dreamless sleep

Sound of waves lapping the shore below. Looks to be grim weather. StABay looking southwest from my porch just now.

I’m no photographer, but the views from here are so captivating that the iPhone camera stays busy. Grainy, but I’m not interested in moving up from bad to good, much less better, best. The pics are for me in the moment.

Considering whether to add Saturday to my morning exercise “regimen” that’s no regimen at all but Monday - Friday hour sometimes half-hour, not to be beautiful but to maybe extend +Time. Article online this morning says for best effects exercise before breakfast, so I’m sitting here typing and starving while deciding whether to cook an omelet or go downstairs to the gym room. The important thing will not be the decision but how I feel later about what I actually did. My history and being is the omelet. But I wasn’t a heart patient looking at 80 then either.

Officiating a wedding this afternoon. My sister’s birthday today. Fourth anniversary of that morning in Cleveland. It’s in my personal time capsule. Rise early, shower head to toe with foul soap that I was warned not to get in eyes or mouth, bundle up, meet friends and loved ones in the lobby, go outside into bitter cold Ohio winter dawn, board bus trolley for ride to the heart institute, wait in waiting room with friends and loved ones for a few minutes until name is called. Hugs and get in a wheel chair. Roll to the prep room. Take off everything but your birthday suit orders the aide. Shall I keep my birthday suit on? I reply for a little Monday morning humor but the grim-faced aide cracks no smile, just repeats the order. Take off everything but your birthday suit. Covers me up with a warm blanket. Do you want to see a minister before you go for surgery? asks the voice of doom. No thank you, I say, my priest is here. Aren’t you from Florida? Yes. You’re here from Florida and your priest is here with you? Yes. He comes in for prayer, anoints my forehead with oil, sign of the cross. Final family hug as gurney with me aboard swings round and heads out through double doors like a battleship leaving port for the war zone. Ties up to a pier for nearly an hour as I watch enormous machinery wheeled into my OR and my Team assemble. Clutching my bottle of nitrostat, I’m planning my dreams. The main one will be riding the Jamestown Ferry, in my sailor uniform, from downtown Newport across Narragansett Bay to where that green Dodge sedan is waiting on the pier. 

No dreams came. I woke up thinking I was drowning, struggling to breath as a tube was pulled up my throat. Eyes open. Loved ones beaming down at me. “I’m alive!” I exclaim as +Time begins ticking.

T+