SINGING WE GO

After we left the hospital at 5 p.m. today, we drove in Pastor Mike and Dana's luxury van two hours down the state for The Last Supper. Cancel that last thought. For a sweet meal with my other two grands. Julie wanted her 8 and 5 year-old boys to see me before the surgery. We were going to meet at Mom and Dad Dykes's house, and Milton's other siblings were going to join us, but Mom got the flu Sunday with a high fever, so we met at a big travel center and had fast food together. We were a lively party, the four grands together, jumping and shouting and holding up curly fries, and saying, "Look, Nana, look!" Jennifer and her two little ones live in Puerto Rico, and the kiddies love to be together with their cousins. Fortunately, we've been able to arrange for that to happen fairly often.

We finally parted after spending about an hour together, and in the van I started bawling and bawling. Jennifer reached across the wide aisle and patted and patted me. I was thinking about that old movie where the beautiful young mother dies and leaves a legacy of a homemade movie for her little baby. Someshine, On My Shoulders, Makes Me Happy was a lyric of the song accompanying the movie, I think. I started thinking about, oh, I don't know, missing my grandchildren, and my family, and wondering what was going to happen to me. I started thinking about having to crawl into that narrow MRI on Thursday morning for them to map out my surgery, and then…never mind.

Then I mopped my tears away and put on a happy face, and crawled into the backseat between the two carseats and started singing to Jennifer's kiddies. I love singing with my grandchildren. And little Claudia sang with me. I sang every kids' song I could think of. Then I called the other two grandkids on my cell phone, who were making their way back home, and I put it on speaker, and we were all singing together, except little Lorenzo who's not two yet, so he just blabbered along. It was such a sweet moment.

Adios. It's after 11. I have to go take my steroid.