Notes - I forget who I was sometimes

         You did your exercises today, first time all week. Lunch was at the Regal, medium buttered popcorn and one medium No Sugar Coke. Your seats were fairly close to the screen, second row, but not as bad as you supposed. The film was everything you expected it to be, but you would like another to take the audience through the war. What excited you both was the bunker not far from 10 Downing Street, half a block if you remember rightly. - Amorella

         1601 hours. I doubt they used the real bunker, but it was quite realistically staged from our memory, even the steps down. They appeared I was saw them while walking down. I wept several times while the actor Churchill spoke. Growing up I listened to all his public speeches, mostly on a 1950's record series titled: "Hear It Now" with Edward R. Morrow and his "This is London". I heard the whole series of records not just Churchill. I remember as a teen thinking that by doing so, and watching historical films and listened to the personal stories of old people I could stretch my life by really absorbing what the medias and people had to say about living in their own lifetime. I believed I could personally gain insight as I did not know how long I was going to live. It was a personal education not a formal one. It still is. Perhaps that is the reason I continue the blog -- personal education. (1612)

         Saturday night. You watched CBS Weekend News, another Netflix episode of "The Crown" concluding with the marriage of Princess Margaret to Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Then you watched the next to the last episode of "Major Crimes" and conclude TV with an old episode of HGTV's "Property Brothers". Carol went up to read while you spent twenty minutes filling you weekly pill boxes and taken your weekly 'pen' shot of Bydureon. - Amorella

                                                                                   

         2150 hours. Filling the seven day pill box and taking my Bydureon shot is a major ritual every Saturday night or Sunday morning if I forget. Knock on wood I have never had to take insulin. My mother was sure I would be a diabetic like Dad when I was thirty. I was pre-diabetic for at least twenty years and I have been a type two diabetic since the late nineties. When my 'cousin' Bill Freeman was starting his medical practice in the middle sixties he said he doubted I would live to thirty with my drinking, high blood pressure and lack of caring about much of anything. This was probably in 1964/1965 not good personal years for me. I remember drinking Thunderbird wine for breakfast to get me started on the day. Not every day, but days when I remember drinking Thunderbird wine. Most people were eating breakfast at the time. Once, who knows why, I stopped drinking then and there. Eventually, I would have a glass of better wine once or twice a year. I glass. Now I have a sip or two of Carol's wine once or twice a year. No beer, no hard stuff -- a sip once or twice a year, but no more. Neither one of us really drinks any more. Cookies and ice cream do us in, that's our sinning. (2206)

         You can't help yourself boy, you've got a lot of memories and lots of stories in you, real ones yet you go for writing fictions. - Amorella

         2207 hours. Stories saved me in the classroom. I told many, all true or at least true enough by memory. Sometimes we would have finished up some big writing project or a major test or an exam and I would take a day and tell life stories. Stories that would make them think. I remember when you had the killings at Kent State and how students who were there did not know soldiers might actually shoot them. Unbelievable. From then on I would tell a story to seniors about how my dad who was an avid hunter and sportsman instructed me as a lad of ten with a twenty-two to never ever point a gun loaded or not at another person unless I was going to use it if needed to do so. I  remember laying down the law that if they were ever in a situation where a soldier or policeman or a crook was holding you by gunpoint that you sober up quickly and do as you were ordered. I know some of those students remember that short lecture to this day. I put the fear of God into them I did, or tried to, if it was to help them learn to stay alive. The world is not a very forgiving classroom. (2216)

         Time to put the keys away, young man. When you write such things you are there again and again in your mind, that last lecture year after year for as long as you can remember. The focus always on hints on how to stay alive, not only the senior curriculum. You were teaching real live human beings not machines to regurgitate whatever you said on tests and in essays or papers. - Amorella

         2223 hours. I forget who I was sometimes. It is not always good to remember.