Maybe it’s because he isn’t smoking anymore, but Ed is having a struggle not overreacting to every-day missteps. He took a 3-hour round trip to Port Charlotte yesterday to deal with an assisted living resident having legal problems. He wore nice slacks and blazer because he hasn’t gone native. He wears a pair of driving shoes and changes into better ones before leaving the car.

In midday, I pulled myself together and walked to the tailor shop and chatted with Susan and started back late. It’s easily a 90 minute walk in total. I was walking up our street when I saw Ed coming in our Isuzu. Ed had taken a loaner, a huge van, to Port Charlotte and on getting back, had driven to the body shop to pick up the Isuzu, now repaired at an obscene cost because it involved taking apart the transmission. I was happy to see our car back because I wasn’t about to try drive the van, as long as a celebrity limo, and crash into things when backing up. I had walked a lot on my first effort and it was nice to have a ride back the rest of the way. Ed was very upset because he couldn’t find his fine shoes and had driven back to the body shop to look in the loaner and they weren’t there and that meant he’d have to drive back to Port Charlotte (the aforementioned 90 minutes one way) and check the parking lot because he thinks he left them next to the car when he was changing into his driving shoes.

I asked him where he had been and looked up the facility on the internet and called but no one answered. Nothing for it but to go. I said I’d go along to keep him company and off we went. The shoes weren’t in the lot. We walked into the facility and found some factotums and no one had turned in any fine shoes. Ed put a good face on – he takes very good care of his expensive shoes and although these were 20 years old, they were in perfect condition. In truth, these are more than shoes. These are a symbol of hard-won achievement. Losing them was like going backward, being shoved into poverty, ground back into the nothingness one started out with. No other way to describe his mood.

It was now 6:30, back another hour, 7:30, defrost something, 8:15, cook it, 9:00. I was going to do it but knew it was going to be an effort. But fortune shined and we passed a Red Lobster and went in with a minor wait and had a lovely dinner. We got home and I chucked a lap robe I had been covering myself with into the back of the car before getting out. Ed poked his head into the back for something or other and, voila, there were his fine shoes.

I said, with a smile, “Hey, thanks for the ride and the dinner,” and let it go at that.

Ed is tutoring the son of a friend to pass his pharmaceutical exam and has gone off to Fort Myers. He’ll be gone most of the afternoon. I am out of hot cereal and decided to try cold even though cold milk does me in. I saw part of a banana, in a little plastic saver bag on top of the microwave. I don’t know why I thought this was still edible since it had been sitting there since before I went to the hospital. So I picked it up and it was a soggy mess and had leaked out of the bag and all over the top of the microwave and down the back and all over the rear counter and, and … so I cleaned it up. In case you are interested, decomposed banana smells like spoiled cardboard.

I finally got to the piano after days of neglect and worked on a Bach Toccata. It is so much easier for me emotionally to work on Chopin, but I am technically better off mixing up my composers, so Bach it is. This Toccata has a great ending. I spoke to JSB about it as I was leaving the piano, “You sure know your stuff, you little dickens,” I said. I know he heard me.

xx, Teal