Trip time

I've gotten the green light on my elbow so we will make our trip west. Snow storm today so we'll leave Friday a.m. first thing. In Bartlett with Maggie &Jerry Sat. Night and Sun., then on to Wyoming. Hoping for good travel conditions. 

Minutewomen

Yesterday afternoon, Katie, Savanna, Brendon and I went to a U Mass women's basketball game. Since the men are the "minutemen" the women are. "Minutewomen." They were playing Davidson College. Davidson had a star who made 37 points! They won by 4 points. The Minutewornen tied the score a few minutes before the final buzzer but they couldn't pull out a win.

        The Minutewomen are in pink 

Good band at the game:

            U Mass band 

         Savanna, Katie and Brendon

Ellen was at a piano recital Tamar was in. 

Saturday evening we were at a monthly sing at K&S's house. 

Today we sang in the choir at Dummerston. A lovely coffee hour follows.

Thinking about MLKing, Jr.

This morning, John came over for a couple of hours and we had a chance to think together about a session we are going to do together at Hallelujah Farm on April 22. We had originally planned to do a seminar together last November, but I begged off because of Betsey's de?ath. John decided to go it alone, and we had a what I felt was a very successful event on Contemplative Ecology and the Whole Movement of Life, with about 18 people in attendance. See an earlier posting on this blog titled Catching Up for November 22, 2016. So this will be sort of a sequel, and more of a dialogue. John found doing the whole day himself to be pretty exhausting, so this should be better. Our theme will be "embodied spirituality." I.e., a spirituality that is fully integrated with our material nature and our oneness with the natural world, with other creatures and the totality of nature. It's a big theme! But the date April 22 has special meaning for us. On that day, 50 years ago, John, who was 6 years old, and I, drove to the Providence, RI airport to pick up Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young, and bring them back to the Brown University campus. MLK was preaching the next day. So that was a very special day for us. MLK was not an environmentalist, but we hope to channel his revolutionary spirit. 

Piedmont College and my mother

Today I mailed off a package to the College Archivist at Piedmont College in Demorest, GA. It contained about 50 slides of the college taken back c. 1965, and some letters written by my mother at that time. How did I happen to have these? Well, when my father died in 1957, my mother was left virtually penniless, and she had to work. She was 56 years old at the time. She lived with me and Shirley in the parsonage at Dummerston for a few months, but learned that in Vermont, as a woman,  she could be a lay minister, and so for several years she served churches in Glover and Bridgewater, VT. Then she tried being a housemother at St. Johnsbury Academy, but that did not last for long. It was then she decided to go to the place where she and my dad had met, the summer of 1925 - Piedmont College. Mother had been a student at Atlanta Theological Seminary for a year and was taking courses at a summer session at Piedmont (she had never gone to college). Dad had just graduated from Piedmont and was teaching at the summer school. I think he heard mother singing - she had a beautiful voice - and was smitten.

Here is what I wrote to Craig Amason, the archivist:

In addition to the slides, enclosed are two documents written by my mother, Olga W. Crockett. The first is a letter she wrote to me and my wife, Shirley, May 7, 1965, almost exactly 40 years after her first arrival at Piedmont. It describes how she arrived at the college unannounced one evening, Monday, May 3^rd, was very kindly accommodated and eventually re-connected with "Dr. Schultz," a member of the Piedmont faculty whom she had known at Atlanta Theological Seminary. She ended up being offered work by President Walter, and staying at Piedmont almost exactly a year. Eventually she found the work, and especially the travel it entailed, to be too stressful. She was 64 years old at the time and had some health issues. She lived only a year and a half more after leaving Piedmont in the spring of 1966.

       The second document is a talk which she apparently gave to groups in various places in the surrounding area about the college. I imagine that the slides might have been shown on the same occasion as her talk, but her talk does not refer directly to the slides. Her talk includes a little personal history about how she had originally come to Piedmont and met my father there in 1925. 

I had written Piedmont and asked if they were interested in the slides and letters. They were. It was good to find a home for them. 

Here are some scenes from the college in 1965:

Entrance sign

Newly built Daniel Hall

President James Walter

New Gymnasium

An early dormitory building

 

Elbow report, etc.

So, here's what's happening, and I apologize to my avid readers for long gaps in this blog!

My elbow laceration is healing well - no infection - and it is almost completely closed in, but not 100%. And there is the rub. There is still a small hole in the wound that is oozing a slight amount of fluid. That means, e.g., I can't use the pool, because going into water runs the risk of allowing bacteria in through that little hole. So I'm missing out on one of my usual forms of exercise, and have been now for over a month.

I saw Dr. Bassett, an orthopedist, today, and he said to give it another week. If it is healed over by next Wednesday, I can go about my business, which would likely mean we would resume our trip plans. If it is not healed over, he would probably "excise" the wound - i.e., open it up, cut out the stuff that isn't healing, and stitch it up. That would entail at least another week of healing, probably, and would probably cancel the trip, because we wouldn't have time to fit it in and still be in our choral groups, etc. They are all starting up in February.  I guess we would have to make the decision for sure after next Wednesday's appointment.  But it looks that way now. So I'm hoping it will heal naturally. He said fluid from the bursa would then just get absorbed by my body. I'm not thrilled by the idea of having the wound opened up again. So let's hope.

Meanwhile, concerning the larger picture of my overall health, I met my new primary care physician last Monday, Jeremy Morrison, D.O., (i have now had three primary care physicians retire on me!), and he spent almost an hour and a half with me! Plus he gave me not only his personal email address, but his home phone, and said I could call him at night in an emergency - after 10pm! Amazing. I heard he also makes house calls. He is very personable and easy to talk with. He is referring me for a sleep study program, pending review by my insurance, to tackle my sleep problems. He also made some common sense  suggestions that would help - things we already knew from reading, mostly. And he referred me for PT to do exercises that will increase my strength on my feet, and general steadiness and stability. If I could get back into a daily exercise routine, that would help a lot.

So, we'll hope for the best!

Meanwhile, here are some photos from past events that were stuck on my iPod:

This was the scene of my fall on Jan. 15. The frame of the backdrop looks like

 gibbets, doesn't it? It wasn't that bad. But I fell off the riser in the far left corner 

when I sat on a chair that had one leg off the platform (unbeknownst to me!). 

Deborah Lee Luskin showing a slide of Virginia Woolf and her family, part of a

 three-lecture series on Virginia Woolf, about whom I knew very little. Ellen and 

I read To the Lighthouse aloud to each other for several evenings in a row. 

An amazing book! 

          The Gawler Family at the Northern Roots Festival last Saturday.  

This has been a good time in the sense that we have stayed close to home, led a fairly quiet life, reading, enjoying the woodstov, etc.  I've been working again on the Guilford Church history that I was working on before Christmas -some deadlines coming up there.. And other interesting projects that I'll report on when I get a chance.

Stayed tuned, and I'll try to be more frequent in my posts!

 

 

Hanging in there!

Elbow-wise, things are slowly improving! I have doc appts. tomorrow and Wed. I'll know more after that about what lies ahead. Meanwhile I am doing things. Last night Ellen and I went to the Northern Roots Fest., a concert of traditional music. Great fun.

                              Finale of concert

Back home

We are home again. I have an appointment with an orthopedist next Wed. (Earliest I could get) and with my primary physician Mon. the 30th. So we'll be here at least 10 days. Then we'll see.