Today the countdown will really start as there is only one week to go. People ask if I am ready. No, I am not. Part of the getting ready is saying my/our goodbyes. We had a few of those this weekend.
Alison’s goodbye was hardly a goodbye, more a comparison of note cards about transitions. But the visit to Uncle Charles, who is just 7 week s shy of turning one hundred years, was more of a goodbye.
We took him to his favorite lunch place, down the road, Lindsey’s family restaurant. It serves traditional New England fare, much of it deep fried, to people who shouldn’t be eating such foot; that their arteries are clogged is visible from a distant to the non-trained eye. Charles, a regular at the place, had his usual dish; he doesn’t even check out the menu: fried scallops and a cup of coffee. Sometimes the restaurant doesn’t even charge him.
Lunch with Charles is always wonderful; unlike conversations with other people of a certain age Charles never repeats himself, only when you ask him. He has at least 95 years worth of stories and we can never exhaust the reservoir in our few visits. We hope that we can pick up where we left off a year or so from now. When we drove away, watching him wave to us in front of his trailer, we both had to swallow hard. Although he was in great shape and has the Wilson’s longevity genes, a goodbye at that age maybe more of a farewell. I invited him to come visit us in Kabul. “My plane is warming up,” he quipped.
From there we drove straight to Ipswich where another goodbye was organized by Edith and Hugh for our Ipswich and Newburyport friends. Edith reads my blog first thing in the morning and I better get this part of the story in before I am heading out to the physical therapist, the hand doctor and MSH where I hope to see Razia Jan and the person who introduced us to her, Ghia.
Edith and Hugh have half a share of a fish CSA (a CSF?), an experiment that is going on simultaneously in Newburyport, Ipswich and Gloucester. They served us this week’s bounty on the grill, a delicious haddock surrounded by agricultural bounty from Essex County. At the end of the gathering there were more hugs and more goodbyes (of the ‘see-you-later variety), and reminders that, at our age, one year is nothing. Everyone agreed.
Sylvia's Journal 
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