Saturday, December 25, 2010

Christmas day 2010

I started out by getting another email from a dying friend.
What do you write to someone who has numbered days and is in pain.
You can't use the usual cliche and say "get better".
He can't get better.
You can tell him to try and stay without pain and get the help
he needs from Hospice.
I can't tell him that he will go here or there, he does not have
a spirituality sense nor a religion.
He has lived a full life.
Perhaps too full to keep organs working.
Who knows.
So I wrote something lame and said that I hoped he would see Bob.

Better days we can remember when we sat on his veranda in Maui
he had a store mannequin on his deck and she had faded.
He asked Bob to repaint her face and nipples.
Between a few brandy glasses Bob had the courage to sit on his knees
and paint nipples. It was a sight.
It would be fun if these two met again who knows what he would be
asked to paint next.

Inside the Maui house is a fabulous collection of paintings by Bob.
We traded with my friend , traded a large ball of Gouda cheese,
some other foods when they had been to Holland and we lived in Spain.
At last we traded a bunch of paintings for a VW bus with illegal Belgian
license plates. We were young and crazy.

We brought the bus back to the USA and it cost us a bundle to have it changed to our specs but we made hundreds of trips still with that worn out VW.

I hope you can rest in peace very soon, Hawaian bon vivant.

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