Notes - Reflections: present&past /

        Mid-afternoon. Roused from a nap by daughter. Instructed to watch Owen as he sleeps; while she and Carol head out for errands. Chinese, Happy Buddha, for supper. Earlier today you were about to leave when Owen felt warm and became lethargic – he is down with something. You are staying until Tuesday so Kim won’t have to use a sick day. He was fine through breakfast at First Watch.

         From mid-afternoon Friday he was fine. Lots of positive ‘let’s play’ energy. He is becoming a helpful little lad, bringing me my shoes and cane when it is time to run errands. He helps his mother also (which is a good thing). He also can have a devilish sense of humor, that twinkle in his eye is full of life whether his is creatively playing with his food or pushing a new toy rake around the room like he is sweeping (mimicking his dad’s motions as Paul runs the sweeper). 

         Paul is at the hospital studying. I did not realize these August Boards are in Oklahoma and are anesthesiology Boards not regular medical Boards – the first of three – oral Boards next summer and the summer after his fellowship – practical Boards where he is followed around for a day then judged accordingly. The key is, according to Paul, study so that he does not have to retake it as it costs five hundred dollars plus perhaps plane fare. 

         I was never a good test taker (unless it was an essay sometimes). The last one Carol and I took (similar to Paul’s in it basic nature) was the Graduate Record Exam. The only one that ever saved me with the Miller Analogy, I would have never got into graduate school without the good grad. Different times. Back then people worked the graduate school circuit to get out of going to Vietnam. Not me though. I had volunteered but they wouldn’t take me because of blood pressure issues.

         You felt duty-bound to go in the service?

         I guess. I first volunteered in 1961, before Otterbein College. Blood pressure issues. Air Force. Then Air Force ROTC at Otterbein for two years until I failed the physical again (still blood pressure). I don’t know that I felt ‘duty-bound’ as such. I can’t remember. I do remember the Kent State incident in the spring, when I was working on my Master’s thesis at Bowling Green. I felt bad about it, but I also worried that BGSU would close in protest (for) her sister university, Kent State and I needed the library open to complete my research. I never identified with the anti-war movement and the hippies as such; mostly I was indifferent – they were a different generation from my own. I was ten years older than most of them were. Besides, I was a beat, not a hippy. Big difference in my book. I did sympathize with the ‘Ban the Bomb’ movement, that seemed a necessity to me. We are still here though, who would have thought civilization would have lasted this long? Not me.

         Post. – Amorella.