Of Breakfast Meats and War Movies

Olivia Pope don't need no nickname.

My first name is "Kerry" and that, along with its spelling, does not lend itself easily to a nickname. In its other variations, it usually is a nickname of itself.  "Carrie" is usually short for "Caroline," for example. But "Kerry" is not short for anything, even though I've met several people who insisted it couldn't be, it HAS to be short for something and why won't I just tell them my full name?? What am I trying to hide from them??? (I don't see anyone pestering Kerry Washington about this.)

My sister is in the same boat. Her name is Katie. Just Katie. Not Katherine, not Kathleen, not Kaitlyn. Just Katie. I should know; I named her. (If she was a boy, she would've been Busy Timmy. YOU'RE WELCOME.)

So I've never really had people try to shorten my name to a nickname. There's been the occasional "Kerr" thrown out there in casual encounters (and never repeated after the initial experiment because 1. it sounds weird and 2. dropping the "y" at the end does not really shorten it much). I had a teacher in high school who called me "Kerr Bear" like the Care Bears, which was a little perplexing but I think he was just grasping at straws.

The only real nickname I've ever had is the one my dad gave me when I was baby:  Hamchuck.

Yeah, it's right there in the title to this blog. The irony is that I hate ham. I don't even like Canadian bacon because it's too hamlike. Hamlike? Hammy? ( I love the Denny's breakfast special named "Moons Over My Hammy." But only for the pun. I'd want to substitute sausage for the ham. But "Moons Over My Sausage" just sounds really, really dirty and too unpleasant for breakfast time. Although in doing a quick search just now, I learned that Moons Over My Hammy is actually slang. I'll let you find out for yourselves. And yes, by the way, I do eat other pig products. I like bacon; I like sausage. I will even eat ham if it's chopped up in teeny tiny bits and used primarily to flavor another dish, like mac & cheese or even split pea soup. But ham on its own is gross. So are pork chops. But I digress.)

My dad, however, LOVES ham. Loves it. (Even in Spam form, god help his liver.) So much so, that I always assumed that's why he called me Hamchuck. He loved me, so of course he'd call me after his favorite meat product, right?

Well, turns out it's not quite that cute.

A few years ago, a friend of the family read my blog post about chasing after a bat in my parents' house after bringing my dad home from knee surgery. He informed me that "Hamchuck" is actually a character's name in the John Wayne movie "The Green Berets." Hamchuck (or alternately "Ham Chunk") is a Vietnamese orphan who is taken under the wing of one of the main characters, Sgt. Petersen.

Here's what IMDB said about the film:

Hamchuck is the one on the right.

"Petersen befriends a young native boy named Ham Chuck, a war orphan who has no family other than his dog and the soldiers at the basecamp. As the battle rages, the dog is killed and the boy tearfully buries his faithful companion. Symbolically, the boy uses the stick he had used to dig the dog's grave as the tombstone. As the soldiers rush to their defensive positions, the stick is knocked away, leaving an unmarked grave."


I think I preferred the pork product reference.

Screw you, Dorothy Hamill.

Was it this one?

Or perhaps this one?

Nope. Definitely this one:

This one right here. 

Hellllooo, headband. 

*sigh*

Of Loss and Luck

Yes, I know this blog post is supposed to be about the topic card I found last week, "who do you sorely miss." I'm not veering far. This is about loss and luck.

I got into a bit of a Facebook-comments battle with someone who posted a story about the folks who took advantage of a technical error with their EBT cards that left them with no spending limit and went on a spree. While, yes, that was despicable behavior, the comments left about this article were cruel and disparaging to anyone using public assistance or even being in the position of needing it, with some especially vicious yet typical mean-girl comments from the poster's wife (they fell into the eloquent 'oh no she didn't, don't make me come after you, I'm gonna beat you up behind the silk mill after school, which really means I'll just launch myself at you, scream and pull your hair' typical invective of the less-intelligent variety of mean girls that populated my hometown area and for all I know, still do.)

I was, quite literally, stunned at the viciousness that poured out through their comments for anyone who was not as well off as they are.

Maybe I'm naive, but I didn't realize people hated people who are poorer than them. Loathing those who have more than you, that I understand, but why all the hate for someone who'd fallen on hard times and needed a hand?

I got to wondering if this was just the way we think as Americans. We've always idolized rich people- we emulate them, we eagerly read every tiny detail about their lives, we're supposed to aspire to become them. But did we resent poor people as much during the Great Depression as we do now?

I posted a question on Facebook asking this and got some thoughtful responses. The most succinct was from a friend who had seen Garrison Keillor speak recently and mentioned that he said no one resented or mocked poor people back then because everyone was poor. Considering the hard financial times we're going through, I wonder why we don't share that same attitude. Very few of us can claim we're completely financially secure; I don't know anyone who doesn't have some worries about money, who doesn't worry about the roof caving in over their heads, both figuratively and literally. Our incomes have declined while the cost of goods and services have increased. We're really not any better off than we were before the financial crisis hit.

And why don't these people turn their anger to those who did this to us in the first place? Why is their disdain saved for the single mom with two toddlers who husband ran out on her instead of the Wall Street maverick who made record profits off other people's misfortune? I suspect that that attitude is driven by fear, a subterranean ice-cold dread you hide deep down in your consciousness and fight very hard to keep from thinking about, a fear that that down-on-their-luck person could be you.

Because it could. Honestly, it's not so much about doing everything right or following the rules; it's all about luck. Some people who do bad things have good luck; some good folks who try their hardest every day get crapped on by bad luck. Luck is a dirty, fickle little troll who haphazardly and arbitrarily decides to either kiss you or spit on you. You have no control over luck; maybe that's what's so scary.


It made me think of a friend of mine. We knew each other in high school- not well,  we shared the comradery of the mat-sitters- the unathletic amongst us who sought sanctuary in the furthest reaches of the gym during PE to avoid being called on to participate. I got to know her better through Facebook as adults. She was funny, sharp, witty, kind, and above all, honest. She was the first to call someone out for perpetuating a bullshit stereotype. I wished I could hear her voice on the discussions I was reading.

My friend was a good person who knew bad luck; she knew struggle. I read her posts as she learned of her mother's illness, hundreds of miles away. She shared with us her desperation to visit her mother one last time so she could meet her little girl, so her daughter would get to meet her grandmother just one time. Somehow, she made it happen. I felt like I was on the journey with her- watching her little girl's wonder at her first plane trip, the weird hotel where they were staying, her joy at seeing her daughter and her mother together.

Her mother passed away not long after the trip. It was her spot of good luck that she'd been able to see it before that happened. I admired her so much as she dealt with her grief and took the steps she needed to move on with her life. I shared in her joy at buying her first ever new couches. (My own new couches, my first ever pieces of furniture that weren't handed down from someone else, were still a source of wonder to me, too.) Her family adopted a kitten. Things seemed good again.

Then her husband fell ill. Seriously ill. My friend ranted and raved, she was furious at fate- that fickle troll's ugly cousin- for dealing her this hand so soon after facing tragedy. She threw herself into caring for him and fighting his illness with him. Things were serious, but he was responding to treatments and there was hope ahead.

And then one day, as I checked her page, I saw a post that was not written by her, but her husband. My friend had suddenly collapsed while walking from her car to her apartment with her daughter and died. They thought it might have been a blood clot from recent surgery. She'd been complaining about sharp leg pain and had had a blood clot previously.

I didn't know what to do with this information. We were still young enough for the death of a classmate to be unusual and strange. It was just so sudden. It just seemed so unfair. She had brand new couches, dammit! She had plans for the future! I think she had tickets for a cruise. She had a brand-new kitten. She had a little girl to raise.

I thought of my friend and her family a lot. They were good people. They didn't deserve what happened to them. They didn't ask for that. It was just bad luck.

And then yesterday I happened on to my friend's Facebook page where her husband had occasionally posted updates on how their little girl was doing. Another friend, one I don't know, had posted a notice.

Just a little over a month after his wife- my friend- had died, her husband succumbed to his illness and passed away. I really was in shock this time. All I could think of was, "What horrible luck." And to think of their daughter, just four years old, having to deal with all this tragedy. Only people in olden times, in your grandparents' time, lost their entire family when they were so small. It seems like such an old-fashioned thing to have happen to you. Even the word they use to describe someone who has lost their parents is so antiquated, so Dickensian- "orphan."

My friend's little girl is being cared for by family members. I wish her so much peace, love, and good counseling or therapy. And I most fervently wish that her family's hard luck has been used up, and she has nothing but the good kind from here on out.

Of E.R.s and I.D. cards

Oy vey, I have not posted in a very long time.
It has been a very eventful summer, to say the least.
Some highlights:

• I've spent time in four different hospital emergency rooms since May. Not as a patient. Four different hospitals. In two states. I am getting gooood at this shit. I don't want to be. (Both family members who needed emergency medical care are now much, much better. I don't want to sound like I'm whining; I'm very glad I was able to help out. It's scary. It's hard not to count your blessings, sitting in an

  

  They hide the washcloths in those cupboards up there.

  emergency room. We were lucky in our cases; everything was going to be okay, and with some work, even better than before. A lot of other people waiting with loved ones weren't getting good news.)
• I swam across a lake. I participated in Women Swimmin', a fundraiser for Hospicare of Tompkins County for the first time. It was tremendous. Beyond being such a great thing to be a part of (and having an amazing romp of girls to train & swim with), it was my bright spot throughout three really difficult months at

  

  My beautiful Misfit Otters

  work. Every time I got a notification that someone else had donated to my swim, it made my day, even when I'd just spent two hours on the phone with someone explaining to me in great detail exactly why it was important for him that the toilets in our new development have elongated bowls, not round. (You don't want to know. Trust me.)
• My dear friend Ledbetter moved to Ithaca. LB got a job at Ithaca College, our alma mater, and moved to Ithaca. Now she works less than a half-mile away from me and is available for adventures! So far, we've done Feast Fridays, went out for cocktails, spent loads of time at Wegmans, and attended meditation class. We've watched documentaries on the Dust Bowl, a homeless camp in Nashville and a Filipino guy who is now the new lead singer for Journey. I am so proud of her for

  

  I don't wanna hear it, Ledbetter,
  I love this picture of us.

  being so brave- moving to a new state, starting a new job, facing off with spiders.

Anyway, one of the things I HAVEN'T done is keep up this blog. I stumbled after I ran out of letters of the alphabet and even though I initially thought numbers were a pretty easy (and infinite) source of blog post inspiration, it didn't do anything for me. Then I had to do resident ID card photos yesterday.

Twice a year, we take residents' photos for ID cards. They're completely optional- folks are required to wear nametags here the first seven days of every month to help everyone get to know each other, but they don't need anything more than the little pin-on card with their name that they get when they move in. But some people requested a nametag with a photo, like the staff have to wear, so we offer up photo day twice a year.

© Tom Hussey. Go here: http://www.tomhussey.com/
to see the rest of this series called Reflections from an
award-winning ad for an Alzheimer's medication.

I have a piece of black fabric I put up as a backdrop, snap their mugshots, and then laminate them up a nametag. It's actually kind of fun. I get to meet the new people who've just moved here and joke around with them to get them to smile. But it's a little sad, too. Most older people really don't like getting their photo taken. For one thing, this generation is not the "selfie generation" we have today. But the photos also show how time has changed them. We all have an image in our minds of what we think we look like; it's often an image from a younger time in our lives. It's a bit of a shock sometimes when I show them the screen of my camera and they see an old person looking back. I hear that a lot- "Who's that old person?" I also hear, "Well, I guess that's me." Even though they may look in the mirror every day to shave and put on makeup, they don't expect to see clouded eyes, wrinkled skin, lopsided mouths, discolored teeth when they see themselves in the camera.

I had a lull in activity and I was poking around the game room where we stage the photos while I waited for the next group. I saw a little lucite box filled with cards- white with black print. The first one said, "Who do you sorely miss?"  It struck me, because I had recently been missing my grandma Genevieve more than usual. I flipped through the other cards in the box; they were discussion questions, table topics, part of an old game. I liked the questions they asked, so I've decided to use these cards as my blog post themes until they run out.

So, tune in next week, when our theme will be Who Do You Sorely Miss.
And please share your answers as well.

1 Weird Dream That I've Had

Coming up with ideas for blog posts is tough.

I just finished a round of using the letters of the alphabet as a starting point.
I asked some friends on facebook for ideas for the next round once I'd depleted the alphabet.

Numbers were suggested and I thought it would be a good idea, so today's post is  

"One weird dream that I had."

Since we got back from what will hence be known as the vacation that never really was, I've had weird, weird dreams when I was finally able to sleep soundly through the night again. A lot of them involved me being in a hospital bed and having no idea where I was, just looking up from my pillows to see the curtain they pull around your space for privacy. Then once I started catching up on my sleep, they got interesting.

A lot of the time they've been snippets- Tuesday morning, for example, I don't remember what I was dreaming about but I woke up with the theme from Charles in Charge in my head. (It was not a stellar start to the day.)

Today, I had a snippet that made me chuckle out loud.

I dreamed there was a new show on Nickelodeon or Disney Kids or whatever channel puts this crap out these days. It was called "Hey! Nosferatu!" and it was a zany sitcom where Nosferatu was transported from the past to our present and had to deal with the trials and tribulations of being in junior high. I think this has a great deal of potential. I'm tempted to start working on a spec script.

Z is for ...

Z is for ... Zelda.


I have a bit of a thing for the Lost Generation. I've been on Hemingway and Dos Passos kicks lately, I adore Dorothy Parker, and I can't ever get enough of Gerald and Sara Murphy. I've always been kind of lukewarm about F. Scott Fitzgerald, though, and I think recently I figured out why: he was an oppressive jerk, specifically in regards to his wife, Zelda.

There's a lot of interest in Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald right now because of the latest film of The Great Gatsby (which I have not yet seen). There's a handful of books that have just come out looking at their life together through her eyes, which was just not done years ago. Like a lot of other literary wives, she was seen as merely window dressing, a muse, or a deterrent. Most of the time these wives turn out to be fantastically talented people who subverted their own dreams so their spouse could shine. In many cases, they completely devoted themselves to taking care of their spouse so they could work on their masterpieces. Vera Nabokov is one of them. Even without her famous spouse, she was a fascinating person in her own right and I'm so grateful that authors like Stacy Schiff and Nancy Milford see fit to focus on the person just outside the spotlight.

But Zelda is different. Hers is a sadder story and I think one that illustrates the fight for women's rights. Because that battle isn't just for equal pay, control over our health care, or legal permissions; at its heart, the women's rights movement is about respect. And Zelda didn't get much of it.

I'm reading Nancy Milford's fantastic biography of her right now.
It's heartbreaking.

While I certainly do not deny that Zelda had a personality order or some other psychiatric illness, it's clear from their letters and other people's reminisces that Scott Fitzgerald had an awful lot to do with her deteriorated mental state. Her cosseted, traditional Southern girlhood also contributed to her conflicts.

Although Fitzgerald held her up as the first flapper and queen of her kind, Zelda wanted to be useful and successful, in spite of her protestations that she didn't "want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally."

She was never trained to do any kind of useful work, or even trained in the arts. She was a bright girl but found school boring and no one bothered to try to interest her in her studies because as a southern belle, she was just going to marry and have babies anyway. She found herself so alone when Scott worked that she longed to have

something of her own to do. So she wrote too. She was undisciplined and untrained, but imaginative and extraordinarily creative with her word play. But Scott didn't like her treading on his turf, and he was especially livid when she wrote a novel, Save Me the Waltz, that was heavily autobiographical.

The reason for his anger toward this novel? Scott Fitzgerald had planned to use Zelda's life and experiences for HIS next novel, Tender is the Night. He didn't feel that Zelda had any right to her own life story. He actually used whole passages from her letters to him AND her diaries word for word in his novels! And yet he was furious that she try to write about her own experiences herself.

And he was cruel about it. According to Milford, "he mercilessly exposed Zelda in his characterization of Nicole Diver.  He drew upon Zelda's most terrible and private letters to him, written in the anguish of the early months of her illness... snipped and pieced them together in Book II with very little regard for Zelda's reaction or for the precarious balance of her sanity."

Zelda, in the hospital again after another relapse, was upset by the book. She said of it, "What made me mad was that he made the girl so awful and kept on reiterating

how she had ruined his life and I couldn't help identifying myself with her because she had so many of my experiences .... But on the whole, I don't think it's true- I don't think it's really what happened."

In a therapy session, Scott called her- to her face- a third rate writer and a third rate talent. He denigrated her for devoting herself to ballet, convinced she was delusional thinking she could be a top rate dancer at her age. He was blind to the fact that she just wanted something for herself, and every time she found something, he made sure to take it away from her in one way or another. She had to give up so much of herself in order for him to be happy with himself. All her desperation came through when she said, "I'm so tired of compromises. Shaving off one part of oneself after another until there is nothing left."

Scott made frequent mention of her as if she were an acquisition, something whose procurement would serve only to make him seem better in the eyes of others. He didn't necessarily want Zelda the person- he wanted the most popular girl in Montgomery, Alabama. The prettiest girl, the one with the most men after her. It's debatable whether her illness drove him to his excessive drinking or his drinking played a part in her illness, but he came to blame her for all his woes. His 'asset' had become a liability. He told Malcolm Cowley, "That girl had everything... she was the belle of Montgomery, the daughter of the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court... everybody in Alabama and Georgia knew about her, everybody that counted. She had beauty, talent, family, she could do anything she wanted to, and she's thrown it all away." Well, she could do anything Scott wanted her to do. And apparently her talent was to be admired only when it didn't compete with his. She was to stay up on her pedestal where he put her.

After enough blow-ups over her writing, she turned to painting, but she was in the full throes of a mental illness that no one knew how to treat at the time, and they're scary things. Looking at her paintings, while inventive and intriguing, they're clearly a window into a broken mind. They're not paintings you could live with for long.

This isn't necessarily a very cheerful post, but at least we have the reassurance that things have gotten better for women since the 20s and 30s.  The recent findings that fairly soon more women will be the primary breadwinners in their families than men show that we have indeed come a long way since Zelda's time when women were supposed to simply step back and be taken care of. However, the backlash to this change reminds us that our advancements cannot be taken lightly, as there are plenty of people- men and women, unfortunately- who wish to see us revert to old, stereotyped gender roles and not the fulfillment of our ambitions.

In reading this book, I've often found myself wondering what Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald might have been like if she had come of age in the 21st century. Would her star have shone brighter than her husband's if she had just been allowed to accomplish something other than being popular and partying? And just perhaps, was that fear that she might actually be the true talent in the family what fueled the drinking that sent Scott Fitzgerald to his grave at the age of forty-four?

** And thus our exploration of the alphabet has come to a close. Next blog series- numbers! And hopefully more frequent posting!

Y is for ...

Y is for...

My uncle Fred & me

Y I'm doing this.
(Pun intended. It'll make sense. Just stick with me for a bit.)


Initially I was going to write about this incident when I was a kid when we went to my Uncle Fred's camp at Cayuta Lake and the adults all got hammered and kept playing the Village People's YMCA (on 45, nonetheless) and singing and dancing around the campfire and we kids trying to sleep in the tent out front were getting more and more pissed because the damn noisy adults were keeping us awake and WE WERE JUST TRYING TO GET SOME SLEEP, FOR LORD'S SAKE.

But then my brother was in town for his birthday this past weekend and on Monday, we decided to go to Montour Falls and go to breakfast at one of my uncle's favorite places, Chef's. And then while we were in the area, we decided to set out on an adventure and find my uncle's old camp.

We did find it, through some half-assed directions (Dad- you need to know that a 'great big hill' means something entirely different to Ithaca people) and the miracle of Google maps on an iPhone.

It was so weird to be standing in a place you knew so well from childhood and that you hadn't visited in seventeen years.

My brother Kevin & sister Katie in front of
what used to be Fred's camp

My uncle Fred was my dad's oldest brother. He was a confirmed bachelor, and oftentimes something of a crank. He wasn't that crazy about small children, especially their germs, and would often decline hugs for that reason. As a painfully shy child, I was always relieved by this. Being made to hug people, even family, can be kind of unnerving if you're shy and I was always grateful to uncle Fred for letting me off

my dad, Uncle Fred, Uncle Bob

the hook, whether he knew it or not.

Once you got older, and could help out on the boat or ride snowmobiles or had learned not to mess with his stuff and not to slam the screen door, you were okay by him. He loved his boat and waterskiing, and he loved few things more than being able to brag that he had taught his nieces and nephews to ski, rarely needing more than two or three tries to get right up.

He also taught my dad how to waterski. This may not sound like such a big deal, but my dad lost his left leg above the knee in Vietnam serving with SEAL Team One. My dad learned how to waterski on one leg, years after he'd returned home and learned how to walk with a prosthesis. I remember being on the raft out on the lake watching as Fred called out instructions to my dad in the water, looking all roly-poly in his life vest, the tip of his one ski sticking out above the water like a little shark fin. I watched as Fred gunned the boat and raised my dad out of the water only to have him wobble and fall back in with a huge splash. I watched him do it over and over again. And over again. I heard my mom talking to my aunts about how she was worried Dad was getting tired or might get hurt.

me & my dad at the lake

I watched him try again and again. My dad wouldn't give up and Fred wouldn't give up on him. And then finally, he was up. And stayed up. And there he was, flying by us, on one leg, one ski cutting crisply through the water. I don't remember how old I was when this happened, but I remember being so proud of my dad that my eyes filled with tears and the tears spilled out on my cheeks as the boat's wake rocked the raft.

Fred lost an eye to cancer when he was a young man. They found a tumor on his optical nerve. If it had happened a few decades later, they most likely would've been able to remove the tumor and save the eye. It wasn't a big deal to us. In a family where my dad had an artificial leg and my grandmother had full dentures, a glass eye was no big whoop. We used to joke that before long, we'd be able to make a whole new person just out of everyone's extra body parts.

my dad, Fred, my grandpa George,
Aunt MaryAnne (picking her nose) and Uncle Bob

Just before I graduated from high school, a checkup discovered a mass in uncle Fred's liver. He went for treatment and learned it was cancer. He had what they called recurring ocular melanoma, meaning it was a melanoma type cancer that had originated in his eye and it would keep returning. Melanoma is a particularly deadly type of cancer- it's why skin cancers are so dangerous. (Melanoma is cancer of the melanocytes. Melanocytes are found in two places in your body: in your skin and in the colored parts of your eyes. Ocular melanoma is much rarer than melanomas that occur in your skin.) Melanomas don't respond well to 'normal' cancer treatments like chemo or radiation. The most successful way to treat melanoma is to remove as much of it as possible. And do so each time it comes back, and in each new location.

They removed nearly three-quarters of my uncle Fred's liver. (The liver is pretty cool, by the way. It regenerates!) It came back, took over his stomach and then it was just unstoppable. Fred's doctors were at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to his treatments, surgeries and check-in visits, he also participated in some trials for immunotherapy, which seemed to have a great deal of promise in treating melanomas. My dad drove him to his appointments and then brought him back to our house to recuperate until he felt strong enough to go back to the home he shared with his mother. He always needed to just be left alone after those doctors' visits. I'm learning that I'm a lot like him; we're people who need alone time to regenerate and recharge ourselves. Being surrounded by people- even those caring for us- is exhausting.

When he was at our house, we didn't fuss over him. He got Kevin's room when he stayed with us and he could come and go as he pleased. My mom would make sure we had his favorite foods (and snacks, most importantly) and if he needed anything, he just had to ask.

Bob, Fred, my dad & Grandpa George

Fred struggled to deal with the hand he had been dealt. Especially when they had to remove part of his stomach and he had to change his diet significantly. It frustrated him to no end that as a person who had always been so active, he was now tired and frail. Hospice was an enormous help when we finally called for their services. In addition to the things hospice is known for, like getting him set up with the necessary equipment so he could be at home and not have to deal with hospital stays anymore and providing support to family members, they counseled him and helped him work through his emotions.

I had just moved to Rochester to my first real grown-up apartment and grown-up job. I was lonely and didn't really like the city so I came home often. I observed the changes in Fred first-hand. It was amazing to watch someone grow so quickly. It was almost as if he had achieved the mellowing that might naturally come from a good long old age. Hospice helped him find peace. It was extraordinary to experience.

All the Barneses got together for Easter that year. Uncle Fred wanted to be a part of everything. He laughed at the cousins trying to balance spoons on our noses at the table. And when a bunch of us went out to the bar that night, he insisted on hugging each of us goodbye as we left. I'll always remember how fragile he felt, how it seemed like I could feel every bone in his body when he hugged me, and how tightly he held all of us, as if he was worried maybe it might be the last time.

Thanks to hospice, Fred was able to die in the place he loved best, his camp at Cayuta Lake.

And that brings us back to "Y."

Earlier on Monday, before we set out to find Fred's "lost lake camp" and before we had breakfast at Chef's, I signed up for a fundraiser called Women Swimmin'. It's a 1.2 mile swim across Cayuga Lake (not Cayuta) and it raises money for Hospicare and Palliative Care Services of Tompkins County.

And uncle Fred is why ("Y") I'm swimming.

I'm also swimming for my sister-in-law Cathy Bossard, who was strikingly like Fred in her independence, dry sense of humor, and fierce devotion to the home she built and designed from scratch. 

You can support my swim and help others experience the services Fred did by clicking this link.
Thank you so very much for helping me honor Fred's and Cathy's memories.