Don't Grow Old. It's a joke. Only not really. My maternal grandmother is a master of the deadpan delivery of sarcastic humor. She can make just about any funny sentence sound completely serious. She also seems to manage the reverse, something that I admire and respect and hope some day to master, she can make any completely serious statement sound funny. Don't Grow Old. It's a phrase stuck in my head, that she would use a standard part of so many stories. I've tried and continually failed to reproduce it, but she can say it with such humor that you can find it funny for a time. You can believe that mortality is a choice and that the pain and suffering and heart-ache caused by it can all just be laughed at. It's fun. Don't Grow Old.
My maternal grandmother broke her leg (including an ugly hairline fracture), but she's been doing well and my mother has been taking care of her and my grandfather just about every day for the last two weeks since the accident happened.
My paternal grandfather, around the same time, wound up in the Hospital for chest pains. He's had a few heart attacks and subsequent bypasses so everything about that was complicated. He returned home for Easter. He returned to hospital again for the same problem. In letting him off the blood thinners in an effort to try catherization and recheck his system to readjust his medications... today he suffered a massive hemmorage stroke. They are not expecting him to make it through the night.
My birthday was last week. My brother's birthday is in a few hours. I just had an awful week to cap a bad semester of combined stress+"senior fever". Everything always seems to happen at the same time...
On a lighter note, starting Monday I plan to serialize my recently completed story. I've been working on it for a while, but I finally got it to the point where I feel I've brought the story full circle. It's the closest thing I've consciously done "in the style" of another author and it references and attempts some of the style of Cory Doctorow's excellent Eastern Standard Tribe. You shouldn't need to read it, the short story should certainly stand on it's own, but I'll recommend reading it just because it's a good novel.
Don't Grow Old.
I need to get back to the busy night now...