The Judge—at most, under extreme duress, he offers the very top of his head for a kiss, holding the rest of his body an almost gravity-defying distance away. Then he asks, Why are all the workers who have to take care of old people, why are they all from China? I’d guess it’s actually the Philippines, but point well taken. I’m sure there is a socio-economic answer to that question. But what I want to know is why a woman who raised 5 kids and whose mind is a tack is trapped in a room with a man who is in an end-state spinal stenosis fetal position about 20 hours a day, and she’s going blind so the novel a day to keep her occupied is down to one a week using a magnifying glass as thick as the desk I’m sitting at, and the only other people she sees in a daily way have vocabularies in her language that seem completely limited to the word “okay”.

Why is that the case, and how can there be a “meanwhile”?

Meanwhile, sis’s first ultrasound. The baby looks like something that would go well with cocktail dip. And still, a little pang of love shoots right through me. A sad kind. My kind.

neko case, andy