To all my loyal readers and correspondents,
Just a note to let you know that SongSpell is still under way.
About a year and a half ago I underwent an ileocectomy, intended to remove intestine that had become -- essentially -- scar tissue. The expectation was that some of the symptoms of Crohn's would abate. This did not happen. During this year alone I have been 'funding my own room' in the local hospital's ER at least one time every other month.
More personally pressing; back in June my father died.
Every time I try to convey, verbally or in writing, what a loss that is to me, I fail abyssmally. This was a mensch. A man with both a courage and a bravado I cannot approach and a will of diamond. Against the subliminal training of his generation & family he learned to ask for help when he needed it, to love with ferocious honesty both his 'queer' son and that son's partner. The only emotion men of his generation were freely permitted was anger. My father learned, slowly, to give equal time to the other three emotions. He thrived despite nearly fifty years as a paraplegic(I can all but hear him say "Don't make so much out of it. That never got in the way of the life I tried to make for us all, did it? Its nobody's business anyway.") and tended wholeheartedly to a second wife who is assailed by MS.
Robert Gibbons had a salacious but gentle sense of humour. He was irritating, intransigent, vocally opinionated, faithful, cynical, uncannily perceptive and more irresistible force than immoveable object. A social chameleon who developed an impatience with B.S., including his own. His friends were many and diverse and -- in the main -- lifelong. At the relatively young age of seventy-three, he outlived those he knew the longest, but they stayed alive in his memory.
So bear with me a little while longer. The story is not on any 'back burner'.
Cordially As Ever,
Kristopher Gibbons