It recalled for me a Harry Chapin line about a special woman in his life: "I could not make things possible...but she could make them holy." I came home, and Wifey peppered me with questions about the class -- asking the next one before my tired self could complete the answer to the last one. I asked myself: what would make things holy?
Anyway, Harry and I are FaceBook (tm) friends, and he had a lovely post today talking about how he and his wife, a nurse, first moved to Miami in 1979, and have lived for years in what is now Palmetto Bay, in a neighborhood called Mangowood. I know it -- after Hurricane Andrew they called it, smarmily, Mangle-wood. Harry's final post was nostalgic as he said goodbye -- he and his wife are ...
Harry and his wife came over. I believe we brought in pizza or Chinese -- my Dad joked that he wouldn't dare barbecue for a true Southerner like Harry's wife. They were delightful. Harry had a slight accent, and his wife was full on "Driving Miss Daisy." She was born and raised in Gastonia, which was shocking to me, as she was Jewish.
Harry was out of town, and I was seen by the senior guy Yale, who wanted to admit me to South Miami Hospital, since I technically had "unstable angina" -- chest discomfort that came and went without a known trigger. I begged off, but came the next day for a stress test with thallium, followed by a CAT Scan.
The youngest, Harry, died in his early 40s, when I was a young boy. Ann died last night, 11 months before she would have "made the Smuckers jar," as my sister Trudy pointed out.