Two strolls down memory lane.....

A friend's mother is fighting cancer, and the latest word is a new series of tumors has been found.

Deju vu all over again? You betcha. One of the last "findings" of my mother's oncologist after a debilitating round of chemo and radiation was something almost exactly along these lines.

This friend called to talk about her mother, but kept drifting off--and no, it wasn't because she was on her cell phone. I remember it well--the absolute fog that settled between my ears when the news got really bad where my mother was concerned. The same fog that settled in after my father died and didn't lift for a year.

Now, I know enough not to tell my friend about my timeline (a year in a fog?!), but I was able to tell her that it's perfectly normal to find oneself unable to focus after getting such terrible news.

Sigh.

On happier fronts, I spoke to an old art school friend last night, as she had received the two DVDs of my The Comedy Studio performances as requested and was waiting for her husband to come home to watch them. Talking to her was a hoot, for she has the same loopy laugh she had in college, and it's always great to hear it (especially since it's not attached to some major beer-induced mistook I made, as had been oh-so-often the case back in those bad old days).

She and her husband both enjoyed the DVDs (altogether now: Whew!) and were very encouraging about my material and what-all in his-and-hers e-mails.

That's so sweet, when both parties in a couple are moved to write individually--means a lot, but please don't ask me to explain why.

Now, I promised myself I was going to exercise officially today, so off I go (yesterday's exercise was going to the dump, which entails a lot of lifting, but isn't exactly aerobics, if you know what I mean).