'Bernie' waves goodbye to summer; I get my blood 'sunburned'

"Bernie' waves goodbye to summer

In Atlantic Beach, you might have thought that the summer ended on July 4th, from the way my father sounded so sad when he raised the flag and said, "Summer's over." It was a routine. My mother would say, "Al..." She didn't need to say much more.

Of course even after Labor Day, it isn't actually over, but the melancholy that washes over (most of) us makes it feel that way. Though I remember Mimi having me write a story, back at the paper, about people who loved the crunch of acorns under their feet and felt revived and relieved when summer officially ended. The other day I dreamt that I really wanted to drive down to the beach to see my parents, but I didn't do it because I knew the Labor Day traffic would be too bad. It didn't occur to my dream self that they wouldn't be there.

They had framed a New Yorker cover that I hangs on my wall now. Their friends Bernard and Muriel Glazer loved Fire Island. After Bernie died, this cover came out. The man waving goodbye to the ocean bears an eerie resemblance.

Car food

Today was my first ECP visit with a gap of three weeks, as compared to the two that I have been doing for a while. The last time I tried to extend the time between the sessions for the light therapy on my blood, to lessen the skin-tightening effects of graft vs. host disease of the skin, my stomach started to harden again. That was a while ago. So far so good. As previously noted, I don't really mind going to the Kraft Family Blood Donor Center except for the part about the needle in each arm, and today, the added element of blood dripping down my left arm and Rosalie having to thread the needle in because the needle wasn't cooperating in drawing blood even though it was in. I had missed some of "Sharpie-gate" so she updated me. They REALLY dislike Donald Trump. 

I didn't have much time between tennis and the time that a driver would be picking me up, so I made a "picnic" for the back of the car. The driver was interesting: a minister transplanted from Jamaica to Worcester, he was listening to Radio Jamaica. (I wrote a stream of thought about it on Facebook.) On the way back, the Jamaican news seemed to be obsessed with body count in the Bahamas. Watching it on the news, and reading about the devastation, and getting incensed by the climate deniers (and wondering what exactly they're denying) was horrible enough. But the announcer kept talking about bodies piling up and more refrigerators needing to be found to store them. I asked him to change to local news. He put on Christian broadcasting. 

I listened to, and watched, everything on the US Open app and talked on the phone. I forgot to bring headphones and so I held the phone up to my ear. I tried a meditation app for public transport but quit as soon as it said to find a place to lie down. Now I'm eating chocolate ice cream with Evelyn Hatch's coffee cake mixed in and thinking of calling it a night.