Tuesday, September 1 through Saturday September 5:
I took Dad to his doctor’s office early Tuesday morning for a blood draw in advance of a regular appointment with his doc next week. This was before going into Palmetto for the day for volunteer work and lunch with granddaughter, Vanessa. On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, Dad and I went to work out at the YMCA. Thursday, I spent the morning with my friend Jackie helping her go through some of her files with the aim of creating a spreadsheet of her income and expenses over the past year which will help her to create a budget for her future. I finished up the week making sugar-free chocolate cupcakes with my granddaughter, Emma.
Sunday, September 6 through Saturday, September 12:
There was a business meeting after church on Sunday, so I set up the on-line service for Dad to watch and then went to church so that I could attend the meeting. The church has received a $30,000 CARES grant (related to Coronavirus) which will be used to expand our food pantry program. Monday, September 7th was the Labor Day holiday. On Tuesday morning, I took Dad to see his doctor for a wellness visit. The doctor says that Dad is in extraordinary health for being 90 years old. His next visit will be in 6 months. On Wednesday and Thursday, I spent most of the morning and half of the afternoon with JP and Emma observing her home-school on-line class. JP and Kellie will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary on September 25th. They had booked a cruise to Alaska, but it was cancelled due to the Coronavirus. Instead they are going to drive to Key West and then to St. Augustine spending 3 or 4 nights in each place. I will be taking care of Emma while they are gone and that means that I will also be managing her schoolwork. Wish me luck. It’s a lot different than when I taught in public school in the 1970s. On Friday morning, I joined Jackie Sosville, and some of her family to see her husband Ken’s ashes interned. Inside the box pictured below, was a metal vault which Jackie placed into their designated spot on a mausoleum wall. (If you click on the picture, you should be able to read the label on the box.)
In addition to the internment, today was 9/11. I hope everyone took a moment to think of the many who lost their lives or lost loved ones because of the terrorist attack 19 years ago. I remembered that I was at work when one of the managers came to the department director’s office saying that the twin towers had just been hit by a plane. The director wheeled her portable tv out into her waiting area where many of the staff were watching as the second tower was hit. President Bush was at a school in Sarasota that morning, just south of where we live, I remember seeing Air Force One fly right over the Manatee County Administration Building going to an undisclosed location (for security reasons.) We learned later that he had been taken to Barksdale Airforce Base in Shreveport, Louisiana. My father had lived on that base as a child and I had visited it when I was a teenager with my grandmother. Her sister taught art and ceramics on the base. Rick and I had attended one of his class reunions (Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Florida) that summer. Within a week of the attack, we received an e-mail from one of his classmates, Bill Carr. Bill just wanted to let everyone know that he was all right. Bill’s office was in the Pentagon building, but he and his wife (also one of Rick’s classmates) had taken a few days off and he was not at work on that fateful day. But his office had been destroyed. Had he been there, he would have surely died.
On Saturday, September 12, the college football season started for most fans. FSU played Georgia Tech. The game was supposed to start at 3:30, but had a half-hour delay before it even started due to lightning within 8 miles of the stadium. FSU made an early touchdown to go ahead and then they had two more rain delays (half hour each) before I left the house to attend Ken’s Celebration of Life service at Groover’s Funeral Home at the Mansion Memorial Cemetery on Ellenton-Gillette Road where a number of other of Jackie’s family members have been buried. The room was filled with Jackie’s three sisters and their families along with two of Ken’s sisters and the sons of his third sister. In addition to a gentleman he had worked years ago and remained friendly, there were at least a half dozen couples that knew Ken from the Bradenton Yacht Club. Everyone enjoyed the slide show presented during the visitation hour and the comments made by his brother-in-law, Curt Mahoney (who had known Ken since high school); both of his sisters, and some of his friends.
A big thanks goes out to Jeanne Reeves who took the picture at the Yacht Club which was used for the portrait above. It was Ken’s final wish to “go out with a bang” so after the service was concluded, we all went outside to watch a fireworks show to send him off.
I got home about 9:00 p.m. and saw the last minute of the FSU vs Georgia Tech game. FSU lost. Congratulations go out to my nephew, Tim.
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, 9/13 through 9/15
Dad and I pretty much stuck to our routine activities these first three days of the week with the addition of my sitting in on Emma’s on-line school so that I will know what to do while her parents are on vacation.
Wednesday, 9/16 through Thursday, 9/25
JP and Kellie’s 10th Wedding Anniversary Vacation
Wednesday, 9/16 – I “moved” next door at 8:45 a.m. Emma had already logged in for school attendance. We said goodbye to her parents and watched them drive off.
After they left, Emma and I got to work getting organized for her school day. We took out all of the books that she would need to work out of today and she completed one printed assignment – vocabulary. We took a break before her 10 a.m. class meeting while Emma started a diary for herself. It was a whole 10 minutes into her morning class time before she was crying saying “I want my Daddy” and 5 minutes later it was “I want my Mommy and Daddy”. But, she settled in and was happy to be able to go for a walk when the class meeting was over. We walked down to a nearby pond where we saw these water hyacinths.
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When we returned home, she ate some lunch. After her lunch, she finished all of her morning assignments and took her math assessment test.
Thursday, 9/17 – Day two of “Parents Vacation”. We have been getting along pretty well. It seems to take us longer to plow through her daily school work than it does when she is at “Daddy School”. We generally get finished by 3:00 – just like real school.
Saturday, 9/19 – No School Today. Emma and I went to play Putt-Putt Golf at Smuggler’s Cove Adventure Golf on Cortez Road in Bradenton. We invited my Dad, her “Pa Pa” to join us but he said, “No thank you.” This golf course has a lake with real live alligators that you can feed. Emma put the food on a clip at the end of the line and put the pole over the fence. Then she lowered it until it was about a foot above the water and the gators jumped up to get the bite. She said that it only pulled on the pole a little bit.
Sunday, 9/20 – On Sunday afternoon, Emma and I went to the neighborhood park for about an hour. While she was playing, she found a “painted rock”. This is something the kids are doing. They paint a rock and then hide it somewhere for another child to find. Then that child hides it somewhere new for someone else to find.
She couldn’t decide on a good place to re-hide the rock, so as we were leaving, another family came to the park and she gave the rock to their son and asked him to hide it.
Monday, 9/21 – Back to on-line school – with some new instructions: Sign in for attendance about a half and hour earlier and watch a 30-minute video on English or Math before the 10:00 class meeting on-line.
Tuesday, 9/22 – When I was back at my house getting lunch ready for Dad, I looked out the window and saw these Sand Hill Cranes enjoying some of the seeds that blew out of the bird feeder which hangs next to my driveway.
Wednesday, 9/23 – Emma and I have usually been going out to our mailbox around 2:00 to get the mail, but we cleaned the house and then went swimming in the afternoon and didn’t get the mail until just before supper. We found four pieces of mail mixed in with our mail that was for one of our neighbors. I told Emma that we would put it back in our mailbox tomorrow so the mail person could take it to the correct mailbox.
Thursday, 9/24 – This morning, when I said to Emma that we should take the neighbor’s mail out to our mailbox, she asked, “Why couldn’t we take it to their mailbox?”. So, we walked 4 blocks down our street and put the mail into the correct mailbox. When we got back to the house, we noticed how many flowers were in bloom.
Emma finished all of her schoolwork about 2:30 and was working on a “Welcome Home Mom and Dad” sign. At 3:00, we went to get the mail. While we were standing at the mailbox, we saw Dad’s car come down the street and turn into the driveway. Everyone was happy to have them home again. They surprised us because we didn’t expect them home until 5:00. I spent a little time with them hearing about their vacation and then catching Emma’s father up on her school work before I “moved” back home.
Friday, 9/25 through Wednesday, 9/30
The end of the month passed quietly for Dad and me with both of us returning to our routine activities. A call has gone out for additional choir members to return to Wednesday night practice, so I went back for the first time since last March. Our church will also resume Sunday School classes next Sunday.
During this time, several things happened related to the Coronavirus pandemic. Florida announced on Sept. 25 it was lifting all restrictions on businesses, allowing bars and restaurants to operate at full capacity. The United States reported 22,300 new deaths in September compared with 28,700 deaths in August, bringing the nation’s death toll to over 207,000. The death toll from the deadly COVID-19 has topped one million, with the United States leading the fatalities worldwide. Despite my concerns about being exposed to the virus through travel, I have made a reservation for Dad and me to drive up to North Carolina for a week in October.
Our journey has been inspired by Joy and Steve Fredrick. You can see more of their story at