It's the Not Knowing

Yeah. It's the not knowing that drags us along. We can predict certain things, assign them a probability, but we don't know until it all plays out.

My dad's brother died. He didn't recover after we visited him in the hospital. The picture on the right is my dad's family with his parents and all his siblings save the one as yet unborn. Dad is the small, hopeful-looking boy, dwarfed by his brother and older sister and even a bit shorter than his younger sister on his right.

Dad and I were talking about all the unknowns and how it is good not knowing as we drove Monday to the funeral in a little town northwest of Dallas.

Dad has had his eyelid lift since I last posted here. Technically called a blepharoplasty according to the surgeon, what was done was the removal of excess tissue from the eyelid. This excess flesh was pushing his eyelashes against his eyes and generally making his eyes uncomfortable and interfering with his vision. It went rather well. His face was (and still is) bruised but he never had swelling and the incisions have healed nicely. He said he kept thinking he wasn't going to last long enough to make this surgery worthwhile but, after finding it uncomfortable for two years, he just decided to get it fixed. I don't like the idea of cutting and I hate the nurse maid role, but I went along with it. And it has turned out well. Soon the only evidence will be his rather more wide open eyes. The bruising around his eyes has faded leaving bruising around his cheekbones that puts everyone in mind of Kiss makeup. And I guess he'll get Medicare's money's worth and last a while with his better vision and comfort.

We spend a lot of our time planning for the future, doing uncomfortable things for comfort later. We are never sure how it will pan out. We know we will die but not when and the journey until that time can take a lot of turns. August 1 approaches. August 1, 1966 saw a sniper (Charles Whitman) on the UT Tower ending a lot of lives and turning others in directions that hadn't been dreamed of. FFP was on campus that day. He escaped harm. But it would be wrong to say he wasn't changed.