Saturday, June 8, 2024

     I don’t know how to write about my father. His mother dies in Monterey in 1920 of the world wide Spanish flu epidemic.  My young father and aunt spend most of their childhood in boarding schools. This flu kills many young women here. His Irish family comes to California during the gold rush era. They settle on a farm in San Juan Bautista. This simple outline hides many secrets and stories.

     I remember as a kid sitting at a dark cool table waiting for a ride home. My father is at the bar loudly talking and joking with some other guys.  This is his business and we are to wait quietly while he works. Sometimes my mother would arrive and take us home. Other times we wait until he is ready to leave. We were given Shirley temple drinks by the kind bartender.

     I water the front yard wearing a warm jacket.  The few days of warm weather are gone and the plants are thirsty. A pair of small yellow and black birds flutter around the birdbath. Bees are in the bottle bush tree and a solitary squirrel shakes the limbs and eats at the flowers.

     I continue to read the memory book WHY WE REMEMBER. Well written and accessible. There are definitely new ways for me to understand how our brains actually work. Lots of new experiments and uses for scanning equipment. I have a new perspective on brain fog as I get ready for Monday’s next monthly chemo treatment.