Porter the trumpeter with his mates at school.  

Today was "lower school rising", when the kids symbolically cross a bridge from one grade to another.

Nico crossed from second grade to third -- and Porter moved out of the lower school altogether into 6th grade and middle school.

Monica's been the "class coordinator" for the 5th grade and this Wednesday was Beach Day.  She sent her account out to the parents:

"We had a great day at the beach.  We started off with some heavy drizzle but the kids all put on bathing suits and most went running into the water, some voluntarily, others not quite so.  None the less, there was no whining or crying and everyone seemed up for a good time.  A couple here and there would sit apart and discuss life topics.  An interesting segregation of gender took place until a few bold ones broke the barrier.  We were served a hot lunch of hot dogs and burgers (and veggie burgers too) which was welcome in the chill after swimming.  As we ate lunch, the sun struggled to come through and the dampness lessened and temperatures rose.  All were eager to enjoy the ice cream sundae fixings with only a few experiments on new toppings(promptly stopped in order to stop world hunger and waste of course!)  After lunch, gender segregation was no longer an issue and  great games of tag and some sort of capture the flag took place.  Balls, frisbees and a kite where played with. Parents and teachers were well entertained by our attractive lifeguard (We made sure not to distract from his duties of course!) After that, sand in all its glory became the focus.  Interesting digging, burying and building projects started to spring up everywhere with all sorts of collaboration taking place. Dry clothes soon became wet.  Then it was time to go.  I am sure all will sleep well tonight . . . It was a little frightening watching the hints of teenagerness but they are wonderful."

Had the stitches out. For those who asked, all the lab-pathology reports came back fine, the scar's a good six-incher from sideburn to Adam's apple, and the object itself was the size of a dove's egg (about an inch across). So now it's just a matter of patiently letting tissues re-knit.

For sixty-odd years the Swamp Yankees in Ashaway have been putting on a "Huck Finn Day" in the park.  

Fishing with bamboo poles in the pond, free burgers and hotdogs for the kids, water-balloon toss, obstacle course, games.

So I ventured out with a great white sail of a bandage on my face, and we met Charles, Patty and the girls by the carnival games.

Sometimes, when I've found myself hanging out with pagans or new-agers, I run up against some of the limits of my empathy.  One characteristic in particular that rubs me the wrong way is the new-agey interest in healing.  Some people become specialists in healing themselves from whatever tragedies and handicaps they are working on.  It's the very kernel of their identity.

Blech.  I hate healing.  First of all, I don't see that I have much role in it other than staying out of the way and not aggravating anything.  Second of all, it's just a drag.

So Monday morning, the surgeon removed the parotid gland from back of my left cheek, which had developed a benign tumor.  The assumption was that it was the "superficial" lobe that sits atop the main facial nerve, but once inside he discovered that, on the contrary, the nerve sat atop it all.  He had to spread the nerve in order to fish out the gland, which made the whole process more difficult and a bit more damaging.  

After 3 hours in surgery I woke all tubed up and with a great bandage upon the side of my face.  They had placed a draining tube in the side of my head and hooked me into a pump.  It would be an afternoon and night of dozing, contemplation, and peeing into a bottle every two hours.  I had a button to release a flow of morphine into the IV, but I didn't use it much, since my face was pretty much numb.

I might have been nauseous if I'd tried to read or watch the television, but I was just content to be idle and to put up with the nurses' regular interruptions.  Maybe there was more morphine than I thought.

Home and resting comfortably, with about 7 inches of souvenir needlework along the side of my face. It'll make a fine dueling scar. (I just won't tell people that it's a duel I lost with the medical establishment . . . )

The boys were at Pine Point at some jump-rope thing, so I took the two hours to walk the wetlands and woods of  Barn Island with my binoculars.  Redwinged blackbirds, barn swallows, osprey, white egrets, snowy egrets, yellowlegs, yellow warblers, yellowthroats . . . .  A cottontail nibbled in the shadows along the trail.  

A mink strutted out of the reeds five feet from the toe of my sandal.  A murdered field mouse dangled from its mouth.  It stared at me for a moment with its black and unreadable mink-eyes, then turned and slipped back the way it had come.

Porter made a bonfire in the fire circle -- filling a cardboard box with sticks and setting it alight.  It was a cool evening, but the aggressive spring mosquitos pushed me too close to the fire and smoke.  My naked ankles taunted and tempted them.  Porter methodically sharpened a maple stick to a trident of perfect tines, and he and Nico toasted marshmallows.  A woodcock whuttered rapidly by in the dimness with the cats in futile pursuit.

I stayed up late reading a novel, but was shaken out of it by a shrieking, snarling brawl in the climbing tree.  Two raccoons were fighting -- or at least one was.  The bigger one, making plaintive-sounding noises would approach the smaller angry one, which would attack, snarling, chittering and biting.  The big one would just push on, infuriating the other one even more.  It's the wrong time of year for raccoon courtship, so maybe it was a pair of males fighting - or tough love from a parent driving off a young-un.  Whatever it was, they made a shocking amount of noise and had the whole house up at 1 a.m.

Sun and springtime arriving . . . 

    Finally.

We brought out the grill on Sunday and had friends over for the beautiful, sunny, breezy day.  The kids played, the adults sat or wandered and chatted and drank their beer.  And oh, the shishkabobs were luscious -- lamb, pork and chicken, with grilled squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes.

Andy's fine.

The bump's benign.

They'll nick it out soon

(on the 1st of June).

The Paper Airplanes are Flying!

I can see this is going to be an adventure in medical technologies.  

Today it was an MRI.

After they have subdued you with paperwork, they strip you of your metal -- leaving you with your tooth fillings, your pants' zipper and the eyelets of your boots.  With cheery talk of claustrophobia, they immobilize your head in a vaguely spanish-inquisitionish device and slide you deep into a torpedo-tube.  At the last moment, they slip a panic button into your hands just in case.  (In case of what?  They don't say, but probably it has something to do with the bits of metal you've just claimed to not have in or around your body.)  With your eyes closed and a distracting injunction against swallowing or twitching overmuch -- it's hard to tell what's going on.  But judging by the sounds, they apparently bring out a dozen or so dwarves with pickaxes, tongs and jackhammers to go to work on the outside of the tube.

After an entertaining twenty minutes of that, they bring you back out, and if you don't have nice big sewer-pipe veins like I don't, they poke around with a needle until they can tap into your wrist so as to fill your tissues with gadolinium.  It's a rare-earth mineral that hardly ever ruins your kidneys and almost never gives you an exoskeleton.  It makes pretty tumor pictures.

The dwarves aren't visible within the still-immobilized visual scope, but they are still around somewhere.  And sure enough as soon as I'm reinserted into the tube, they start up with their jackhammering.  And so it goes . . . . 

A resplendent old turkey gobbler made his stately way across the yard, pausing to tug on a stem and scratch over a bed of leaves.  He hopped up onto the stone wall, stepped down on the other side and, blending gradually into the wet and shiny forest, strolled away.