Here I am at home on Sunday, last day on a newspaper payroll, gate swinging open to retirement. Sunny day. Good coffee. Office window open to the breeze. Coop at my side. Sunday media, in which I am no longer complicit after 40-years of toil, a mouse click — or not — away. I have …
Chamber music concert Sunday afternoon cleared cancer at least briefly from my thoughts. Turned out it was a celebration of my recent retirement from newspapering, too. I first realized my retirement and its pleasures a couple of weeks ago when I looked up through my living room window to watch clouds rolling in over the …
My mother’s pencil sketch of her cottage and the bay at Hadlock, Washington, leaves me thinking about the uncertainty of human distance, how far we will travel. A question lingers in the moment of the drawing, sent to me after her death in 1979. “12 miles?” my mother asked in her neat hand, maybe wondering …
WEATHER: Finally, real rain. Not virga, not barreling through like a train with another destination. It’s drumming on my flat roof at 6:30 this morning, pouring from the canales, wakening white blossoms on the Apache Plume, reddening the flagstone outside my bedroom window. It’s too good to sleep through, even early on a Sunday. I …
Trees started leafing out at my elevation in Placitas a couple of days ago, including this desert olive on the east side of the house. Nothing like their green in the morning light — it’s very soft, or the receiving leaves are — and I can’t quite get it on my little point and shoot. …
— This morning is the last of Round 1 of lung cancer treatments — the end of a coordinated radiation and chemotherapy plan to first shrink the tumor and then get rid of it, hopefully, with surgery. Apparently, I won’t know much about the effects of Round 1 until late April and CT scans. There …
— A little Raymond Chandler fog in the atmosphere this morning, or at least that’s what came to mind as I looked out the bedroom window at first light. I started pondering mysteries of the weather, cancer, spinners and Western movies, in no particular order. — We only get fog a few times a year. …
— Some days I wake thinking my new job is to head off in the morning to get my butt kicked at Presbyterian’s cancer center in Albuquerque. But I kid a bit. I’m actually driving in to get fixed. And frankly I’ve felt pretty darn good so far this week — near normal, in fact. …
I’m on leave from work, but I’m thinking of the late House Speaker Ben Lujan this afternoon as his son, the congressman from New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District, addresses a joint session of the Legislature. I am remembering that Lujan kept his lung cancer diagnosis and treatment secret for years, even while he and his …
— Second week of cancer treatment. So far, so good. — People tell me it will get worse, but today, after radiation and chemo, I ate, napped, walked and ate again. Even wolfed down my hideaway peanut butter and jam sandwich earlier in the chemo chair. Feel good except for the gasping that comes from …
dreamranch 