Everybody's So Different I haven't Changed

In my family we hate to be parted but we love to say goodbye. We love the weepy, beery farewells, the exit calls to have one more drink, one more bite, to stay just a little longer. The grown ups embrace and the little kids cling to each other, screaming as we pry them apart. You'd think they were being sold into slavery. We each press each other as if ...we may or might never all meet here again.

And we press a sack lunch on the departing, something for the road. Frequently, there is a bale of hand-me-downs the children of the hosting house have outgrown but which will do just fine for the children of the departing. We slip dollar bills to the little kids and tell them to buy themselves a treat. We slip a ten or a twenty to the older kids and tell them not to spend it all in one place.

I guess that's why the wake is our clan's supreme expression of solidarity. We love to say goodbye.

Its too bad the internet won't support a wake. Or maybe I just don't know how to have one on the internet. There's a lot of things I didn't know about the internet until I came to BitchPhD.

In fact, this blog has been a revelation to me, one revelation after another. I came here following a recipe search for pan de dulce and was introduced to a sweetness I never imagined. A complicated sweetness, one requiring a palate sophisticated and discerning and learned. This is, after all, BitchPhD, not SweetHoneyintheRockPhD.

I thank you for being so sweet to me. Thank you for many kindnesses. Thank you for giving me time to become a little learned and listening to me while I struggled to express what I've learned. Being invited to join the bloggeen of the Sisters Bee has been a great honor. I will never forget it. I will never forget you.

My time posting here has coincided with one of the most tumultuous phases of my life. Shortly after I started posting, I left my little home on the mountain to work in Wisconsin for what I expected to be a few months. Nearly two years, six months of chemotherapy, one ghastly surgery, two hospital stays, and several months of physical and mental therapy later, I'm back in my mountain croft. I never, ever, ever, want to leave again.

Not sure what I'm going to do from here on. I've got a lot of catching up to do. I need to find my place, again, among the members of my household and among my friends. It may or may not be worth writing about. The Great Recession has caused much dislocation for our people. My experience is unique to me but has probably been repeated, in similar form, millions of times over the last couple years. Just look at the BitchPhD staff. No one of our bloggeen is in the same place and situation they were two years ago.

Except me. I'm back where I started. Mostly, I want to play my guitar and have a drink with my friends. And wake BPhD.

Dr B said the internet is a big place and it is. The world, however, is really a very small place. Who knows where we might run across each other again? Anywhere people crowd in for a drink and a dance and a bit of a joke, that's where to look for me.

I'm the guy at the end of the bar, chatting up your sister.