- Once we got back to our home in Texas, I was on tenterhooks, waiting for our little Teddy to be born. Turned out he was late by about a week, while I expected him to come a week early,* so my wait was pretty long. But during that time, though we entertained a couple of times and were entertained alike, though we kept a couple of medical appointments, and though we had plenty of settling in to do, for me, all activities were done with half my mind and heart, the other half being in Mountain View, waiting with Elizabeth and Nathan.
- I had somewhat foolishly agreed to chair the annual Clear Lake Shores turkey dinner, held the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and that endeavor took enormous amounts of time, almost like a full-time job for a while. So my leisurely-writing time was limited.
- And this is the big one: I just wasn't interested in blogging. Living my life seemed enough. Oddly, I also spent less time photographing, being less interested in that endeavor, as well. I refuse, by the way, to feel guilty or concerned about that fact; it just is. My interest, however, is returning. In fact, Tom bought me, for Christmas, the Great Courses set of DVD's on photography, and we plan to start watching them soon, together. I plan to get out my previous camera, a Panasonic, for Tom to use as I use my Sony and we learn together. It is a sad fact that I used to know more about photography decades ago, when I had a manual camera. F-stops, ISO, the whole shebang: I understood it all. Not so much now. But, just as a familiar phrase in French returns unexpectedly from a wrinkle created during my high-school class or just as the lyrics to a song forgotten since 1962 pop up from an even older wrinkle, perhaps my long-ago-learned knowledge will reveal itself as I study. And by the way, Tom, mostly pre-me, enjoyed taking photographs, mostly black and white (just as I did), but pretty quickly turned that activity over to me. Maybe he'll get back into it.
And so I return, though I can't tell you how frequent my posts will be. Enough for now.
*I was indulging in what Joan Didion, in her book about the year after her husband and daughter died, called "magical thinking." I didn't want Teddy to come before our appointments, but, once they were done, I was ready, and so thought he would be, too. Why wouldn't he want to indulge his "Dodi"?
