This is written with apologies to the moderator for an off-topic
message, but I want my friends here to know why I may not be posting
for a while. Please don't worry or think that Fido is being bad and
losing my posts.
Yesterday was a day of very mixed emotions for me.  My husband got
a job offer that he accepted and a few hours later I got the news
by e-mail that a dear friend of almost forty years in New York is
hospitalized for probably the last time in his battle against cancer.
So the good news is that Doug has a job again. We won't be seeing much
of each other, that's for sure.  He's going to be working at one job
7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. five days a week and I'm working from 12:00 noon
to 10:30 p.m. on two part-time jobs and one freelance assignment four
days a week regularly and sometimes a few hours on Fridays for one of
the places (as I'm doing today). I don't get home until after 11:00 p.m.
and he will be leaving for work by 6:00 a.m. This morning he left
earlier than that to be sure of arriving on time the first day on the
job.  I got up as he was leaving so I could wish him good luck, but I
told him not to expect me to make a habit of it.
And the bad news is that Mike is going to die very soon. So I am happy
and sad at the same time, and my smiles for my husband are through
my tears for Mike who was my boyfriend when I was sixteen. We were
separated at seventeen by my family's move to a distant state and at
eighteen broke off our "going steady" relationship by mail with a vow
to always remain friends, and we kept that promise through the rest
of our "growing up" years and into adulthood when we each fell in
love with and married people who reminded us in some ways of each
other. We have been good friends by mail and telephone and occasional
visits for almost forty years, and his wife has been a very special
person in my life for nearly that long, and I am hurting for her and
for me and trying to cope with the knowledge that very soon I will get
a call saying he has died.
Right now I don't even feel like reading new packets of BBS mail and
may stop for a while until I work my way through my grief.  I'll be
back; I just don't know when.
                                               Anne Page
 * SLMR 2.1a *
 * SLMR 2.1a * Sorrow shared is halved.
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