Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff

to all!

Here at The Briary, our New Year’s Eve and Day will be quiet, due to current circumstances.

However, despite Doc’s continuing pain and my Nancy Nurse cap slightly askew, we are grateful for small things:

A neighbor bringing our daily paper and mail to us down the end of the rural road we live on.

Others brought Chinese food tonight (no cooking!),  a real treat.

Our Chapel Hill friends, down for the holiday, brought us crispy baguettes and a challah from our food co-op in Carrboro.

Paramedic son procured an over-bed table for Doc (not covered by insurance) but he’s using our breakfast-in-bed tray, fearful of hitting his knee on it with a quick move.  However, it is EXACTLY the right size for a laptop table for moi, allowing me to blog here and there and check emails.  Way cool.

Most of all, the love of a supportive family and good friends.

May your 2009 be filled with happiness and light, with peace and good health.

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Chestnuts aren’t roasting on our fire as we hit 60 degrees here in northeastern NC!

We are having a quiet day with just Mom out to visit as Doc is home from the hospital but not up to company.  He’s in bed, in pain, nauseous and uncomfortable, and REALLY HATES using the bedside commode.

But he’s here, the surgery was successful, and now the hard recovery period begins.

We’ll be having our big dinner on Saturday, when Paramedic Son and his wife are off work and can join us, and hopefully by then Doc will actually feel like eating something!

I’ve pulled out all my nursing skills, from bed baths to back rubs, checking for pedal pulses, redressing and rewrapping and reicing the knee.  That includes biting my tongue to keep back snarky comments remain pleasant at all times, as men are, as women everywhere know and acknowledge, the WORST patients.  Throw in the fact that he’s a retired surgeon, and it only escalates from there.

But I’m happy he’s home, I’m happy it’s Christmas, and I’m sending all of you peace and love.

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FRACTURE was the name of a really neat and intense Anthony Hopkins movie I saw on DVD a few months ago.

It is also what happened today when my sister’s 120 lb chocolate lab, Judas, (don’t ask) ran into Doc’s knee, head first, all that poundage transferred sideways, breaking his tibial plateau and probably tearing some ligaments to boot.

I was in the house throwing dog bed covers into their own cycle of wash when I heard Paramedic son calling me outside. I strolled to the porch and saw Doc sitting on a cooler. Why is he sitting on a cooler? I asked. Why is he so white? came next, as I got a good look.

It took P. son and myself over ten minutes to wrap a pillow around the bad knee and get Doc into the car to go to town to the Doctor. I insisted he pop a Percocet on the way; he did not argue. This was bad sign number 1.

Bad sign number 2 came when our doc took me back to show me the Xrays and even I could see the fractures, wedge-shaped, on the tibial plateau, the head of the long bone in the lower leg that your knee sits on and that carries your weight.

Now Doc is a big boy, 6’4″ in height, and despite a recent 40 lb weight loss, still a formidable giant of a man. So the bone that takes his weight has to be in tip-top shape, and right now it’s in 3 pieces….

He got a shot; he got a knee immobilizer; he got an ice pack; he got shiny new crutches and had to practice lurching around the ER until the nurse, a friend of ours, let him go home.
This time he spread out across the back seat and I went VERY slowly on the drive home due to the bumps.

Fortunately we have a lift up to our house and he used it today. He’s been in bed with ice, pain pills, his crutches resting next to him, in a bit of a snit over the entire thing. I spent a few hours canceling our appointments and engagements for the next three weeks.

Tomorrow we see the orthopod, who will probably do a CAT scan or MRI and pass judgment, but our doc and the Physical therapist pal we have both feel he needs screws. No, not that kind, although he’d probably love one of those too if he had enough pain meds in him. Not tonight, sweetheart, nor for many nights to come, I fear.

I’ll keep you posted, but may be out of touch for a few days while we literally straighten this leg out. Poor guy.
All due to a close collision with a dog…..sheesh.

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Auntie M enjoys the pictures we get at Christmas of friend’s children.  We track their progress, see whom they favor, giggle at lost teeth and wide smiles.  I keep these non-family-but-very-special photo’s in their own album, adding the new snaps every year.

We also dote on our four Grands, even though they live so far away.  We have hopes that one day down the road Paramedic Son and his wife will give us one living closer, too.  These little people are a joy to behold, so very different from having one’s own.  There is a remove there, a generational gap which allows us to enjoy them, spoil them and love them without the agony of parenting and the full time worry.  Pure bliss.

And although Our Three Sons are all married now, Doc and I can still easily recall those days when we were the responsible parents: the time committment, the aching for them when things were off, the delight with them when they went well, the accomplishments and the failures and the hurts and the highs as we watched them grow and become independent human beings with thoughts and feelings all their own.  Three distinct personalities, all special.

So it is with a heavy heart that I heard on the news today that it is very likely the body of a little girl missing for over six months has been found in Florida.  I ache for those grandparents, their worst fears confirmed, who now have to grieve for their grandchild even as they face the very real probability that their own child is capable of murder.  I wonder at the mental process of a parent who can toss their own child away and see this most precious gift as only a burden.  And I feel deep sadness for that little life cut so very short, not through illness or any fault of her own.

It’s unthinkable, and it’s left me in a blue funk all day.

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Auntie M hasn’t figured out the origins, but there’s something about a black Scottie dog she adores.

And it slays me even better with a tartan ribbon around his neck or blanket on~ there is always one being walked somewhere in every novel I write.  One day some reader will notice this and write to me about it.

Maybe it’s because they remind me of licorice, and I LOVE licorice!

I have never wanted to own this particular type of dog~I just love the way they look: scruffy (I’m big on scruffy, being a kind of scruffy person myself); feisty; fun-loving; and just darn cute.  Kind of regal in a small package, and I’m big on small packages, being height-challenged myself.

I think I were to ever own one, he’d have to be called MacTavish, or Hamish, don’t you think?

What’s your thing that just gets to you? (in a good way!)

At Christmas symbol I use dishes with  a Scottie with a tartan rim for me and Doc; I have just those two plates and bowl and wish I had the entire set of dishes for winter use.  How decadent!  Whilst the snowmen and angels and holly abounds, look closely and you’ll find a few Scotties on our tree (with tartan collars, of course).

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Auntie M acknowledges upfront that probably no one reading this will know who John Royston is, so I will tell you.

He was my tenth grade English teacher, the man who turned me on to Shakespeare, plays, acting and writing.  He was jovial, inspiring, loved literature, and understood my bibliomania.  He was the one teacher who encouraged me to be a writer.

Recently he’d been on my mind and I decided it was time to try to find him, to thank him for his influence and to tell him that after a 30 year successful nursing career, I was finally doing what he and I both knew I’d always wanted to do–be a writer.  I knew he would be happy that I’d made it there.

I figured he’d be retired by now, but couldn’t find him anywhere I searched.  Then in an email to an old high school pal, I mentioned trying to find him and she told me she thought he had been a member of a theatre troupe in Port Washington on Long Island.

Tonight I finally stole a few minutes to Google with great anticipation: John Royston, Port Washington, NY.

And up came his obituary.  He is being buried tomorrow, having died earlier this week after ” a valiant fight with cancer.”

I waited too long to tell this fine man how much his teaching had meant to me and I am so sad about that.  I signed his condolence book and explained who I was to his wife, but it won’t be the same.

My message tonight to all of you out there is: don’t put off what you want to do, especially if it’s something that could warm the heart of someone else.

Sad in North Carolina tonight.  JR, Rest in Peace.

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