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Christmas sock
This past Christmas marked a first for me. I didn’t forget anything. I didn’t find candy a month later that was supposed to go into the stockings. I didn’t find a gift in the bottom of my closet where I’d hidden it and forgotten it. The reason was, of course, that I was recovering from surgery and didn’t have the opportunity to run around like a crazy woman the week before Christmas doing last minute buying and then stashing things willy nilly all over the house.
But I didn’t get away scot free. A couple of weeks after the holidays, when the kids had all left with their gifts and things were back to normal, I had a thought. I had ordered special socks for the three women, and I didn’t remember seeing them. I checked my email, there was the order. I had no memory of them being delivered to the house, but an online tracking confirmed that they had been delivered. The socks are specially made to wear under boots to keep your feet warm and dry. But where did they go? I looked outside all of the doors to the house, and in the mailbox. No socks.
I didn’t have to wait long to find out. John mentioned that although he was very happy that I had given him three pairs of socks for Christmas, he had to tell me they just didn’t fit. Much too small.
Aha! So I retrieved them from his sock drawer, and then went about trying to get them to the girls. What I had envisioned as a fun little part of a Christmas stocking full of miscellaneous gifts just didn’t stand up to an individual presentation in the middle of January.
“Here, Morgan, I gave these to your Dad instead of you,” I said as I handed her a pair of socks.
“Gee, uh, thanks, Mom,” she said.
Then this past weekend, I had intended to give Cassidy and Angie their socks, but in all the excitement of bringing John home from the hospital, I completely forgot. So now I have two pairs of socks that I’m going to drop in a manila envelope and mail to them. I haven’t decided whether to enclose a note or not. It might make a better gift to keep it mysterious.
“Where did these socks come from, I wonder,” they would say, maybe envisioning a secret admirer, or maybe a crazy fetishist who gives them socks for no reason at all. It might actually make January a much more exciting month than it usually is, which is to say not much.
Update on John
Just an update on John Edstrom. He went into surgery last Friday for squamous cell lung cancer in the top lobe of the right lung. They determined with a biopsy that the cancer was not in the lymph nodes and had not spread into the middle of the chest, which is a hazard, and advised me in the waiting room that they were going ahead with the surgery. Good news! About an hour later, the nurse communicator came to get me to “talk to the doctor.” Bad news! But it turned out to be not so bad.
John’s lung, the surgeon said, was so full of pneumonia that it was impossible to operate. So, out of surgery, into Intensive Care to come out of the anesthesia, and to tell him the surgery had not been completed — not welcome news, as you can imagine. They then sent him home with a heavy duty antibiotic to fight the pneumonia, and will attempt surgery again in about two weeks.
Meanwhile, John feels fine, and is at work, waiting. Argh! Will keep you posted after surgery finally takes place. And thank you for all of your thoughts, prayers and concern.
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