Nothin Special

I keep meaning to leave little bread crumbs, so I can find my way back, or you can find your way forward, but wait, that's awfully pretentious, thinking that I am moving forward. I am moving, but which way is not clear. Or, perhaps it is everything else that is moving and I am not. I don't know. Do you?

Things around me moved to Duluth over the weekend. I caused that to happen because there was an extra special poker game there on Saturday night. You remember my story of the poker games and all who partake? Well, one of the old timers, who like me, moved south to the big city many years ago was making one of her rare trips north and there was a commemorative gathering planned because it was her birthday.

Now, this was someone whom I had not seen for some time. We had zigged and zagged over the years in our poker comings and goings. I kind of kept up on her activities through others who kept in better touch. She and her partner had a child late in life as those things go, then she found out she had breast cancer. Now it was time to get together, so I left my children to fend for themselves for a night and made the world move past me until I was in my old home town.

It was also a time to visit with my mother. She is alone in the old house now and we don't see enough of one another. Her dance card was open as it turns out and we went to an old supper club up the shore of the big lake. The restaurant had recently gone through a re-birth and was now decked out with a new look, new staff, new menu, and still the old beautiful view of our inland sea.

I can't remember the last time I had my mother all to myself at dinner. It was nice and we enjoyed a slow dinner of food we would never make for ourselves. Conversation flowed with the slow tempo of the placid waters outside the windows. A sip of wine, a bit of thought. Memories pulled from hidden places. Shared loneliness and a longing for things that were.

In time, we were done and made our winding way back along the lakeshore. Then it was time for me to have the world change its gears and move me to my old crew of poker players. Upon arriving, I found a full table that in time split into two - the testicles and the ovaries. For the first time that I can remember, there were more ovaries than testicles. After a while, I lobbied to sit at the ovary table because my luck sucked with the testicles.

As it turned out, the game shed a few players and we all moved to one table. From there, I can't remember a lot of specifics. I won and I lost if one were to count cards and hands, but I wasn't - counting, that is. I was being. I was in the company of friends.

Those of us with cancer compared notes and hair (or the lack of it). We moaned about the medical bureaucracy and the soullessness of the healthcare system. We also lauded our personal oncologists and compared notes on all other minutiae of the cancer train.

Then, it was late and we all stumbled our way home (or what passed for it). I tossed and turned on a bed that was not "mine" and in the morning, made my way back south to see where my children had hidden the bodies.