but an earlier, lesser-known 1940 British version, starring Diana Wynyard as the wife. It was free. The 1944 version costs $2.99).
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| Poster for the 1944 version of Gaslight |
This morning was the Shirley Harris Crockett award Sunday at the Guilford church, and so I had to be there to give certificates to two young women who are going to be youth delegates to the UCC Synod meeting in Milwaukee this summer. Lisa was preaching on Hagar this morning, who is of course the mother of Ishmael who is the father of all Muslims. So she chose a Muslim song for an anthem, and Andy Davis decided to do Ahmede Muhammede, which was the song we sang in River Singers last week in which I had a little solo, so I got to reprise that this morning. Then I came home with the New York Times and worked on the Spelling Bee while Tamar and Ellen played a game and watched a movie. And now here I am! Happy to be sitting quietly by the fire.
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