The Seated View

 (credit: David Govoni) "On the other hand, I feel lighter these days. I spent much of the summer feeling like I was about to die and just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing has changed really except that I seem to have decided to enjoy living. It's so much easier to exist this way." – Laurie Kingston Many of us talk about wanting to leave the world a better place. My dear friend Laurie actually did. I don’t remember the exact particulars about how Laurie and I became friends, but I know we found each other through blogging. She wrote about living with metastatic breast cancer — with the emphasis on the living bit — on her blog Not Just about Cancer and in her wonderful book Not Done Yet: Living through Breast Cancer . At the Toronto launch for Not Done Yet In Laurie, I found a steadfast friend and we were lucky to share almost a decade together. She was madly in love with her spouse Tim and proud, adoring mom to her wonderful b...

Alcatraz, 1992   At some point in the ICU , I had a transcendent experience. Buzzing with excitement, I waited for The Boy to arrive for his daily visit and then told him all about it. That as soon as I was better, the first major adventure we were going to have was to go to Giraffe Manor . Do you know about Giraffe Manor? If not, you simply must click that link. It’s a hotel in Kenya that’s has a herd of domesticated giraffes wandering about the grounds. Giraffes that stick their heads through the windows and steal your breakfast!    I’ve wanted to be a game warden in Africa ever since I read Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds as a little girl, but for now it’s fairly obvious that this job option is going to have to wait until my next life. The photo safari, too, because the savanna isn’t too accessible. But there it is, Giraffe Manor, and it is at the very least partially accessible! So, anyway. The reason that we were going there was because I’d d...

 Mary and Ginger. Photo by Ralph Blakely, III I don’t remember exactly when and why Lynn introduced me to her cousin Mary. I think it had something to do with Mary being diagnosed with RA and Lynn thinking that we’d hit it off. So we emailed and then we called each other and yes, indeed. We hit it off. One of our biggest regrets was that Mary lived in Charleston and I in Toronto. We had plans that someday, we would get together and laugh our butts off while eating good food. We did a lot of that — the laughing. Mary was funny. Ridiculously funny and smart and that’s the best combination there is. Despite having lived many years in Ireland and then Charleston, Mary’s voice was quintessential New York. Raspy, straight out of the city accent, and she swore like a sailor. Always appropriately and in context, which made everything so much more funny. She was one of the first women to be diagnosed as HIV-positive in the late 1980s and was one of its longest surviv...