The Rainy Seasoning
I feel like I should be mounting a "We Survived Church Thanksgiving Dinner!" bumper sticker on the rear of the old blue Kicks. Hostility, indigestion and turkey go so incredibly well together, don't you think?
Thanksgiving Day was a hard one. We got up and Jim had to go to the clinic. Running a fever, a couple of different spots oozing pus and blood all over the sheets. It's a vicious cycle. Jim gets bug bites here, scratches and presto-chango you got staph infections. It was indeed. Culturing, cleaning out and gross medical things done and sent home to prepare for a turkey day feast at the church.
I was already tense because it was exactly two weeks since Jim's biopsy and we're heard nothing, plus making 4 dozen deviled eggs for a potluck at the last second was a new level of misery involving a misfiring pastry bag and eggs that simply did not want to peel. Jim was sick, I was asthma sick and here we were preparing to visit the church. A church run by twin pastors that gave Jim an ultimatum about being on the elders board in that ugly meeting a couple of days before.
Somehow I finally finished up making the eggs, and was starting to put on proper duds for a church dinner when Jim's urology doctor called to say that he had cancer. It may be small and he claims easy to treat, but it was rough news to hear. Jim's 3rd bout of cancer, kidney cancer something like twenty years ago, a couple of bouts of parathyroid cancer and now this prostate cancer. He will be receiving treatment in January, likely radioactive seeding, but surgical removal is possible too.
We headed out, going about five miles out of our way to pick up Davey Jones, the dude that's tried so many times to work Jim for money, rides and favors. He brought de nada for the potluck. And people wonder why I over bring. It's because of the Daveys out there. I was still so rattled by Jim's health news that Davey started his usual self-congratulatory back patting over his feats of non-daring do and I ripped into him like he was the turkey and I wielded the carving knife.
I was shaking by the time we reached the church, plus I was dealing with not just the asthma. The day before I fell down in the grocery store, did a very ungraceful split in the checkout line because an employee came up and mopped in front of me. Hips, knees and ankles screeching in pain. Once I was there and I started looking for our friends we were supposed to sit with I damn near went ass over teakettle 3 more times as people working at the church kept coming up behind me to grab me by the elbow to try and steer me to a seat. Newsflash! Never. Grab. A. Person. With. No. Balance...
Food was sort of mediocre, but it could have been I was just so sick at heart by the news that nothing would have tasted great. I spent the roughly 2 hours we were there staring futility as the back of the heads of the two biggest agitators that wanted Jim off the board. I kept thinking I would have liked to have had a few hanks of hair to construct voodoo dolls. Not really, although the idea did keep crossing my mind.
Since then we've been here at home, trying to deal with this thing, and Jim is still very agitated at church leadership for threatening to toss him from the board for his anti war stance. He has more meetings with the pastors. However I'm pretty sure this is a lost cause. Where this takes Jim in his faith heaven alone knows. I know one thing, I am done forever with these ridiculous non-denominational churches.
Comments