Posts by Jonah

My husband apparently has no memory.

We went to Chick-fil-a the other day for breakfast. Berck ordered the chicken breakfast burrito. I was kinda surprised because he had ordered it the last time we went to breakfast there and had decided it was okay but not worth giving up a chicken biscuit. He got the salsa with it, and as expected, Chick-fil-a does not specialize in salsa.

The clerk asked if Berck wanted salsa with his new burrito. “It’s Chick-fil-a salsa,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” said Berck, declining the salsa.

We sat down, and Berck took a bite of his breakfast burrito. “This is really good!” he said. “Here, try it!”

“I tried it last time,” I said.

“What do you mean ‘last time’?” asked Berck. “I’ve never had this before!”

“Yes, you got it the last time we had breakfast here!”

“No, I didn’t! I’ve never had this before! Try it!” So I took a bite. “What do you think?

“It tastes exactly like it did the last time I tried it.”

Ask Berck. He’ll insist that he’s only had a Chick-fil-a breakfast burrito once in his life. (Unless, of course, he replies with, “Chick-fil-a has breakfast burritos? Sweet!”)

So a couple of days ago, Berck was talking about guitar music and mentioned how reggae Jimi Hendrix was.

On our honeymoon, Berck had said the same thing. I played every single Jimi Hendrix song on the MP3 player to try to prove that Hendrix was in no way reggae and that he was confusing Hendrix with Bob Marley.

I couldn’t believe we were having this same discussion again. “Hendrix isn’t reggae!”

“I Shot the Sheriff??” declared Berck. “That’s reggae!”

I’ve never heard Hendrix play “I Shot the Sheriff,” but I’m willing to accept the possibility that he played it at some point. “Yeah, because Bob Marley wrote it!”

“Bob Marley didn’t write it! He covered it. Hendrix wrote it!”

So just now the MP3 player randomly played some Hendrix song (I don’t know which one). “Nice reggae beat,” I said faceciously, nodding to the rock song.

“I’m telling you, Hendrix did a lot of reggae!” insisted Berck.

“Why are we having this discussion AGAIN?”

“Because it’s true! Eric Clapton did a lot reggae!”

“ERIC CLAPTON? We’ve been talking about Jimi Hendrix!”

“No, I said Eric Clapton!” insisted Berck. “He wrote ‘I Shot the Sheriff.'”

Fortunately, we were sitting at our computers this time around. Two seconds later we were both reading from the Wikipedia entry. “Like I said, Bob Marley wrote ‘I Shot the Sheriff’!” I said.

“Like I said, Eric Clapton did a lot of reggae!” said Berck.

“Except you didn’t say Eric Clapton! You said Jimi Hendrix! You’re mixing up a white Brit with a black American!”

“You think Jimi Hendrix is black??” (He’s African American, Caucasian, and Cherokee. And Tiger Woods is half Asian.)

Berck also can’t remember how to get out of the liquor store parking lot. Granted, it is confusing. If you exit from the street entrance, you can only go east and have to drive all the way up to the next light to make a U-turn to go west; whereas, if you go through the Advanced Auto parking lot to the light, you can turn left. But we go there once a week, and he has yet to remember.

Now if he could just be as forgetful about the last time I forgot to turn off the car headlights.

We had an open house at our new, donated campaign office space today, inviting all the delegates and alternates to the district assembly.

John is an alternate and stopped by to check us out. He liked what we were about, and I hooked him up with a petition to carry to get us on the ballot. He mentioned another race a long time ago, and I said I didn’t know about it, having just moved here 9 months ago. He asked where I moved from. Alabama, I said.

“You don’t have a Southern accent, so you couldn’t have lived there your whole life.”

So I gave him the run down: Georgia; Colorado; Alabama; Texas; Athens, Greece; Oklahoma; and back to Colorado.

“Athens, Greece!” he said. “What were you doing there?”

“I was a missionary.”

“With what organization?”

“International Teams.”

“My niece is a missionary with International Teams in Athens, Greece! She started Lost Coin! Her name is Jennifer Roemhildt!”

I know Jennifer well. And I spent many a night walking the streets visiting prostitutes with Lost Coin ministry. (Jennifer, our teammate Andy, and I started an INTP club.)

He told us later that he had just dropped by to pay a courtesy call, but now he thinks it was more like a calling. He’s going to start coming to our weekly volunteer meetings.

My husband just deep fried marinated portobello mushrooms.

Wow.

Michele’s foot hasn’t been doing well. I talked to her on the phone today. She said cheerily that it looked like they’d only have to amputate a third of her foot. “But there’s a vein of black going all the way up to my ankle,” she said. “And when I say it’s black, it’s not blue or dark. It’s black like coal. But I’m hoping that part is just faking it.” They scheduled an MRI today to see how much bone was alive. If bone is dead, it doesn’t grow back. They have to cut it off.

I was a little distracted the rest of the day.

I went to visit Michele this afternoon and got to be there while the foot doctor was there. I even got to watch him change the dressing. “You okay with this?” he said, as I eagerly peered forward.

“Oh yeah,” said Michele.

“I used to work in the OR,” I said.

He nodded and unwrapped stained bandages. Michele’s foot looks horrible. It’s the worst wound I’ve ever seen. I watched an amputation once when I worked in the operating room as an anesthesia aide before going to college; a lady with diabetes had to have most of her foot taken off. That was gross. This is unbelievable horrendous looking. Her flesh is a raw mass of black and red and blue on one side of her foot. The two toenails look like fuzzy growths of fungus clinging to a rotting loaf of what used to be bread.

“This is good,” said the doctor, pointing at her toes. “See this pink here? This wasn’t there before.” I have to say that it looked like a miracle to me…that new life could be generating out of that ugly mass of black seemed entirely improbable.

He doused it with a little saline and then wrapped it up again. The MRI results weren’t ready yet, he said. He’d come back when they were.

He popped back in the room a little later. No change in the bones, no spread of dead tissue. He wouldn’t need to amputate tomorrow. He wouldn’t do any cutting, just “power-wash” the dead stuff away and put synthetic skin grafts over the places where the skin was gone.

I asked him about these grafts, and he started explaining them. Michele said something like, “Ooo! Biotech!” and wanted to know all about the company. I was interested in the science. He said they have big petri dishes where they grow skin cells. Then they remove the cells, just leaving behind a protein matrix. He said he’s starting to use this kind of stuff to replace injured cartilage in knees and stuff too.

He was explaining all these while Duncan walked in. Poor Duncan was waiting to hear how much of his wife was going to be removed, and the doctor kept going on about the technical aspects of this new grafting technique. Finally, I blurted out, “He’s just going to do a power-wash tomorrow!” which, I’m afraid, didn’t help Duncan out at all.

The doctor explained what that meant. He said Michele would probably lose both toenails, but with her continued recovery, he expected her to come out of the hospital with all ten toes. “There goes my modeling career,” said Michele. He said he might send her home Friday. He says he’s very happy that there has continued to be no infection, and he thinks she’ll be less likely to develop infection outside of the hospital.

All three of us looked like we were trying not to break into tears.

Boy, this has been a roller coaster day. I’ve been asking God all day, why. And he seems to be saying, “Oh, I’m not finished yet.”

I’ve had better birthdays

We had a late campaign meeting the night before. I finally got home around midnight. When I got up the next morning, there was a message from Max Bremer’s wife Tamsey (she and the kids are staying with Michele and Duncan while Max is deployed flying over Iraq) saying that, when Duncan got home from the campaign meeting the night before, Michele was in intense pain. She’d had surgery on her left foot last Friday to correct damage to her toe joints as a result of the Lyme disease.

(Had I mentioned that Michele was diagnosed last year with Lyme disease, not untreatable MS as she thought she’d had for 15 years?)

So Duncan was up all night with Michele at the hospital. Turns out she wasn’t getting circulation to the two toes that had been operated on. It’s still up in the air whether or not they’ll have to amputate part of her toes. And the pain is horrendous.

The good news is that today she asked Duncan to bring her knitting and some chocolate. So I think she’s feeling a little better.

On top of this, Berck was sick, and I was coming down with his cold as well.

Tamsey and the kids got me a balloon and a card, though, that they gave me when I got to the Bremers to work. (JB got a Thomas the Train balloon as well, and Gloria got a “Thinking of You” balloon, which will eventually perform double-duty on a trip to the hospital.)

I got home to find Berck crumpled on the couch in the study. “I don’t think I can construct you anything for dinner,” he said weakly. And he certainly didn’t look like he should be dragged out into public to eat. “Doesn’t making you lasagna from scratch and a seven layer torte last year carry over a year?” he whimpered.

So I ordered a pizza from Extreme Pizza (“The best overpriced pizza in town,” according to the Independent newspaper), complete with anchovies on the side, just for me. And Berck didn’t even complain about being in the same room as them. It’s been so long since I’ve had anchovies. I’d forgotten how good they can be.

Then for dessert I ate refrigerated fudge sauce with a spoon.

I spent most of the evening on the phone, either with my various family members or my campaign staff and volunteers.

Today my neighbor rang the doorbell to our open door (the weather was beautiful today, and we don’t have bugs) and handed me a plate of zucchini bread. For my birthday.

Berck said he’d cook me a special dinner tonight, but I told him I don’t know if I’d be able to taste anything. I feel pretty pathetic. (I think today is my cold’s apex.)

Tonight he’s making me pea casserole.

Actual Fact: In auto accidents, injuries are twice as likely to be fatal for whites as for blacks.